Disputes in English grammar

Numerous grammatical constructions in English are disputed, with a significant number of native speakers identifying a given construction as either correct or incorrect. Differences between formal and informal speech and between dialects are at the root of some of these disputes. Informal speech and non-standard dialects are sometimes simply labelled as incorrect. Correct use of a given register or dialect may be seen as a marker of education, culture, group identity, or respect. Various proscriptive authorities such as style guides and teachers make pronouncements on the correctness of many constructions. Disputes arise when these authorities disagree with each other or with actual usage by a population of speakers.

Some of the sources that consider some of the following examples incorrect consider the same examples to be acceptable in dialects other than Standard English or in an informal register; other sources consider certain constructions to be incorrect in any variety of English. On the other hand, many or all of the following examples are considered correct by some sources.

Several proscriptions concern matters mainly of writing style and clarity but not grammatical correctness:

For an alphabetical list of disputes concerning a single word or phrase, see List of English words with disputed usage.

The following circumstances may feature in disputes:

Speakers and writers frequently do not consider it necessary to justify their positions on a particular use, taking it for granted that a given use is correct or incorrect. In some cases, people believe an expression to be incorrect partly because they also falsely believe it to be newer than it really is.

The difference between prescriptivist and descriptivist approaches is often described as being that the former prescribes how English should be spoken and written and the latter describes how English is spoken and written, but this is an oversimplification. Prescriptivist works deal with topics other than grammar, such as recommendations on style, but they may also contain statements about purported incorrectness of various common English constructions. Prescriptivists and descriptivists differ in that when presented with evidence that purported rules disagree with the actual usage of most native speakers, the prescriptivist may declare that those speakers are wrong, whereas the descriptivist will assume that the usage of the overwhelming majority of native speakers defines the language, and that the prescriptivist has an idiosyncratic view of correct usage. Particularly in older prescriptivist works, recommendations may be based on personal taste, confusion between informality and ungrammaticality, or arguments related to other languages, such as Latin.

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