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Linguistic Fieldwork

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Introduction to what we mean by 'linguistic fieldwork' ... creepy crawlies, and at some personal risk ('Crocodile Dundee Fieldwork Model' ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Linguistic Fieldwork


1
  • Linguistic Fieldwork
  • Peter K. Austin
  • Endangered Languages Project
  • Linguistics Department, SOAS

2
Overview of the day
  • Introduction to what we mean by linguistic
    fieldwork
  • Why, how and where do linguists do fieldwork?
  • Some examples fieldwork in remote locations and
    fieldwork at home
  • Ethical issues
  • Communities and reciprocity
  • Fieldwork in the linguistics curriculum
  • Student experiences SOAS MA and PhD students

3
Overview of this session
  • Defining linguistic fieldwork
  • A little bit of history
  • Why do we do fieldwork?
  • Where do we do fieldwork?
  • How do we do fieldwork? a little bit about
    methods and styles
  • Conclusions

4
Definitions
  • Bowern (20082) Fieldwork (not just linguistic
    fieldwork) is about collecting data in its
    natural environment when linguists go to the
    field, they are going to study the natural
    environment for their object of study that is,
    they go to study a language in the place where it
    is spoken, by the people who usually speak it.
    Of course, its not quite that easy. Linguists
    dont just dig up the grammar of a language to
    put it in grammar book. We work with real people,
    and become part of the data collection process
    ourselves (cf. Hyman 2001).

5
Kennedy discovers the gerund and leads it back
into captivity
6
More on definitions
  • Bowern (20087) So, after all that, what is
    fieldwork? My definition is rather broad. It
    involves the collection of accurate data in an
    ethical manner. It involves producing a result
    which both the community and the linguist approve
    of. That is, the community (the people who are
    affected by your being there collecting data)
    should know why youre there, what youre doing,
    and they should be comfortable with the
    methodology and the outcome. You should also be
    satisfied with the arrangements. The third
    component involves the linguist interacting with
    a community of speakers at some level. That is,
    fieldwork involves doing research in a place
    where the language is spoken, not finding a
    speaker at your university and eliciting data
    from them. (emphasis added PKA)

7
A bit of history
  • Up until 19th century linguistics tended to be
    based on studying books or written materials,
    describing languages or testing out theories
    about language structure and history
  • Information on exotic languages typically came
    from reports by missionaries, amateur settlers,
    or explorers professional linguists rarely
    ventured out from their offices
  • the first researchers actually going into the
    field in 19th century were linguist-anthropologist
    s studying indigenous languages in America, Asia
    and Australia-Pacific region or dialectologists
    in Europe keen to record local dialects and
    folklore (France, Germany, Italy)

8
eg. Atlas Linguistique de la France
  • 1897-1901 Edmond Edmont (a grocer) helped collect
    data on French dialects for the Swiss linguist
    Jules Gilliéron by cycling through 639 localities
    in France and the French-speaking parts of
    Belgium, Switzerland and Italy
  • he collected phonetic data transcribed in a
    consistent phonetic alphabet and interviewed
    males aged between 15 and 85 (considered to be
    local intellectuals and good folk speakers)
  • Note this was slow to catch on in England
  • 1875 Alexander Ellis (English dialect collector)
    said Collecting country words is looked upon as
    an amusement, not as laying a brick in the temple
    of science.
  • 1948 Eugen Dieth of Zurich and Harold Orton of
    Leeds started the Survey of English Dialects (SED)

9
In North America
  • 1890-1940 Franz Boas was a strong supporter of
    anthropological and linguistic fieldwork among
    native American groups and sponsored and trained
    generations of researchers who did summer field
    trips, as well as training native speakers to do
    research on their own languages and to co-publish
    their results
  • Boas famous students included Sapir, Bloomfield,
    Haas, Kroeber, Swadesh, all of whom did fieldwork
    on indigenous languages and trained a generation
    of students (eg. Survey of California Indian
    Languages at UC Berkeley)
  • Fieldwork and descriptive linguistics was
    side-lined by the emergence of Chomsky in 1955,
    devaluation of mere description in favour of
    theory and introspection

