Posts tagged dissertation

This post is inspired by reading two books, and a conversation. The first book is Aikhenvald’s The Art of Grammar: A Practical Guide and the second is Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention. Aikhenvald is practical, but only with regard to the lofty, theoretical bits of grammar writing. I liked how Peterson talked about typology of language, but also occasionally about more mundane things, like coding fonts. The conversation was with a friend who is in the process of writing a descriptive grammar.

I wrote my PhD thesis in a descriptive model, focusing on some specific bits of the grammar. I’ve also written a more detailed grammar of Lamjung Yolmo, which I’m hoping will be published… eventually (academic publishing is a bit of a grind). So, I’m not an expert but I have got my hands pretty dirty in this area. These are just my suggestions, but they may be useful if you’re starting a descriptive grammar, or any long format academic publication. I can’t honestly say I completely abide by these rules myself, but I’d like to think I try to, and I survived my PhD. I’m going to put the rest below this ‘read more’ section now because I don’t know how much ranting is going to happen.

Read more …

I’m currently doing some research that involves reading lots of descriptive grammars - both published books and PhD dissertations - of languages from all around the world. It’s very enjoyable, but I’m really struggling to find a sufficient number of PhD dissertations to include. 

This has lead me to spend a lot of time musing about the inaccessibility of much PhD research. I feel a little sad that people will spend 4 years of their lives on important and useful research, and it never makes it beyond a bound copy in their university library. I have been going directly to specific institutions, and emailing lots of colleagues, and today I thought I’d put a wider call-out up here. Can you help me out?

I’m looking specifically for:

• PhD dissertations/theses (no MA sorry!);
• Dated 2003-2012;
• That are based on primary documentation of a language, and are either a grammatical description of the whole system, or focus on a specific morpho-syntactic area;
• Are not from Australia or the USA (as I have many from both countries);
• Are in English;
• That I could access as an electronic copy.

As you can see, it’s a rather specific list - but I only need another 5 or 6 to round out my collection. If you’ve written a PhD that fits this description, or have one in your PDF library (the Pokemon collection of the modern academic) then let me know in the comments below, as a reblog, or by emailing me at superlinguo(at)gmail.com.

This project is shaping up to be a really exciting one, and I look forward to sharing it with you in the future!!

- Lauren