Geoff Pullum is locked in an intractable dispute with a colleague about whether so-called descriptive work on English grammar is in fact prescriptivism in sheep’s clothing.

An English-literature professor at Cambridge sketches a distinction between grammarians who prescribe and those who describe; Geoff Pullum strongly objects.

She centered the course by introducing two contrasting ideas: prescriptive and descriptive grammar. Prescriptivism can best be symbolized by the “red pen wielding” English teacher trope. This teacher ...

Others said the sentence is idiomatic English and that a possessive sometimes is used as a substitute for a noun. Therefore, the question is testing "usage" or descriptive grammar.

Researchers have developed an intelligent computational model of the descriptive grammar of the Spanish language. This opens up new possibilities for the computational representation of languages ...

The paper serves both as a contribution to the semantic literature on gradability and as a contribution to the descriptive grammar of English, as it is, to the best of my knowledge, the first ...

Or is it descriptive grammar day, when linguists get all huffy about the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of the language scolds among us. My inclination is to split the difference.

Those who label the use of singular they as “wrong” do so from the viewpoint of prescriptive grammar rather than descriptive grammar, which describes how linguistic forms are actually used by ...