10
In the UK
  • 1910-1940 British anthropologists such as
    Bronislaw Malinowsky emphasised fieldwork and
    studies of local languages
  • Fieldwork was an important part of research at
    SOAS from 1930s to 1960s, especially for Asian
    and African languages (eg. Milner, Robins,
    Hudson, Smith) and at some other universities
  • But fieldwork all but died out between 1970s and
    2000 as Chomskian linguistics dominated
  • ELAP founded 2003 all staff and students do
    fieldwork across the world

11
Technology played a role
  • Starting in the late 19th century, linguists and
    anthropologists made recordings of indigenous
    languages
  • using the latest technology

12
  • Equipment became smaller in the 1970s, but still
    researchers intruded into peoples lives

13
  • Today compact equipment means we can go to where
    the languages are spoken and live together with
    the people, and learn their languages

14
Why do fieldwork-1?
  • to document linguistic diversity
  • about 6,800 languages are spoken on earth today,
    50 are endangered and may disappear this century
  • very few languages have been properly studied and
    most of them have never been recorded or written
    down
  • around 2,000 languages have writing, most of them
    very recently, and so around 5,000 languages have
    no written form
  • studying languages in the field provides the data
    to answer fundamental questions like what are
    languages like and how are they used?, are
    there universal characteristics shared by all
    languages, cultures and societies?, how much
    variation/difference can there be between
    languages/varieties and how is it patterned?

15
Why do fieldwork-2?
  • Intellectual satisfaction of solving complex
    descriptive and analytical problems, test
    theories, encounter other ways of
    being/living/talking, and try to understand them
  • to support communities whose languages are under
    pressure by documenting and strengthening them
  • to forge meaningful relationships with members of
    other communities and cultures and experience
    significant cultural/social events
  • to learn amazing languages that are different
    from ones own in interesting and challenging
    ways
  • to be able to go to exotic locations and tell
    everyone about it when you get home safely

16
Where do we do fieldwork?
  • Prototypically, fieldwork is done in remote
    locations, requiring long distance travel, living
    in basic conditions, under attack from diseases
    and creepy crawlies, and at some personal risk
    (Crocodile Dundee Fieldwork Model)
  • however we can also do fieldwork in situ,
    especially among diaspora or immigrant
    communities in major urban centres like London
    with its 400 languages and vibrant communities
    and cultures in which they are used
  • access to field sites depends on who is doing the
    research, and in some cases, due to physical or
    political or social danger, it is not possible to
    go to remote locations and local fieldwork is the
    best or only alternative

17
How do we do fieldwork?
  • There are several well-tried fieldwork methods
    and each has its own advantages and disadvantages
    (see References handout)
  • elicitation
  • staged communication
  • participant observation
  • Some linguists insist that you have to learn the
    language being studied and use it as much as
    possible (monolingual fieldwork) while others
    rely on lingua francas (eg. Spanish, Hausa,
    Bislama) and translation, and others use a mixture

18
Elicitation
  • Contextualising elicitation
  • Speakers are asked to comment on or provide
    contexts for a given word/construction.
  • Translation equivalent
  • Speakers are asked to translate a given
    word/utterance.
  • Judgement
  • Speakers are asked to evaluate the
    acceptability/grammaticality of a given form.

19
Data resulting from contextualising elicitation
How do you say hello to people in the morning?
  • MINUS
  • Results depend heavily on the creativity of the
    researcher and the receptiveness of the
    consultant
  • Easily lead to misunderstands that go by
    unnoticed
  • Can thus yield syntactically, semantically,
    pragmatically odd utterances
  • PLUS
  • Yield phonologically natural utterances.
  • Can be quantified to some extent.
  • Are highly controlled, or at least seem to be.
  • Offer negative evidence

20
Data resulting from translational equivalent
elicitation
How do you say my mother in Cicipu?
  • MINUS
  • Yield phonologically odd utterances
  • Give no complete picture of the extension of the
    word in the target language
  • Can easily lead to misunderstandings due to the
    lack of context
  • Translatable items are limited in number
  • Hyper-cooperative consultants may create
    neologisms to be helpful
  • PLUS
  • Are easy when starting work on an unknown
    language
  • Give good data to work on phoneme inventory,
    basic lexicon, and for lexical comparison
  • Are quantifiable and highly controlled
  • Offer negative evidence

