Descriptive Syntax

The descriptivist approach initiated by Saussure and developed in the United States under Boas did not dissapear wih the rise of the behaviouristically oriented American structural linguistics. In Europe synchronic descriptions of English were developed by Jeperson, Curme and Poutsma in the 1920's and 1930's. In the United States, many anthropological linguists continued descriptive research on native-American languages with the behavioristically oriented linguists representing only part of the range of research, though the most influential at the time.

During the late 1960's and early 1970's, these British grammarians/linguists developed major corpuses of the English language which were used, in turn, as resources for an extremely influential modern descriptive grammar of English , A grammar contemporary English.

Descriptive grammar definition