Synopses & Reviews
This book offers a state-of-the-art guide to linguistic fieldwork, reflecting its collaborative nature across the subfields of linguistics and disciplines such as astronomy, anthropology, biology, musicology, and ethnography. Experienced scholars and fieldworkers explain the methods and approaches needed to understand a language in its full cultural context and to document it accessibly and enduringly. They consider the application of new technological approaches to recording and documentation, but never lose sight of the crucial relationship between subject and researcher. The book is timely: an increased awareness of dying languages and vanishing dialects has stimulated the impetus for recording them as well as the funds required to do so. The Handbook is an indispensable source, guide, and reference for everyone involved in linguistic and cultural fieldwork.
About the Author
Nicholas Thieberger is a linguist who has worked with speakers of Warnman, from Western Australia and South Efate, a language from central Vanuatu. His grammar of South Efate broke new ground to include citable data linked to an archival version of the primary recordings. He is interested in developments in e-humanities methods and their potential to improve research practice, and is currently developing methods for creating reusable data sets from fieldwork on previously unrecorded languages. He is the project officer with the multi-institutional Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC.org.au), a databank that holds 3,000 hours of digitised audio files. He was an Assistant Professor in linguistics at the University of Hawai'i and is currently an Australian Research Council QEII Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction,
Nicholas ThiebergerPart One: Data Collection and Management
2. Audio and Video Recording Techniques for Linguistic Research, Anna Margetts and Andrew Margetts
3. A Guide to Stimulus-based Elicitation for Semantic Cetegories, Asifa Majid
4. Morphosyntactic Analysis in the Field, a Guide to the Guides, Ulrike Mosel
5. Linguistic Data Management, Nicholas Thieberger and Andrea Berez
Part Two: Recording Performance
6. Sociolinguistic Fieldwork, Miriam Meyerhoff, Chie Adachi, Golnaz Nanbakhsh, and Anna Strycharz
7. Gesture - Understanding the Role of Gesture in Communication, How Gestures Can be Described, Mandana Seyfeddinipur
8. Including Music and the Temporal Arts in Language Documentation, Linda Barwick
Part Three: Collaborating With Other Disciplines
9. Anything Can Happen: the Verb Lexicon and Interdisciplinary Fieldwork, Nicholas Evans
10. Understanding Human Relations (kinship systems), Laurent Dousset
11. The Language of Food, Nancy Pollock
12. Botanical Collecting, Barry Conn
13. Ethnobiology - Basic Methods for Documenting Biological Knowledge Represented in Languages, Will McClatchey
14. Technology, Pierre Lemonnier
15. Fieldwork in Ethnomathematics, Marc Chemillier
16. Cultural Astronomy for Linguists, Jarita Holbrook
17. Geography - Understanding how to Identify Landforms and Their Uses, Andrew Turk, David Mark, Carolyn O'Meara, and David Stea
18. Toponymy, David Nash and Jane Simpson
Part Four: Collaborating With the Community
19. Ethical Issues in Linguistic Fieldwork, Keren Rice
20. Copyright and Other Legal Concerns, Paul Newman
21. Training Linguistics Students for the Realities of Fieldwork, Monica Macaulay