She earned her doctorate in linguistics in 2007 from the University of Texas at Austin, and her dissertation, " A Descriptive Grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua " won the Mary R . Haas Book Award from the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
32.
A standard language is a particular dialect of a language that is promoted above other dialects in writing, education, and broadly speaking in the public sphere; it contrasts with vernacular dialects, which may be the objects of study in descriptive grammar but which are rarely taught prescriptively.
33.
For a proposal aimed at creating a descriptive grammar or dictionary, the grant writer should explain why this document would be significant to the field being studied, the method of organization to be used, the potential users, and how the new book will be better than existing ones.
34.
As Gowers explains, Jespersen " held that ` of greater value than this prescriptive grammar is a purely descriptive grammar which, instead of acting as a guide to what should be said or written, aims at finding out what is actually said or written by those who use the language'and recording it objectively like a naturalist observing the facts of nature ."
35.
There are academic writings on the descriptive grammar and phonology of Kayap?language; some by Stout and Thomson in 1974, and Borgues in 1995, dictionaries with Portuguese translations; syntactic and phonological studies by Andres Salanova and Amelia Silva, translations of the New Testamen t into Kayap?published in 1996, and literary works including myth and ritual stories and descriptions of the Mebengokre speaking communities.
