العربية
中国
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिन्दी
Italiano
日本語
Português
Русский
EspañolDESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS
(Redirected from Synchronic linguistics)
'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 is found 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 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. Lexicology 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. Prior to 1900, there was little academic descriptions of language.
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.
'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 is found 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 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. Lexicology 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. Prior to 1900, there was little academic descriptions of language.
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.
This article provided by Wikipedia. To edit the contents of this article, click here for original source.
psst.. try this: add to faves
