How to be a language detective

1. How to be a language detective The Language Detective Villiers Park 9-13 July 2007

2. Methodologies for language study • Introspection • Use an existing corpus • Collect a new corpus

3. Introspection • What is or is not possible for you as a speaker • Example: constraints on the beginning of syllables that begin with /s/ in English – still, spill, skill; strike; sprain; scratch; *stl-; splint; *skl- etc. • How widespread is this constraint – is it peculiar to you? To the dialect of English you speak? To English? How would you answer those questions?

4. Corpora • Large collections of machine readable text • Can contain spoken or written language, or both • Can represent contemporary language or language from earlier periods • Can represent one or more than one language • Bas Aarts’ talk tomorrow night

5. Collecting your own corpus • Could be for a variety of purposes: language attitudes; regional variation; language change; linguistic universals; etc. • Will make your research unambiguously unique! • Representativeness

6. Exercise Each group to discuss possible methods for investigating the following linguistic questions, then report back in a plenary session in 15 minutes • Is the word order of English and Japanese different? If so, in what ways is it different? • How has the marking of negation in French changed over time? • Do men speak more than women? • Do the Hopi people of Arizona, USA, have any way of referring to the concept of time? • What is a noun?

7. The tools of the trade Describing phonology How would you transcribe this: You could use ordinary letters, but that wouldn’t distinguish the different qualities of the two ‘types’ of<e>s

8. IPA • IPA originated in nineteenth century as a uniform means of representing the spoken sounds of the world’s languages • Has a wide range of uses (e.g. in SLT, in foreign language learning, phonological theory) • Uniformity means that anyone trained in using the IPA knows what any other writer is trying to represent when she gives IPA transcriptions

9. IPA detective work • Using the IPA chart, spend 15 minutes in groups trying to transcribe the phrases on the handout into English orthography. • The IPA transcription of these phrases was based on a particular regional accent of English. Which one? What particular features of the transcription helped you to identify that accent?

10. A difficult case The Lakhota exercise – things to work out • Generally which words in Lakhota correspond to which words in English? • What is the word order? • How are person, number and grammatical role marked? • Do interrogatives have a different marking from declaratives? • How are the clauses coordinated? • Is there a noun marker?

11. Lakhota English correspondences lakhota ‘Indian’; matho ‘bear’; hoksila ‘boy’ wičha- ‘them’; ma- ‘me’; ni- ‘you (obj.)’; tuwa ‘someone’ (indef.); wičhasa ‘someone’ (def.); no marking for 3s; ‘ya-’ you (subj.); -pi ‘they’; wa- ‘I’ kte ‘killed’; čho ‘called’; hi ‘came’ Ki = noun marker; he = question particle čha = ‘and’, when the subject of clause A is different from the subject of clause B; na = ‘and’ when the two subjects are the same

12. Word order • Word order is SOV where S and O are full nouns; pronouns are attached to the verb lakhota ki wičha kte Indian NOUN 3PlObj killed matho ki wa kte Bear NOUN 1SSubj killed

13. Person, number and role

14. Assignments 1 and 2 Ass. 1 I came, and the Indians and the bears killed them Someone killed you and called me Someone killed you and someone (maybe somebody else) called me He or she killed you Ass. 2 Who did he or she kill? Who killed him or her?

15. Assignment 3 • lakhota ki hokšita ki ktepi čha matho ki hi • yahi na lakhota ki yakte • tuwa wačho he • wičhaša ki hipi čha tuwa wičhakte

16. Case solved!