Asides

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.

 

 

There’s a detailed review of the Greek Verb Revisited on Amazon. It’s exciting to see the positive response the volume is getting.

Of course, I disagree with a few of his points across a variety of the chapters (including my own), but that should be unsurprising. It’s a big book with plenty of room for discussion. I certainly don’t think the fact that negation scope lacks morphological or syntactic marking is even remotely problematic, but then, that probably goes without saying since I made it the centerpiece of my work. It’s one of those places where you’d love to sit down with the person giving the review and just ask them questions to get a sense of their reasoning.

Still, receiving such a detailed review so quickly after the book’s release is satisfying. The review is definitely worth a read. If anyone else has any thoughts about it, I’d love to get a discussion going.

I could have sworn that I had mentioned Lars Nordgren’s book, Greek Interjections Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics at some point before, but apparently not. I can’t find the post. In any case, his book received a detailed review in the latest issue of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review by Coulter George:

Lars Nordgren, Greek Interjections: Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics. Trends in linguistics, 273.   Berlin; Boston:  De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. Reviewed by Coulter H. George, University of Virginia

Nordgren’s book is, of course, expensive on Amazon (here), though with all such monographs, patient waiting can often land you a reasonably priced copy–I picked one up about a year ago.

The author has a academia.edu page, as well, but he has not uploaded any papers.

I don’t think I’ll have time for posting this week, so I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas!

I have two or three posts on the burner that should be finished fairly soon after Christmas, though, so you can expect some more reading soon.

One post will be my comments & response to Dan Wallace’s post, Lexical Fallacies by Linguists [supposed fallacies–I would say].

The other is my second & final post (the first one here: Challenges in language analysis) providing some context for why my thesis is the way it is. There will be a like to the PDF available in that post, too.