Catching Language The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing

This is the first book to focus on the problem of writing grammars of little-known languages, a task of major urgency as linguists face the challenge of documenting the thousands of endangered languages around the world. Its different chapters are written by a distinguished group of grammarians, typologists and theoreticians, who represent a wide range of different descriptive traditions and have themselves described little-known languages of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia. The book addresses the many questions that the author of a reference grammar must tackle, as they try and distil the regularities of a whole language into a single integrated volume whose audience will lie at the intersection of language specialists, typologists, formal linguists, and members of the speech community.