LSA 2025 Workshop
Foundations of Minimalist Syntax: Steps Toward the Miracle Creed
Organizers: Andreas Blümel (Universität Göttingen/Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, andreas.bluemel@hu-berlin.de) and Chris Collins (New York University, cc116@nyu.edu)
Sunday January 12, 2025 (Salon G: 10:15am to 1:30pm)
Andreas B. and I have a workshop to present at the 2025 LSA Annual meeting. During this break, I have been preparing for it. Here is a concept map of my process.
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Here is a list of descriptive books (grammars and dictionaries) on the Khoisan languages that I have written, or helped to write. It is unlikely that I will write any further descriptive books of this nature on the Khoisan languages. So I thought I would gather all the titles together in one place. If you need any of these books, please let me know.
In chronological order:
Collins, Chris and Levi Namaseb. 2011. A Grammatical Sketch of N|uuki with Stories. Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. (https://www.koeppe.de/titel_a-grammatical-sketch-of-n-uuki-n-uuki-with-stories)
Collins, Chris and Jeffrey S. Gruber. 2014. A Grammar of ǂHȍã. Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. (https://www.koeppe.de/titel_a-grammar-of-hoa-h-a)
Sands, Bonny and Kerry Jones (chief editors). 2022. Nǀuuki Namagowab Afrikaans English ǂXoakiǂxanisi/Mîdi di ǂKhanis/Woordeboek/Dictionary. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media for African Tongue. (https://dictionary.sadilar.org/#/about) [Chris Collins was a member of the editoral team.]
Collins, Chris. 2023. A Grammatical Sketch of Kuasi (Botswana). Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. (https://www.koeppe.de/titel_a-grammatical-sketch-of-kuasi-botswana)
Collins, Chris. 2024. Sasi Dictionary (Botswana). Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. (https://www.koeppe.de/titel_sasi-dictionary-botswana)
Collins, Chris and Zachary Wellstood. 2025. A Grammatical Sketch of Cua. Peter Lang. (https://www.peterlang.com/document/1499513)
Summary
Cua is a Kalahari Khoe language spoken in southeastern Botswana (Kweneng District). It is closely related to languages such as G||ana, Tshila and Tsua. The phonology chapter describes the consonant, tone and vowel inventories, as well as a system of depressed tones following aspirated and voiced consonants. Later chapters provide concise overviews of the morphology and syntax of the language. Cua is characterized by a complex system of person-gender-number markers (PGN markers), which play a role in the formation of the pronouns. The features defining pronouns include: singular, dual, and plural number; first, second, and third person; and masculine, feminine and neutral gender. There is also a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns.
https://www.peterlang.com/document/1499513
Andrew Radford passed away on December 16, 2024.
I first met Andrew Radford in China. We were both invited speakers for the 5th International Conference on Formal Linguistics, held in Guangzhou, China (December 2011). When we met, we hit it off right away, and the four of us (me and my wife, Andrew and his), spent most of our time outside of the conference together. The conference organizers had assigned to us two young Chinese linguistics students as guides, one male one female. So that was our little group of six. We went to lunch and dinner together, and had fantastic feasts of Chinese food, in styles from all over the country. We asked our Chinese guides endless questions about China and Chinese food and the local region. We also did some sightseeing, going to various scenic regions and a zoo, where there were pandas. It was without a doubt one of the best conference travel experiences of my life, due in large part to meeting Andrew and his wife there (and of course, the hospitality of our Chinese hosts).
While at the conference, Andrew and I gabbed pretty much non-stop about syntax. This was when ‘Imposters’ was just about to come out, so that was on my mind. As for Andrew, he was working a lot on spoken corpus data that he had put together. He was finding all kinds of interesting syntactic patterns that he told me about. After intensive discussions for a few days, we decided to collaborate on a paper, which lay at the intersection of our research domains.
Collins, Chris and Andrew Radford. 2015. Gaps, Ghosts and Gapless Relatives in Spoken English. Studia Linguistica 69.2, 191-235.
From that time onward, I valued him greatly as a colleague. He was a real syntactician’s syntactician, brilliant and deeply committed to the scientific research agenda of generative syntax. After China, I wrote to him often about all kinds of issues. For example, he gave me extensive written feedback on various versions of my 2024 monograph (‘Principles of Argument Structure’), and helped me to clarify a thorny issue concerning exempt anaphora.
I was so happy to meet Andrew in China, because I owed him a special debt. In the summer of 1984 (nearly thirty years before I met him in-person), I read through his Transformational Syntax (Cambridge University Press, 1981) in its entirety and worked through the exercises with a friend. I still remember how clearly the textbook was written and how captivating it was. It literally drew me in so that I became excited about generative syntax. Then the next academic year, I took a number of graduate level syntax courses (with Hale, Rizzi, Ross), with Andrew’s textbook as my background. It is quite possible that my career would have turned out differently if I had not found and studied his textbook.
I believe through his syntax textbooks he has probably done as much as any other individual to promote the scientific study of generative syntax in the world.
Abstract: These scribbles investigate unaccusative verbs that have an agent.
Keywords: unaccusative, unergative, agent, theme
Abstract: On November 9-10, 2007, a conference on creating a database of the syntactic structures of the world’s languages was held at NYU. This document contains the original proposal for the database (Chris Collins and Richard Kayne), the paper presented by Chris Collins and the paper presented by Richard Kayne.
Keywords: adposition, agreement, comparative syntax, database, dialect, glossing, primitives,
questionnaire, replicability, Wikipedia
