Descriptive linguistics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is spoken (or how it was spoken in the past) by a group of people in a speech community. All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic world as it is, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be.
Linguistic description is often contrasted with linguistic prescription, which comes into play especially in education and in publishing. Prescription seeks to define standard language forms and give advice on effective language use, and can be thought of as the attempt to present the fruits of descriptive research in a learnable form, though it also draws on more subjective aspects of language aesthetics. Prescription and description are essentially complementary, but have different priorities and sometimes are seen to be in conflict.
Accurate description of real speech is a difficult problem, and linguists have often been reduced to grossly inaccurate approximations. Almost all linguistic theory has its origin in practical problems of descriptive linguistics. Phonology (and its theoretical developments, such as the phoneme) deals with how native speakers pronounce their languages. Syntax has developed to describe what happens when phonetics has reduced spoken language to a normalized control level. Lexicography collects "words" and their derivations and transformations: it has not given rise to much generalized theory.
An extreme "mentalist" viewpoint denies that the linguistic description of a language can be done by anyone but a competent speaker. Such a speaker has internalized something called "linguistic competence", which gives them the ability to extrapolate correctly from their experience new but correct expressions, and to reject unacceptable expressions.
There are tens of thousands of linguistic descriptions of thousands of languages that were prepared by people without adequate linguistic training. With a few honorable exceptions, all linguistic descriptions done before ca. 1900 are amateur productions.
A linguistic description is considered descriptively adequate if it achieves one or more of the following goals of descriptive linguistics:
- A description of the phonology of the language in question.
- A description of the morphology of words belonging to that language.
- A description of the syntax of well-formed sentences of that language.
- A description of lexical derivations.
- A documentation of the vocabulary, including at least one thousand entries.
- A reproduction of a few genuine texts.
There are some bonus topics that might also be included, like an analysis of discourse and historical reconstructions.
[edit] Opposition and controversy
Currently the most controversial topics are usually morphology and syntax. English has a very meager morphology and an over-emphasized syntax, but in the study of other languages, morphology has revived as an active field of study.
The purpose of linguistic theory, so far as a practical linguist is concerned, is to make descriptions of morphology and syntax comprehensible. It is easy to see that the same data can often be described in different ways. For a while there was an active desire to find some measure which would allow some one description to be called the best. Today that goal seems to have been given up as chimerical.
