Re: CHAT: _Describing Morphosyntax_

J. K. Hoffman said:
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> Date:    Sat, 28 Aug 2004 18:34:45 -0500 From:    "Mark P. Line"
>> <mark@...> Subject: Re: CHAT: _Describing Morphosyntax_
>>
>>
>> What is it exactly that makes you experience these books as 'dry'?
>> I'm curious because I can easily imagine that most non-linguists find
>> much of what I write 'dry' in the same way. But I wouldn't know where
>> to start to make it any wetter...
>>
>>
>> -- Mark
>>
>> ------------------------------
>
> Well, to a certain extent, I think it's unavoidable.  I mean, there's
> all this technical jargon that, frankly, is quite necessary to the work.
>   I guess, in the case of _Describing Morphosyntax_ it started off quite
> well, but went on and on describing all these different parts of speech
> with very, very few examples most of which were quite hard for me to try
> and pronounce in my head.  I'm sorry to admit, but I have neither the
> IPA nor the X-SAMPA chart memorized, so those references occasionally
> overwhelm me.  And, it would have been nice if they at least *mentioned*
> the IPA chart in the introduction.  I think the book was written with
> the idea that the reader had quite a bit of linguistic education
> already.
The IPA is for phonetic transcription, although the symbols are often
adopted for the representation of phonemes and morphophonemes when the 26
letters can't be made to suffice.

Payne's examples are phonemic or morphophonemic, not phonetic.

It's not necessary for you to be able to put specific sounds to the
examples he gives in order to understand the points he's making about
morphosyntax. (That doesn't mean you can do fieldwork in morphosyntax
without a good grasp of phonetics and phonology, of course.)

In any event, you couldn't know how to pronounce his phonemic
representations without seeing a phonological description of the language
in question.


> I've slogged my way through several textbooks and other
> books, mainly introductory texts, just trying to get a handle on all the
> technical jargon that's required to adequately describe even a "simple"
> language, if such a thing exists.
So far, there's no adequate description of any natlang using any kind of
technical jargon or formalism -- so you may be setting a standard for
yourself that even descriptive linguists don't set for themselves.


-- Mark

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