field linguistics

8/9/2019 Field linguistics

1/33

@BARIRAH NAZIR


2/33

Study of languages in field

@Barirah nazir


3/33

Why Bother?

In 21st century no linguist can fail tobe aware that a substantial number

of languages ceased to be spoken

We can hope to maintain linguisticdiversity, but if we cant at leasthope they will be recorded forposterity

@Barirah nazir


4/33

Some Lessons from Truganini

What could Truganini have taught us?So who was Truganini then?

In one sense, she was nobody terribleimportant at all.

A woman who died in 1876 inTasmania

She was not formally educated, neverheld a public office; did not become afamous leader; never accumulatedwealth; wrote no books.

@Barirah nazir


5/33

Last speaker ofAboriginallanguage of Tasmania

@Barirah nazir


6/33

Before 1803 every one spoke aTasmanian Aboriginal language. After1876, nobody did

Construction of sentences, Noun class,Distinction between Singular & Plural

Regrettably the main lesson that she

can teach linguists now is the folly ofallowing a language to disappearwithout properly documenting it first

@Barirah nazir


7/33

Diversity still

Undocumented It was estimated that in 2001 that of the 250 or

so languages that were originally spoken in

Australia about 17 could be considered strong

(McConvell & Thieberger 2001:61)

In U.S. & Canada many languages have

disappeared (Nettle & Romaine 2000:5)

The indigenous languages of Caribbean, wherefirst settlement took place have long been

extinct (Crystal 2000:24)

@Barirah nazir


8/33

Arm Chair &Dirty Feet Linguists

Dirty Feet Linguists

Typically characterizearm chair formalists

as being out of touchwith reality and totake data withoutempirical verificationand as delving ofteninto theoretical trivia

Arm Chair Linguists

Tend to look down ontheir counterparts

because they feelthat they fail to carryout analysis atsufficient levels ofderivational depthand because there isno theoreticalsophistication

@Barirah nazir


9/33

Fieldwork at Home &Fieldwork in Field

There are some who claim that theyhave done field work on such and suchlanguage, though in reality they havenot.

Should you consider field work at homehaving informant at your desk?

Elicitation may not be varied pragmaticallyto produce a full range of vocabulary

Your single speaker may be trying to flatteryou

@Barirah nazir


10/33

Terry Crowley There is part of me which says that for your

grammar to be truly worthy, you must havesuffered at least from Malaria or some other

impressive sounding tropical ailment in itswriting, or you should have had at least onetoe nail ripped off by your hiking boots, or youshall have developed a nasty boil on anunmentionable part of your body. I, of course,have suffered all of these misfortunes in fieldand many more.And if I had to go through thisthen I feel that everybody else should have tosuffer a similar extent

@Barirah nazir


11/33

Field Linguistics Which type of

Linguistics? Some descriptive Linguistics, the type of

linguistics documentation is all about writing agrammar and phonetics; composing a

dictionary and publishing a volume of annotated texts (Dixon 2001)

Linguistics in daily round is often neglected

Linguistic Anthropologists have provided the

language in social context

@Barirah nazir


12/33

To documentlanguage as it isparticipantobserver is bestway but

demanding

@Barirah nazir


13/33

No field linguist can fail to be partanthropologist, and no failed

anthropologist can fail to be part-linguist.

As field linguist we have advantage ofknowing which patterns we are going

to follow

@Barirah nazir


14/33

Ethical

Issues

Informed Consent

Voluntary Participation -- Insider

Money &Few Public Awareness

-- Motivated Informant

-- Reluctant Informant

@Barirah nazir


15/33

Earlier Approaches to

Linguistics Description

American Descriptivist

@Barirah nazir


16/33

Field methods were developed byAmerican Descriptivist

The concern of field methods weremainly dying American IndianLanguages.

Some linguists working in this field wereBoas, Bloomfield, Sapir.

American linguists following the line ofreasoning exemplified by Bloomfielddeveloped the scientific method ofdescriptive linguistics.

@Barirah nazir


17/33

@Barirah nazir


18/33

They strove to obtain objectivity bydeveloping accountable procedures derivinglinguistics generalization from observable

data The important methodological principle

springing this concern was that thelanguage should be analyzed in order(phonological, morphological, syntactic,semantic pattern) so that the analyst couldremain in touch with observable part oflanguage.

