Introduction to Fieldwork Methods

1
Introduction to Fieldwork Methods

• Tom Honeyman
• PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for
  Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures),
  University of Sydney
• http//www.paradisec.org.au

2
My Baggage!

• More a Relativist than a Universalist
• Linguistics is a sub-discipline of Anthropology
• Interested in syntax and discourse pragmatics
• Work for and endangered languages archive
• Interested in Australian and Papua New Guinean
  languages

3
The Problem

• 6000 languages (possibly more!) currently spoken
  around the world today
• The number will likely drop to 3000 in the next
  100 years
• We have good descriptions of less than 2000

4
Why is it a problem?

• Unique cultures, ideas, etc
• Cultural systems
• Identity
• Modes of thought
• Interesting linguistic phenomena
• Non-configurationality
• Typological breadth

5
The Solution

• Put the community first
• Good, thorough documentation
• Thinking of the next researcher
• Do it all perfectly within a short period of time

6
Community First

• Why are you there?
• What can you contribute in return?
• Be realistic
• Be considerate
• Consider yourself an ambassador

7
Documentation

• Metadata Metadata Metadata
• What have others done
• What tools are available

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Share your data!

• drop dead principle
• Can you read my handwriting?
• Empirical weight
• Who, what, when, where, why, how?
• Field notes and published materials

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Time

• This is a time constrained problem
• Prioritise your goals and outputs
• Multi-task

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Fieldwork Preparation

• Language and Culture
• Contact language
• Cultural considerations
• Neighboring languages
• Community Approval
• Transport

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Fieldwork Preparation

• Do the paperwork well ahead of time
• Funding/Grants
• Ethics Approval
• Visa

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Fieldwork Preparation

• Medical Considerations
• Diseases
• Fitness
• Diet

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Fieldwork Preparation

• Mental Preparation
• Gather existing materials, if any
• Check for neighboring grammars
• Gather materials to guide your fieldwork
• (our primary focus today)

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Fieldwork Preparation

• Mental Preparation (the other kind)
• Isolation / Outsider status
• Different Cultures
• Lack of creature comforts
• Third world conditions

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Fieldwork Preparation

• Equipment
• Recording Equipment
• Logging/note-taking equipment
• Power, torches, communications
• Data storage
• Backup! Backup! Backup!
• Consider the environmental conditions
• Dust or humidity?

16
Weight, power generation and power consumption
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Fieldwork starting work

• Informants
• Release forms
• Living in the community

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Fieldwork informants

• Delicate area, tread carefully
• Community resentment
• Clan systems
• Community involvement
• Can you choose an informant?
• Gender, age, etc

19
Fieldwork release forms

• The delicate issue of informant fees
• Ethically bound work
• Release ownership back to the community or
  individuals
• Make sure the release is understood
• Agreement can be verbal, but must be recorded
• All people who primarily contribute must agree to
  the terms of a release before you begin recording

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Fieldwork community

• Remember you are a guest
• Be inclusive
• Consider community level events
• Requires a community level release

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Fieldwork starting work

• Develop a pattern of work
• Have a good idea what you want to do each day
• Elicitation sessions are boring!
• Mix the tasks up, but try to remain systematic
• If something isnt working, make a note and go
  back to it
• Do a summary at the end of the session

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Fieldwork starting work

• Recording
• State the date and time, you name and location,
  and the people youre working with
• Write the date and time in your notebook, or
  digital notes
• Set the recorder up properly and test it
• Record everything!

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Fieldwork starting work

• Elicitation sessions rough plan
• Begin with words
• As your confidence increases move to words and
  sentences
• As you confidence increases begin to spend time
  on texts as well

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Fieldwork words

• What are words, and how do I go about getting
  them?
• Form and meaning
• Why start with words?

