Grammatical Sketches From The Field Yasuhiro Yamakoshi by Yasuhiro Yamakoshi 9784863370739, 4863370733 instant download after payment.

This book presents‘grammatical sketches’created by young Japanese descriptive linguists. Each contributor describesthephonological and grammatical outlineofthe language which they have been working on, mainly by using the primary data researched by them. 

This book aims to not only provideageneral outline, but also present the typological or cross-linguistic characteristics of the studied languages. For this purpose, we considered two principles with regard to the mannerofdescription, namely,(1)to use general linguistic terms instead of traditional, specific termsofeach language and area, and(2)to shareatableofcontents for reference. However, these principles led to some problems.Ifwe use general terms insteadofspecific terms, the description ofthegrammar may be incomplete. This is because many linguists have written the grammarthatis adapted tothegrammatical/functional structuresofeach language by using specific terms.Ifwe sharethetableofcontents, we might include an‘unnecessary’point,e.g.suffixation of isolative languages. 

On the other hand, if each of us uses specific terms based on the traditional descriptions, it would be very difficult to emphasize the contrast among the structures of different languages. Furthermore, the use of ‘un- necessary’ description points enables us to visually capture the relative characteristics of each language. Therefore, we decided to follow these principles and discussed how to draft the table of contents.

We, along with young descriptive linguists based in Japan have attempted to describe the grammars of various languages worldwide on the basis of these principles since 2005.