LING 630: Field Methods

Instructors

• Gary Holton (facilitator)
• Sisilia Gravelle (Language Expert)

Overview

This course is primarily designed to equip graduate students to carry out linguistic fieldwork, building on previous documentation and description where available. It is the first part of a two semester course in which students acquire training in the skills and tools of linguistic fieldwork, language documentation and language description by working with a speaker of a language previously unknown to them to produce a documentation and description of aspects of the language. We will take a holistic and ethnographic approach and simultaneously create and annotate a corpus of language in use, build a lexical database, and produce a grammatical sketch. Students will learn techniques of data collection, elicitation, management, and analysis by doing language documentation.

Course objectives and learning outcomes

At the end of the course, a successful student should be able to:

• Plan, initiate, and conduct fieldwork on an unfamiliar language in an informed and productive way by drawing on state-of-the-art methods in language documentation.
• Investigate different levels of the structure and use of a previously unfamiliar language by collecting and using various types of language data.
• Effectively use and critically evaluate a range of audio and video recording equipment, software, stimuli, and other elicitation tools.
• Clearly describe aspects of the language’s phonology, morphology, and syntax based on analyses of primary data.

Course readings

There is no required textbook for this course, and there may be sporadic required readings. Below is a list of helpful books, articles, and online resources that may be referenced during the course. The list below will be updated throughout the semester.

• Bowern, Claire. 2015. Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide. 2nd edn. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
• Chelliah, Shobhana L & Willem J. de Reuse. 2011. Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork. Dordrecht: Springer.
• Crowley, Terry. 2007. Field Linguistics: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford University Press.
• Newman, Paul & Martha Ratliff. 2001. Linguistic Fieldwork. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sakel, Jeanette & Daniel L. Everett. 2012. Linguistic Fieldwork: A Student Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Thieberger, Nicholas (ed.). 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Prerequisites

• The course assumes previous background in language documentation theory (e.g., LING 680) and methods (e.g., LING 710).
• Some training in phonetics/phonology (e.g., LING 421) and morphology/syntax (e.g., LING 420, 422).

Tentative Course Outline

This course will go where the language takes us, so there is no set schedule. However, there is a general progression of topics that we will (try to) follow:

• Language/culture learning
• Background research on language
• Sociolinguistic background of consultant
• Archiving plan for class
• Eliciting lexical items
• Creating/maintaining lexical database
• Phonological analysis Phonetic analysis
• Develop practical orthography
• Recording speech events
• Transcription and translation
• Morphosyntactic analysis

Classroom sessions

• Class sessions meet during the scheduled course time slot with the entire class.
• Class sessions will primarily be spent working with the language consultant, carrying out elicitation, record- ing, transcription, and translation.
• Class sessions will also be used to discuss organizational issues and analysis of the language.
• Class sessions will not include discussion of readings on language documentation theory and methods. (These issues are covered in LING 680 and 710.)
• Students will take turns: (i) leading the session, (ii) acting as the scribe, and (iii) setting up, monitoring, and putting away the recording equipment.

Individual sessions

• Individual students will meet with Ms. Gravelle for approximately 1 hour per week in Moore 476.
• Students need to work with the language consultant to work out times that fit her schedule.
• Each session needs to be audio and video recorded. It is the responsibility of the students to make sure that the audio and video recorders are available and ready for use in each session. If there is an issue with the equipment, make sure to notify everyone in the class.

Previous Literature

Normally, when working with an un(der)documented languages, one of your first tasks is to undertake a comprehensive literature review of everything that has ever been written in or about the target language and (genealogically and geographically) closely related languages. In spite of the colonial myth of the “undiscovered” language, no language it truly undocumented. It is always possible to find some clues—if only a wordlist from a neighboring language variety. A good field worker always does her homework before heading to the field. This entails much more than just reading the Wikipedia entry on the language but should include scouring archives, emailing other linguists, and talking with community members.

However, for pedagogical purposes in this class we have explicitly chosen to skip the literature review phase of fieldwork. This is in part due to time constraints, as a good literature review could occupy several months, but it will also allow us to grapple directly with the challenge of encountering a new language. That said, there is no ban on consulting previous documentation of the language, and we will do this occasionally throughout the semester. Indeed, one of our key challenges will be to navigate the gulf between existing documentation and the particular language variety spoken by our language expert. We must be very careful not to assume that the language spoken by our expert is the same as that described in the grammars. Previous literature can serve as a guide, but our task is to document the language spoken by our language expert.