Grammar documentation

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?