ABSTRACT
The media is full of stories about new discoveries: caves that have revealed ancient human remains, DNA sequences that allow us to understand previously untreatable diseases, new planets discovered in the outer reaches of our galaxy. And, from time to time, such discoveries relate to language. Everett used the bottom-up, 'empirical', approach in his research on Piraha. He worked on the language in detail, and described and analysed the features he found. Chomsky had built up a theory of language, starting with work he conducted in the 1950s. The theory was based on a range of hypotheses about languages. linguists worked in the paradigm called Behaviourism until the mid-twentieth century; Chomsky's and other generativists work on language led to a paradigm shift in the field. Prescriptive grammar, relates to a set of rules that set out how a language 'ought to be', such as grammar books for learning a foreign language.
