Course Description
Fieldwork is the process of eliciting linguistic data from speakers of a language. In this course, our focus will be on hypothesis-driven fieldwork: collecting data for the purpose of testing a linguistic hypothesis. The class will work with a speaker of an understudied language. Class time will divided between discussion (methods, techniques, debriefing, troubleshooting, …) and the elicitation of data. Students will also have the opportunity to work with the speaker outside class time.
Four weeks is a short length of time when working on a brand new language. While it is certainly possible that students will discover something exciting that could lead to a research output, our focus will primarily be on learning what works and what doesn’t work when doing fieldwork. The skills learned can then be applied to other languages and in other contexts.
Area Tags: Fieldwork, Language Documentation
(Sessions 1 & 2) Tuesday/Friday 3:00pm – 4:20pm
Location: ILC S140
Instructor: Lisa Matthewson (Hale Professor)
Lisa Matthewson is a Professor and Distinguished University Scholar University of British Columbia. Dr. Matthewson’s research focuses on cross-linguistic variation in semantics and pragmatics, and what variation (or the lack of it) tells us about Universal Grammar. She has been doing fieldwork on St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish) since 1992, on Gitksan (Tsimshianic) since 2010, and on Niuean (Austronesian) since 2012. She has worked on a range of areas in semantics and the syntax/semantics interface, including determiners, quantifiers, pronouns, adverbs, lexical categories, tense, aspect, modals, mood, evidentials, mood, discourse particles and presupposition. Her research also focuses on the methodology of semantic fieldwork, and on endangered language preservation and oral history. She is involved in community language preservation initiatives, including contributing to the First Voices website for Northern St’át’imcets.