21
Data resulting from acceptability judgements
Can I say liwuru na when the book is lying
over there?
  • PLUS
  • Are controlled and quantifiable
  • Can give results for domains that are difficult
    to cover otherwise
  • Give comparable results for many fields
  • Offer negative evidence
  • MINUS
  • Very often do not test acceptability of the
    utterance, but rather of the context provided for
    it
  • Can therefore very often be contradicted by the
    same and by different speakers

22
Participant observation
  • other terms naturalistic data, spontaneous
    speech data
  • external interference is limited to the fact that
    the communicative event is being observed and
    recorded attempt to create a natural context
    of interaction (story telling, ritual,
    conversation etc)
  • generally constitutes the backbone of a language
    documentation and an important component of a
    data corpus

23
Data resulting from monologues
The elephant went into the forest and waited for
the lion...
  • MINUS
  • Can seem natural but actually arent because
    the cultural settings are not respected
  • Can contain pragmatic oddities
  • Are not very controlled
  • Many features are not quantifiable because a
    unique performance of one speaker
  • Dont offer negative evidence and are not good
    for low-frequency phenomena
  • PLUS
  • Have a high degree of ecological validity
  • Yield phonologically, semantically and
    syntactically natural utterances
  • Give insight into the culture, if thematically
    balanced
  • Show high-frequency phenomena

24
Data resulting from conversation
A you wont believe what I heard on the bus
this morning B are you still catching the 19
to Euston?
  • PLUS
  • Often seen as the non-plus-ultra in naturalness
  • Yields data that are naturalistic in every
    respect
  • Also gives important information about the
    culture
  • MINUS
  • Is not controlled at all
  • Is very difficult to get
  • Is tedious and time-consuming to transcribe
  • Is even more time-consuming to analyse
  • Dont offer negative evidence and insight into
    low-frequency phenomena

25
Staged communication
  • Other term quasi naturalistic data
  • Communicative events that are enacted for the
    purpose of recording them for analysis
  • Telling of a story/joke/the way to do something
  • Description of a picture/acted video/animated
    video
  • Matching/sorting game that involves
    non-linguistic categorisation or linguistic
    interaction.

26
Data resulting from static stimuli
  • PLUS
  • Are highly controlled, quantifiable and
    comparable
  • Yield phonologically, semantically and
    syntactically accurate data
  • Are free from linguistic interference of the
    metalanguage and from misunderstandings of
    context
  • Can be used for non-linguistic categorisation
    tasks
  • MINUS
  • Validity of the data depends on coverage of the
    domain under inspection by the stimulus
  • If gaps in parameters, data can be severely
    flawed
  • Cross-cultural applicability can be limited
  • Use is limited to visually depictable scenes

27
Data resulting from dynamic stimuli
  • MINUS
  • See previous slide and
  • Require the use of high-tech, which is
    complicated if not impossible in many field
    settings
  • if stimulus is abstractness and the purpose is
    unclear, misunderstandings can occur
  • PLUS
  • Yield phonologically, syntactically and
    semantically quantifiable and comparable data
    etc. (see previous slide)
  • Can be used for non-linguistic categorisation
    tasks

28
Data resulting from interactive stimuli
  • PLUS
  • Allow controlled interaction of two or more
    speakers
  • Yield quantifiable and comparable data
  • Can be used for non-linguistic categorisation
    tasks
  • MINUS
  • May create culturally inappropriate or strange
    situations.
  • Since the true purpose of the interaction is
    normally not known to the consultants,
    misunderstandings occur easily

29
Summary
  • linguistic fieldwork is about working on language
    in a culturally, socially and ethically
    appropriate ways in a context where the language
    is being used
  • linguistic fieldwork began in the 19th century,
    was interrupted and side-lined by Chomskian
    science, and is now seeing a resurgence
  • we do fieldwork for a variety of reasons, in a
    variety of places, and using a variety of methods
    and styles
  • but mostly we do fieldwork because its fun
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