User:Jah238/sandbox

I am part of a course taught by Wiki Education that trains scholars in how to edit Wikipedia. Learn more at wikiedu.org. All of my contributions are my own and I take responsibility for them.

IPA symbols ʍ

Research Methods
Research questions and methodologies vary considerably between subdisciplines. However, all subfields share a descriptive approach to the study of language, rather than a prescriptive approach. Increasingly, research methodologies are also borrowed and shared with allied fields (e.g. psychology, anthropology) and across subdisciplines of linguistics.

Description vs. prescription
Linguistics is primarily descriptive. Linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature or usage is "good" or "bad". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular species is "better" or "worse" than another.

Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favouring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures that they consider to be destructive to society. Prescription, however, may be practised appropriately in the teaching of language, like in ELT, where certain fundamental grammatical rules and lexical terms need to be introduced to a second-language speaker who is attempting to acquire the language.

Judgment data
A linguistic acceptability judgment is the perception that a language user reports in response to a particular linguistic stimulus--whether the stimulus is "good" or "bad". A judgment may pertain to phonology, the lexicon, morphology, semantics, sociolinguistics, or syntax, although syntactic judgments are the most well studied. Acceptability judgments, traditionally called grammaticality judgments, are often used synonymously with the terms "introspection" or "intuition".

Generative linguists, following Noam Chomsky, argue that judgment data provides important evidence about language--in particular, evidence about what is not possible in a language--that cannot obtained by other methods, such as studying spontaneous speech in a language corpus or by measuring brain activity.

Critics of judgment data worry about small sample sizes, small sets of stimuli, the use of researchers themselves as participants and limited response options (e.g. "good" or "bad") that linguists have used in informal collection of judgment data over the last half century. On the other hand, linguists have also come to make use of more formal methods that include more nuanced tasks, such as the Likert scale task or magnitude estimation ; formal experimental methods, such as factorial design, multiple lexicalisations and fillers; use of a large sample of "naïve" (non-expert) participants; procedures for elicitation of judgments in fieldwork settings ; and statistical analyses such as t-tests, ANOVAs and linear mixed-effects models.

Fieldwork
Linguistic fieldwork, like field research in other disciplines, involves the collection of data in its natural environment. Traditionally, fieldwork is carried out in locations which are remote from the linguist's home, in a rural community or foreign country, although many linguists also regard fieldwork as including the collection of linguistic data in urban settings, such as fieldwork on the languages of diaspora communities or fieldwork on marginalized varieties of a mainstream language. A field linguist engages in the documentation and/or the description and analysis of a language. Fieldwork may focus on any aspect of a language, although it is traditional in documentary linguistics to focus on the lexicon, phonology and morphology of a language, and perhaps also its syntax.

Many field linguists elicit language data directly, including judgment data, rather than only documenting language that occurs naturally. Critics of elicited field data worry about its naturalness, while proponents regard direct elicitation as a kind of small-scale experiment.

Population sampling
Social representativeness can be more challenging in linguistics compared with other disciplines, given that there are a large number of social variables relevant to language, including age, gender, sexuality, ethnic identity, geography, education, formality, speaking style, accommodation, ideology and conversational topic.

Types of sampling in linguistics vary by subdiscipline and are often adapted from allied fields of sociology, developmental psychology, anthropology and geography. These include convenience sampling, random sampling, stratified random sampling, ethnographic approaches, social network and snowball sampling.

Anthropology
The objective of describing languages is often to uncover cultural knowledge about communities. The use of anthropological methods of investigation on linguistic sources leads to the discovery of certain cultural traits among a speech community through its linguistic features. It is also widely used as a tool in language documentation, with an endeavour to curate endangered languages. However, now, linguistic inquiry uses the anthropological method to understand cognitive, historical, sociolinguistic and historical processes that languages undergo as they change and evolve, as well as general anthropological inquiry uses the linguistic method to excavate into culture. In all aspects, anthropological inquiry usually uncovers the different variations and relativities that underlie the usage of language.

Analysis
Before the 20th century, linguists analysed language on a diachronic plane, which was historical in focus. This meant that they would compare linguistic features and try to analyse language from the point of view of how it had changed between then and later. However, with Saussurean linguistics in the 20th century, the focus shifted to a more synchronic approach, where the study was more geared towards analysis and comparison between different language variations, which existed at the same given point of time.

At another level, the syntagmatic plane of linguistic analysis entails the comparison between the way words are sequenced, within the syntax of a sentence. For example, the article "the" is followed by a noun, because of the syntagmatic relation between the words. The paradigmatic plane on the other hand, focuses on an analysis that is based on the paradigms or concepts that are embedded in a given text. In this case, words of the same type or class may be replaced in the text with each other to achieve the same conceptual understanding.