Re: Ways to get good grammar coverage

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 9:06 PM, Dirk Elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...> wrote:

> Thomas Payne's _Describing Morphosyntax_ serves fairly well as a template
> for things to cover (at least WRT morphosyntax; he says next to nothing
> about phonology).
Indeed, I've found it a rich source of ideas, the best book on linguistics
I've read since John Lyons' _Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics_
got me interested in the subject many years ago.   What books are
there of similar thoroughness and excellence on higher-level aspects
of language? -- semantics, pragmatics, stylistics...?  I recently read
Anna Wierzbicka's _Semantics: Primes and Universals_, and it's
good, but not on the level of  _Describing Morphosyntax_.

> One of my favorite grammars, Beverly Crum and Jon Dayley's
> grammar of Western Shoshoni provided the template for my online description
> of Shemspreg (sort of; Crum and Dayley put off phonological discussion to
> the end--I start with it). It is very clearly written with a non-specialist
> audience in mind, and as a result, is very easy to read.
The Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire,

http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/fieldtools/linguaQ.html

seems pretty thorough, and I keep meaning to go through the
whole thing and figure out what aspects of gzb grammar aren't
specified yet and how to specify them.  So far though I keep
noticing specific things about my use of the language that
I want to document, adding them to the to-do list, and working
my way slowly through said list, so that going through the
LDSQ, the bottom task on said list, never gets to the top.
I've used the LDSQ as a reference while writing some
sections of the gzb grammar, e.g. the section on questions.

I'm puzzled by the reasoning behind the order of topics
in the LDSQ though.  I'm reading slowly through Desmond
Derbyshire's _Hixkaryana_, which is based on that template,
and though it's all fascinating and most of it's clearly
written enough, it seems as though it would benefit
from a more logical organization that would require
fewer forward-references.  Starting with syntax, then
covering morphology and saving phonology for
last seems completely ass-backwards to me, and
it also seems within the syntax section, to cover topics
in order from more complex to less complex; e.g. starting
with questions and subordinate clauses before going
on to simpler declarative sentence structures...!

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article