ABSTRACT
The descriptive linguist, if we are to believe some accounts, is a
Renoir operating in the field of speech. What the linguist’s
descriptions show us is language stripped of its mundane values,
but accentuating its bare essentials: language unclothed, but divested
too of the ‘practical stimuli’ which would ordinarily accompany it.
Such a description leaves us free to delight in the aesthetics of
language structure, its symmetries and complexities, purified of any
plebeian communicational interpretations.
