Field Methods

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course in Linguistic Field Methods develops skills in language documentation and description through practical work with native speakers of a language they are unfamiliar with. Students work to understand the structure of a non Indo-European language that is less commonly studied in the academy. The class will involve both the elicitation of linguistic data in oral interviews using English as a contact language, and also introducing students to more direct elicitation methods using prompts, props, and multimedia that try to avoid coloring speakers responses by the influence of a contact language. Students will develop skills in linguistic analysis, and in the art of crafting linguistic descriptions that can provide for a robust corpus of language data with the richness and flexibility to be taken up by researchers with different theoretical interests in the future. A goal of language documentation for the field of linguistics is to provide data from as many of the 6-7000 languages of the world that will no longer be spoken at the end of this century. Students will also focus on the dialogic process involved in the production of linguistic knowledge by engaging speakers as a source of utterances to study, and relying on their metalinguistic awareness, judgments, and reflection on their language. This course also introduces students to inscription methods used in fieldwork, including the latest technologies of audio and video recording, transcription, and digital archive building. In the end the aim is to sharpen one’s skills in linguistic analysis and in the process to produce an explanatory description of as much of the language as possible. Prerequisites for the class are previous courses at Ling Tier I and Tier II levels, or permission from the instructor. The course is open to undergraduate and graduate students. The aim of the course will be to produce a grammatical sketch of the language’s phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, with grounding in the discourses of fieldwork interaction. Linguistics 404 will be useful to any student who foresees doing fieldwork in any area of linguistics or wants to learn how data are collected to help inform their use of linguistic data from the academic literature, and growing world of language archives and linguistic corpora. All students will participate in fieldwork tasks and are expected to attend at least 1 hour of office hours per week that speakers will schedule outside of class time. There will be frequent oral and written progress reports on the class’ work, and a final report on aspects of the language. Students are encouraged to form teams to work together on specific aspects of language that contribute to the overall representation of the language we develop over the duration of the course.