Chapter II

DISCUSSION

·         PRINCIPLES Of THE 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, however, can completely dissociate himself from the knowledge 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. Futher more, 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 variate 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 dialect of 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 grammatical 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 verbal 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 sets of 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 departementalized grouping 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 adequately without reference to the other parts. This fact becomes most fully avident when we attemps 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 such tendencies 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 alternative forms tell us something about the rute of change, but without some knowledge of the history of the language, we don’t know what her such changes are increassing or diminishing in number.