ABSTRACT
All branches of linguistics are first and foremost descriptive and thus it is no surprise that text linguistics confines itself to describing what is, in other words to (selections from) already existing and usually published texts. The past thirty years have seen fascinating and lively debate about the nature and boundaries of linguistics, but one tenet has remained unchallenged: that linguistics is concerned solely with making descriptive and not prescriptive statements. While it is universally agreed that evaluating alternative grammars is a proper concern of linguistics, evaluating the comparative communicative success of two alternative sentences generated by any given grammar is not-despite the fact that both pure and applied linguists, in their role as teachers, are daily involved in telling students how to improve their linguistic skills.
