Tools for Language Documentation

Here’s a useful collection of materials for doing language documentation and typological field work.

Software

ELAN has evolved into the defacto standard tool for audio/video annotation.

Similarly, in spite of its age and generally acknowledged “clunkiness,” FieldWorks (a.k.a. FLEx) remains the standard for lexical database management and morphological parsing. Brad McDonnell has put together a useful guide to running FieldWorks on a Mac using a virtual machine.

There are a number of useful guides to using ELAN and FLEx together. For example:

• Tim Gaved and Sophie Salffner wrote a guide targeted at ELDP grantees (pdf).
• John Mansfield describes the ELAN -> FLEx -> ELAN “round trip” workflow here.

laMeta is a Metadata and Collection Management Tool which allows you to easily keep track of files, file names, and relation, thus greatly simplifying the archiving process.

Stimulus Materials

The MPI Field Manuals and Stimulus Materials contain a self-described “bonanza of material for the field elicitation of semantics and and the field collection of verbal behaviour.” One of the advantages of using the MPI stimulus materials is that it facilitates cross-linguistic comparison. These materials have been used widely by researchers at MPI Nijmegen and elsewhere to investigate a wide range of languages, and a number of publications have used these tools to explore particular semantic domains (space, motion, body, emotion, etc.) across languages.

Other useful elicitation tools include:

• Lisa Matthewson’s Totem Field Storyboards.
• San Roque et al.’s (2012) Problem Solving Task (“Family Problems”). (Exercise caution: the violence depicted in these picture stimuli may be disturbing to both researchers and speakers.)