The application of linguistic analysis to editing may serve three purposes.
First, it can provide insights into the nature of linguistic structure. The
editing process often results in minute changes which put language structure
under the microscope in a way which usually occurs only in the arm-chair
linguist's intuitions. This motivation is purely internal to the discipline of
linguistics. Although it applies linguistic analysis to an object to which it is
not normally applied, it is not applied linguistics in the sense of addressing
issues beyond the discipline itself.