Columbia School linguistic analyses typically are based on observable data, such as corpora (texts or recorded speech), not on introspective ad hoc sentence examples.
Rather than a single theory of language, the Columbia School is a set of orientations in which scholars analyze actual speech acts in an attempt to explain why they take the forms they do.
On the other hand, the results produced are more reliable, because they are based on objective data, rather than on mentalistic or philosophical entities[citation needed].
Conclusions about how the mind functions, based on the structure of language, should wait until a new, more reliable linguistics emerges, as did astronomy from its origins in astrology[citation needed].
Instead of trying to produce rules to generate all possible “grammatical” sentences, CSL scholars count and compare numbers of occurrences of various phenomena and then apply statistical criteria to draw conclusions about the reasons for this usage.
CSL researchers typically search the gray areas for an explanation of why one form appears more often than another, and are not satisfied with a black-and-white mapping of the frontiers of grammaticality.
For example, many linguists believe that the word with has several meanings, such as instrumental: “cut with a knife,” adversarial: “struggle with your enemies”, and even partitive: “split with the organization,” among others.
In “don’t struggle with him,” the sense is radically affected by the antecedent of him, whether him was identified in the previous sentence or whether the speaker is pointing to someone likely to be the listener’s comrade or enemy.
CSL does not neglect sound as the means through which spoken language is transmitted and whose perceptible differences serve to distinguish linguistic signs.
Like Saussure, CSL considers a language to be a kind of system “où tout se tient” (where everything depends on or influences everything else).