Grammar writing, documentation, data collection

Date: 09-Sep-2024 - 10-Sep-2024
Location: Poznan, Poland
Contact: Aimée Lahaussois
Contact Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics

This section focuses on recent advances in practices underlying grammar writing, documentation, and data collection, and the interconnections between them.
Grammar writing is a well-theorized discipline but the subfield of metagrammaticography is still very young, with questions of how grammar-writing decisions affect the use made of resulting grammars (for language comparison, for typology) beginning to come to the fore. Questions of how grammars are organized and the impact on how the data is interpreted by readers, of the place of traditionally more marginal word classes, such as interjections and ideophones, of the place of diachronic data or commentary in a descriptive (and traditionally synchronically-oriented) grammar, of what constitutes a representative dataset for grammar writing of what statements about productivity actually mean, all represent interesting avenues for research. A corollary question concerns the reasons for the inherent challenges in using descriptive grammars when carrying out areal or typological research.
The push towards open access has shaped grammar-writing, documentation and data collection in very concrete ways. There is a growing expectation that examples in grammars and other types of descriptive documents be accessible through and linked to oral archives, with time-aligned sound and annotation files; publicly funded institutions and grant agencies are increasingly insistent that materials be made available, both in the form of primary data and the associated analyses, the latter typically through open access grammars (such as those published by Language Science Press) and open access journals (such as those focusing on descriptive and methodological questions, like Language Documentation and Conservation, and typology, like Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads).
Developments in the tools that accompany the descriptive and documentation process are also undergoing advances: to the traditional toolkit of word lists and questionnaires we can add stimuli carefully informed by typological and psycholinguistic advances, as well as video recordings of field sessions, making it possible to carry out multimodal studies featuring gesture. Annotation has also been affected: Despite widespread adoption of the Leipzig Glossing Rules, which greatly facilitates the accessibility of interlinear glossed texts, increased consistency of glossed material is needed to make it usable for language comparison and machine readability. Efforts towards the automatization of annotation, through methods making it possible to automatically produce phonemic transcriptions of audio files in the field, and the use of interlinear glosses to generate grammars, represent remarkable steps forward. And electronic grammaticography and its associated methods (which circle back to changes in expectations about open access of both analyses and data) will continue to lead to major headway in the production of grammars.
Data collection has been impacted and changed by recent public health and political crises, which have made it increasingly difficult to reach some field sites. This has resulted in the development of new techniques for hybrid fieldwork, and has also increased attention paid to using legacy data sources on minority languages, often necessitating collaboration with historians of linguistics for contextualization.
The section welcomes papers in any of these areas as well as papers which explore the interconnections between them, particularly those dealing with these questions from the point of view of under-resourced languages.