Course Description
Introduction to linguistic fieldwork and language documentation through work with a speaker of an unknown language. Methods of eliciting, transcribing, organizing, and storing data; data analysis, formulating and testing hypotheses; and ethical issues involved in linguistic fieldwork.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will be required to do additional weekly
elicitation sessions with the language consultant outside of
the classroom during the second half of the semester, with the
objective of gathering data that will allow for a more
fine-grained analysis in their final research projects. They
will write an annotated bibliography of at least ten
references by week 13, and their final papers are expected to
be of a quality suitable for presentation at a national
conference.
Athena Title
Language Doc and Field Methods
Undergraduate Prerequisite
LING 3060 and (LING 3150 or LING 3150W or LING 3250)
Graduate Prerequisite
LING 6021 and (LING 8150 or LING 8120)
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course is an introduction to linguistic fieldwork and language documentation in which we will practice our skills as linguists by investigating a language previously unfamiliar to us. The course is an intensive exercise that will emphasize the value of language documentation for scientific and cultural purposes, especially with reference to endangered languages. Although the work is done in the classroom, which represents a controlled and somewhat artificial version of real fieldwork, it replicates many of the aspects particular to fieldwork in any linguistic community. The students’ work consists of an intensive hands-on exercise in learning how to investigate and document a language they do not know anything about—ideally, an understudied language—by interacting regularly with a native speaker (the language consultant). The class will draw upon the students’ linguistic training in previous coursework (primarily phonetics/phonology, syntax, morphology). Activities and methodology (i) Eliciting data from the language consultant, which involves structured questioning that will be recorded and then transcribed for analysis. (ii) Transcribing data, glossing, and translating into English. (iii) Uploading to the course website sound files and transcriptions of individual and group elicitation sessions. (iv) Creating a dictionary of the language. (v) Applying linguistic knowledge to the data collected by systematically analyzing the data, engaging with theories to describe the language, and testing predictions, with the goal of arriving at the best possible analysis. (vi) Managing and organizing linguistic data in both a database and on paper. Students are responsible for transcribing the data and updating the database regularly after meeting with the language consultant. Learning outcomes Students will: (i) Learn basic aspects of linguistic documentation, especially issues of ethics. (ii) Learn how to use and manage equipment and software for language documentation. (iii) Learn to work individually and as part of a group to meet common goals. (iv) Gain practice writing up empirical findings and supporting proposals with linguistic data. (v) Learn to conduct research independently, take responsibility and ownership to achieve the goals of the course. Assessment of students’ performances Students’ performances will be evaluated on the basis of their transcriptions of elicited data and weekly write-ups in which they describe the patterns observed and make empirical generalizations; active contributions to class discussions of their findings; two short papers (one on phonetics/phonology and one on morphosyntax); and a final research paper about some aspect of the language's structure, for which students are required to consult relevant literature and analyze the data in order to formulate and test theoretically-informed hypotheses. Students will also present the results of their research as a poster or oral presentation at a department-wide colloquium.
Topical Outline
I. What is language documentation? A. Doing documentation B. Methods C. Types of media and their properties D. Metadata E. Data formats F. Archiving and dissemination II. What is linguistic fieldwork? A. Linguistic aspects of fieldwork: eliciting, organizing, and analyzing data B. Ethical, anthropological, and social aspects of fieldwork C. Fieldwork on phonetics and phonology D. Fieldwork on morpho-syntax
Syllabus