Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic
structure of the world's 6 000 languages. They bring together in one place a coherent
treatment of how the whole language works and therefore form the primary source of information
on a given language consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists typologists
theoreticians of any part of language (syntax morphology phonology historical linguistics
etc.) and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is
a major intellectual challenge that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the
language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work to combine rigour
with readability to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material
and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation
inherent in any speech community.Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document
little-known languages there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the
author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the
problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves but others
represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of
grammar design the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians the balance
between grammar and lexicon cross-linguistic comparability the role of explanation in
grammatical description the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language
description the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context
and the tensions between linguistic particularity established practice of particular schools
of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework.This
book will renew the field of grammaticography addressing a multiple readership of descriptive
linguists typologists and formal linguists by bringing together a range of distinguished
practitioners from around the world to address these questions.
