Comparative Grammar workshop

[R. Rankin]

> 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