GRASSROOTS GRAMMAR IN THE GULF STATES

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) Project. Atlas data from most sections of the country provide baseline evidence for the inductive study of regional phonology, morphology, and vocabulary. For the sake of efficiency, atlas projects survey morphology and syntax through the investigation of features observed in earlier research and exploratory fieldwork. Closely related to function words in the interpretation of grammatical and idiomatic constructions are the structural signals of prosody—stress, pitch, and juncture as they combine in the basic contours of intonation. The combinations of morphemes recorded in free conversation provide not only examples of lexical, semantic, and grammatical variation but also outline processes of word formation observable in the idiolect. In the composition of a national grammar, the role of LAGS and other regional surveys is predetermined by the division of labor within the field of descriptive linguistics.