Syntax from the Bottom up: Elicitation, Corpus Data, and Thick Descriptions

Syntacticians working in language documentation need to approach syntax in the context of an overall documentation program, which often includes creation of a lexicon and collection of texts. In such an environment, syntactic research needs to use both a text corpus and elicitation in a careful way. A deeper understanding of several unusual syntactic properties of Copala Triqui has emerged from syntactic research conducted in the context of such a language documentation program.