Summer 2012 Workshop in Grammatical Description

In the summer of 2012, the Canada Institute of Linguistics (CanIL) at Trinity Western University, inWorkshop Langley, British Columbia will be having an advanced grammar emphasis featuring the following opportunities:

  • Workshop in Grammatical Description (6-9 weeks)
  • Advanced Grammar class (featuring Role and Reference Grammar) (9 weeks)

Special guests include Drs. Thomas and Doris Payne (SIL/University of Oregon). Potential participants are encouraged to start making plans immediately for this rare opportunity.

Download an application form (pdf).

Workshop Costs:

  • Workshop in Grammatical Description: $200

If you want to additionally take LING 560 Syntax and Semantics, please contact CanIL Admissions for more information. Costs are determined by a number of factors including whether you are taking this for audit or credit, for which degree program, and whether or not you are a member of SIL.

Room and Board costs are $70/week ($630 total) for a shared dorm room. Equipped cooking facilities provided in shared dorm room accomodation. Other housing opportunities may also be available. Refer to: Summer Cost Calculator for more information.

For more information or to register for any summer classes or the grammar workshop, please contact CanIL Admissions.

The Workshop in Grammatical Description June 11 – August 10, 2012 (6-9 weeks).

Led by Drs. Thomas and Doris Payne

This workshop is designed for experienced SIL fieldworkers, though it will be open to anyone who could profit from six to nine weeks of focused time working on a grammatical description, with the support and guidance of SIL International linguistics consultants. The ideal workshop participant would be a linguist-translator with one or more years of direct experience learning and doing linguistic analysis of one of the many under-documented languages of the world. A digital database of text materials of various genres (narrative, expository, hortatory, etc.) is also desirable.

The goal of the workshop is for each participant or team to produce a 30 page or longer “Grammar Sketch” that gives a brief overview of some key morphological and syntactic features of a field language. This sketch will not necessarily be a publishable paper, but may serve as the basis for a future published work. In addition to, or instead of the Grammar Sketch, participants may want to concentrate on another specific topic of interest, whether or not that topic appears on the workshop outline. The Grammar Sketch will be the focus of the workshop plenary sessions, and after the six-week workshop, consultants and workshop staff will be glad to continue working with individuals who wish to develop their papers (grammar sketches and/or other topical papers) into publishable form.

The workshop will be organized as follows:
Plenary sessions, 1 hour a day five days a week, will involve a combination of lectures by the workshop staff and presentations/discussion by the workshop participants of the work they are doing. Friday plenary sessions will consist of presentation of material by workshop participants.
Consultant sessions. Each individual or team who is participating in the workshop will be assigned a consultant early on. The team will meet with their consultant for up to one hour each day to discuss progress on the Grammar Sketch.

The rest of the work day will involve individual research and writing.
Insights from many different theoretical traditions may be employed in the workshop where they are useful, principally Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar, and Role and Reference Grammar. However, this will not be a workshop on linguistic theory. Theory will only be employed as it proves useful to clear, insightful linguistic description.

The cost of the workshop is $200. Scholarships may also be available. Participants may choose to enroll for Trinity Western University credit, though this is not required. We hope to have ten or more workshop participants.

CanIL’s Advanced Grammar course June 11-August 10, 2012 (9 weeks).

Taught by TBA

LING 560 Syntax and Semantics covers such topics as syntactic and semantic categories, clause and constituent order typology, and grammatical relations within the Role and Reference grammar paradigm.

We are hoping that many SIL and SIL-related entities around the world will encourage and support field linguists who wish to participate in this class and/or workshop, as an alternative or supplement to area or entity level workshops.