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Fieldwork words

• Figuring out the sounds of a language
• Phonetics
• What are the interesting features
• Pay attention to the vowels
• Phonology
• Gather minimal pairs!
• Develop a practical orthography
• This is harder than it seems

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Fieldwork words

• Are any standard wordlists available?
• Culturally and environmentally salient
• In the contact language
• Sample multiple domains

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Fieldwork words

• Semantic domains
• Body parts
• Kinship
• Food
• Animals!
• Terminology
• Complex domains

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Fieldwork words

• Gather information in parallel with elicitation
  of words
• Body parts is there a left/right distinction
• Kinship what is the kinship system? Gather
  genealogies
• Food what, where, how, why
• Animals mythologies, ethno-biology
• Terminology what are the parts of things

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Fieldwork tasks

• Consider free pronouns in Tok Pisin and English
• Kinship example Warlpiri
• Body parts ? spatial terms

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Fieldwork ethnography

• What kind of society?
• What do people eat, how do they get it?
• What economic activities do people engage in?
• How do they relate to neighboring groups
• What name do they use for their language
• What name do they use to differentiate themselves
  from the outside groups
• How do they interrelate to these other groups

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Fieldwork ethnology

• What is their environment?
• What is their cosmology?
• These will all be interrelated

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Fieldwork ethnography

• How to people interrelate within the village/town
• Is there a clan system?
• What is the kinship system?
• Is there avoidance language?

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Fieldwork lexicon

• Begin a lexicon
• If paper, then consider cards
• Preferably use lexicography software on a laptop
• Even more preferable, link your recordings to
  your lexicon

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Fieldworklexicon

• Problems are good
• Things become clear in waves, not straight away
• Lexicons collate data in an organised fashion and
  can help you discover facets of the language that
  are not obvious

35
Fieldwork words to sentences

• Systems and Complex Domains
• Will lead to more sentence-like or utterance-like
  elicitation
• Will depend on the language
• Verbs are harder to talk about in isolation

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Fieldwork sentences

• Sentence level elicitation triggers many problems
• Observers paradox
• Grammatical categories
• Context

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Observers Paradox

• Always there
• Can only be minimised hopefully
• Will shape your elicitation data, so be mindful
• Dont ever assume its not there

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Grammatical Categories

• Parts of Speech
• Open ?? closed
• Major ?? minor
• Noun ?? Verb spectrum
• Time-stable ?? dynamic
• Gather distributional/structural properties and
  plot them

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Example Nouns

• High degree of variation possible
• You must test systematically for features
• Example

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Context

• Language is anchored in the real world
• Everything is contextually bound
• Remember this!

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Fieldwork sentences

• Domain oriented
• Some verbs are better than others
• Start with easy verbs (hint, theyre not the
  verbs you think they are!)
• Use materials and gestures

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Fieldwork constituent order

• Grammatical
• Discourse
• Other?

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Fieldwork simple sentences

• A few interesting sentence types
• Comparatives
• Questions
• Equationals
• Evidentials

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Fieldwork verb paradigms

• Keep track, use a grid
• Once you know the pronouns, use them
• Be mindful of context
• Try not to vary TAM at first as this may overly
  complicate matters
• Use stable referents initially

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Fieldwork simple sentences

• As you get a better grasp of the basic verb
  paradigm, vary TAM and Referents
• Some combinations of person trigger interesting
  results
• TAM can be difficult
• Use referents that are present, mythical,
  animate/non-animate, and so on.
• Easier if grounded in context

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Fieldwork sentences

• Define the context
• Example sentence elicitation materials
• Space
• Reciprocals
• Emotions
• Others

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Fieldwork texts

• Collect as wide a variety of texts as possible,
  for instance
• Personal
• Mythological
• Historical
• Cultural
• Structured
• Performance
• Conversational?

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Fieldwork texts

• During a recording of a text make notes
• What is the context?
• Record mundane details
• Who is present?
• Where are you?
• Who is the story being told to?
• These notes will be critical later

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Fieldwork texts

• Use stimulus materials and also see what people
  want to tell you
• Use this to break up elicitation sessions
• Be mindful of context
• Initially, texts will take a long time to
  transcribe
• Do not collect lots of texts early on
• 20 to 1 rule, depends on your informant

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Fieldwork transcription

• If paper based then produce interlinearised texts
  by hand. Include timecodes. Date your transcript
• If computer based, consider modern software, not
  a text editor

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Fieldwork transcription software

• Transcriber
• http//trans.sourceforge.net/en/presentation.php
• ELAN
• http//www.mpi.nl/tools/elan.html
• Shoebox/Toolbox/Fieldworks
• http//www.sil.org/computing/catalog/index.asp

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Outputs

• Simple wordlists
• Local taxonomies
• Stories
• Audio-visual
• Dictionaries
• Grammar Sketch
• Thesis