Internet Grammars (from Paul Hopper)

[P J KAHREL]

Dear ALT Colleagues,

Re. Peter Kahrel's message: I look forward to trying the demo. Peter
suggests combining older, ex-copyrighted works with newer, unpublished
ones in a single extra-copyright archive. It's a minor point, but it
might be better to split these into two archives, or series, since they
have little in common other than their legal status, and even this is in
some doubt (see next).

Regarding John Verhaar's suggestion that older grammatical works whose
copyright has expired could be placed on the internet:
(1) I believe the copyright currently extends to 75 years, so anything
published before 1923 would be eligible. However, there are proposals in
the air to extend this period (taking it even further beyond any direct
interest of authors or tangible investment of publishers.)
(2) Optical scanning, while not perfect, has come a considerable way in
recent years, so the technology might be less of a problem than the
legal obstacles. I've been discussing the possibility with Geoff Sauer,
who has developed the English Server (URL
<http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu>) here at CMU, of starting an archive of
older, copyright-expired grammars to be stored on the Server. It remains
to be seen how expensive it would be to post-edit the scan output to the
point where a useful and reliable document emerged. We will also have to
face the question, both here and in general, of where to draw the line
between full grammatical descriptions and partial grammars, i.e.
monograph studies of sub-areas of grammar.

Frans seems to be suggesting that all the ALT Internet Grammar
Series should be located in one site, but is this in fact necessary? The
only important thing is that to be endorsed as part of the series they
would have to be reviewed by an ALT body and given an imprimatur of
quality. The ALT grammar "archive" could be a home page with a bunch of
links to sites in different places, couldn't it?

Paul Hopper