Linguistic description

In the study of language, representation or descriptive linguistics is the earn of objectively analyzing together with describing how language is actually used or how it was used in the past by a speech community.

All academic research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other scientific disciplines, it seeks to describe reality, without the bias of preconceived ideas approximately how it ought to be. modern descriptive linguistics is based on a structural approach to language, as exemplified in the form of Leonard Bloomfield together with others. This type of linguistics utilizes different methods in sorting to describe a language such as basic data collection, and different shape of elicitation methods.

History of the discipline

The earliest requested descriptive linguistic work took place in a Greek, Latin, Chinese, Tamil, Hebrew, and Arabic. The description of innovative European languages did non begin ago the Renaissance – e.g. Spanish in 1492, French in 1532, English in 1586; the same period saw the first grammatical descriptions of Nahuatl 1547 or Quechua 1560 in the New World, followed by numerous others.: 185 

Even though more and more languages were discovered, the full diversity of language was non yet fully recognized. For centuries, language descriptions tended to ownership grammatical categories that existed for languages considered to be more prestigious, like Latin.

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, and the impression that every language forms a unique symbolic system, different from other languages, worthy of being spoke “in its own terms”.: 185