Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and
analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages.
They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the
whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of
information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of
users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of
language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics
etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing
of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that
calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's
distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work,
to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural
regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to
represent something of the native speaker's competence while
recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite
a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known
languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues
that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings
together contributors who approach the problem from a range of
angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but
others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they
address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary
roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance
between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the
role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of
theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description,
the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and
historical context, and the tensions between linguistic
particularity, established practice of particular schools of
linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable
analytic framework. This book will renew the field of
grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive
linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together
a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to
address these questions.
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