This proposal will cover participant costs for four graduate students and one postdoctoral researcher to attend the International Summer School in Language Documentation and Description in Lyon, France, June 23-July 4, 2008. The LDD program is a special summer course in concepts and practices of language description. Although this subfield of linguistics is traditionally concerned with the preparation of grammars and dictionaries and language documentation, it has increasingly become concerned with the compilation and preservation of primary linguistic data and the inter-relationships between primary data and the various types of analyses based on these data. The opportunity to attend LDD will have both immediate and broader benefits. The students will benefit from the training they receive, and their future research will inevitably be improved. Moreover, the attendance of U.S. students at LDD is a very useful way to build trans-Atlantic intellectual and practical cooperation in the growing field of language description and documentation.
