The Descriptivists

Descriptivist theory of names is a view of the nature of the meaning and reference of proper names generally attributed to Gottob Frege and Bertrand russell. The theory consists essentially in the idea that the meanings (semantic contents) of names are identical to the descriptions associated with them by speakers, while their referents are determined to be the objects that satisfy these descriptions.

In the 1970s, this theory came under strong attack from Causaul theorists such as Saul Kripke, Hilary putnam and others. However, it has seen something of a revival in recent years, especially under the form of what are called two-dimensional semantic theories. This latter trend is exemplified by the theories of David chalmers, among others

A theory is by definition something which concentrates on the relatively constant factors in the range of phenomena which it it concerned, while ignoring the many features that are peculiar to single individual instances. descriptivist successors emphasized the diversity found in human languages.

In other words for the descriptivist the true theory of language was true was no theory of language which as I say makes it difficult to write at length about their theory.

Descriptivist linguistis tended to react in one of two ways. some of them took the tack that linguistic analysis was a matter not of discovering structure that existed independently of linguistics researches but rather of inventing structure which the linguistics imposed on the language under study. they saw linguistics as concerned with hocus pocus rather than god truth.

the descriptivist would not have made to move of rejectiving phoneme theory, because he did not think of linguistics as emboying a set of theories about human language in general which might be right or wrong and it was therefore difficultfor him to recogniza what had happened when he met counter-example toone of the beliefs which were tacitly implied by to his analytic practice.