Reflections on linguistic analysis in documentary linguistics

This article reflects on the role of analysis in language documentation since Himmelmann (1998). It presents some of the criticism that Himmelmann's notion of analysis faced and how he responded (Himmelmann 2012). However, analysis in this context rarely refers to analysis alone, but the term includes the larger research goals and research questions. This study, then, situates the research goals, research questions and analyses that I have employed in my research on Besemah on a cline from facilitative to restrictive in terms of the diversity and spontaneity of the (archival) record that is produced, building upon Himmelmann's (2012) conceptual basis for distinguishing documentation and description. It does so through two case studies in Besemah, one with a highly facilitative research goal, question, and analysis and another with a highly restrictive research goal, question, and analysis.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Developing methods for reproducible research in linguistics: a first step

Poster: Reproducible research in other fields has developed various software tools that facilitate the publishing of code and results in a single document that are linked directly to the data. In mainstream linguistics, however, such software does not exist. The workflows for including linguistic examples in published work typically involve manual methods of copying and pasting text from a database into a word processing document. These manual methods are error-prone and time-consuming--often involving tedious tasks of aligning glosses in tables or with tabs. Furthermore, the examples in these documents are in no way linked to the corpus. This poster presents a first-attempt at developing a family of scripts called glossbox that link data, code, and analysis. At present, glossbox works with the typesetting software LaTeX, allowing users to semi-automatically import examples directly from the corpus. These examples require little to no manual manipulation and automatically produce citations to the corpus.Reproducible research in other fields has developed various software tools that facilitate the publishing of code and results in a single document that are linked directly to the data. In mainstream linguistics, however, such software does not exist. The workflows for including linguistic examples in published work typically involve manual methods of copying and pasting text from a database into a word processing document. These manual methods are error-prone and time-consuming--often involving tedious tasks of aligning glosses in tables or with tabs. Furthermore, the examples in these documents are in no way linked to the corpus. This poster presents a first-attempt at developing a family of scripts called glossbox that link data, code, and analysis. At present, glossbox works with the typesetting software LaTeX, allowing users to semi-automatically import examples directly from the corpus. These examples require little to no manual manipulation and automatically produce citations to the corpus.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant SMA-1447886

Roadblocks in the Grammaticalization Highway: When Phonology Gets in the Way

BLS 39: General Session and Special Session on Space and Directionalit

Distributed Reduplication in Kankanaey

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Overhauling the comprehensive exam in the Department of Linguistics: First steps

The Department of Linguistics Comprehensive Exam consists of two Qualifying Papers. In recent years the QPs have fallen out of step with trends in the field, resulting in students struggling to pass. We describe our actions to overhaul our Comprehensive Exams, including clarifying procedures, realigning SLOs, and developing better rubrics

Symmetrical Voice Constructions in Besemah: A Usage-based Approach

This dissertation presents a comprehensive account of the symmetrical voice system in Besemah, an under-documented Malayic language spoken in the highlands of southwest Sumatra, Indonesia. Utilizing a corpus primarily consisting of conversational data, but also including narrative data, this study treats both the syntactic structure and discourse properties of symmetrical voice constructions in Besemah. Previous research on voice in the languages of western Indonesia has sought to understand these languages in terms of well-established systems of voice and grammatical relations, whether that be active-passive or ergative-absolutive. Since the notion of symmetrical voice—a voice system with multiple transitive voice constructions, none of which is clearly the ‘basic’ voice form—was introduced by Foley (1998) just under two decades ago, it has provided valuable insights into the voice systems of the languages of western Indonesia (Riesberg 2014). Drawing on these insights, this dissertation presents a thorough treatment of symmetrical voice in Besemah, which has not been the subject of any in-depth grammatical analysis.The dissertation has two primary objectives. The first objective is to describe the syntactic nature of symmetrical voice by identifying grammatical relations in Besemah. Based on several ‘diagnostic’ constructions that have been used to provide evidence for grammatical relations in related languages of western Indonesia, this study identifies two grammatical relations in Besemah, primary argument and secondary argument, by utilizing data from the corpus of Besemah. While two of these ‘diagnostic’ constructions, word order and quantifiability, provide evidence for grammatical relations in Besemah, this study demonstrates that many of these ‘diagnostic’ constructions cannot be used for determining grammatical relations in Besemah.The second objective seeks to answer the following question concerning voice selection in Besemah: at any given point in a conversation, what factors lead a speaker to choose one symmetrical voice construction over the other? In order to answer this question, this study uses advanced statistics to investigate the role of information flow (Chafe 1994), syntactic priming (Gries 2005), and collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) in voice selection. The findings reveal that each of these factors play an important role in voice selection in Besemah conversation

Introduction

This chapter introduces the volume, Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998, providing a short justification for the volume, summarizing each of the four major parts of the volume, and identifying major themes that emerge in the 31 chapters. It concludes by noting some of the volume's limitations.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Reduplication in Indonesian and the Lexicalist Hypothesis

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Writing data citation guidelines for linguistics: Lessons learned

Poster presented at the RDA 14th Plenary conference, arranged by Research Data Alliance, Helsingfors, 23.10.19 - 25.10.19. https://www.rd-alliance.org/plenaries/rdas-14th-plenary-helsinki-finland. One of the main objectives of the Linguistics Data Interest Group is to develop and adopt common principles and guidelines for data citation and attribution. As a first step, the Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics were published in 2018. Since then, the group has been working on developing data citation guidelines, whose target audiences are academic publishers, resource providers, and researchers who use linguistic data. --- The citation guidelines have been discussed as a work in progress on the 11th and 13th RDA plenaries, and are now more or less ready to be disseminated to the intended audiences for some final feedback. The goal is to finalise and publish the guidelines in late 2019. --- In this poster, we describe the process of developing the linguistic data citation guidelines, a process we believe is transferable to other disciplines. We share our approach to identifying discipline-specific needs while maintaining a connection to data management frameworks and principles that cross fields. We focus on our workflow and organisation, how the relevant communities have been involved in the process, what kind of challenges we have experienced, and how these have been addressed