The concept of Grammar

Giorgio Buccellati – February 2016, January 2025

Encoding manuals as envelopes

The antecedents of the Grammar are to be found in the various Encoding Manuals that governed the recording system since the beginning of the Urkesh/Mozan Archaeological Project. They are of interest in that they shed light on the development of the system. But they are also interesting in order to highlight the nature of the Grammar.

By its own nature, an encoding manual has two aims:

to provide a list of definitions that are available for describing the items known to belong to a certain inventory, and
to resolve the codes that are used to formulate these definitions.

In an encoding manual, the focus is on the details. There is, to be sure, an overall cohesiveness that governs the list of definitions and the corresponding codes. But this is in the nature of providing an envelope, or a set of envelopes, that neatly assemble these discrete elements which would otherwise be floating in a vacuum.

A trend beyond

It may be said that an encoding manual tends to be a grammar, since, for the “envelope” to be effective, it must clearly delimit what it may, and may not, contain. This implies, however subtly, a notion of the whole, but it is truly only an “implicitation,” i. e., it is not a declared principle: an encoding manual does not articulate the conceptual and theoretical framework that defines the system as a whole.

It may also be said that an encoding manual has a hidden theoretical component. In the case of the Mozan/Urkesh project, this was briefly enunciated, in a set of “Principles and presuppositions,” of which one will find the 1992 version in the UGR digital book.

Even more important, in the development of the Mozan/Urkesh encoding manual, was the presence of an overriding concept of a system: this served as the underlying buttress that kept the system coherent over the several decades of operation through which it evolved. It is for this reason that data entered in the early stages of the project are still usable within the current framework.

Grammars as systems

It is clear, then, that the Grammar is not an overgrown encoding manual, but something substantially different. The main difference is that a grammar emphasizes the structural coherence of the whole. It does certainly include the details that are at the core of an encoding manual. But these details are seen in function of the whole.

This may best be explained in terms of the difference between a list and a paradigm. A list is not a closed system: it is open to any addition that may fit at any place in the sequence. A paradigm is instead a closed system: any change or addition entails a revision of the system as such, a revision that affects by necessity all the specific cases where the paradigm applies. If the paradigm of a verbal tense admits three persons in the singular and three in the plural, adding a dual voice implies that all verbs must accept it. There can be no ad hoc and casual addition that pertains to only one or some lexical examples.

An example

As an example I may refer to the paradigm of contact associations. The “list” given in the main lexicon is in fact a closed system, a tight paradigm with ten possible “verbs” which form a tight paradigm. There cannot be more or less than ten items, and they include all possible types of contacts, organizing them in a specific and tightly knit arrangement of five categories, each subdivided into two alternatives. The actual occurrences in the excavations are given in the sitewide digital book.

The paradigm does not exclude additions or subtractions: but any such addition or subtraction would have to show how it affects the other elements in the system: is it a refinement of an existing category? a totally new category? if so, how does it relate structurally to the others? and so on.

Database and argument

In a database, however relational it may be, we have a repository of facts (the “data”). They are, indeed, coded so as to show not only the definition of each item, but also its potential connection with others. But the connection remains, precisely, potential. An encoding manual serves well such a purpose.

The grammar goes beyond that. It is intended to serve the development of an argument, and not just to serve as its presupposition in the form of a database. An argument aims to connect the data in function of a thesis which starts from a premise and leads to a conclusion, according to a sequential logic. A grammar is constructed in function of such a whole.

The concern for seeing the coding system as a grammatical structural whole is what makes possible on the one hand the development of the segmented narrative, and to allow, on the other, for the full interaction among all levels or planes within any given website and among websites.

Linguistic model

Power

The quality of a grammar is judged in part by its “power,” i.e., the effectiveness with which the rules generate an output.

The actual process whereby the output presented here is generated from the data represents an altogether different exercise, requiring as it does the application of specific input protocols and the running of a set of programs. The development of these protocols and the writing of the programs has occupied much of my effort, alongside the development of the theoretical framework embodied in the Grammar: they are described in detail in a separate website, the Digital Operation Manual

While actual use of protocols and programs obviously requires a certain amount of training, two main points may be stressed here:

The protocols are intuitive, and the programs have been written in function of their use. As a result, the actual recording process, and the coterminous process of data entry, are typically learned quickly and have typically become second nature for the staff.
The programs operate with great speed on any normal computer, so that the buildup of the entire record for any given excavation "book" takes place in constant concomitance with the data entry itself. Typically, it takes a few seconds to process the few files that are produced on any given day, so that at the end of the day we have in effect the final publication.