Reflections on funding to support documentary linguistics

Funding for documentary linguistics has changed dramatically over the past two decades, largely due to the emergence of dedicated funding regimes focused on endangered languages. These new regimes have helped to shape and reify the field of documentary linguistics by facilitating and enforcing best practices and integrating archiving into the documentation process. As a result both the pace and quality of documentation have improved dramatically. However, several challenges remain, and additional efforts are needed to ensure the sustainability of funding for language documentation efforts. In particular, more funding needs to be allocated toward training and capacity building in under-resourced regions.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Public access to research data in language documentation: Challenges and possible strategies

The Open Access Movement promotes free and unfettered access to research publications and, increasingly, to the primary data which underly those publications. As the field of documentary linguistics seeks to record and preserve culturally and linguistically relevant materials, the question of how openly accessible these materials should be becomes increasingly important. This paper aims to guide researchers and other stakeholders in finding an appropriate balance between accessibility and confidentiality of data, addressing community questions and legal, institutional, and intellectual issues that pose challenges to accessible dat

How do speakers coordinate?:Evidence for prediction in a joint word-replacement task

We investigated whether speakers represent their partners' task in a joint naming paradigm. Two participants took turns in naming pictures; occasionally the (initial) picture was replaced by a different picture (target), signaling that they had to stop naming the initial picture. When the same participant had to name the target picture, he or she completed the name of the initial picture more often than when neither participant had to name the target picture. Crucially, when the other participant had to name the target picture, the first participant also completed the name of the initial picture more often than when neither participant named the target picture. However, the tendency to complete the initial name was weaker when the other participant had to name the target than when the same participant went on to name the target. We argue that speakers predict that their partner is about to respond using some, but not all, of the mechanisms they use when they prepare to speak

Disfluency: Interrupting speech and gesture

Item does not contain fulltextRadboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 6 juni 2006Promotor : Levinson, S.C. Co-promotores : Indefrey, P., Kita, S.178 p

The visual mode of language

The study of language began with the study of ancient written text. This practice has shaped and is still shaping our practices in language documentation. The way we conceptualise language and language use has implications for our documentary practices. We still focus on what we think can be written down and often disregard what we think cannot be written down. But, typically, when we speak, we cannot only hear each other but also see each other. Language is grounded in face-to-face interaction and speaking is a joint activity (Clark 1996). Language acquisition is a process that takes place in face-to-face contexts and our cognitive system automatically integrates both what we hear and what we see (McGurk & McDonald 1976). When we speak, we use our hands to gesture and the information provided in this visual, gestural modality is also integrated automatically in our mind. The gestures we use contribute crucially to our understanding of what speakers are communicating (Kendon 2004). Communities have developed alternate sign languages used in e.g. mourning practices (Kendon). Deaf people develop fully fledged sign languages in the manual modality (Meir et al. 2012). However, despite this basic multimodal nature of language use we often still do not document language to its full extent due to restricting our recordings to audio or restricting video recording to a few genres like story telling. In this talk I will exemplify the multimodal nature of language use, focusing on manual gesture in its various forms and functions from indexing to semantic specification, and discourse structure marking. I will discuss its implications for language documentation practices. The role of video recording and the way language use needs to be video recorded to provide useable material for linguistic and ethnographic documentation and analysis will be highlighted. A methodology for training the much needed video recording will be suggested which embeds the technical training of video technology and recording within a theoretically grounded understanding of language use