Catching language

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Descriptive grammars serve as essential tools for documenting and analyzing the structures of the world’s 6,000 languages. They provide a comprehensive overview of how a language functions, making them vital resources for specialists, typologists, theoreticians, and members of the respective speech communities. Crafting a descriptive grammar presents a significant intellectual challenge, requiring grammarians to respect a language's unique characteristics while considering other languages, to balance rigor with readability, and to depict structural regularities while honoring real language use. Despite a growing recognition of the need to document lesser-known languages, no existing work addresses the various challenges faced by authors of descriptive grammars. This volume gathers contributors who explore these issues from diverse perspectives. Most have experience writing descriptive grammars, while others represent different readerships. Topics include grammar design, the roles of outsider and native grammarians, the relationship between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the importance of explanation in grammatical description, and the challenges of contextualizing languages culturally and historically. This book aims to rejuvenate the field of grammaticography, appealing to descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists by uniting distinguished practitioners to tackle these complex questions.