“The habitual association of radical elements, grammatical elements, words, and sentences with concepts or groups of concepts related […]
Category Archive: Grammar
Today’s the last day to book accommodations for the Greek Prepositions Workshop. So if you don’t have your […]
In the 1970s, Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan took a hard look at where Chomsky’s ideas were headed and did not like what they saw.
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?
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This excerpt is from my chapter, “Linguistic issues in Biblical Greek,” in Lexham Methods: Linguistics & Exegesis. It’s published […]
This is part one of a multi-part series. Part II is: A brief history of syntactic theory: Parallel-contraint based […]
Both contributors to this blog (yes, there actually is more than one — Mike and Rachel Aubrey) are […]
What’s the difference and how do they relate? Pragmatics is a sort of funny thing. On the one hand, […]
Porter, Stanley. 2015. Linguistic analysis of the Greek New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. This review is […]
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!)
