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Ulrike Mosel
doing his practical year in the maternity ward of the national hospital. He
told me in near desperation, “They don’t explain anything. They just want
me to watch. Just watching, how can I learn anything?” In fact, this is pre-
cisely what Samoans and many other people expect, and are expert at:
learning by observation.
Such different attitudes and practices can lead to misunderstandings. If,
for example, you explain how to use a tape recorder and continue talking
while showing how to insert the batteries, switch on the microphone, and
press the recording button, your counterpart might have the impression that
you regard him or her as stupid: Too much talk can be interpreted as pa-
tronizing. Accordingly, the learner is expected not to bother the teacher
with questions, but be a silent observer (see Duranti [1997: 104 ff.] and
Chapter 5).
In many fieldwork situations, the indigenous teachers will be pleased
when the linguist learns to actively speak the language and they may be
disappointed when she does not make the effort to learn phrases and para-
digms by heart. But this is not necessarily so. There are speech communi-
ties who consider it as inappropriate or even intrusive when an outsider
tries to speak their language or a particular variety of the language (see also
Chapter 5). My Samoan family, for example, did not want me to speak col-
loquial Samoan.
Many linguists no longer see the production of annotated recordings,
grammars, and dictionaries as the only goal of linguistic fieldwork. Instead,
they regard it as their responsibility to train and mentor the indigenous lan-
guage workers to enable them to work on the documentation themselves
and thus “consider themselves genuine shareholders in the project” (Dwyer
in Chapter 2, also see Grinevald 2003) So, what do the local language
workers need to learn in order to eventually become independent of re-
searchers from outside? The answer is, much of what a student of linguis-
tics also has learned at school or at university, namely:
–
handling technical tools (recorders); organizing notebooks, folders, files,
etc. (see also Chapter 4);
–
understanding the basic theoretical concepts of phonology, grammar,
and lexicography (see further Section 5);
–
making recordings, transcriptions, and translations and editing the tran-
scriptions (see further Section 6);
–
organizing the work flow (see Section 7).
Chapter 3 – Fieldwork and community language work
75
5. Getting started: elicitation
In the very beginning of fieldwork, the researcher has to rely on elicitation.
Elicitation means getting linguistic data from native speakers by asking
questions.
1
Accordingly, some older fieldwork manuals give advice on what
kind of questions to ask or not to ask, how to make the interview interesting
and keep the informant attentive, etc. In this manner, such manuals quite
automatically assign a passive role to the native speaker.
If we regard fieldwork as a mutual teaching-learning event, this approach
is no longer acceptable. Rather, we have to develop methods that involve
the speaker as an active partner who eventually becomes an independent
language documenter him- or herself. In the remainder of this section, we
will briefly outline how in the initial fieldwork phase the data collection
can be combined with training in basic linguistics. Section 6 describes how
the linguist and the local language workers can cooperate in building up a
corpus of annotated recordings and edited texts.
5.1. Wordlists
In the very first sessions of fieldwork, you need to compile wordlists to
investigate the phonological system and create a working orthography, or
understand an existing orthography. Traditional fieldwork manuals recom-
mend compiling wordlists by asking bilingual native speakers for the trans-
lation of wordlists in the lingua franca into their native language. Some also
provide the translation terms for such wordlists (Kibrik 1977: 103–124;
Vaux and Cooper 1999: 44–49). This method is questionable on both lin-
guistic and psychological grounds. The native speakers might feel embar-
rassed when asked for the translation of a word they do not understand or
even worse, a word that they cannot translate because they have forgotten
the indigenous equivalent, or because there is a taboo about it. An alterna-
tive method works like this:
–
Explain what you need the wordlists for – this is not just for studying
phonology and orthography; the first wordlist of about 180 words will
also serve as the starting point to build short clauses;
–
discuss what semantic fields might be suitable to start with, and perhaps
suggest food and cooking;
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Ulrike Mosel
–
ask the native speaker to teach you words of this particular semantic
field by dividing it into subcategories, e.g.:
–
fruit and vegetables, edible animals
–
dishes
–
activities
–
tools.
Thus you ask:
–
tell me the names of fruit and vegetables you grow and eat
(apples, spinach, beans, potatoes ...);
–
what do you do when you make a dish with potatoes?
(wash, peel, boil, fry ...);
–
what kind of things do you use?
(knife, spoon, tongs, pot ...);
When eliciting words expressing activities like ‘wash, cut, boil, roast,’ etc.,
it is often useful to ask for commands because imperatives are in many
languages the most simple verb forms. In order to get the simplest forms
and avoid complex polite expressions which may be crucial in certain so-
cieties, establish a scenario where the mother asks her daughter to wash the
vegetables, boil the water, etc.
This method of active eliciting will not only help you to learn the first
words and short sentences, but also make the native speaker aware of the
notion of semantic fields and different word classes, e.g. verbs and nouns.
5.2. Phonology
180 words are not enough to study the phonology of a language. But no-
body is expected to do a more or less complete study of the phonology be-
fore investigating morphology or syntax. Rare sounds, sound combinations,
or tonal patterns that are overseen in a preliminary phonological analysis
will certainly show up in the course of later analysis and then phonology
can be revised accordingly. In a fieldwork methods course I taught with a
speaker of Acoli, a tonal language from Uganda, most of us had difficulties
hearing the tonal patterns. Instead of spending numerous frustrating ses-
sions on phonology, we started with syntax before we had worked out the
phonology in detail. This gave us time to familiarize ourselves with other
features of the language, while at the same time, our teacher became in-
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