Digital grammaticography

Note: The digital grammar project was part of my postdoctoral research and is currently on hiatus. The tools and resources remain available, though active development has paused.

Digital grammars represent an innovative approach to language description that combines traditional linguistic analysis with computational tools, interactive elements, and structured data.

What are digital grammars?

Digital grammars go beyond traditional print grammars by:

• Integrating corpus examples directly with grammatical descriptions
• Providing interactive elements such as searchable paradigms and glossaries
• Linking to primary data (recordings, texts) where available
• Supporting multiple output formats (web, PDF, print) from the same source
• Enabling data-driven updates as new language data becomes available

My explorations in digital grammar Writing

I’m developing a comprehensive framework for creating digital grammars that combines:

• Markdown-based content compiled to multiple formats with lingdocs
• Structured linguistic data encoded as CLDF datasets (example), using my cldf-ldd framework
• Data conversion tools for *box and FLEx

Digital grammar tutorial

I’m building a do-it-yourself guide (currently under construction) to help linguists create their own digital grammars.

Examples and case studies

My digital grammar projects

• Yawarana Digital Sketch Grammar - A demonstration of my approach with a Cariban language

Notable Digital Grammar Implementations

• Citation: Thieberger, Musgrave & al. (2018) (N.A.). (2018). Nunggubuyu Grammar Online. Retrieved from http://users.monash.edu.au/%5Ctextasciitilde%20smusgrav/Nunggubuyu/ , as described in Citation: Musgrave & Thieberger (2012) Musgrave, S. & Thieberger, N. (2012). Language description and hypertext: Nunggubuyu as a case study. InNordhoff, S. (Eds.), Electronic Grammaticography. (pp. 63–77).University of Hawai'i Press.
• Citation: Lau (2022) Lau, J. (2022). Abesabesi Grammar. Retrieved from https://abesabesi.cceh.uni-koeln.de , as described in Citation: Lau (2021) Lau, J. (2021). A Digital Reference Grammar of Abesabesi: Towards a data format for digital reference grammars  (phdthesis). University of Cologne
• Citation: Junker (2000) (N.A.). (2000). The Interactive East Cree Reference Grammar. Retrieved from https://www.eastcree.org/cree/en/grammar/
• Historical note: The now-defunct GALOES project ( Citation: Nordhoff, 2007 Nordhoff, S. (2007). The grammar authoring system GALOES.; Citation: Nordhoff, 2007 Nordhoff, S. (2007). Grammar writing in the Electronic Age.; Citation: Nordhoff, 2007 Nordhoff, S. (2007). Growing a grammar with GALOES.)

Theoretical Background

• Citation: Nordhoff (2008) Nordhoff, S. (2008). Electronic reference grammars for typology: Challenges and solutions. Language Documentation \\& Conservation, 2(2). 296–324.
• Contributions in Citation: Nordhoff (2012) Nordhoff, S. (2012). Electronic Grammaticography. University of Hawai'i Press. :
  • Citation: Drude (2012) Drude, S. (2012). Digital Grammars: Integrating the Wiki/CMS approach with Language Archiving Technology. InNordhoff, S. (Eds.), Electronic Grammaticography. (pp. 160–178).University of Hawai'i Press.
  • Citation: Nordhoff (2012) Nordhoff, S. (2012). The grammatical description as a collection of form-meaning-pairs. InNordhoff, S. (Eds.), Electronic Grammaticography. (pp. 33–62).University of Hawai'i Press.
• Citation: Lau (2021) Lau, J. (2021). A Digital Reference Grammar of Abesabesi: Towards a data format for digital reference grammars  (phdthesis). University of Cologne

Presentations and Publications

• Digital grammaticography: towards data-rich corpus-based interactive hypertext grammars (SLE 2023)
• A digital sketch grammar of Yawarana (Amazonicas IX, 2023)
• A first glimpse at a workflow for writing digital grammars (GLOSS Colloquium, 2023)

References