In the
study of language
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of
objectively analyzing and describing how
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a
speech community
A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language. It is a concept mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.
Exactly how to define ''speech ...
.
[ François & Ponsonnet (2013).]
All academic research in
linguistics
Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
is descriptive; like all other scientific disciplines, it seeks to describe reality, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be. Modern descriptive linguistics is based on a
structural approach
Structural approach is an approach in the study of language that emphasizes the examination of language in very detailed manner.This strategy, which is considered a traditional approach, examines language products such as sounds, morphemes, words, ...
to language, as exemplified in the work of
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalis ...
and others. This type of linguistics utilizes different methods in order to describe a language such as basic data collection, and different types of elicitation methods.
Descriptive versus prescriptive linguistics
Linguistic description is often contrasted with
linguistic prescription,
[ — entry for "Descriptivism and prescriptivism" quotation: "Contrasting terms in linguistics." (p.286)] which is found especially in
education
Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty ...
and in
publishing.
As English-linguist Larry Andrews describes it, descriptive grammar is the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like.
In other words, descriptive grammarians focus analysis on how all kinds of people in all sorts of environments, usually in more casual, everyday settings, communicate, whereas prescriptive grammarians focus on the grammatical rules and structures predetermined by linguistic registers and figures of power. An example that Andrews uses in his book is ''fewer than'' vs ''less than''.
A descriptive grammarian would state that both statements are equally valid, as long as the meaning behind the statement can be understood. A prescriptive grammarian would analyze the rules and conventions behind both statements to determine which statement is correct or otherwise preferable. Andrews also believes that, although most linguists would be descriptive grammarians, most public school teachers tend to be prescriptive.
History of the discipline
The earliest known descriptive linguistic work took place in a
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
community in northern India; the most well-known scholar of that linguistic tradition was
Pāṇini
, era = ;;6th–5th century BCE
, region = Indian philosophy
, main_interests = Grammar, linguistics
, notable_works = ' ( Classical Sanskrit)
, influenced=
, notable_ideas=Descriptive linguistics
(Devanaga ...
, whose works are commonly dated to around the .
Philological traditions later arose around the description of
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
,
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
,
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
,
Tamil
Tamil may refer to:
* Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia
**Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils
**Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia
* Tamil language, nativ ...
,
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
, and
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
. The description of modern European languages did not begin before the
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history
The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...
– e.g.
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
in
1492
Year 1492 ( MCDXCII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
1492 is considered to be a significant year in the history of the West, Europe, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Spain, and the N ...
,
French in
1532
Year 1532 ( MDXXXII) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–June
* January 22 – São Vicente is established as the first permanent Portuguese settlem ...
,
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
in
1586
Events
* January 18 – The 7.9 Tenshō earthquake strikes the Chubu region of Japan, triggering a tsunami and causing at least 8,000 deaths.
* June 16 – The deposed and imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, recognizes Philip II of ...
; the same period saw the first grammatical descriptions of
Nahuatl (
1547
Year 1547 ( MDXLVII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
Events January–June
* January 8 – The first Lithuanian-language book, a ''Catechism'' (, Simple Words ...
) or
Quechua
Quechua may refer to:
*Quechua people, several indigenous ethnic groups in South America, especially in Peru
*Quechuan languages, a Native South American language family spoken primarily in the Andes, derived from a common ancestral language
**So ...
(
1560
Year 1560 ( MDLX) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–June
* January 7 – In the Kingdom of Scotland, French troops commanded by Henri Cleutin an ...
) in the
New World
The term ''New World'' is often used to mean the majority of Earth's Western Hemisphere, specifically the Americas."America." ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'' (). McArthur, Tom, ed., 1992. New York: Oxford University Press, p. ...
, followed by numerous others.
Even though more and more languages were discovered, the full diversity of language was not yet fully recognized. For centuries, language descriptions tended to use grammatical categories that existed for languages considered to be more prestigious, like
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
.
