The grammatical description as a collection of form-meaning-pairs

Abstract

This paper analyzes the structure of books containing grammatical descriptions and builds up on work by Good (2004). It argues that the discussion of morphology, syntax, semantics, and intonation found in grammatical descriptions can be seen as a collection of interdependent form-meaning-pairs. These form-meaning-pairs form part of the larger structure of frontmatter, mainmatter and backmatter (Mosel 2006) and have themselves an internal structure which includes, among other things, linguistic examples as formalized by Bow et al (2003).