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CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS
Language Documentation Series
Published by Psammeticus Press
Psammeticus Press offers a number of Language Documentation Series geared toward the needs of typical linguists. Each series admits to and even embraces a certain amount of human frailty, while acknowledging the need to publish.
Hastily-Written Grammars
We know what real fieldwork is like. If you’re like 96% of real linguists, you didn’t have enough time or money to manage anything like complete documentation of a language. More likely, you squeezed in a few hours of elicitation, between frequent trips to the bathroom and frequent visits from the local police. Not to mention the hours spent plying local officials with alcohol, just to get permission for your trip to begin with. In the end, you got enough data to fool your dissertation committee, but nothing that would make Keren Rice sit up and take notice.
Then, when you got home, you found that paying for your dissertation year of grad school meant working 60 hours per week, while all your weekends were taken up with your kids’ soccer games.
No data, no time. If this is your situation (and we know that it is), HWG is the series for you. With only a minimum of data, and a few days to write it up, you’ve got a magnum opus appropriate for the HWG series. Our average volume is 34 pages, and is based on approximately 8.6 contact hours in the field.
So what are you waiting for? Submit your grammar today!
Reasonably Natural Text Materials
Did you have trouble collecting natural texts when doing your fieldwork? Did speakers balk when you turned on a recording device? Did you have to resort to piecing together invented narratives during elicitation sessions?
RNTM wants your texts! They’re good enough for us.
(Note: we require only reasonably complete glossing. Free translations are nice, too, if you have time to do them.)
Patchwork Grammars
Let’s face it, there’s nothing new under the sun. From a typological point of view, there isn’t anything left to say about natural languages. We’ve seen it all before. The Patchwork Grammars series invites linguists to admit the truth of this observation, and to streamline the production of new grammatical descriptions.
Patchwork Grammars draw their descriptions from existing grammars. Suppose you find that noun compounding in your language is pretty much just like that in Fijian, while adjectives work just like those of Fula. Simply copy the relevant sections from published grammars of Fijian and Fula (with proper citations, of course), update the data with your own examples, and move on to the next topic. Look! You’ve almost finished noun phrases already! Writing a grammar has never been easier.
If you’d like to write a Patchwork Grammar, send a proposal listing the name of your language, its likely genetic affiliation, and a couple of basic typological facts about it. If we accept your proposal (which we always do), we’ll respond with a personalized list of grammars that you can copy from. The rest is a cinch!
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