[1] All academic research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other scientific disciplines, it seeks to describe reality, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be.
[2][3][4][5] Modern descriptive linguistics is based on a structural approach to language, as exemplified in the work of Leonard Bloomfield and others.
Andrews also believes that, although most linguists would be descriptive grammarians, most public school teachers tend to be prescriptive.
[1] Philological traditions later arose around the description of Greek, Latin, Chinese, Tamil, Hebrew, and Arabic.
The data they collect often comes from different kind of speech genres that include narratives, daily conversations, poetry, songs and many others.
[12] While speech that comes naturally is preferred, researchers use elicitation, by asking speakers for translations, grammar rules, pronunciation, or by testing sentences using substitution frames.
Stimulus driven elicitation is when a researcher provides pictures, objects or video clips to the language speakers and asks them to describe the items presented to them.
This long process ends with a corpus, which is a body of reference materials, that can be used to test hypothesis regarding the language in question.