Grammar Writing

A MG-nak új egyetemi nyelvtanként kulcsszerepe lesz abban, hogy a nyelvtanról (úgyis, mint magyar nyelvtanról, és úgyis mint a nyelvekről szóló tudományról) milyen képük lesz azoknak, akik később tanárként a laikusok nyelvtani ismereteit alakítják. Ha mindezt figyelembe vesszük, nem tarthatjuk túlzásnak a Magyar grammatika szerzőinek álláspontját (22), miszerint ennek a tankönyvnek a sorsa nem szakmai, hanem nemzeti jelentő ségű. Ez indokolja azt is, hogy a tankönyvről nem egy rövidre szabott ismertetés keretében szólok, hanem nagyobb terjedelmű írást készítettem róla.

This work is a descriptive grammar of Denjongke, or Sikkimese Bhutia (also known as Lhoke or Sikkimese) (ISO 639-3 sip), an endangered Tibeto-Burman, Tibetic language spoken in the Indian state of Sikkim. The study is based on original fieldwork conducted over more than six years. The theoretical framework is functionalist-typological and may further be characterized as an application of Basic Linguistic Theory. The discussion is data-oriented and aims to describe Denjongke in its own terms.

The grammar begins with an introduction to the language and the people who speak it and continues with a description of phonology and an introduction to word classes, suffixes and clitics. The remainder of the grammar presents a mainly functionally-oriented description, starting with phrase-level syntax and proceeding through clausal syntax to discourse. The last chapter on vocabulary and the texts in the appendix provide a cultural window into Denjongke speakers' life.

Denjongke is an incipient tone language with 43 consonants and eight vowels. Nasalization and length are contrastive in vowels. The analysis establishes four major word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) and eleven minor word classes. Many nouns and verbs have ordinary and honorific equivalents. Controlled vs. non-controlled verbs occur in phonologically related pairs. Unlike many Tibetic languages, Denjongke does not make a clusivity distinction in first person plural pronouns. There are five case-marking enclitics some of which may be stacked.

In syntax, the marking of A argument shows signs of both syntactic and pragmatic control. The marking of P argument is sensitive to animacy, specificity and affectedness. Denjongke has a rich array of copula forms, which mark three evidential values: personal, sensorial and neutral. The semantically oriented category “personal” differs from the more syntactically-oriented Lhasa Tibetan category “egophoric”.

Denjongke is a clause-chaining language and has a wide variety of adverbial clauses, which are expressed through various constructions, including ten converbs. Relative clauses are a subclass of genitive-marked constituent-modifying clauses. The last chapter addresses some interesting features of Denjongke lexicon, including ideophones, i.e. vividly descriptive words which are semantically, phonologically and morphologically distinct from other words.

My dissertation is a comprehensive grammatical description of the Wutun language (ISO 639-3 WUH), a distinct local form of Northwest Mandarin spoken by approximately 4000 people in Upper Wutun, Lower Wutun and Jiacangma villages in Tongren County, Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, People s Republic of China. While the basic vocabulary and grammatical morphemes of Wutun are mainly of Chinese origin, it has adapted phonologically and structurally to its current linguistic environment, where varieties of Amdo Tibetan are dominant regional languages and lingua francas. The Tibetan influence manifests itself in all domains of Wutun grammatical structure, including phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. This has yielded some phonological and grammatical properties that are unusual for a Sinitic language and cross-linguistically rare, including the size of the phoneme inventory, multiple aspect marking and egophoricity. In addition, there are some grammatical features, such as the paucal-plural distinction and sociative case marking, which represent areal interference from Bonan, a small Mongolic language spoken in the immediate vicinity of Wutun-speaking villages. The dissertation is based on first-hand field data collected during three field trips to the province of Qinghai in June-August 2007, June-August 2010 and June-July 2013. My data consists of approximately 1300 clauses of descriptive and narrative texts as well as conversations that were complemented by elicitation and grammaticality judgements. The theoretical framework used for language description is based on an informal descriptive theory referred to in the literature as Basic Linguistic Theory (BLT) (Dixon 1997, 2010; Dryer 2006). My dissertation aims to detail aspects of Wutun phonology, morphology and syntax, including phoneme inventory, noun phrase, verb complex, minor word classes, clause structure, non-declarative speech acts and clause combining. It also includes an appendix with three oral texts in Wutun. It is my hope that the present study will be accessible to a wide audience, including linguists working on Sino-Tibetan languages, languages of Northwest China, linguistic typology and historical linguistics.

