Grammar documentation
From LING073
Notes
What we're concerned with
- Any alternation of forms of a given word based on their syntactic or phonological environment
- Phonological and [functional] morphological alternations
- Any categorisation schema relevant to the lexicon
- noun/verb classes, pronoun features, etc.
- can have bearing on what morphology is taken, or what syntactic arguments are allowed
To consider
- Are there any irregular forms in the language? What about the pronouns (are their alternations identical to nouns?)?
- Is there any sort of agreement morphology for person/number/etc on verbs or nouns?
- How are tense/mood/aspect/evidentiality marked in the language? Do the verbs change form? Are there auxiliary verbs or other particle-like words that might be analysed as part of the morphology instead of as separate words? Do transitive and intransitive verbs take different morphology, or different syntactic arguments?
- Do nouns change form in different number (e.g., singular/plural)? Do they change form based on how they are used in the sentence? Are they lexically specified for class (masculine/feminine, or more?)? Do all nouns take the same set of forms?
- Do adjectives behave like nouns in terms of number/case/etc.? How are comparatives formed?
- What properties of personal pronouns are distinguished? Most languages have at least 3 person distinctions (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and many have number distinctions as well (singular, plural). Are other things distinguished, like an additional person or number, relative social class encoding of speaker and hearer (for all pronouns or just 2nd person?), etc.?
- What about demonstrative and interrogative pronouns?
- Are there any phonologically productive alternations in the language?
- Make sure you say what the use of the morphology is.
Examples
- You could document something like the plural pattern(s) of English. List the regular form, predictable alternations, and a list of irregular forms.
- You could document something like a single tense conjugation of Spanish. Mention that the theme vowel determines what the set of endings is, and list the endings for each person/number.
- spellrelax. If there is a list of common spelling alternatives that you want to interpret as a given standard, listing those (with some explanation) can count as one grammar point. For example, if certain accent marks are considered proper, but most people don't use them, then you'll want to interpret characters without these accent marks
- The Hawai'ian system of demonstrative determiners or personal pronouns.
- Prefixing prepositions in Arabic (with examples!)
The assignment
- Determine what the main parts of speech are in your language. There are going to be some main parts of speech
