The Columbia School of Linguistics is a group of linguists with a radically functional and empirical conception of language. According to their school of thought, the main function of language is communication. 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 set of orientations in which scholars analyze actual speech acts in an attempt to explain why they take the forms they do. This was the methodology of its founder, the late William Diver, who taught linguistics at Columbia University until his retirement in 1989.
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—The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, the first sentence of the article on “life” (based on wording in the First Edition, 1935)
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