How to Cite This Blog

Doing syntactic research includes acknowledging ideas that you get from informal sources, such as blog posts, talks, conversations, etc. If you find ideas on this blog useful in your own work, please cite the relevant blog post. 

Minimalist Syntax and the Many Faces of Recursion

This blog post summarizes the confusing web of concepts associated with recursion, and comments on how they are related to each other. In particular, I will show how each of the concepts relates to the minimalist structure building operation Merge.

Ghanaian versus Togolese Ewe (prepublication draft May 21 2026)

Abstract

Based on a survey of some Ghanaian and Togolese dialects of Ewe, this paper shows that there are features that distinguish dialects of Ewe spoken in Ghana from dialects of Ewe spoken in Togo. These features include lexical items, syntactic constructions, pragmatic uses of certain expressions and a hand gesture. Because of these systematic differences, Ewe dialects spoken in Ghana are collectively referred to as Ghanaian Ewe, and those in Togo are collectively referred to as Togolese Ewe. 

Edits to Preliminary Kpelegbe Dictionary

The original version of the Kpelegbe dictionary was a set of hand-written fieldnotes from the early 90s, meant to provide me with a tool for my syntactic analyses at the time. It was arranged by tonal category (e.g., L.LH).  During this last academic year (2025-2026), I wrote up those notes into a word file, and gave it to Zach to translate into a FLEx project, which is much easier to work with in creating dictionaries. That initial process is outlined here:

Fieldwork Starter Kit

This blog post is for people who are heading off on their first big fieldwork expedition, and just want a few pointers to get started. The advice is oriented toward syntactic fieldwork, but in most cases is more general.

The First Field Trip: 10 Pieces of Advice.

Worksheet for Syntactic Fieldwork

Audio Recording a Fieldwork Session

Recording onto Your Computer

Capturing Oral Texts

Basic Consultant Skills for Linguistic Fieldwork

Backup Workflow for Linguistic Fieldwork