The chapter locates the Minimalist Program (MP) in the wider context of the Generative Program (GP). It argues that MP is the next logical step for GP to take given the relative success of two prior projects: (i) explaining how linguistic creativity (the capacity to use and understand an unbounded number of different hierarchically organized linguistic objects) is possible and (ii) explaining how linguistic flexibility (the human meta-capacity to acquire the grammatical recursive procedures that undergird linguistic creativity) is possible. The argument is that given that we (roughly) understand what kinds of recursive procedures natural language grammars (Gs) contain, and given that we (roughly) understand key aspects of the fine structure of the faculty of language (FL), MP asks the obvious next question of why FL has the particular structure it has.

This chapter examines the different kinds of Indigenous-language texts that scholars can find in the archives, including word lists, philosophical vocabularies, dictionaries, grammars, and religious texts. It provides an overview of the kinds of features scholars are likely to find in these sources and the kinds of (sometimes competing) interpretations scholars have put forward to understand them. This essay argues that Indigenous-language texts reveal the practices of intercultural communication and demonstrate the varied ways traders, missionaries, officials, and other colonizers deployed linguistic knowledge to justify dispossession and to achieve the practical goals with respect to colonization. Yet because these texts ultimately depended on willing Native participation in the production of linguistic knowledge, these sources also provide unmatched possibilities for recovering diverse Indigenous intellectual and sociopolitical frameworks.

This is a chapter about ‘applications’, specifically the application of corpus linguistics to language learning and teaching. The chapter highlights the input of corpus research into reference materials for learners, including a proposal for a novel ‘constructicon’. It then discusses research using learner corpora, with advice on building a learner corpus and exploiting it to gain information on grammatical development and on vocabulary and collocation. Applications of corpus research to the study of discoursal or pragmatic features such as signalling nouns and stance expressions are then discussed. Finally, there is a discussion of the notion of complexity in learner language. The final part of the chapter discusses the issue of language learners using corpora directly. Research in this area is described, as are some of the materials – software and books – specifically designed to enable learners to gain information from a corpus, especially in the area of academic discourse.

Chapter 3 describes the fundamental research questions, empirical approaches and findings of language documentation and descriptive linguistics. These are two closely interrelated linguistic subfields concentrating on the collection and/or analysis of primary data for the purposes of documenting and describing languages (corpora and grammars). Methodological issues include considerations on research objects, fieldwork, as well as techniques and procedures of data collection, editing, and analysis such as transcription, annotation, and elicitation. The chapter ends with recommendations for further reading and a list of short exercises and ideas for small research projects.

This chapter analyses the role of grammars, dictionaries and other metalinguistic texts in the history and present practice of language standardization, with examples and case studies taken from a broad range of European and non-European languages. The chapter presents a typology of codification types, with examples: standard-creating, modernizing, archaizing and standard-descriptive. It argues that dictionaries, grammars and related texts participate in a historical discourse tradition, with a number of shared features, but where participation in that discourse tradition does not necessarily indicate the presence of a standard language ideology. It presents that discourse tradition in five broad (and inevitably sometimes overlapping) phases: early practical (professional or pedagogical) codifications; patriotic codifications (from the sixteenth century onwards in Europe); public-orientated codifications (rationalist, democratizing codifications, with a wider intended reach, from the late eighteenth century); national and nationalist codifications; and post-national(ist) challenges to standard ideologies. It also looks at the important role of grammars and dictionaries for foreign language learners in the history of language standardizations and the connections to language purism. Finally, the chapter presents a framework to evaluate the difficult question of the authority, reach and ultimate influence of grammars, dictionaries and related texts on usage.