Fieldwork in linguistics

Dans ce cours nous allons recueillir et organiser des données d’une langue peu décrite (probablement une langue autochtone) et nous allons utiliser ces données pour préparer des résumés descriptifs de la langue, formuler et tester des hypothèses concernant des phénomènes particuliers dans cette langue, et finalement développer des analyses de ces phénomènes.

Ce cours va inclure la discussion des données, l’élicitation en classe auprès d’un locuteur natif de la langue ciblée, ainsi que les rencontres en petits groupes avec ce locuteur, hors de la salle de classe. Nous allons aussi enregistrer et transcrire une histoire pour obtenir un échantillon du discours connecté. Cette histoire devrait aussi nous présenter plusieurs énigmes grammaticales que nous allons examiner plus profondément dans les séances d’élicitation.

Inspired by the recent reports on the loss of rhoticity in Dorset (Piercy 2012), my future study will focus on this variable in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. All these counties have traditionally been described as rhotic (e.g. Trudgill 1999), but Piercy's findings point to an almost complete loss of rhotic pronunciations among young people in this area. Because a large part of what we assume about rhoticity in southwestern England is either anecdotal or outdated, the aim is to update the existing references on the use of nonprevocalic /r/, and to find out whether the sociolinguistic patterns of pronunciation in Dorset extend over Cornwall and Devon.

The aim of this talk is to get feedback from the audience on the planned fieldwork in the South-West of England. The recording sessions are to be performed in 2016 on a relatively large sample, c. 120 speakers from each region, comprising both sexes and different age groups. The speakers will be recorded in pairs in sociolinguistic interviews.

Later, the tokens with nonprevocalic /r/ will be analysed mainly impressionistically (which is a common procedure in studies on this variable, cf. Piercy 2012 or Feagin 1990), although acoustic cues like F3 and F4 will also be looked at (after Thomas 2011: 129-136). The collected data will help to answer the following research questions: 1) Are young people in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall switching to r-less pronunciation?, 2) How fast is the process of losing rhoticity in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall?, 3) What is the prestige status of the variable in question?, 4) What are the exact differences in the pronunciation of nonprevocalic /r/ between the researched groups?, 5) How does the phonetic context influence the loss or retention of /r/?.

Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-1884) is mainly remembered as a founder of Egyptology. However, the largest share of his published work was about linguistics and philology, going from the decipherment and comparison of ancient writing systems to the classification of African languages. This article explores his linguistic work and the tensions within it: between different areas of expertise, between theory and observation, and between the study of languages with high and low philological prestige. In particular it focuses on his fieldwork in the Nile region in 1844, his design for a phonetic Standard Alphabet, and the hypothesis of a 'Hamitic' language family that connected Egyptian, Coptic, and Ethiopian with Berber as well as Khoisan languages.

In Adam Benkato & Arash Zeini (eds.), The roar of silence: A Festschrift in honour of François de Blois. [Special issue]. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 31(3), 421-432. 

This article contains ethnolinguistic observations and materials on the so called zâr cult, as practiced in present day Hormozgân province, Iran. The cult, which is spread across the Persian Gulf and central and north-east Africa, consists of practices and rituals of placation with which a category of spirits known as zâr and referred to as winds are warded off from a victim. The article, in particular, aims at offering an accurate description of the sub-lexicon associated with zâr in local Hormozgâni dialects, an aspect of research which has not been taken into consideration up to now.

This article aims to describe a newly-discovered slang used in the diamond and jewellery trade in Paris during the 20th century, the lexical element of which being constituted with loanwords from Yiddish, Dutch, Judeo-Spanish and some semantically restricted hereditary French words. After a comparison of this oral material and its written counterparts in an already extant lexicographical work about the diamond traders’ technolect, we give a few elements of characterization of trade argots, and some advice towards the actual practice of oral investigation in the field of slangs.
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À partir d’enquêtes linguistiques récentes ayant mené à la découverte fortuite d’un argot de diamantaires parlé à Paris au XXe siècle et dont le lexique consiste essentiellement en emprunts au yidich, au néerlandais et au judéo-espagnol, cet article propose, après une description et une mise en perspective de cette variété, quelques réflexions sur les argots de métier : quels métiers donnent lieu à des argots de métiers ? Pourquoi n’en est-il pas dans tous les milieux socioprofessionnels ? À ces questions, nous répondrons par quelques cas d’espèce et, enfin, par un formulaire d’enquête proposé au (socio-)linguiste désireux d’entreprendre une collecte dans ce champ négligé.

