What do you think?
Rate this book
Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists
This book is a guide for linguistic fieldworkers who wish to write a description of the morphology and syntax of one of the world's many underdocumented languages. It offers readers who work through it one possible outline for a grammatical description, with many questions designed to help them address the key topics. Appendices offer guidance on text and elicited data, and on sample reference grammars that readers might wish to consult. This will be a valuable resource to anyone engaged in linguistic fieldwork.
430 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
17 people are currently reading
342 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 17, 2018
I would never use this book in the way that it was intended: as a reference work for missionaries interested in translating scriptures into tongues with alien and bizarre grammatical categories.
That said, the book leads the reader on an interesting tour through a necessarily limited but apparently representative sampling of the world's languages, especially those very different from English and from English's European cousins. We are led to (re-)examine the analysis-polysynthesis continuum, clause types, case, tense-aspect-mood, voice and valence, topic-focus, lexical categories, etc. Entire shelves have been dedicated to each of these, so it is not surprising that the analysis feels shallow at times.
There is no sense of the ecology of the languages studied. A language might be highlighted for having one grammatical distinction, but there is no larger view of how that category's exponence leads to the presence or absence of other grammatical phenomena elsewhere in the same language. After reading this book, I felt as though I had come away with a grocery list of morphosyntactic possibilities but no real sense of nutrition or farming. The food just shows up on the shelves and we just take what we like. There is no real treatment of more formal syntactic processes and arrangements. The reader is left with the idea that semantic and in some cases pragmatic ideas map in a one to one relationship between morphemes and concepts. Nevertheless, this book should be treated as a roadmap through some only recently charted terrain. To truly describe a language, it would be necessary to consult whole grammars from the ethnolinguistic region under consideration.
But for people like me, those who are not likely ever to write a grammar or to translate a Bible, this book is well worth the effort. Payne presents a thousand interesting ideas that can be followed up and expanded upon by the reader's subsequent curiosity and drive. Think of this book as being like a literary anthology, one which can guide the reader to pursue and expand upon what interests her/him the most.
That said, the book leads the reader on an interesting tour through a necessarily limited but apparently representative sampling of the world's languages, especially those very different from English and from English's European cousins. We are led to (re-)examine the analysis-polysynthesis continuum, clause types, case, tense-aspect-mood, voice and valence, topic-focus, lexical categories, etc. Entire shelves have been dedicated to each of these, so it is not surprising that the analysis feels shallow at times.
There is no sense of the ecology of the languages studied. A language might be highlighted for having one grammatical distinction, but there is no larger view of how that category's exponence leads to the presence or absence of other grammatical phenomena elsewhere in the same language. After reading this book, I felt as though I had come away with a grocery list of morphosyntactic possibilities but no real sense of nutrition or farming. The food just shows up on the shelves and we just take what we like. There is no real treatment of more formal syntactic processes and arrangements. The reader is left with the idea that semantic and in some cases pragmatic ideas map in a one to one relationship between morphemes and concepts. Nevertheless, this book should be treated as a roadmap through some only recently charted terrain. To truly describe a language, it would be necessary to consult whole grammars from the ethnolinguistic region under consideration.
But for people like me, those who are not likely ever to write a grammar or to translate a Bible, this book is well worth the effort. Payne presents a thousand interesting ideas that can be followed up and expanded upon by the reader's subsequent curiosity and drive. Think of this book as being like a literary anthology, one which can guide the reader to pursue and expand upon what interests her/him the most.
April 28, 2025
Just fine; some cool stuff. I've now read two field method books and still feel like I could've intuited half the stuff in them.
January 4, 2013
Excellent reference book to introduce all the ways language can vary to students. The explanations are a little light lots of time, and there is some "school" specific terminology (I heard DJP's voice in my head decrying "morphemes"!) but it would be hard to find a more comprehensive, useful book.
October 6, 2011
Read it before years ago. Great book with fascinating insights on language.
August 17, 2012
Actually I think it's 4.5,,,for there is no practical exercise
February 17, 2013
good as a textbook, but not enough for postgrad
October 13, 2014
Really helpful.
June 18, 2008
A superb reference for all things related to morphosyntax.
September 6, 2014
Quite clear, nice selection of topics
July 20, 2017
Though not intended as such: wonderfully clear and systematic intro to the morphosyntactic and related aspects of linguistics, very useful for conlangers and for teaching yourself the field.
November 9, 2018
Finished this one ages ago, whoops. Definitely a must-read if you're into linguistics.
November 5, 2012
This was a pretty good book, but not so great as a first introduction to linguistics because the author sometimes doesn't explain things very well. There were parts of the book that the professor had to explain to us because they were hard to understand. At the same time, it might be too basic for those who know the subject already. Beyond the awkward passages, though, it's thorough and pretty useful. I recommend it as long as you have other resources available to clarify a few points.
Read
March 2, 2021read this language description & linguistic fieldwork course. It's actually a far better introduction to morphosyntax than the one I read for my morphosyntax course [Kroeger] with more widespread language samples, better category description, and simply more engaging reading. Very recommended.
December 4, 2007
This is a really fabulous guide for doing linguistics fieldwork. I used it in my field study of Farsi, and it really helped me to write the grammar.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews