K mimoběžné polemice M. Beneše a O. Dufka Kodifikujme deskriptivně
On the divergent polemic Let’s codify language descriptively by M. Beneš and O. Dufek

Summary/Abstract: The paper responds to the paper Let’s codify language descriptively – and by doingthat, let’s practice linguistics! A response to paper by Luboš and Vojtěch Veselý by Martin Benešand Ondřej Dufek, which was formulated as a polemic with the paper Let’s not codify language,let’s describe and explain its norms and usage instead: let’s practice linguistics instead of refininglanguage. In the first part of the paper, the authors comment critically on the line of reasoning aswell as on individual claims of M. Beneš and O. Dufek. Second part of the paper presents analyzesof two cases of a mismatch between the language use and the present codification, namely:1) spelling of the noun výjimka (the form vyjímka is considered incorrect by the codification),2) sentences of the type Byl jsem dítě, kterého když se učitel na něco zeptal, odpovídalo váhavě‘I was a child who answered hesitantly when asked by a teacher’ (in such cases the syntacticengagement of the pronoun který is considered incorrect by the codification, as opposed to thecorrect alternative …které když se ho učitel na něco zeptal…). The aim of the second part of thepaper is 1) to show that codifying language norms in a prescriptive way actually happens, 2) toprovide an attempt to elucidate both phenomena (from word-formation, semantic and phoneticperspectives in the former case, and from semantic-syntactic perspective in the latter case).The authors suggest that a descriptive approach (instead of a prescriptive one) should be optedfor especially with such language phenomena which are difficult to analyze and explain; spellingof the noun výjimka and the question of the syntactic engagement of the pronoun který inthe aforementioned sentence are two examples of such phenomena.

• Details
• Contents