Descriptive and explanatory theories of language.
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Linguists differentiate between descriptive and explanatory theories of language. Descriptive theories describe the structures of a language, avoiding comparisons to other languages. Explanatory theories aim to explain the phenomena and internal structures of a language as well as how a language evolved. While the distinction is not widely recognized, generative grammar aims to be an explanatory theory. Chomsky also views that a single theory can simultaneously serve as both a descriptive and explanatory theory by explaining innate linguistic knowledge.
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Sociolinguistics emerged as an important field of language study in the 1960s as researchers began examining the relationship between language and society. Sociolinguistics focuses on how social factors like age, gender, social class, and relationships influence the way people use language in different contexts. Some key aspects of sociolinguistic study include language variation according to dialect, accent, and register; diglossia, where communities use more than one language in different social settings; and bilingualism, the use of two languages.
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2) Generative grammar includes finite state grammar, phrase structure grammar, and transformational grammar, which identifies rules that govern sentence structure beneath aspects like word order.
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Ellipses: We went shopping after work and then to the movies.
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4. Prescriptivism - the belief that there are correct and incorrect ways to use language based on explicit rules imposed on speakers.
5. Methods of linguistic research include collecting primary and secondary data using tools like interviews, observations, and questionnaires for qualitative and quantitative analysis.
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Descriptive and explanatory theories of language.
- 2. • Linguists often differentiate between descriptive and explanatory theories of language. • Some work is regarded as descriptive while some as explanatory. • The difference between these theories is not widely recognized in the field of linguistics .
- 3. EXPLANATORY VS Descriptive theories EXPLANATORY THEORIES • Explanatory theories (or theoretical frameworks), are theories about why languages are the way they are. Descriptive theories • Descriptive theories (or theoretical frameworks) are theories about what languages are like.
- 4. •The distinction between descriptive theories and explanatory theories is not recognized in linguistics, although it is not hard to identify the historical explanation for this. • Regenerative theories, such as American structuralism, explicitly disavowed the goal of constructing an explanatory theory. As they were examples of descriptive theories. •Generative grammar, in contrast, has aimed at being an explanatory theory.
- 5. Descriptive theories • In Descriptive theories the principles of language are presented through description of that language. • Basically these theories investigates the form and function of a language. • They can be described as the study of the description of internal phonological, grammatical and semantic structures of a language.
- 6. • When language is studied descriptively, the main concern is to find out the unconscious rules that people follow while using a language. • Therefore, linguistics takes a descriptive approach to language as it tries to explain things as they actually.
- 7. • Some linguists are of the view that, “a linguistic theory is said to be descriptively adequate if it makes a descriptively adequate grammar for language”. • In Linguistics, descriptive theory describe the structure of a language at a given time, avoiding comparisons with other languages or other historical phases.
- 8. EXPLANATORY THEORIES: •They tend to explain the phenomena of language. •They are concerned with the internal structures of a language. •They consider the aspects that govern the language.
- 9. •As descriptive linguistics, for example, describes the current state of language; an explanatory approach would try to explain how this state came to be. •Therefore it also studies the history of a language.
- 10. • Moreover, explanatory theories in linguistics studies how language evolved, what are the factors which influenced it, shape it and make it the way it is. • For example, starting from the primary linguistic data, how does a child acquire language? How does it come to have an internal representation of a system of rules that determines how sentences are to be formed? He needs a strategy for selecting a grammar. To the extent that a theory of language succeeds as providing such a strategy, it is said to be explanatory adequate.
- 11. CHOMSKY’S views on Descriptive VS Explanatory theories •He is of the view that a single theory can serve simultaneously as a descriptive theory and as an explanatory theory.
- 12. • Such a view follows from Chomsky's ideas about innateness: • if one believes that languages are the way they are because of our innate linguistic knowledge, then a theory about that innate linguistic knowledge will simultaneously serve as a theory about what languages are like and as a theory about why they are that way.
- 13. Conclusion: •Explanatory theories answer the question ‘WHY’ •While descriptive deals with the question ‘WHAT’. •In a linguistics research both of these theories go side by side. •We can not exclude any one of these.