Linguistic description as a discipline really took off at the end of the 19th century, with the
Structuralist revolution (from
Ferdinand de Saussure to
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalis ...
), and the notion that every language forms a unique symbolic system, different from other languages, worthy of being described “in its own terms”.
Methods
The first critical step of language description is to collect data. To do this a researcher does fieldwork in an
speech community
A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language. It is a concept mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.
Exactly how to define ''speech ...
of their choice, and they record samples from different speakers. The data they collect often comes from different kind of speech genres that include
narratives, daily conversations,
poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
,
songs
A song is a musical composition intended to be performed by the human voice. This is often done at distinct and fixed pitches (melodies) using patterns of sound and silence. Songs contain various forms, such as those including the repetition ...
and many others.
While speech that comes naturally is preferred, researchers use
elicitation, by asking speakers for translations, grammar rules, pronunciation, or by testing sentences using substitution frames. Substitution frames are pre-made sentences put together by the researcher that are like fill in the blanks. They do this with
nouns
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, ...
and
verbs
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descrip ...
to see how the structure of the sentence might change or how the noun and verb might change in structure.
There are different types of elicitation used in the fieldwork for linguistic description. These include schedule controlled elicitation, and analysis controlled elicitation, each with their own sub branches. Schedule controlled elicitation is when the researcher has a questionnaire of material to elicit to individuals and asks the questions in a certain order according to a schedule.
These types of schedules and questionnaires usually focus on
language families
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hi ...
, and are typically flexible and are able to be changed if need be. The other type of elicitation is analysis controlled elicitation which is elicitation that is not under a schedule.
The analysis of the language here in fact controls the elicitation. There are many sub types of analysis controlled elicitation, such as target language interrogation elicitation, stimulus driven elicitation, and many other types of elicitation.
Target language interrogation elicitation is when the researcher asks individuals questions in the target language, and the researcher records all the different answers from all the individuals and compares them. Stimulus driven elicitation is when a researcher provides pictures, objects or video clips to the language speakers and asks them to describe the items presented to them.
These types of elicitation help the researcher build a
vocabulary
A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the la ...
, and basic
grammatical structures.
This process is long and tedious and spans over several years. This long process ends with a corpus, which is a body of reference materials, that can be used to test
hypothesis
A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous obse ...
regarding the language in question.
Challenges
Almost all
linguistic theory
Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics which inquires into the n ...
has its origin in practical problems of descriptive linguistics.
Phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
(and its theoretical developments, such as the
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
) deals with the function and interpretation of sound in language.
Syntax has developed to describe how words relate to each other in order to form sentences.
Lexicology collects words as well as their derivations and transformations: it has not given rise to much generalized theory.
Linguistics description might aim to achieve one or more of the following goals:
# A description of the
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
of the language in question.
# A description of the
morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
* Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
* Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
of words belonging to that language.
# A description of the
syntax of well-formed sentences of that language.
# A description of
lexical derivation.
# A documentation of the
vocabulary
A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the la ...
, including at least one thousand entries.
# A reproduction of a few genuine texts.
See also
*
Mondegreen
*
GOLD (ontology)
Linguistic categories include
* Lexical category, a part of speech such as ''noun'', ''preposition'', etc.
* Syntactic category, a similar concept which can also include phrasal categories
* Grammatical category, a grammatical feature such as ''t ...
*
Grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
*
Text linguistics
Text linguistics is a branch of linguistics that deals with texts as communication systems. Its original aims lay in uncovering and describing text grammars. The application of text linguistics has, however, evolved from this approach to a point in ...
*
Language documentation
Language documentation (also: documentary linguistics) is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given spee ...
*
Linguistic relativity
*
Linguistic typology
References
Bibliography
*
*
* Haviland, William A. (2005)
''Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge'' Thomson Wadsworth.
* Renouf, Antoinette & Andrew Kehoe (2006)
''The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics''408 pp. p. 377.
* Rossiter, Andrew (2020)
207 pp. {{ISBN, 979-8645611750
Linguistics
Analysis