Sketch Grammars

Instructions for sketch grammars

Introductory video by Mark Alves

Suggested Table of Contents

Note: The following is provisional; you may adapt your text as you feel appropriate. Ideally departures from this template should be circulated so that authors can benefit from the insight, and maintain comparability and consistency throughout the volume. Individual chapters should be about 25-30 pages in length (10'000 words). An important point to keep in mind is that the information given in the language sketches should be easily accessible also to linguists working on typological issues outside Southeast Asia or AA languages. The terminology and presentation should therefore adhere to common standards in the linguistic literature. A list of features to be addressed (adapted from the WALS database, which can be consulted for details and an extended list) is downloadable at the bottom of this page.

Examples must be glossed according to the Leipzig glossing rules (http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php). Suggestions for additional specific glosses and abbreviations necessary to the description of Austroasiatic languages are welcome and are published on this site (http://sites.google.com/site/icaalprojects/aa-book-project/notational-conventions) in order to achieve the greatest possible uniformity and comparability of the individual chapters.

If you want to include an established indigenous orthography, please make sure that you use Unicode fonts only.

First drafts of the Grammar Sketch Sedang by Paul Sidwell and Modern Mon by Mathias Jenny are available as PDF (link at bottom of page). Comments and suggestions are welcome!

1. BACKGROUND

(affiliation, demography, geography, sociolinguistics/contact, previous research, etc.)

2. PHONETICS/PHONOLOGY

2.1 Word/Syllable structure

2.2 Phoneme inventory (consonants and vowels) and phonotactics

2.3 Suprasegmentals (tones, registers, phonation)

2.4 (Other issues as needed)

3. WORD FORMATION

3.1 Compounding

3.2 Derivational affixes

3.2.1 Deriving nouns

3.2.2 Deriving verbs

3.2.3 Deriving other parts of speech

3.3 Reduplication

3.4 (Other issues as needed)

4. PHRASE AND CLAUSE STRUCTURE

4.1 Simple sentences (word order, questions, commands)

4.2 Complex sentences

4.2.1 Coordination, chaining, and subordination

4.2.2 Relative clauses

4.2.3 Complement clauses

4.2.4 Adverbial clauses

4.3 Syntax and pragmatics (topic-comment, etc.)

4.4 Noun phrases

4.5 (Other issues as needed)

5. WORD CLASSES

5.1 Nouns

5.1.1 Common nouns

5.1.2 Pronouns and question words

5.2.3 Measure words and quantity words

5.1.4 Names and Terms of Address

5.1.5 (Other categories as needed)

5.2 Verbs

5.2.1 Intransitive verbs

5.2.2 Transitive verbs

5.2.3 Ditransitive verbs

5.2.4 Directional verbs

5.2.5 Causative verbs

5.2.6 Existential verbs

5.2.7 Preverbs and Auxiliary verbs

5.2.8 (Other categories as needed)

5.3 Locational and Directional words

5.4 Conjunctions/Connective words

5.5 Particles

5.6 (Other categories as needed)

6. SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

6.1 Specialized vocabulary

6.2 Language use

6.3 (other categories as needed)

7. SAMPLE GLOSSED TEXT (1 page)

8. SHORT LEXICON (SEA adapted Swadesh list, 285 items; attachment below)

9. BIBLIOGRAPHY (no more than 1 page)