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Linguistic description is often contrasted with linguistic prescription, [8] which is found especially in education and in publishing. [9] [10]As English-linguist Larry Andrews describes it, descriptive grammar is the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like.
Phrases which denote one definite object, for example "the present President of the U.S.A." We need not know which object the phrase refers to for it to be unambiguous, for example "the cutest kitten" is a unique individual but his or her actual identity is unknown. Phrases which denote ambiguously, for example, "a flytrap".
Factual texts merely seek to inform, whereas literary texts seek to entertain or otherwise engage the reader by using creative language and imagery. There are many aspects to literary writing, and many ways to analyse it, but four basic categories are descriptive, narrative, expository, and argumentative.
Fiction writing specifically has modes such as action, exposition, description, dialogue, summary, and transition. [3] Author Peter Selgin refers to methods, including action, dialogue, thoughts, summary, scenes, and description. [4] Description is the mode for transmitting a mental image of the particulars of a story.
Linguistic prescription is a part of a language standardization process. [20] The chief aim of linguistic prescription is to specify socially preferred language forms (either generally, as in Standard English, or in style and register) in a way that is easily taught and learned. [21]
It investigates the origins of a word and the ways in which its structure, meaning, and usage have since changed. [9] Synchronic or descriptive lexicology examines the words of a language within a certain time frame. This could be a period during the language's early stages of development, its current state, or any given interval in between. [10]
Descriptivist theory of names in philosophy, a view of the nature of meaning and reference generally attributed to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell; Linguistic descriptivism, the practice of objectively analysing and describing how language is spoken
In the philosophy of language, the descriptivist theory of proper names (also descriptivist theory of reference) [1] is the view that the meaning or semantic content of a proper name is identical to the descriptions associated with it by speakers, while their referents are determined to be the objects that satisfy these descriptions.