Comparative Grammar workshop

[Catherine Rudin]

Answering a few of Regina's comments/questions:
 
RP:  >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?
 
CR's reply:  The way I see it the whole point is to compare across languages -- obviously most of us will start from what we know, in most cases one language, but by the time we all meet, we should each be ready to present an overview of the family.  Which is why I think we need significant lead time, to be able to search the literature, consult with each other, etc. before the meeting.  How to get to that point would be up to each author, but at the meeting each of us will present a summary of e.g. "Possession IN SIOUAN", not "Possession in language X".  
 
RP:  >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.
 
CR's reply:  I definitely think we should include these latter "basic description of any language" topics.  In fact, these are the ones of most interest to me.  
The number of topics could get very large.  Should we try to cover everything, even if in a pretty sketchy manner, or go for depth over breadth?  I guess I'd favor broad-and-shallow at this point, saving deeper investigation of certain areas for the second annual meeting  :-) or for individual papers, theses, etc.  
 
Briefly on other issues:
--E-publication of some sort would be great in the short run, but I'm definitely in favor of a book as the long-term goal.  I don't think it would need to be encyclopedia-sized, either -- chapters should be fairly succinct overviews, not detailed descriptions of all the languages.  
--Boulder and Billings are both fine with me -- but I suspect I'm not the only one who will find it a stretch to travel to two separate Siouan conferences within a few months.
 
 
 


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