This paper discusses a series of so-called “elicitation” games that encourage children to
talk in a situation that is as natural and relaxed as possible. Such games have played a
central role in language teaching and speech therapy, where they have been employed to
provide language training or to assess children’s linguistic development without putting
them under stress. Recently, such games have become more widely used in language
acquisition research. Here they are employed to obtain rich sets of language production
data from children who are too young to take part in controlled experiments on language
production. Moreover, they can be used in longitudinal studies where children are
recorded over longer periods of time and might develop strategies in experiments. Most
of these elicitation games target a specific construction or domain of grammar and so
language teachers, speech therapists and researchers spend a lot of their time developing
new games for each individual construction they would like to elicit from children. As
this can be very time-consuming, there is a demand for games that can be adapted to a
broad range of phenomena and situations (for instance, situations with one or several
players). In this paper, I will present three such games, which might be useful for
acquisition researchers, language teachers and speech therapists: the Bag Task, the
Picture-Pairing Task and the Puzzle Task. In addition, I will discuss the advantages and
disadvantages of using such games in a research context.

The Formosan languages are the languages of the Aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. These languages are part of the Austronesian language family, and represent all but one primary branch of this family of 1,200+ languages. The Formosan languages are endangered, some critically so. While these languages have seen attention in the literature for their syntactic and phonological systems, little work has been done on their prosodic structure or intonation.

This dissertation analyzes the prosodic structure and intonational phonology of Mantauran Rukai, Budai Rukai, Tsou, Kanakanavu, Hla’alua, Sandimen Paiwan, Piuma Paiwan, Kavalan, Amis, Bunun, Tgdaya Seediq, Truku Seediq, and Pazeh, based on original fieldwork. In addition, archival materials are incorporated into analyses of Tsou, Truku Seediq, Tgdaya Seediq, and Puyuma.

This study finds that the Formosan languages show rich tonal phonologies in their intonational systems, and have complex interactions between stress assignment and morphology. Some examples include the following: Mantauran Rukai, previously described as an initial-stress language, actually has a complex stress assignment system with an alternation between first- and third-syllable stress, which as a system is unique in descriptions of stress assignment in the world’s languages. Hla’alua (Saaroa), previously described as having free variation between antepenultimate and penultimate stress, actually has an accent system in which some lexical items are consistently produced without an accented syllable, while others are. Hla’alua also has a rich tonal phonology assigned at two higher levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Kavalan has a unique rule that causes spreading tones to shift to the opposite domain edge when a certain number of tonal elements are aligned to the same boundary. Elements of the intonational phonology in Amis and Kavalan include glottal stops in addition to tonal elements. Bunun has distinct pitch accent melodies for words vs. clitics.

In addition to the unique features found in individual Formosan languages, this dissertation’s comparative study finds at least two geographic areas within Taiwan in which features of prosody and intonation cluster. One is southwestern Taiwan, including Tsou, Kanakanavu, Hla’alua, and Rukai, which share features including a lack of glide-vowel contrasts and variability of initial H vs. L elements in certain prosodic domains. The other is eastern Taiwan, including Amis, Kavalan, and Puyuma, which share features including suppression of non-IP-final pitch accents, alternations between ultimate and pre-ultimate F0 peaks across intonational contours, and interactions between glottal stop epenthesis and intonational phonology.

Commander: http://www.septentrion.com/fr/livre/?GCOI=27574100141390
La traduction joue un rôle central dans la production d’information par les agences de presse et pourtant, elle est longtemps passée inaperçue. Est-ce dû à l’image que les journalistes ont de la traduction ? Traductologie et sciences de la communication entrent en dialogue pour répondre à cette question. Comment les agenciers participent-ils à la production d’information en plusieurs langues ? Quelles sont les conséquences des stratégies de traduction adoptées par les journalistes ? Par son enquête de terrain, cette étude ouvre la porte d’une agence mondiale, l’Agence France-Presse, et d’une agence nationale, l’Agence télégraphique suisse. Par son analyse discursive, elle illustre les conséquences d’une conception étroite de la traduction sur des dépêches d’agence consacrées à un problème public suisse.

Jenjo is an Adamawa-Ubangi language group spoken in parts of Taraba State, Adamawa State and Gombe State in North East Nigeria. Jenjo is the name of the language and the tribe. The study was motivated by the need to document the language since it is one of the minority endangered African languages. The objectives of the study were: to describe the noun phrase structure of Jenjo; to analyze the Jenjo noun phrase using X-bar theory and to identify the syntactic functions of the NP in Jenjo sentences within X-bar. The New Testament Jenjo Bible and introspection were used. The study describes the structures and functions of Jenjo NP and analyses it in X-bar convention.  A descriptive research design was used for data collection. Qualitative data was collected from five systematically sampled books of the Jenjo New Testament Bible. Random sampling was used to select one chapter per book while purposive sampling was used to select noun phrases and sentences for the study. The study determined Jenjo as a head-initial language since almost all the elements within the Jenjo NP are post-head. We established that there are simple, complex and conjoined NP structures in Jenjo.  Secondly, a single noun can be a full NP and can be projected maximally in Jenjo. All the structures were accounted adequately by the X-bar convention. Lastly, Jenjo NPs function as specifiers, complements, and adjuncts in sentences.

