Refine
Document Type
- Article (3)
- Part of a Book (2)
- Book (1)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
Keywords
- Feldforschung (7) (remove)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (2)
- Peer-Review (2)
Publisher
This paper provides insights into the ongoing international research project Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German): Documentation of a highly endangered creole language in Papua New Guinea, based at the University of Augsburg, Germany. It elaborates on the different stages of the project, ranging from fieldwork to corpus development, thereby outlining the methods and software background used for the intended purposes. In doing so, we also give some approaches to solving specific problems, which have arisen in the course of practical work until now.
In semantic fieldwork, it is common to use a language other than the language under investigation for presenting linguistic materials to the language consultants, e.g. discourse contexts in acceptability judgment tasks. Previous works commenting on the use of a ‘meta-language’ or ‘language of wider communication’ in this sense (AnderBois and Henderson 2015; Matthewson 2004) have argued that this practice is not methodologically inferior to the exclusive use of the object language for elicitation, but that the fieldworker needs to be alert to potential influences of the meta-language or, indeed, the object language, on the elicited judgments. Thus, the choice of a language for presenting discourse contexts is an integral component of fieldwork methodology. This paper provides a research report with a focus on this component. It describes a multilingual fieldwork setting offering several potential meta-languages, which the fieldworker and the consultants master to varying degrees. The choice of the languages in this setting is discussed with regard to methodological, social and practical considerations and related to selected, more general methodological questions regarding semantic fieldwork practice.
Der zweite Band der Reihe des Zentrums Sprachenvielfalt und Mehrsprachigkeit (ZSM) der Universität zu Köln enthält die Beiträge des Kolloquiums "Was ist linguistische Evidenz?". Die Beiträge stammen aus verschiedenen sprachwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen (Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Anglistik, Sprachliche Informationsverarbeitung, Phonetik und Psycholinguistik) und widmen sich der Frage des Kolloquiums aus verschiedenen Perspektiven. Behandelt werden grundsätzliche Diskussionen über den Zusammenhang von Evidenz und sprachwissenschaftlichen Theorien, experimentelle Paradigmen (Priming-Experimente, Eye-Tracking-Experimente, Thermometerverfahren), computergesteuerte Korpusanalyse und Herausforderungen bei der Datengewinnung durch Feldforschung.
Traditionally, research on language change has been a post-mortem activity, focused on isolated changes that are complete and often only documented in written texts. In the 1960s the field was advanced considerably by Labovian sociolinguistics and the investigation of “change in progress” adduced through patterns of community-internal linguistic variation correlated with external facts about speakers such as age and class (see Labov 1994 for an overview). However, despite the many benefits of such work on “dynamic synchrony,” we still know relatively little about how language change unfolds over the lifetimes of individual speakers, that is, in real time (cf. Bailey et al. 1991). The logistical challenges of such research are, of course, considerable. Whereas it is straightforward for psycholinguists to observe language development in children over the course of a few years, documenting changes in the verbal behavior of individuals over several decades is by contrast much less feasible. Nevertheless, present theoretical models of language change could be considerably improved by the results of real-time studies.
In recent years, formal semantic research on the meaning of tense and aspect has benefited from a number of studies investigating languages with graded tense systems. This paper contributes a first sketch of the temporal marking system of Awing (Grassfields Bantu), focusing on two varieties of remote past and remote future. We argue that the data support a "symmetric" analysis of past and future tense in Awing. In our specific proposal, Awing temporal remoteness markers are uniformly analyzed as quantificational tense operators, and both the past and the future paradigm include a form that prevents contextual restriction of this temporal quantifier.