The primary purpose of this paper is to compare the two important approaches to the description of grammar, prescriptivism and descriptivism, and to discuss the disparities between the two approaches. Some “syntactic deviances” have been selected for the in-depth discussion and are thoroughly examined in this paper. Those syntactic oddments of English under investigation include Number mismatch in Small Clause (Quirk, et al. 1985, Safir, 1993, Haegeman & Gueron 1995, Hong 2000), Number mismatch in Expletive Constructions, Adverbs modifying Nouns (Quirk. et.al. 1972, Bolinger, 1996), and non-DP/NP subjects with Case issue (Stowell 1991, Boskovic 2007), Conjoined NP subjects, and “ghost sentences” in the sense of Bolinger (1996). These oddments of English will make the disparity between prescriptivism and descriptivism even more clear in that prescriptivism and descriptivism do differ from each other in terms of their goal of research, their distinction between informality and ungrammaticality, and their interests and emphases. This paper does not provide the proper resolutions for the problems but implies the possibility of reducing the role of Case in the syntactic operations.
1. Introduction
2. Prescriptive and Descriptive Approaches to English Grammar
3. Some Oddments of English
4. Conclusion