Category Archive: Grammar

Looking toward the future of our grammar writing endeavors, we would like to get a better grasp of where the state of knowledge for the average Greek student/scholar.

You can help us. If we can get good results, we’ll put together a few more polls that deal with more specific issues. Your participation will help us gain a better view of what language topics are important to people and which ones need better explanations in grammars.

How well do you feel you understand what Aspect is?

 

 

 

Click below to follow us via e-mail or RSS or even Facebook (ugh, Facebook).

Martin Haspelmath has an interesting piece about the intersection between grammar writing and typology on his website, responding to a recent article in the journal Linguistic Typology:

Should descriptive grammars be “typologically informed”, and what does this mean?

The thrust of the post is probably this quote here:

“While the language documenter’s and describer’s work is no doubt “greatly enhanced” by knowing about typology, are description and comparison also part of the same enterprise? I have argued that they are not, even though they are of course mutually beneficial (Haspelmath 2016). The difference is that description relies exclusively on language-internal distribution (Croft 2001), while comparison relies on substantively defined semantic and/or formal concepts.”

As someone currently working on a grammar project, this is food for thought. It seems to me that there’s a case to be made for a greater inclusion of typological information in a grammar depending on the intended audience. The intended audiences of writing a grammar of a well-known language vs. the writing of a grammar of a heretofore undocumented language are going to be different.

(also: Happy Easter!)

I posted a new set  of pages here on the website, providing the current table of contents of my wife and I’s in-progress reference grammar.

It’s time we stop pretending that it’s anything more than a pipe dream and start showing the evidence that this project is real, albeit slow in is progress.

We could use help, but we are still examining what that would/could look like and what our needs are.

Take a look, if you’d like: The Grammar.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.