Prosodic description: An introduction for fieldworkers

This article provides an introductory tutorial on prosodic features such as tone and accent for researchers working on little-known languages. It specifically addresses the needs of non-specialists and thus does not presuppose knowledge of the phonetics and phonology of prosodic features. Instead, it intends to introduce the uninitiated reader to a field often shied away from because of its (in part real, but in part also just imagined) complexities. It consists of a concise overview of the basic phonetic phenomena (section 2) and the major categories and problems of their functional and phonological analysis (sections 3 and 4). Section 5 gives practical advice for documenting and analyzing prosodic features in the field.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Documenting Simpa: Advances in language documentation

Documentary linguistics, also known as language documentation, a relatively new branch of Linguistics, advocates for the fundamental need to collect records of language use and practices in various forms from diverse genres for multiple purposes. Such purposes include language description, language development, language maintenance, and language revitalisation. Such a record of a language serves to feed not only linguistic research but also research in other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, and ethnography. Language documentation is recognized as an ultimate response to language endangerment. This paper explores language documentation with specific reference to Simpa, an under-described, minority language of Ghana. The paper reviews theories, approaches, methods, and tools of language documentation to highlight how they were employed and attuned to take care of the Simpa context. Thus, the discussion dilates on specific field methods and tools adapted for obtaining a balanced set of data from three complementary event types, viz., natural communicative events, staged communicative events, and elicitations, to build a language documentation corpus. Data processing, data annotation, and data management practices applied in building the corpus, as well as dissemination of the research outcomes are also addressed. Furthermore, fieldwork ethics used in the study are discussed. Finally, for consideration in future research, the paper reflects on some challenges that were encountered in documenting Simpa.   &nbsp

Annotation Graphs and Servers and Multi-Modal Resources: Infrastructure for Interdisciplinary Education, Research and Development

Annotation graphs and annotation servers offer infrastructure to support the analysis of human language resources in the form of time-series data such as text, audio and video. This paper outlines areas of common need among empirical linguists and computational linguists. After reviewing examples of data and tools used or under development for each of several areas, it proposes a common framework for future tool development, data annotation and resource sharing based upon annotation graphs and servers.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Framework to edit and use data from fieldwork in linguistic research

Dissertação apresentado à Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão do IPL para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática - Computação Móvel, orientada pelo Doutor Vítor Manuel Basto Fernandes.O presente trabalho foi realizado no Centro Interdisciplinar de Documentação Linguística e Social, no âmbito do projeto “Framework to edit and use data from fieldwork in linguistic research”, que é um dos sub-projetos pertencentes ao CLARIN (Common Language Resource and Technology Infrastructure) dentro do 7º Programa Quadro da UE (FP7). O objetivo do projeto consiste na construção de uma ponte entre os formatos de dados e ficheiros usados na documentação de línguas – especialmente ELAN-Annotation-Format – e os formatos de dados usados em corpus linguísticos e em Processamento de Linguagem Natural, NLP (Natural Language Processing), que hoje são armazenados em arquivos de línguas como o The Language Archive no Instituto Max Planck, situado em Nijmegen, Holanda. O projeto consiste no desenvolvimento de uma biblioteca que transforme os formatos de dados e ficheiros numa estrutura de dados unificados, seguindo uma implementação da ISO 24612 LAF (Linguistic Annotation Framework)

Linguistic diversity, language documentation and psycholinguistics: The role of stimuli

Our psycholinguistic theories tend to be based on empirical data from a biased sample of well-described languages, not doing justice to the enormous linguistic diversity in the world. As Evans and Levinson (2009: 447) put it, a major challenge of our discipline is to harness this linguistic diversity and “to show how the child’s mind can learn and the adult’s mind can use, with approximately equal ease, any one of this vast range of alternative systems.” This paper explores some of the possibilities and limits of how language documentation and description can contribute to taking up this challenge, focusing on the role of both natural data and stimuli in this enterprise.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Archaeology in the Digital Age: From Paper to Databases

Research units in archaeology often manage large and precious archives containing various documents, including reports on fieldwork, scholarly studies and reference books. These archives are of course invaluable, recording decades of work, but are generally hard to consult and access. In this context, digitizing full text documents is not enough: information must be formalized, structured and easy to access thanks to friendly user interfaces.Comment: Digital Humanities 2015, Jun 2015, Sydney, Australia. 2015, Proceedings of the conference "Digital Humanities 2015