Language Documentation

1. Week 2: Elicitation Language Documentation Claire Bowern Yale University LSA Summer Institute: 2013

2. Types of Elicitation Suggestions for structuring sessions Suggestions for structuring a field trip Elicitation

3. Types of elicitation • Structured • Translation • Grammaticality judgments, sentence checking • Picture identification tasks (e.g. flora/fauna identification, color chip naming) • > direct relationship between the task prompt and the language outcome • Semi-structured • Vernacular definitions • Language games (e.g. card games, map tasks) • Visual prompt tasks (videos, frog stories, etc) • > task prompt guides the language outcome but speakers have more freedom in their responses. • Unstructured • Narratives • Conversation

4. Structured elicitation

5. Types of structured elicitation • Translation • lexical elicitation • surveys • …

6. Class example: • How would you design a test to see whether the language is ergative? • What sort of questions would you ask? • (Use me as the consultant for Bardi to work out the Bardi case alignment.)

7. Making up good sentences • Work out what you want to test. • Don’t try to test too much at once. • Do several sessions on the same material (e.g. one exploratory, several follow-ups) • Don’t use weird vocab (it’s a distraction) • Pros and cons of using the same small vocab set. • priming • discourse factors • less distracting • may increase translation errors?

8. Grammaticality judgments • Ways of testing what are possible constructions in the language. • Ways of checking your hypotheses for how the grammar works (e.g. can your theory distinguish real sentences from impossible ones)? • Bound up in theoretical issues about the object of study (what people do say, or what they can say?)

9. Ways of asking • Can you say… • Can I say… • Is this a good sentence? • Is it ok if I say… • Does it sound right if I say… • If someone said … what would you think? • I made up this sentence but I don’t know if it’s something a real speaker would say… • I think Bessie said this … but I don’t know if I wrote it down right.

10. Other ‘experimental’ tasks • fill in the blanks • arrange the words in a sentence • put the word in a sentence • minimal permutations of a sentence

11. Example: hybrid objects

12. Advantages • Targeted to particular constructions; lets you fill in holes in the documentation quickly • Vital for types of data collection that need standard responses (e.g. intonation research) • Allows the linguist to plan; reduces the ‘unknowns’ (e.g. can use familiar vocabulary)

13. Disadvantages • Priming • Might not get natural translations • Might not get accurate translations • Some types of structures are hard to get with translation equivalents (e.g. getting passive examples if the elicitation language doesn’t have passives) • Can be boring for consultant

14. Things to watch out for • Don’t have too many (or too few) examples. • People new to elicitation planning tend to vary too much or too little across the sentences. • Varying too little restricts the utility of the data. • Varying too much makes it hard to generalize • Priming! • Leading questions! • Nonsense data (confusing your consultant) • Rushing your consultant (not giving them time to answer) • Boring your consultant • Some judgments are fragile

15. Training the consultant? • Keeping the consultant in the dark about the purpose of the session versus clueing them in and getting their insights • Need to distinguish between the language data/judgments and the consultant’s analysis. • Some people are better at this than others.

16. Examples: • MPI field manuals: http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/ • EUROTYP questionnaires: http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/questionnaire/eurotyp_description.php

17. Taking fieldnotes

18. By hand or on computer? • By hand: • slower to write than type [unless using IPA] • probably means retyping notes later • might be hard for consultants to read your writing • interlinearizing, callouts, etc, are faster • harder to accidentally delete something. • On the computer: • keyboard noise? • screen as barrier? • Easier to back up • Try both

19. Information to include: • Date • Consultant’s name • Number the pages • Language name • Your name

20. Fieldnote exercise • examine the following scans of notes.

21. Some questions to think about • Do you know what language the notes are about? • Can you easily work out when these notes were written, who the consultant is, and what the notes are about? • Can you tell whose notes they are? • Can you read the handwriting? • Can you tell which words line up with which glosses? • Can you interpret any non-standard symbols? • If pages fell out of the notebook, would you be able to put them back in the right place in the right order? • Can you easily tell if there is associated media (e.g. a related tape)?

22. Questions: cont. • When you cross something out, can you still read the rest of the word? • When you write over a letter/word, can you tell which is the right representation and which is the wrong one? • When you have two alternative transcriptions, can you tell which is right, or if they are both legitimate variants? • Can you tell what is a deduction on your part and what was a metacomment made by your consultant? • Can you tell what you need to check and what you know is right? • Do all the diacritics you’ve used show up if the notes are copied or scanned? • Will you be able to find crucial examples again? • Will you be able to read what you wrote if you come back to it in a year (e.g. will you be able to tell whether you wrote a vs o)?