Comparative Grammar workshop

[John Boyle]

I agree with Bob.  This kind of workshop would be very valuable for
those of us preparing to write descriptive grammars (as well as those
of us who are interested in historical and comparative linguistics).
I think we are in a good position to do this since several people
have just (or are about to) publish quality descriptive grammars.
Although I think it is important to look at how the languages work
syntactically as well.  Here I mean things like, how do adverbs work?
Does the language allow movement for topic or focus constructions?
How do the languages do coordination? etc.  These questions can be
posed in a purely descriptive manner (i.e. we don't need to posit
what node (if any) focused items move to only if the languages allows
such movement).  A lot of this is done with morphology so there is a
natural overlap in many of these questions.  I think I can talk about
this stuff for a day or two without saying "SPEC of IP".  I'd also be
happy to work with Bob on a "program committee".  We can restrain
each other towards our natural tendencies!

I'm all for sometime this fall and Boulder is a nice place to visit.
Plus two people (and their resources) are already there.  I think if
we do this, it is important to get a series of questions and topics
to be covered out there pretty quickly so that we can work on them
throughout the summer.  What do other people think?

John


>>Well, these things are always tremendous fun, and my schedule in the fall
>>is relatively light -- but it would likely be quite a lot more expensive
>>than in the past, since the faculty club is no longer operating as a hotel
>>and conference center.  Shall I explore for real? Who wants to volunteer
>>to be the program committee?
>
>This sort of depends on just what we mean.  I have a hunch that we
>may be talking about different sorts of things.  What I meant when I
>tossed out the suggestion (or seconded John's suggestion) was
>primarily comparative inflectional morphology and grammatical
>particles, enclitics, etc.  (Like the Uto-Aztecan absolutive -ta,
>Nahuatl -tl, etc., i.e., the sort of thing Langacker did for UA)  In
>that sense, it's an extension of comparative phonology/lexicon, but
>applied to morphemes and grammatical categories, along with certain
>well-defined syntactic formations.  For example, I'd want to look at
>the inventories of tense/aspect enclitics, different
>grammaticalizations of the verb ?uN 'do, be' or the positionals in
>different subgroups/languages.  I'd want to compare verb templates,
>such as they are, in the different subgroups.  And I'd want to
>compare (strictly) surface syntactic constructs:  How does each
>language do relative clauses, topicalization, switch ref., focus,
>etc.?  Is morphology for a particular usage cognate, or has it
>developed independently?
>
>What I would NOT be interested in is comparing any phenomenon that
>has a special role only in some one particular theory of
>morpho-syntax.  To me such things as "DP vs. NP", "spec of IP",
>"checking", "chommeurs", "tagmemes", "sympathy" or the like are OK
>synchronically, but they have no place in comparative grammar.  In
>other words, I'd want to write up something that linguists 200 years
>from now could make sense of.
>
>If that's the sort of thing people have in mind, I'd volunteer for a
>"program committee", although I don't think y'all would want me to
>be the only member.  My recollection of the earlier
>(sort-of-comparative) syntax meeting and the Dhegiha issues meeting
>in Lincoln is that both were sort of fragmented, so I do think more
>organization is of the essence.
>
>I have a number of handouts I prepared for my comparative Siouan
>seminar at KU that I could donate to the cause.  They are mostly
>just charts of cognate grammatical morphemes from among the verb
>prefix sets and a few such from the enclitics.  I think those are
>important, but we want more than just that sort of thing.
>
>And, yes, Boulder is pretty expensive if you have to live in a
>motel.  But it's a nice place to visit.
>
>Bob