Kopya ng aking panayam sa online forum na inorganisa ng UP Sandigan para sa Ikauunlad ng Kamalayang Maka-Araling Pilipino (UP SIKAP), PUP Samahan ng mga Mag-aaral ng Kasaysayan (PUP-SMK), at UP Archeological Society (UP ArchaeoSoc). Maa-access din ang recording ng forum sa https://fb.watch/7v-xhbJnyI/.

The Bunun language is spoken by one of the thirteen officially recognized Austronesian minority groups on the island of Taiwan. Its most marked characteristics are its complex verbal morphology and its unusual argument alignment system. Takivatan Bunun is the third-largest of its five extant dialects and is spoken by a number of small settlements two counties in the central mountains and at the east coast of the island.
Based on more than one year of field work data, this dissertation explores aspects of the grammar of Takivatan as spoken by the people of the villages Ma-yuan and Qi-mei in Hualien County. It is intended as a preliminary to a full descriptive grammar. After an introductory chapter and an overview of Takivatan phonology, Chapter 3 discusses how words and affixes can be defined in Takivatan and gives a general overview of word building processes. Chapter 4 is a concise treatment of compounding, an uncommon and unproblematic process in Takivatan. Chapter 5 discusses TAM affixes. Chapter 6 concisely describes the grammatical and derivational uses of focus suffixes. Chapter 7 is an elaborate discussion and classification of the large set of verbal prefixes in Takivatan. The final chapter concludes with an overview of definiteness markers, personal pronouns, demonstratives and other pronominal forms.

Australian Indigenous languages are often reported to have compensatory lengthening of consonants after phonemically short vowels. There have, however, been very few perception studies of these languages, and none, to date, focused on vowels. This paper aims to determine whether Djambarrpuyŋu listeners use consonantal lengthening as a cue to vowel length. A forced-choice categorisation task investigated how 19 Djambarrpuyŋu listeners (9M, 10F) use segmental duration in their processing of words minimally distinguished by vowel length. Results show that listeners rely primarily on vowel duration in their categorisation behaviour. However, when the vowel's duration was ambiguous, that is, between the duration ranges of short and long, phonetically long nasals affected the cross-over point of word categorisation. This study supports the primacy of the phonemic vowel length contrast for listeners and also shows that durational context can expand the range of vowel length categories.

Both language documentation and field linguistics have been blossoming for the past two decades as awareness of the urgency of preserving the world’s linguistic diversity has increased in the linguistic community. An integral part of language conservation is fieldwork, hence the importance of preparing linguists and speech community members interested in fieldwork through field methods courses. Unfortunately, “those few departments that do teach field methods never offer courses in monolingual fieldwork, even though such training is necessary for research on many endangered languages” (Everett 2001:169). In this talk, I will argue in favour of monolingual field methods courses with more than one language consultant as the preferred method for fieldwork training.
My discussion will be based on Everett’s (2001) “Monolingual field research” and will explore how his arguments in favour of carrying out fieldwork monolingually also apply to field methods courses. This analysis will draw on a field training course taught at the 2010 Institute on Field Linguistics and Language Documentation. The talk will be structured in the following way: (1) Language consultants, (2) Conduct and substance of the work sessions, and (3) Disadvantages and advantages of the monolingual method. In each of the proposed sections, I will discuss the key points of Everett’s article and how they applied to my personal (and team) experience at InField 2010 by means of elicitation examples, props used in class, and general class anecdotes.

References:
Everett, Daniel L. 2001. Monolingual field research. In Linguistic Fieldwork, ed. by Paul Newman and Martha Ratliff, 166-188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This paper provides an overview of the sound system of three main varieties of Yang Zhuang (Debao Urban, Debao Ma'ai, and Jingxi Urban) of the Central Taic language, and a description of a phonetic spelling system which aims to uniformly cover all the varieties of Yang Zhuang. The phonetic spelling system is actually a preliminary orthography based on the comparative Yang Zhuang varieties.

