Customer Reviews

Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists

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Although subtitled as a field guide for linguists, I have been using this book as a guide for studying linguistics. It is well set out, full of examples (usually in non indo-european languages) and with cogent English desciptions. A good bibliography, which is frequently referred to, gives further more in depth reading if more understanding is required.

Anyone interested in the world's lesser-researched languages will want to use this "guide for field linguists." The author provides a well-researched approach to common and not-so-common features of morphology and syntax. Practical, clear questions at strategic points provide an outline that could be used to produce a good descriptive grammar of most any language. The examples are a marvelous cross-section of linguistic tid-bits from around the world.

The helpful index of languages and index of subjects concludes the 400-page volume.

I recommend this book to students and faculty alike.

Even though this book is intended for linguists doing fieldwork, it is an absolute must for those who create languages for fun. Why? Well, the purpose of the book is to teach a fieldworker how to write a descriptive grammar for the language s/he's working on. It points out everything that should be recorded, and gives examples of different phenomena from different languages. Well, guess what? A language creator is essentially a fieldworker working on an undiscovered language: his/her own. This book will guide a language creator in creating a grammar of his/her own language, and, when you get stuck, it's always helpful to see how natural languages do things. As a language creator, I highly recommend this book to anyone who creates languages.

(And, as a linguist, I highly recommend this book to anyone who's doing fieldwork, of course.)

If language documentation is your thing, then this is the book for you. The book's subtitle is "a guide for field linguists," which is a very apt description. This book is a good introduction to morphology and morphosyntax from a non-Chomskyan perspective; i.e. no mention of syntactic theory or parse trees. I enjoyed the vast amount of diversity in the language data the book has. It also includes some information regarding issues you might encounter in the field, if you're describing a previously unknown language. I used this book for an undergrad morphology class and I didn't find it too difficult to read or understand.