DISCUSSION
PRINCIPLES
Of DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS
The
descriptive analyst must be guided by certain very fixed principles if he is to
be objective in describing accurately any language or part of any language. It
would be exellent if he could adopt a completely man-from-Mars attitude toward
any language he analyzes and describes. None of us, hiwever, can completely
dissociate himself from the knowladge of language he has already acquired or
from the apparatus which has been used to describe the grammar of such
language. Despite this fact, the descriptive linguist must divest himself of
the tourist’s view point, which consist in judging everything strange and
different on the basis of things found at home. To help reorient oneself to the
new approach, it is important to bear in mind constantly the following
fundamental principles.
A. Descriptive
Analysis Must Be Based Upon What People Say
The implication of this principle are greater than a
beginner my realize. In the first place, it mean that the written form of the
language is entirely secondary (in fact, quite irrelevant) so far as the
descriptive linguist is concerned. His description of English, French, Arabic,
or Chinese will treat first and foremost the spoken forms of the language. He
may consider it pertinent to note the extent to which the conventional
orthography conforms to a scientific symbolization of the structural units, but
the descriptive language as such is only indirecly concerned with convensional
or practical alphabets.
In the second place, this principle of basing
description on the spoken form of the language means that the language records
the actual forms employed, rather than regulalizing the data or evaluating
utterances on the basis of some literary dialect. In other words,it is what
people say rather than what some people think they should say that is important
to the descriptive language. Futhermore, the descriptive language is interested
in all types of speakers, representing different educational, social, economic
and racial groups. For the language any dialect of a language is intrinsically
as good as any other, and all variates of language are equally “correct” in
that they represent the dialect of the speaker. The descriptive language simply
describes language, all kind of language, and all types of dialectof any
language. If any judgment are to be passed upon the acceptability or so-called
correctness of some usage, these are left either to the anthropologyst and
sociologist for an objective statement of the factor in the society which make
certain person more socially prominent and hance make their speech more
acceptable, or to the man on the street, who is thoroughly accustomed to
forming judgment upon the basis of his own egosentric attitude and limited
knowladge. Of course, the descriptive language notes such forms as It’s me and
It’s I. he finds that English speaking members of all social, economic, and
educational classes say It’s me, and that an occasional person says It’s I. he
may also care to note that the form It’s I is regarded by many persons of all
classes as distastefully pedantik. The descriptive languange, however does not
go beyond this point in describing such alternative forms.
B. The
Form Are Primary, and The Usage Secondary
The descriptive language start from forms and then
procededs to describe the grammarical positions in which the form occur. In
describing English, for example, he would not say that there are gerunds and
gerundives, but rather that there are certain verbals ending –ing and that
these have a distribution which is parallel to that of nouns (these are the
so-called gerunds) and to that to adjectives (these are the so-called
gerundives). In describing the Greek cases, the descriptive language list five
setsof forms, and then describes how these form are used. He does not base a
decription of greek on the eight cases which are revealed by historical and
comparative study, since in the funcioning greek the formally contrastive sets
are the distinctive features.
C. No
Part of a Language Can be Adequatelly Described Without Reference to All Other
Parts.
This principle means that the phonemics, morphology,
and syntax of a language cannot be described without reference to each other. A
language is not a departementalizedgrouping of relatively isolated structures,
it is functioning whole, and the part are only fully describable in terms of
their relationship to the whole. Nor are language like simple geometric figures
which can be described by beginning at one fixed point and methodically
plotting the structure from there. Language are exceedingly complex structures
and they constitute their own frame of reference. Though one language should
not be described in terms of any other language, no part of a single language
can be described adequatelywithout reference to the other parts. This fact
becomes most fully avident when we attemp to determine the relationship between
word and phrase s. we usually say that a suffix unit into a single word
everything whit which it occurs, but in the expressions the king of England’s (hat), we have a “feeling “ that
the king of England is not a single word, despite the fact that –s occurs with
the entire phrase. The answer to such a relatively basic question as “what
constitutes a word?” can be answered only by examining the morphological,
syntactic and phonemic structure of the language.
D. Language
are Constantly in The Process of Change
Our descriptions of language tend to give the
impression that they are static, fixed structures. This is, of course, the
attitude of the average speaker of language, and yet we do realize that there
are (1) fluctuations of forms, e.g. roofs vs rooves, hoofs vs hooves, proven vs
proved, and dove vs dived in preference to proven and descriptive linguist does
not attempt to take into account the tendencies and trends of a language , but
when he records in his data that there are alternative forms and that these
exhibit a certain relative frequency of occurrence, he is touching upon the
dinamics of language change.
One must not think that only written language change
or, on the contrary, that written language change less than unwritten ones. All
language change, and the rate varies at different times in the history of any
one language. We must be aware of suchtendencies and, in discribing a language
, recognize the significance of fluctuating forms. In a language like Maya of
Yucatan we find a relatively large number of alternative formations, and in a
language such as Navato they are conspicuously fewer. The proportion of
aternative forms tell us something about the rute ofchange, but without some
knowledge of the histiryof the language, we don’t know whwther such changes are
increassing or diminishing in number.
