Descriptive Linguistics

184 Descriptive Linguistics Further Readings to the empirical description of speakers’ actual Derrida, J. (1973). Speech and Phenomena and other essays practices and to the diversity of languages as cre- on Husserl’s theory of signs (D. Allison, Trans.). ations of linguistic communities, DL is closely allied Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. with the social sciences. ———. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). The research agenda of DL can be contrasted Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. with a number of related yet distinct approaches to ———. (1978). Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: language. Anthropological linguistics and sociolin- An introduction (J. P. Leavey Jr., Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: guistics study, each in its own way, the interaction Duquesne University Press. (Original work published between cultural or social factors and language use; 1962) by contrast, DL focuses on the structural properties ———. (1978). Writing and difference (A. Bass, Trans.). of the languages themselves. Historical linguistics Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. studies the diachronic processes of language change, ———. (1981). Dissemination (B. Johnson, Trans.). whereas DL focuses on the synchronic forms taken Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. by a particular language at a given point in its ———. (1986). Glas (J. P. Leavey Jr. & R. Rand, Trans.). development. The endeavor to compare individual Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. languages, and the search for potential universals, ———. (1992). Given time: 1. Counterfeit money (P. is known as linguistic typology. DL may be under- Kamuf, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. stood as the preliminary step in the typological ———. (1995). The gift of death (D. Wills, Trans.). effort, the stage during which the facts of each indi- Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. vidual language are established, before comparison Fleming, C., & O’Carroll, J. (2005). In memoriam: Jacques can take place. Derrida (1930–2004). Anthropological Quarterly, 78(1), These subdisciplines of linguistics differ in their 137–150. scientific goals, yet they essentially share with DL Morris, R. C. (2007). Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology. the same fundamental principles, including the Annual Review of Anthropology, 36, 355–389. emphasis on a bottom-up, empirical approach: All these approaches are complementary components of a single scientific agenda. By contrast, the principles DESCENT THEORY of DL conflict more frontally with those of formal linguistics. Formal linguists—particularly propo- See Alliance-Descent Debate nents of generative grammar—claim that the facts of language are best explained by resorting to an apparatus of theoretical principles that are defined DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS a priori, independently of the facts of particular languages. Descriptivists reject these aprioristic assump- tions and require that all results be derived from the Descriptive linguistics (henceforth DL) is the sci- observable structures of the languages themselves. entific endeavor to systematically describe the languages of the world in their diversity, based on the History empirical observation of regular patterns in natural speech. A Long History of Language Description The earliest known attempts to describe a lan- Definitions guage in a systematic way originated in ancient The core principle of DL is that each language northwestern India, where the desire for a faith- constitutes an autonomous system, which must ful transmission of the sacred scriptures known be described in its own terms. Modern descriptive as the Vedas brought about the need to describe linguists carry out detailed empirical surveys on a Sanskrit. The best known member of that grammati- language. After collecting language samples from cal tradition, commonly dated 5th century BCE, speakers, they analyze the data so as to identify the is Pānini—arguably the first descriptive linguist. components of the system and the principles that Similar grammatical traditions were later estab- underlie its organization. Through its commitment lished in other civilizations and gave birth to the first Descriptive Linguistics 185 grammars of Greek, Latin, Tamil, Chinese, Hebrew, the particular language. Saussure’s insights inspired and Arabic. the new methodological principle of DL: that each Due to the dominance of Latin in medieval language be described on its own terms, based on Europe, most modern languages had to wait until the empirical observation of contrasts—or “struc- the Renaissance to be described for the first time— tures”—internal to its system, rather than on catego- for example, Spanish in 1492, French in 1532, and ries imported from other languages. English in 1586—whether in the form of gram- During the same decade, anthropologists devel- mars or lexicons. At the same time, the languages oped a sustainable interest in languages and their spoken in the newly discovered Americas also descriptions. The American Franz Boas placed the became objects of description—often as a result of description of local languages at the core of his missionaries’ religious agendas. Nahuatl, the lan- research on American peoples, initiating a long-last- guage of the Aztecs, had its first grammar written ing tradition in which linguistic description forms in 1547 and Quechua, the language of the Inca an integral part of ethnographic description. Boas Empire, in 1560. also articulated a question about language that lin- While the discovery of new languages should have guists had not raised: that of the relation between raised awareness of the world’s linguistic diversity, language and culture. Similar issues were later tack- such a realization was hampered by the persistent led by Boas’s student Edward Sapir, who formulated tendency to base grammatical descriptions on the the famous “linguistic relativity hypothesis,” later categories that had been established for languages consolidated by Benjamin Whorf. The Sapir-Whorf then deemed more prestigious. A good example is hypothesis, which concerns mutual influences Diego Collado’s explicit attempt in 1632 to describe between language, thought, and culture, still consti- Japanese, following the linguistic categories of Latin. tutes a significant domain of research. Well into the 19th century, many languages were It took a little longer before linguists followed described using the terminology and grammatical ethnographers in their interest for human diversity. concepts of European languages. As more and more Saussure’s theories had freed linguistic description languages of the world were explored and as the from the mould of Indo-European patterns, yet new discipline of linguistics started to develop in the Saussure himself worked on Indo-European lan- mid-19th century—following the groundbreaking guages. In the wake of Boas and Sapir, the attention to work of Alexander von Humboldt and the Brothers language diversity became central to another promi- Grimm—a new approach to language description nent figure of linguistic structuralism, the American became necessary. Leonard Bloomfield. While Bloomfield became famous for fully developing structuralist theories, he also dedicated his work to American languages, par- The Structuralist Revolution and the Theorization ticularly Ojibwe and the Algonquian family, based of Descriptive Linguistics on firsthand data collected in the field. The main turning point in the history of DL was Equipped with the appropriate theories and the structuralist revolution. During the first decade methods, increasingly aware of the scientific and of the 20th century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de human heritage embedded in linguistic diversity, Saussure articulated a theory whereby a language descriptivists undertook to study as many languages is essentially a system of meaningful oppositions. as possible, across all continents. With about 6,000 Contrasts between forms (signifiants) are paired languages in the world today and only a fraction of with contrasts between meanings (signifiés). For them adequately described, the task is colossal—but instance, “I feed my cat” and “I feed my dog” dif- urgent. Colonization and globalization have already fer by the segments “cat” and “dog”; this contrast sealed the fate of thousands of languages, and it is in form corresponds to differences in meaning. estimated that half of today’s languages will disap- In English, the meanings of cat and dog are also pear in the 21st century. In response to this threat, defined by the set of words they compare with: Cat some linguists have developed thorough techniques differs from dog but also from tiger, lion, kitten, and of language documentation. They emphasize the so on. Each segment gains meaning by virtue of its need for extensive corpora and high-quality sound contrasts with other elements within the system of and video recordings, so as to keep a sound print 186 Descriptive Linguistics of each threatened language. The documentation of phonetic difference, in English, these three sounds languages does not, however, replace the scientific constitute variants of a single phoneme, which lin- insight provided by their description. guists will represent as /t/. The phonetic variation between [t], [ƌ], and [Ƣ] does not affect the meaning of the word better; all three pronunciations can be Principles and Methods of Linguistic subsumed under a single underlying form, /bũtŧ/. In Description other terms, even though they differ from the (phon) The first step toward

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