Description

5 Key excerpts on "Description"

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  eBook - PDF

  Reference Grammars and Modern Linguistic Theory

  • Gottfried Graustein, Gerhard Leitner, Gottfried Graustein, Gerhard Leitner(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  It must be usable by any linguist for whatever his specific interests may be. This implies, among other things, a. that no knowledge of the language or any aspect of it (e.g. its writing system) is presupposed; b. that the general state of the art in linguistics is presuppoeed, so that a layman is not expected to be able to use the Description; c. that the Description will not be framed in terms of some formal model, but in terms intelligible to any linguist, and that practical considerations of usability shape it to some extent; d. that didactic considerations play a minor role in the presentation, since the Description must be usable as a manual. 4 2.2. Composition PI. A language Description is a comprehensive presentation Of a language under all its aspects. The term 'comprehensive presentation' is intended to include not only a scientific analysis or its result, a model, but also a documentation of representative specimens of its subject matter. This leads to the following thesis: Tl. A language Description consists of four parts: 1. Description of the language system, * Most grammars do indeed present information by stepwise building up complex structures from simpler ones. The Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire, to be discussed in 83.2, and the grammars based on it represent the most blatant and remarkable violation of this tendency, by starting with sentence types and subordination. 136 2. lexicon, 3. text corpus, 4. Description of the historical situation of the language. Let us now elaborate on these four parts in turn. Ad 1. The Description of the language system comprises a. the phonology with its interfaces to phonetics and orthography, b. the grammar stricto sensu, i.e. morphology and syntax, c. the semantics with its interfaces to pragmatics and stylistics.* The interfaces are described to the degree that they are systematic.

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  eBook - ePub

  Describing and Explaining Grammar and Vocabulary in ELT

  Key Theories and Effective Practices

  • Dilin Liu(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Language Description Purview, importance, and principles 1.1  Introduction

  As mentioned in the Preface, grammar and vocabulary Description (including explanation) is an essential part of language Description —the analysis and Description of how a language works (i.e., how its lexical, morphological, and syntactical components combine to convey meanings).1 Historically, language Description has focused almost exclusively on grammar, a practice rooted in the long tradition of treating grammar and vocabulary as two separate domains, with the former dealing strictly with the study of language rules and the latter referring simply to the individual words in a language. In language teaching, this separation has often been shown by the fact that there are textbooks and classes devoted exclusively to one or the other (especially to grammar). However, contemporary linguistic research findings from functional, Cognitive, and corpus linguistics have seriously challenged this rigid separation of the two. It has been found that grammar and vocabulary are actually two inherently connected parts of one entity or the two ends of one continuum because “a grammatical structure may be lexically restricted” (Francis, 1993, p. 104) and, conversely, lexical items are not only grammatically confined (i.e., confined to certain grammatical structures) but also grammatical in nature themselves because the choice of a lexical item often has implication for the sentence structure it appears in (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999; Hunston & Francis, 2000). As a result of this new finding, many linguists and applied linguists have argued for the integration of grammar and vocabulary in the study of language and have adopted the term lexicogrammar to describe this integration (e.g., Halliday, 1994; Hunston & Francis, 2000). This book adopts this approach to language Description by covering both grammar and vocabulary. Given this fact and the fact that the term “language Description” may not be clear enough about what it means or what it actually covers, the book is thus entitled Describing and explaining grammar and vocabulary in ELT