Atong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Northeast India and Bangladesh.This grammar provides a deep and thorough coverage and analysis of all major areas of the grammar, which makes this book of great interest and value to general linguists and typologists as well as area specialists. Of particular interest is the pragmatic approach taken for the grammatical analysis. Whereas the form of an utterance provides some clue as to its possible meaning, inference is always needed to arrive at the most relevant interpretation within the context in which the utterance occurs.
What is presented here is a revised grammar of Atong. All examples and texts are presented in Atong orthography. This spelling system is explained in the Atong Spelling Guide, which can be found here on my Academia.edu profile page. Moreover, some parts of the grammar have been re-worded or re-written since its publication in 2014.

http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-379

The German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) occupies an interesting place at the intersection of several streams of linguistic scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century. As Professor of East-Asian languages at the University of Leipzig from 1878 to 1889 and then Professor for Sinology and General Linguistics at the University of Berlin from 1889 until his death, Gabelentz was present at some of the main centers of linguistics at the time. He was, however, generally critical of mainstream historical-comparative linguistics as propagated by the neogrammarians and instead emphasized approaches to language inspired by a line of researchers including Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), H. Steinthal (1823–1899), and his own father, Hans Conon von der Gabelentz (1807–1874).

Today Gabelentz is chiefly remembered for several theoretical and methodological innovations which continue to play a role in linguistics. Most significant among these are his contributions to cross-linguistic syntactic comparison and typology, grammar-writing, and grammaticalization. His earliest linguistic work emphasized the importance of syntax as a core part of grammar and sought to establish a framework for the cross-linguistic description of word order, as had already been attempted for morphology by other scholars. The importance he attached to syntax was motivated by his engagement with Classical Chinese, a language almost devoid of morphology and highly reliant on syntax. In describing this language in his 1881 Chinesische Grammatik, Gabelentz elaborated and implemented the complementary “analytic” and “synthetic” systems of grammar, an approach to grammar-writing that continues to serve as a point of reference up to the present day. In his summary of contemporary thought on the nature of grammatical change in language, he became one of the first linguists to formulate the principles of grammaticalization in essentially the form that this phenomenon is studied today, although he did not use the current term. One key term of modern linguistics that he did employ, however, is “typology,” a term that he in fact coined. Gabelentz’ typology was a development on various contemporary strands of thought, including his own comparative syntax, and is widely acknowledged as a direct precursor of the present-day field.

Gabelentz is a significant transitional figure from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. On the one hand, his work seems very modern. Beyond his contributions to grammaticalization avant la lettre and his christening of typology, his conception of language prefigures the structuralist revolution of the early twentieth century in important respects. On the other hand, he continues to entertain several preoccupations of the nineteenth century – in particular the judgment of the relative value of different languages – which were progressively banished from linguistics in the first decades of the twentieth century.

An Easy Introduction to the English Language (1745) is the grammar in the Circle of the Sciences series, a children’s encyclopaedia published by John Newbery. The volumes in the Circle series were established reading material for boys and girls in Georgian England, and the grammar targeted a broad audience of children, young men and women, and non-native speakers. A comparison between James Greenwood’s (1711) and (1737) popular works shows that the Circle grammar was largely plagiarised from Greenwood’s grammars. The grammar is generally attributed to Newbery, but an advertisement in the London Gazette links the Circle series to author and playwright Eliza Haywood.

(Winner of the 2014 Vivien Law Essay Prize of the Henry Sweet Society.)

A frequently mentioned if somewhat peripheral figure in the historiography of late nineteenth-century linguistics is the German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840– 1893). Today Gabelentz is chiefly remembered for several insights that proved to be productive in the development of subsequent schools and subdisciplines. In this paper, we examine two of these insights, his analytic and synthetic systems of grammar and his foundational work on typology. We show how they were intimately connected within his conception of linguistic research, and how this was in turn embedded in the tradition established by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), especially as it was further developed by H. Steinthal (1823–1899). This paper goes beyond several previous works with a similar focus by drawing on a wider range of Gabelentz’ writings, including manuscript sources that have only recently been published, and by examining specific textual connections between Gabelentz and his predecessors.

This paper is centered around topics that are relevant for grammar writers, namely the status and nature of grammatical rules, variation, grammaticality, the underdetermination of grammar by data, and speaker authenticity. They are normally not treated in the literature on grammar writing because of their general and rather philosophical nature. However, they can help grammar to reflect on their work. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to discuss these topics and sketch answers that have been provided by philosophers of linguistics. Furthermore, the paper gives a short overview on the complex adaptive system/emergent grammar account of language and its possible implications for grammar writing.

