Comparative Grammar workshop

[REGINA PUSTET]

Again, speaking only for myself, what I was suggesting 
is a volume in which each chapter would be written by 
one or two individuals and would be a comparative (not 
necessarily historical) treatment of the way each 
language (or perhaps subgroup of languages) handles 
some particular phenomenon. ... Each Siouanist would 
be able to draw on the expertise of any and all 
participants in writing his/her chapt.

That's an unusual procedure, and I like it a lot. I think this will be fun, and the final output should be very inspiring. So maybe each author/pair of authors will write on what's going on in their language of specialization, to provide the basic grid, and then circulate the draft among the other authors who will add the relevant facts about 'their' languages? Or should the author(s) responsible for a chapter go as far as they can in the analysis of the other languages, mostly unknown to them, on their own, by dealing with the existing literature first? What would be more effective?
Which languages should be included? Extinct ones vs. non-extinct ones would be a category we might want to consider here, also geographic and genealogical distribution.
 
Examples would be, e.g., 
adverbial clauses, noun possession, TAM morphology, 
subordinate clauses (perhaps various types in different 
chapts.), switch reference, etc.
 
Sounds good. I'm thinking about signing up for TAM, if nobody else is too obesessed with this topic. It's tougher than it seems to be -- this chapter gave me a couple of headaches while working on the Lakota grammar. On the semantic side, it's quite a challenge.
But I'm also wondering about the criteria by which we should select the list of topics to be treated. Should we go by what strikes us as particularly interesting and prominent features of Siouan, such as valence-changing mechanisms by means of instrumental and locative prefixes, or shold we go by general relevance of topics for a basic description of any language? In this case, we might want to look at things like predicate structure/types, noun phrase structure, structure of the simple clause,attribution, clause chaining, etc.
 
Regina

 

		
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