Syllabus
This fieldwork tutorial will teach the premises of informant work typical for the early stage of fieldwork. In this period, a researcher needs to rely on direct interaction with a consultant almost exclusively.
The language of this fieldwork tutorial with whom we will try to become acquainted with is Sakha (also known as Yakut), a Turkic language of North-Eastern Siberia. The working sessions will be held in English and when required Russian will be used as an additional means of communication.
Due to restriction of time, the sections will be centered around several structured blocks a) recording settings b) initial work on phonetics/phonology via lexical work c) non-verbal and intransitive predication and d) transitive predication. Initially, the attendees get a short introduction in the beginning of blocks b)-d) how to structure elicitation tasks and how such work could be done.
After this, the instructor will take a back seat in order to let the attendees try to gather data themselves. Additional guidance will be offered if this becomes necessary.
After this, a short demonstration of how to transliterate narratives with a native speaker will follow in order to show how the next phase of consultant work looks like.
Annotation
Teacher: Florian Siegl
Language consultant: Aldana Vlasáková
Interviews and elicitation are among the central tools of linguistic informant work. In this respect, fieldlinguistics is just another technique of data gathering. Although informant work has a firm position in disciplines such as e.g., sociology or anthropology, data gathering via interviews and elicitation is not regularly taught in linguistics, sociolinguistics being perhaps the only clear exception. However, when starting to work on an unknown language, asking questions becomes mandatory as this is the way to accumulate data and to learn the basics of the language (given that both the consultant and the linguist share another language). In order to achieve one’s goal, the fieldworker needs to learn how to ask and what to ask.