Motivations and Goals
There are many methods that can be used to compile information about a language’s grammar and lexicon in order to build an adequate descriptive account. One common and well-tested avenue is that of elicitation, through which phonological contrasts may be established, and where paradigms and other constructions may be built and compared to uncover the inflectional and derivational categories relevant for the language.
However, we must also recognize a language as more than simply the results of the combination of levels of grammatical analysis (phonetics-phonology, morpho-syntax, lexical & grammatical semantics), but also as a communicative event. As a communicative tool, utterances are tailored and shaped to particular grammatical (and social/cultural) functions. As such, to come to truly know about a language is to do so through the collection and analysis of texts from a wide range of representative speakers and of speech genres.
This is by no means an easy task, and admittedly it is one the slowest dimensions of our project to develop, but we make constant and steady progress nevertheless…
This is by no means an easy task, and admittedly it is one the slowest dimensions of our project to develop, but we make constant and steady progress nevertheless…