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Current trends in grammar writing

  • Rigina Ajanki und Arja Hamari EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 25. Januar 2021
Linguistics Vanguard
Aus der Zeitschrift Linguistics Vanguard Band 7 Heft 1

Abstract

Over the last few decades, there has been a tremendous increase in the production of descriptive grammars for languages that had previously been poorly described or lacked description altogether. In most cases, these are minority languages, and many of them are endangered. To enhance the dialogue between grammar-writers and typologists, the conference Descriptive Grammars and Typology was held at the University of Helsinki (Finland) at the end of March, 2019. In this paper, we discuss three current trends in grammar writing that emerged from the conference plenaries as well as from many other presentations: (i) the target audience of grammars and the role of language communities in grammar writing, (ii) the digitalization of grammaticography and (iii) themes that have earlier been more or less neglected in grammars but that would bring more insight into typological research as well as into understanding the structures of individual languages: discourse, variation, diachrony and contact effect of languages.

Keywords: endangered languages; grammaticography; typology
Corresponding author: Arja Hamari, Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, Helsingin Yliopisto, Helsinki, Finland, E-mail:

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Received: 2020-01-31
Accepted: 2020-09-28
Published Online: 2021-01-25

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0039
Schlagwörter für diesen Artikel
endangered languages; grammaticography; typology

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Editorial Note
  2. Editorial note
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat
  5. Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish
  6. Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations
  7. The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
  8. Morphology & Syntax
  9. Brand names as multimodal constructions
  10. NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ
  11. A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers
  12. Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics
  13. Semantics & Pragmatics
  14. Multifactorial Information Management (MIM): summing up the emerging alternative to Information Structure
  15. Language Documentation & Typology
  16. Current trends in grammar writing
  17. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  18. Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm
  19. Phonological and morphological roles modulate the perception of consonant variants
  20. Language Acquisition and Language Learning
  21. Sounds like a dynamic system: a unifying approach to Language
  22. Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics
  23. Using hidden Markov models to find discrete targets in continuous sociophonetic data
  24. “It’s a Whole Vibe”: testing evaluations of grammatical and ungrammatical AAE on Twitter
  25. The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester
  26. Computational & Corpus Linguistics
  27. An empirical study on the contribution of formal and semantic features to the grammatical gender of nouns
  28. A computational construction grammar approach to semantic frame extraction
  29. The “negative end” of change in grammar: terminology, concepts and causes
  30. In order that – a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence
  31. Cognitive Linguistics
  32. Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
  33. Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
  34. Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
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