@Barirah nazir


19/33

The concern with accountability ishallmark of Labovs work.

Labovs view resembles of earlierAmerican linguists but differs fromChomsky.

Generativists- No corpus of data can

serve for linguistics generalization sinceany corpus is a partial collection ofutterances.

@Barirah nazir


20/33

Revolution in linguistics has affectedthe way of field linguistics methods.

But American Descriptive methodsstill provide basis for manycontemporary techniques of datacollection and analysis.

@Barirah nazir


21/33

TraditionalD

ialectology The descriptive methods of language

have been adapted by urbandialectologists.

Dialectology- to produce a geographicalaccount of linguistics difference.

The main objective was to studycontemporary reflexes of older

linguistics forms in their naturalsettings.

Dialectologists- Orton, McIntosh

@Barirah nazir


22/33

M

ethodology Selecting Speakers

Collecting Data

Identifying Linguistics Variables Processing the Figures

Interpreting Results

@Barirah nazir


23/33

Selecting Speakers

Researcher should select such speaker

who are true representative of thatcommunity on which s/he wants toresearch.

@Barirah nazir


24/33

Collecting Data

Finding people who are willing to be

interviewed or recorded and collectingdata through interviews and taperecordings.

Identifying Variables

Researcher listen to the recordings andfind out different variables.

@Barirah nazir


25/33

Processing of figures

Counting the number of identified

occurrence of each variant in the data.Interpreting Results

It involves two stages

1- Description of patterns 2-Explanation

@Barirah nazir


26/33

DATA COLLECTION

ON - THE - SPOT PHONETICTRANSCRIPTION

POSTAL QUESTIONNAIRE

@Barirah nazir


27/33

ON - THE - SPOT PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION

This technique has been adapted in various ways which has

provided the major model for later work.

Supplemented by the Tape recorder which has madepossible to study larger stretches of spoken language rather

than isolated lexical items.

POSTAL QUESTIONNAIRE pioneered in Germany by George Wenker who published his

work in 1876.Mcintosh (1952) and Le Page (1954)

Large volume of easily processible data collection method. ALUS survey of the Linguistic Minorities Project (1985) Amudas study of Yoruba/ English code-switching patterns in

Nigeria (1986)

@Barirah nazir


28/33

The main disadvantage of questionnaires is that datamay be inaccurately reported by informants who are nottrained in phonetic transcription.

Mcintosh proposes using a postal questionnairewhenever possible , supplemented by the observationsof a trained fieldworker.

@Barirah nazir


29/33

DE CAMPS SURVEY OF JAMAICAN DIALECTS

used traditional dialect-mapping techniques to plot linguisticdifferences between Jamaican dialects.

De camp comments,Many people , including some educated Jamacians,

say that there are two kinds of English spoken in Jamaica

STANDARD ENGLISH and the DIALECT, meaning the folkspeech of the uneducated.

Nearly all speakers of English in Jamaica could be arrangedin a sort of linguistic continuum , ranging from the speech ofthe most backward peasant or labourer all the way to that ofa well educated urban professional.

It is evident from the remarks that DeCamp is interested in findinga way to model patterns of contemporary language use , rather thanin applying his data in the mannner of traditional dialectologist tothe solution of historical problems.

@Barirah nazir


30/33

Full Grammar-- Few Informants

The linguist will begin by asking the informant forsimple words and write them down with all thephonetic detail he is able to distinguish;subsequently he will attempt to analyze these byasking the informant to repeat words that seemsimilar to him.And arrives at a crude and firstdescription of phonological system.

In the meanwhile the fieldworker collects morevocabulary and data for his description of

morphology.

To keep track of the progress of the data collected ,all the information is entered in notebooks.

@Barirah nazir


31/33

NARROW FOCUS MANY SPEAKERS

The objective is to collect as much vocabulary and as muchdata about the phonological and grammatical structure of thelanguage as possible.

An example of this fieldwork was carried out by William

Labov who in this study focused on the pronounciation of ramong New Yorkers.

It was carried out in a department store . The interviewerapproached the informant in the role of a customer asking fordirections to a department located on the fourth floor.

The interviewer noted the utterance fourth floor spoken incareful style and then made a written note of the data.

@Barirah nazir


32/33

@Barirah nazir


33/33

@Barirah nazir

field linguistics

Documents