Comparative Grammar workshop

[R. Rankin]

It seems there is agreement, more or less, on the 
usefulness of this.  I wish I'd had the foresight/good 
sense, or whatever to anticipate this when I was 
planning the Conference -- it would have been an 
opportunity to get started on the whole thing.  If 
there's no objection, I'd be happy to follow 
Catherine's suggestion and work with the two Johns on 
this, but other volunteers would be MOST welcome.

I think my inclination is to (a) give this some time 
for the organizational and other aspects to be worked 
out.  I agree with David that Labor Day is much too 
soon.  My time is pretty flexible now that I don't have 
to worry about teaching, so I won't try to decide when 
to meet.  There are some ideas that are worth 
considering.  Late in the Autumn there is, say, the 
first few days of Xmas vacation (not so late as to 
interfere with holiday travel plans, etc.).  There is 
also Spring Break of 2006, provided there is sufficient 
overlap among the several universities individual 
schedules.  And there is next year's Siouan Conference 
period in Billings, MT.  We could go early and/or leave 
late and meet there.  My only personal preference is 
that I'd like plenty of time (at least a number of 
months) to prepare.  (And I do have large obligations 
to the Kaw language program in the meantime.)

What I will do in advance is to collect all of my 
handouts from a Comparative Siouan Seminar I gave some 
years back at KU and again at the Aussie Ling. 
Institute.  I'll try to annotate them into sensible 
shape and send all confirmed participants in the 
workshop copies well in advance.  This can give us a 
bit of a head start on basic morphology (mostly 
verbal).  It won't come close to filling in the 
details, I'm afraid, but it's something we might as 
well put to use.  It's mostly cognate sets of 
inflectional morphemes and a discussion of some of 
their origins (like the fact that the -kte 'irrealis' 
[sometimes called 'future'] comes from 'to want'), etc. 
Simple-minded stuff like that.  Those handouts are in a 
mixture of Word, Wordperfect and WordStar files in 
several different ASCII and ANSI fonts and formats, so 
this will take me a little time to accomplish.

I do not have a lot of material on comparative syntax, 
and I think that is the big hole in our knowledge.  So 
I hope we can accomplish a lot in this area.  My bad 
attitude has generally been that "it's all just the old 
dependent-head typology" anyway, so what the hell. . . 
.  But of course there's a lot more to it than that.

Our tendency has been to assign participants in these 
workshops a language each.  It's easy to see why this 
makes sense, since we each have specialized knowledge 
of a lang.  BUT this leaves the group with no 
coordination of the resultant detailed individual 
studies.  And that can take some poor slob years to 
cobble together (e.g., the CSD or Heather Hardy's 
Southeastern volume).  In the interest of producing 
something more useful quickly, I'd suggest assigning 
each participant an area of Siouan grammar (relative 
clauses, topicalization, possession, noun 
incorporation, stativity, all the usual suspects...). 
All of us could help each such participant by emailing 
examples, summary statements, etc. about the languages 
we know best.  All this would be done well in advance 
of the workshop.  That way, we each arrive at the 
workshop with something that is approaching a "chapter" 
already, and we can spend our time discussing more 
interesting details.

I'll have a look at my copy of Langacker's UA survey 
when I'm at the office next.  (I don't think that the 
rest of that putative series ever materialized, but 
I'll check with Jane Hill and find out).

Enough bright ideas for now.

Bob