Arayaz wrote: ↑29 Mar 2024 23:51
Does anyone have any advice about how to make a reference grammar of a conlang in the style of a real reference grammar? (Aside from reading a lot of real reference grammars.) How should it be organized? What should it include?
It should include whatever is necessary to fully describe the language, and organised in the best way to convey that information clearly.
I'm sorry that that's a non-specific answer, but there is no specific answer. One language will need a chapter one one thing, while another language will need a chapter on a different thing. One language may be best explained by treating two things as distinct phenomena, while another language might require you to treat the same two things simultaneously, because they are so interrelated in this language. One language will encourage you to describe X before Y, while another is really hard to describe without covering Y first and X only later. And so on.
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One way to look at things might be to think of an "ideal" grammar that explains everything completely, and work from there.
Such a grammar would:
- explain the context of the language
- explain the orthography being used in the grammar, and in other contexts
- explain the segmental phonemes of the language
- explain the phonotactics of the language
- explain any supersegmental phonemes of the language
- explain the intersegmental phonological processes of the language (harmony, sandhi, etc) within and between words
- explain the prosody of the language
- explain all the parts of speech in the language
- explain all possible morphology for each part of speech
- explain the permissible syntax of phrases for each part of speech
- explain the permissible syntax of every type of clause
- explain the permissible syntax of every form of conjunction of clauses
- explain the function of each syntactic permutation of phrases
- explain the function of each syntactic permutation of clauses
- explain the function of each syntactic conjunction of clauses
- explain the possible methods for conveying each possible perlocution and illocution, and the reasons why certain methods may be preferred in certain circumstances
- explain the principles of conversational language usage in the language, in varying registers
- explain the principles of prose composition in the language, in varying registers
- explain the principles of poetic composition in the language, in varying registers
- repeat all of the above for each dialect and sociolect
- explain the interactions of dialects and sociolects
- explain processes of code-switching, borrowing and calquing into and from the language into all other languages
- discuss all of the above diachronically, at each stage of the language's development since the beginning of time
- discuss trends in current language use and possible extrapolations into the future
- provide a corpus of exemplar texts in the language
In practice, no grammar ever does all of this, and rarely in this order. Not just because it would be hard, but because it is often inefficient - too much time would be spent repeating yourself or stating the obvious. So things are missed out or abbreviated, and things are moved around in order in a way that makes more sense for the specific language in question.