Edited by Lenore A. Grenoble and N. Louanna Furbee
Language documentation, also often called documentary linguistics, is a relatively new subfield in linguistics which has emerged in part as a response to the pressing need for collecting, describing, and archiving material on the increasing number of endangered languages. The present book details… read more
Most documentation projects for endangered languages arise from the concerns and subsequent collaborations of language experts and of language inheritors. Both groups have vital interests. Linguistic experts view language death as loss of a record of human creativity and adaptation, study of which… read more
Linguistic theories direct scientific inquiry. They propose testable inventories of universal categories, properties, relations, and interactions that may constitute a language; for a particular language, they define sub-inventories of these that are legitimate expressions of the general design. To… read more
