Collaboration in the Context of Teaching, Scholarship, and Language Revitalization: Experience from the Chatino Language Documentation Project

We describe our own experience of linguist-community collaboration over the last ten years in our Chatino Language Documentation Project, focused on the Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico). We relate episodes in the emergence and evolution of the collaboration between ourselves, and of the collaboration among ourselves and the Chatino communities with which we have worked. Our experience has several special features. First, our own collaboration began as native Chatino-speaking Ph.D. student and her teacher in a program focused on training speakers of Latin American indigenous languages in linguistics and anthropology, and developed into a larger collaboration among students and faculty where the student had a major leadership role. Second, our approach was documentary-descriptive and comparative, but it was also socially engaged or ‘activist,’, in that we sought to promote interest, awareness, and respect for the Chatino languages, to teach and support Chatino literacy, and to preserve and offer access to spoken Chatino, especially traditional verbal art. Our approach had synergies with local interests in writing and in honoring traditional speech ways, but it also led to conflicts over our roles as social actors, and the traditionally activist roles of indigenous teachers. Third, we experienced plasticity in the collaborative roles we played. Between ourselves, we were student and teacher, but also initiator and follower as we became engaged in revitalization. At the same time, the native speaker linguist found herself occupying a range of positions along a continuum from “insider” to “outsider” respect to her own community. *This paper is in the series Language Documentation in the Americas edited by Keren Rice and Bruna FranchettoNational Foreign Language Resource Cente

Finding a way into a family of tone languages: The story and methods of the Chatino Language Documentation Project

We give a narrative description of our ten-year path into the elaborate tonal systems of the Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico), and of some of the methods we have used and recommend, illustrated with specific examples. The work, ongoing at the time of writing, began when one of us (Cruz), a native speaker of San Juan Quiahije Chatino, entered the University of Texas at Austin as a Ph.D. student and formed, together with the other of us (Woodbury), a professor there, the Chatino Language Documentation Project, ultimately incorporating five other Ph.D. students and two other senior researchers. We argue for the importance of an interplay among speaker and non-speaker perspectives over the long course of work; a mix of introspection, hypothesis-testing, natural speech recording, transcription, translation, grammatical analysis, and dictionary-making as research methods and activities; an emphasis on community training as an active research context; the simultaneous study of many varieties within a close-knit language family to leverage progress; and the use of historical-comparative methods to get to know tonal systems and the roles they play at a deeper level. *This paper is in the series How to Study a Tone Language, edited by Steven Bird and Larry HymanNational Foreign Language Resource Cente

Morphological Orthodoxy in Yupik-Inuit

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Using \u3cem\u3eLearning Express-Ways\u3c/em\u3e in Special Education Teacher Preparation: Developing Student-Faculty Relationships as a Path to Partnership

This paper explores the effects of implementing Learning Express-Ways as an instructional communication tool between students and faculty in courses that are part of a special education teacher preparation program and apprenticeship. Findings suggest that using Learning Express-Ways contributed to the development of learning relationships with faculty and this instructional communication tool may be helpful in creating a partnership-focused approach in special education teacher preparation program

Lack of privileged access to awareness for rewarding social scenes in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Reduced social motivation is hypothesised to underlie social behavioural symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The extent to which rewarding social stimuli are granted privileged access to awareness in ASD is currently unknown. We use continuous flash suppression to investigate whether individuals with and without ASD show privileged access to awareness for social over nonsocial rewarding scenes that are closely matched for stimulus features. Strong evidence for a privileged access to awareness for rewarding social over nonsocial scenes was observed in neurotypical adults. No such privileged access was seen in ASD individuals, and moderate support for the null model was noted. These results suggest that the purported deficits in social motivation in ASD may extend to early processing mechanisms

Cultural glossary for the translations

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About the authors

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Verbal artistry: the missing link among language documentation, grammatical theory, and linguistic pedagogy

Verbal art has so far played only an occasional role in documentary linguistics. In this talk I want to show, by giving examples from the work of language documenters, grammarians, and teacher-activists, the roles that verbal artistry might play in binding together language documentation, grammatical theory, and linguistic pedagogy. Verbal artistry—and heightened, expressive language use in general (Sherzer 2002)—is a part of what we record, annotate, analyze and interpret when we document language and speaking. It is one of the things that we like and appreciate about language. As Roman Jakobson (1960:356) formulated it, ‘[t]he set...toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language’. In turning attention back to linguistic form and meaning, verbal art propels our ideation—as speakers or as outsiders—of the uniqueness, transcendence, and sacredness of language and languages. And it gives us further strong reason to want to document, reminding us that language documentation is not only a scientific enterprise but a humanistic endeavor. Documenting verbal artistry, in turn, promotes grammatical and lexical investigation both by necessity—so we can access the material at a basic level—but also encourages deep inquiry to the nature and plasticity of speakers’ knowledge of grammar and lexicon, especially if we assume, with Kiparsky (1973), that verbal art mobilizes the authentic structures, categories, and processes of grammar. It then also becomes possible to understand the extent to which verbal artistry and related language practices rely on a language’s special features, and use them in special ways: what I have called ‘form-dependent expression’ (Woodbury 1993). These features tie verbal creations to the linguistic structures they depend on, making translation to a language lacking such features problematic, and language loss deeply threatening to the continuity of such creations. As such, they also bring grammar and lexicon—the subject of science—back into the humanistic equation. In language teaching, an explicit focus on verbal art and linguistic creativity shows students the value and pleasure of curating, studying, and interpreting the speech of others, including one’s own ancestors. It leavens the learning of grammar and lexicon, which is otherwise often based on mundane or constructed content. And it provides a basis for approaching translation and appreciating its complexities. Moreover, it can open up new realms of linguistic creativity for students should they choose to try to shape their language into new cultural forms, from poetic and musical genres to mobile texts and tweets, to new orthographic experiments. Although these roles for verbal art documentation, grammar, and pedagogy are all individually recognizable, it is important to focus on verbal art in its proper social and linguistic context in order to realize its tremendous potential for better linking together our efforts as documentary linguists

The Greenlandic verbal suffix -ut-: Interactions of linguistic form and grammatical function

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