Descriptive and Generative Linguistics

From the Paper:

"In the 19th and early 20th centuries, linguists were concerned primarily with codifying languages as they were spoken and/or written--they limited themselves to what we today call "descriptive" linguistics, or the study of words and sentences that have been produced by native speakers of a given language. Since the 1950s, however, beginning with MIT scholar Noam Chomsky, linguists have largely focussed their attention on trying to discover the range of words and sentences that could be produced by native speakers. This latter approach is referred to as "generative" linguistics; its goal is to account for words and sentences which do exist and, in addition, for all words and sentences which do not, but are grammatically possible. This paper will further explore and explain the differences between these two approaches to the study of language."

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