Re: What would you want to hear Thomas Payne (author of Describing Morphosyntax)

On 4/1/07, Donald Boozer <donaldboozer@...> wrote:
> If we started like we were "discovering"
> a new language instead of "inventing" one, that might
> go a long way to helping us be both exotic and
> naturalistic.
The one difficulty that comes to mind with this approach is that in
real field linguistics you have a competent native. In conlanging you
have yourself, and when you answer things by default you're likely to
be calquing your L1. (We've all been there done that ya? :-P) So it
gets kinda complicated 'cause you probably do need to do some sort of
back-and-forth of a 'field linguist' approach and the now-traditional
phonology-orthography-morphology-syntax buildup. I'd encourage more
discussion on this though, 'cause it's an interesting topic.

We definitely take it all into consideration. I'm pretty sure from
what I've seen so far that no matter what gets settled on, LCC3 should
be pretty good. (And LCC2 too, obviously! Everyone register and come
out! Hint hint.)

> This would be a true coup, Sai, if you could get him
> for a future LCC. As it is, I am really looking
> forward to meetind David Salo!
Yeah, we're pretty excited at both prospects. :-) But for now, re
Payne, I think it's best to simply leave it at what I said in the OP.
I assure you that if we have more certain plans than they'll get
announced. ;-)

I'm glad that we're starting to plan for LCC3 this early though and
get positive responses. Definite improvement & longer-term view in how
things are running, which should make for better (and less stressfully
organized ^^) conferences in the future. Repetition *does* make things
easier.

Payne's definitely not the only very interesting person in the lineup,
just one who has a rather broad range and is relatively well known
within the community for his book, which is why I wanted to gather
suggestions.

Like I said, it should be very neat. And hopefully Rochester - with
warning a year in advance - will be easier for our European friends to
come to.

- Sai