Practice question · Select all that apply
Which are legitimate kinds of linguistic evidence on the descriptive view?
Hints
- Three are observations of what speakers do or know; one is somebody's opinion about what they should do.
- A ruling is an intervention, not an observation.
Show the answer
- A. Native-speaker judgements of whether a sentence is possible
- C. Frequency counts from a large corpus
- D. Recordings of spontaneous conversation
Why
The first three are observations of the language; the fourth is a social intervention about it. Style guides are worth studying — as evidence about attitudes, prestige and standardisation — but not as evidence about what the grammar contains.
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