The paper provides a partial phonological and phonetic description of the segmental system of L2 Telugu English (TE). Previous research on the subject has been carried out in the context of a more general notion of Indian English (IE), so the properties of TE as distinct from other varieties of IE (e.g., Gujarati English) have largely remained unexplored. We have primarily focused on areas that previous research identified as prominent issues in the study of IE: vowel inventory and production, representation and realization of liquids, word-final obstruent phenomena, and allophones of /w/. To account for these aspects of TE, we have combined a generative approach to the study of an individual's linguistic competence with linguistic fieldwork as a means of collecting first-hand data. On the basis of collected data, we have conducted a spectrographic analysis of TE vowels and a distributional analysis of TE consonants. The paper provides the first description of the acoustic spaces of TE vowels. We found that all vowels except [ɔ] and [i] are more central in TE than in General American English. /r/ was realized as either [r] or [ɻ] without a specific pattern, and occasionally as [ɽ] in the intervocalic position. /l/ was realized as [ɭ] in word-final position and as [l] elsewhere. TE displayed word-final obstruent devoicing for all obstruents except for /b/, which was consistently unreleased. /w/ was realized as [ʋ] before front vowels and as [w] elsewhere. While previous research that concentrated on the broad notion of Indian English recognized the issue of /w/-allophony, it has not provided a principle that governs the exact distribution of /w/'s allophones. By combining the generative framework with linguistic fieldwork, we have accounted for this long-standing puzzle with a single rule: /w/ → [ʋ] / __ [-CONS, -BACK].

This is the term paper I wrote for the Field Methods course at Rice University back in 2010. Some information in it might be wrong or misguided given the limited time and knowledge I had to write it. But the transcribed text might be useful to those working on Dravidian languages. So it deserves to be archived here.

"On the southern tip of the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat (India) and commanding a strategic lookout over the Arabian sea, the small island of Diu has aroused seemingly disproportionate colonial interests throughout its history. Among the various effects of its long domination by faraway Portugal (1535-1961) was the formation of a local variety of Indo-Portuguese, a contact language resulting from the encounter of various linguistic influences, chief among which Gujarati and Portuguese. Although the Portuguese-lexified creoles of Asia have deserved scholarly attention from the late 19th-century, the trend towards accurate linguistic description of these languages is a recent one.

This study provides a linguistic account of present-day Diu Indo-Portuguese, duly embedded in its reconstructed historical and sociodemographic context, with the intention to contribute to our burgeoning understanding of the formation, development and present vitality of the contact languages of (South) Asia and elsewhere."

This paper investigates the phonological adaptation of consonant-final loanwords recently borrowed into Italian. The analysis focuses on the examination of Italian vowel paragoge (i.e., word-final vowel epenthesis) which occurs with some of these loans. The data used in the analysis come from a self-designed field study, carried out in Rome on the local variety of Standard Italian. The pho-nological analysis of the data leads to the formulation of the following descriptive generalizations. Consonant-final loanwords adapted into Italian undergo vowel paragoge for two independent reasons. First, paragoge applies in all loanwords which end in a consonantal cluster, irrespective of their stress pattern. In this group, vowel epenthesis is employed as a repair strategy to salvage an extrasyl-labic consonant. Second, paragoge is applicable in loanwords ending with a single consonant provided their stem-final syllable is stressed. Here the process applies to avoid the adaptation of words with a highly marked ultimate stress. The insertion of a word-final vowel creates an additional syllable, which leads to the emergence of a form with an unmarked penultimate stress.

This paper describes the process of studying the notoriously complex verbal tone systems of Bantu languages through the elicitation of systematic, paradigmatic data. The main thrust of this paper is the delineation of the factors known to influence tonal outputs in Bantu languages, providing background on the micro-typology of Bantu verbal tone systems, with discussion of how these considerations impact the data-gathering process.

The hypothesis that the meanings of words in natural language have structure has been debated among linguists for over three decades. This dissertation examines two resultative suffixes in Pima (Tepiman, Southern Uto-Aztecan), referred to as the passive resultative and the possessive resultative, whose properties are relevant for this debate. The interpretations which these two resultatives receive support one type of structure within the meanings of certain verbs.

The passive resultative suffix –s is canonically interpreted as a resultative proper; verbs with this suffix typically express the condition which results from an event of the type denoted by the unsuffixed verb. Certain verbs with this suffix, however, receive a derived stative interpretation, where the condition which they express need not be the result of any event at all. Other verbs with this suffix receive a perfect interpretation; their meaning is solely that an event of some type has occurred. Resultative-suffixed verbs with these interpretations all lack as an argument the agent which occurs as subject of the base verb. Where the base does not take an agent, however, the suffixed form receives one of three other interpretations and the argument structure of base and resultative appears identical. The possessive resultative suffix –kc, in contrast, has a more restricted distribution; verbs with this suffix receive either a resultative or derived stative interpretation, where the subject of the suffixed verb is responsible for maintaining this condition.

While several analyses of the Pima resultatives are considered here, the most economical analysis of the distribution of interpretations which Pima resultatives receive involves monotonically adding semantic components in order to build the meaning of both eventive verbs and resultatives. This analysis is presented within the framework of Distributed Morphology, where the semantic components of these verbs are associated with a number of abstract syntactic elements. Since these resultatives are temporally stative, an introductory chapter explores what temporal stativity is and what it indicates about a predicate; another introductory chapter discusses published analyses of resultatives in Chichewa and German, which show several quite different ways that a morphologically and semantically derived predicate may be given this property.