Essentials of Language Documentation
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- 3. Content
Chapter 12 – Sketch grammar 305
(4) Be-an rake tea nao, ean paa nao papahiana. if- 2 SG want COMPL go 2
SG
TAM go alone
‘If you want to go, you go by yourself.’ (Aro 5.142R)
where paa evidently does not mark past tense, and came to realize that from the very beginning the exceptions should have been taken seriously. Our current analysis suggests that paa does not locate an event in time, but indicates a change of situation be it in the past or the future. Since this find- ing also questions the glossing of other TAM markers, we now gloss all TAM
markers simply as ‘ TAM ’ and compensate for this underspecified glossing by a short description of each TAM
marker in the sketch grammar. There we precisely state our hypotheses and mention open questions such as the compatibility of TAM
markers with negations or temporal adverbs.
An alternative solution would be to give the TAM markers specific, but semantically neutral glosses such as T 1, T 2, etc. which can be easily searched for and be replaced by more meaningful glosses once their functions are better understood. But also in this case, the LDSG should explicitly explain the meanings of the glosses and describe the relevant grammatical phenom- ena in a way that accounts for the preliminary status of the analysis and thus minimizes the danger of misinterpretations.
2.3. User-friendliness To be user-friendly, a LDSG must meet the user’s needs, i.e. to quickly get an overview of the essential features of the language and all the information necessary for using the annotated recordings in further linguistic and re- lated research. Therefore the LDSG should be short and the grammatical facts be clearly presented in a format that follows common practice, for instance one that presents the description in an ascending manner with the chapter on phonology first and that on complex sentences last.
All terms whose meaning is vague or variable in the linguistic literature, e.g. adverb, particle, or is presumably only known to specialists, e.g. appli- cative, should be defined, and all abbreviations be explained. The defini- tions should, however, be short and only briefly state which language spe- cific properties have been relevant for the selection of the terms in question.
306 Ulrike Mosel 3. Content
The content of the LDSG of a previously unresearched language depends on –
the structure of the language; –
the state of analysis; –
how much and what kind of information is provided in the annotations and the lexical database.
However varied these things are, a number of characteristics of the language should be described in the LDSG in addition to the list of abbreviations used in grammatical glossing. These are
–
charts of the consonant and the vowel system; a note on syllable struc- ture, and the most important phonological processes; and a statement on how the orthography and/or transcription used in the documentation re- lates to these phonological characteristics (see Chapters 9 and 11); –
aspect, number, person, gender, case etc.) in order to facilitate a better understanding of the glosses; –
corpora and are hardly ever fully represented there; –
word and constituent order rules that would help the user to quickly understand utterances.
In addition, it might be useful for linguists, especially typologists, to include a list of important typological features and for ethnographers to add a sec- tion with notes on lexical and phraseological characteristics (see Chapter 8). Strictly speaking, the latter do not belong into a grammar but unless they are dealt with in a different part of the language documentation, they may be accommodated here.
3.1. The LDSG and the lexical data base
Since the entries in a lexical database contain information on word classes and subclasses, the sketch grammar only needs to explain the principles of word classification and briefly characterize each class to facilitate the un- derstanding of the abbreviations used in the lexical database and the anno- tations. For instance, in the Teop sketch grammar it is sufficient to say that Chapter 12 – Sketch grammar 307
causatives are derived by the prefix vaa- from intransitive and transitive verbs, but it is not necessary to investigate and describe which semantic types of lexemes have causative counterparts and what kind of argument or role structure they have. Any typologist interested in causativization can find out the rules by checking the lexical database and the text corpus for causatives.
Another example is the semantic motivation of noun class assignment to one of the three noun classes in Teop, the a-class, the e-class and the o-class. Since each noun in the dictionary is classified as n.a., n.e., or n.o., the sketch grammar only needs to describe which role the noun classes play in syntac- tic constructions and give a rough idea of their semantics. A thorough analy- sis can wait until there is time for a specialist investigation.
3.2. The LDSG and the corpus of annotated recordings
To quickly find and understand interesting grammatical constructions, a large corpus of recordings with interlinear glossings and a free translation is not sufficient or at least not always practical. Imagine you are interested in a very frequent conjunction like that in English. Your search gives you over 1000 examples, but 98% are uninteresting, you need the 20 exceptional ones to find evidence for your hypothesis or falsify it (for a similar example see Chapter 9).
Searching can be made easier when the annotation is accompanied by notes on conspicuous grammatical phenomena and they are given easily searchable names like COMPLEMENT CLAUSE . In this manner you can even make notes on constructions that are not characterized by a particular lin- guistic unit, e.g. a particle or bound morpheme, and for example note down “juxtaposed/asyndetic COMPLEMENT CLAUSE .” Apart from creating a useful tool for research on typological phenomena or the compilation of a refer- ence grammar, making such notes is intellectually stimulating and helps to cope with the sometimes boring task of transcribing and translating. Fur- thermore, these notes give linguists the chance to document their insights into the grammatical structure that they or others can make use of later. As futher dicussed in Chapters 1 and 9, a language documentation requires a thorough analysis of the language, but it does not necessarily leave room for writing up a comprehensive reference grammar. A well-planned combi- nation of a sketch grammar and grammatical notes in the annotated corpus of recordings can to some extent compensate for this.
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