Has there been "prescriptive" attempts at language-learning/comprehension in AI? Is there examples of AI systems being taught grammatical rules, or have such rules built-in to them, in order to recognize commands and the like in natural language?

For example, is there a program, when given the instruction (either by speech or by text) in the form of "Open file-1", will attempt to understand the command as consisting the parts "open" and "file-1", then respond according to how each part is classified?

The focus here is the fact that these kind of instructions are processed with built-in rules of grammar, rather than the rules being learned through observation of data.
Yes.  You're basically looking for "rule based" NLP.  For reference, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule-based_system

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-rule-based-methods-becoming-unpopular-in-NLP-Are-rule-based-methods-still-in-use-If-yes-where-should-I-look-for-them

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3756254/

https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/regexner.html

http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~yogo/courses/sem2014/intro.pdf

etc.