This paper explores how to incorporate linguistic typology, argumentation, and theoretical innovation into a reference grammar. It provides recommendations on how to produce a balanced grammar that is firmly grounded in theory, responsible to the unique structures of the language, and comprehensible now and over time. Linguistic typology provides a set of widely recognized linguistic categories used in the classification of grammatical patterns. These can be taken as starting points from which the structures of the language can be compared, contrasted, explored, and explained, profiling the unique shapes of language-particular categories. Argumentation for particular analyses provides clarification and explanation, although excessive argumentation can obscure descriptive facts. Simply asserting facts is appropriate for lower-level linguistic features, simple canonical structures, or uncontroversial elements or their functions. Argumentation is appropriate when structures differ from typologically-expected patterns, when the analysis counters descriptions in the literature, and in cases where there are multiple interpretations of a structure. Grammar writing takes one deep into the structure of a language, revealing new vistas of understanding and novel ways of interpreting structure. Theoretically innovative analyses that reflect these insights can be incorporated as long as they are motivated, well explained, and balanced by a typologically-informed descriptive base.

Up to the mid-20th century, a large proportion of descriptive work on African languages was done by missionaries, who are still responsible for a significant proportion of linguistic research in some parts of Africa. Yet the role missionary linguistics has played in the development of modern African studies is rarely discussed. Just as the intricate relationship between academic and missionary linguistics remains controversial (see Dobrin & Good 2009 and other papers in the same volume), a controversy surrounds methods used by missionary linguists and their attitudes to the languages they encountered. On the one hand, while describing African languages, missionaries relied to a great extent on the models that were familiar to them. Interpreting their material in terms of categories of European languages, they sometimes oversimplified and distorted the data, and it is now common to assume that early missionary grammarians suffered from a lack of broad typological perspective and relied slavishly on the Graeco-Roman descriptive tradition.
On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the Graeco-Latin model as a fixed framework defying any modification. Challenged with data from languages strikingly different from Greek and Latin, missionary grammarians quickly became aware of the familiar model’s inadequacy. They were faced with the difficult choice of either distorting their data or extending the model, and they did their best to find a compromise solution. In this respect, the attitude of some missionary linguists was perhaps even “more open-minded than that of contemporary grammarians in Europe” (Zwartjes 2011: 10): they undertook the task of “re-semantisation of traditional terminology as words were applied for other purposes” (ibid. 16).
This study explores the ways two 19th century missionary grammarians approached the task of describing verbal morphology of two Mande languages. The sources from which I draw examples are John Kemp’s grammar of Susu, published in 1802 in Edinburgh, and R. Maxwell MacBrair’s grammar of Mandingo, published in 1842 in London. Based on these two examples, I illustrate the diversity of attitudes and approaches to language description concealed behind the label “missionary linguistics”. Even in the narrow domain of verbal morphology – which is far from prominent in the isolating Mande languages – the two grammarians resort to very different strategies for coping with the otherness of the material they describe. Their approach also differs in certain ways from the approach that has become prevalent in modern descriptive studies. I address possible reasons behind that difference, and suggest that the contrasting approaches are explained in large part by different interests and goals of missionary and academic linguists.

According to the widely accepted view, there are much more compounds in "Wester" Finno-Ugric languages (as Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian) than is "Eastern" ones (the Onb-Ugric, the Permic, the Mari and the Mordvin languages). However, if we look at the details, at least in the Permic languages, it becomes clear that the difference is not so great.

Within the paradigm of History of Knowledge, much attention has been given to the transfer of knowledge, notably through translation. However, transfer, like translation, implies directionality, suggesting an imbalance of power between sending and receiving cultures. Therefore, it is safer to see translation as a position on a gliding scale of modes within the broader and multidirectional concept of circulation of knowledge.
On the basis of this research concept, the present study examines circulation and distribution of grammatical knowledge (among others, via translation) in the Balkans in the age of Enlightenment, with a special focus on patterns of German origin therein.

Realizing Humboldt's dream: Cross-linguistic grammatography as data-base creation Dietmar Zaefferer 1. The idea of the Cross-linguistic Reference Grammar database1 1.1. Humboldt's dream In his Einleitung in das gesamte Sprachstudium ('Introduction to the gen-eral ...