Comparative Grammar workshop

[ROOD DAVID S]

I think Catherine has a lot of good ideas here.  Delaying the workshop
until we have some time to make careful plans (including assigning an
editor for the book and having that person explore publication
possibilities -- currently I like working with Benjamins the best) is a
wise move.  For what it's worth, I don't like piggy-backed conferences.
It's hard for me, personally, to justify being away from home more than
3-4 days total, including travel time, and I find I don't do very well at
either meeting if I'm trying to do two together.
	Boulder would be available the last week in March (27-31, plus
weekends on either side), which is our spring break.  Again, the weather
is totally unpredictable, maybe snow, maybe sunbathing.
	Best,
	David

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005, Catherine Rudin wrote:

> Assigning each participant a chapter is a GREAT idea.  We really could
> come out of the meeting with a draft of a book.  This sounds better and
> better.
>  When to meet:  I'd vote for piggybacking on Siouan conference in
> Billings.  Labor day/early fall is too soon for all of us to do our
> homework and be well organized.  (Maybe aim to have a list of topics
> finalized and "chapter" assignments divvied up by Labor Day?)  Late fall
> gets extremely messy, with Thanksgiving, Christmas, exams and papers and
> all the end-of-semester stuff, several major conferences, and generally
> way too much travel (and iffy weather).  Mid-spring, trying to hit at
> least some people's spring break, could be ok.  (Though I personally
> have several major comittments in April and May; spring is already
> looking busy)  Billings would give us a little more time, make the trip
> to Montana even more worthwhile than it already is, and avoid making the
> school year even more hectic.  The only downside would be if people felt
> like they couldn't do a paper for the regular meeting and prepare for
> the workshop at the same time.  But I would think research on one's
> "chapter" should spark off ideas for little side papers.  Another idea:
> perhaps if we do hold off till summer for the workshop we could have a
> sort of pre-workshop brainstorming/progress report session at SSILA in
> January, either as a formal roundtable or just informally getting
> together for an hour... not all of us will be there, but I assume most
> will, and it could give those of us who tend to procrastinate an
> incentive to at least collect some material in the fall so we'd have
> something to say.
>
> >>> rankin at ku.edu 6/24/2005 2:35 PM >>>
> ...
> 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.
>
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