Field Methods
LIN4112.01
Course Description
Summary
This course is designed to equip students with the basic methodologies necessary to carry out linguistic fieldwork on un(der)documented languages. Students will be trained in the skills and tools of language documentation and description by working with a speaker of a language previously unknown to them. Students will learn techniques of data collection, elicitation, management, and analysis, and they will be expected to conduct these techniques independently. We will implement these methodologies by taking a holistic approach to creating and annotating a corpus of language, building a lexical database, and producing a grammatical sketch. Students will additionally have the opportunity to use the collected data to explore a linguistic topic of interest to them. This methodological training will be situated within an ongoing discussion of the current language endangerment crisis and the ethical and empowering research methodologies that can be implemented to mitigate it.Prerequisites
Students must have previous taken "Language as System and Social Behavior" or another course that has introduced basic concepts in linguistics, such as phonology and syntax. Because we will be working with a different language, course content will be significantly different from "LIN4109: Language Documentation and Description" offered in Spring 2023. Students who previously took LIN4109 are still eligible to sign up for this course.
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