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  eBook - ePub

  Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary

  • Phil Benson(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  If a language is, in fact, a far more fluid and diffuse object than it appears to be from the definition, the process of Description becomes problematic. Zgusta’s definition of a language, however, is framed within theoretical assumptions about the nature of language that have been widely accepted in twentieth-century descriptive linguistics. The most important of these is the assumption that languages exist prior to, and independently of, their Description – an assumption that is crucial to the constitution of language as an object of scientific inquiry. To this extent, Zgusta’s definition is supported by scientific linguistics. This raises important issues concerning the relationship between lexicography and linguistics, however, for the definition of language underlying the definition of the dictionary is essentially a definition of language as it appears in the form of the dictionary. Indeed, if Béjoint (1994: 25) is correct in his argument that ‘the lexis of a language has no concrete existence apart from the dictionary’, the notion of the dictionary as a Description of the language ‘as it is’ may be based on a tautology. At the very least, we need to explore in greater depth the role of the dictionary in sustaining the conceptions of language on which it is based. Dictionaries and the ontology of language In the preface to his book, The Language Myth, Harris (1981) calls the advent of scientific linguistics ‘one of the most revealing and disturbing episodes in the intellectual history of the twentieth century’. Harris’s critique of scientific linguistics forms part of a growing body of critical work that challenges the assumption that language is capable of objective Description and views the practice of linguistics as a historically and culturally situated form of discourse (see, for example, Fairclough, 1989, 1992; Fowler, et al., 1979; Hodge and Kress, 1988; Kress and Hodge, 1979; Mey, 1985; Pêcheux, 1982; van Dijk, 1993; Wodak, 1989)

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  Language and Society in South Asia

  • Michael C. Shapiro, Harold F. Schiffman(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Language is, to be sure, an inherently social entity, and this fact has been denied by few linguists, 88 but the Description of its use in the world of social interaction has been held to be beyond the domain of linguistic investigation. While minority claims to the futility of such a vigorously antisocial model of language have been persistently voiced since at least the end of the 19th century, 57 it is only in the past decade that formal models have been developed that attempt to integrate the formal structures of linguistic systems with the social orders in which these systems are employed. The attempt to view, linguistic systems in the context of the social settings and social functions in which they are used can be considered to constitute a sociolinguistic approach to language study. There are any number of such approaches, differing among themselves in the formal devices suggested for capturing sociolinguistic correlations, the particular types of covariance held to be of interest, and the overall models 56. Many introductions to linguistics begin with a statement to the effect that language is fundamentally a social entity, but proceed to state that it is only by systemati-cally disregarding this fact that linguistic Description is at all able to be carried on. Gleason, in his Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, for instance, states that language has so many interrelationships with various aspects of human life that it can be studied from numerous points of view. All are valid and useful, as well as interesting in themselves. Linguistics is the science which attempts to understand language from the point of view of its internal structure. (Gleason, 1961:2). 57. Most particularly from the many writings of Hugo Schuchardt, who dealt with many of the concerns of modern social dialectology. 52 LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTH ASIA of what constitute languages designed in response to an enlarged concep-tion of linguistic behavior.

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  The Conduct of Linguistic Inquiry

  A Systematic Introduction to the Methodology of Generative Grammar

  • Rudolf P. Botha(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SIX Giving Theoretical Linguistic Descriptions 6.0 PERSPECTIVE In this chapter we shall be dealing with a fourth main aspect of linguistic inquiry, viz. that of giving theoretical Descriptions of the objects studied by generative grammar. In the first part of the chapter we take a brief look at the giving of theoretical Descriptions in empirical inquiry in general. The discussion hinges on two questions: what is a theoretical Description?; and what activities do scientists carry out in giving theoretical Descriptions? In the second part of the chapter, the same two questions are viewed from another angle, that of grammatical inquiry. The nature of grammatical theories and their various components are discussed first. Special attention is given to the nature of grammatical concepts and the ontological status of grammars. With regard to the ontological status, three questions are raised: which aspect of the ideal speaker's linguistic competence is described by a grammar?; what is meant by saying that theoretical (grammatical) concepts represent aspects of the linguistic competence? and how can a grammar describe a mental capacity of a nonexistent individual, an ideal speaker? Finally, the ontological status of grammars is placed in metascientific perspective with reference to the philoso-phical distinction realism vs. instrumentalism. Secondly, this part of the chapter deals with the nature of grammatical Description. Grammatical descrip-tion is an intellectual activity comprising several parts. The parts singled out for discussion are: forming grammatical concepts, explicating the content of these concepts, integrating these concepts into hypotheses and theories, symbolizing the content of these hypotheses and theories, elucidating the content of grammatical theories and axiomatizing these theories. In the last part of the chapter, the giving of theoretical Descriptions in general linguistic inquiry is discussed in broad outline.

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