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)

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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)

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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)

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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

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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

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Technology played a role

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

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

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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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