Toshihide Nakayam, Keren Rice

This book grows out of the International Symposium on Grammar Writing: Theoretical, Methodological, and Practical Issues, which was held in Tokyo in December 2009. The symposium and this book project were supported by the Linguistic Dynamics Science Project (LingDy) at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, as part of their activity to support and invigorate the descriptive and documentation research of under-studied languages. The goals of the symposium, echoed in the goals of this book, were two-fold. First we aim to encourage and assist those interested in writing grammars in their endeavor by providing them with information and discussion about methodological and practical aspects of grammar writing. Second we hope to raise awareness about some of the complex issues involved in writing grammars and highlight possible ways of dealing with those issues. In this introduction, we situate the reader by identifying some of the challenges that face the grammar writer in the contemporary context.