Introduction to Language Documentation

Instructors: Marianne Mithun (Hale Professor)

We will work together with a speaker or speakers of a mystery language to begin documentation of the language and discover patterns inherent in it at the levels of sounds, words, and sentences, and their uses in larger stretches of unscripted speech. Students will be introduced to techniques of data collection, data management, and analysis. An emphasis will be on models of collaborative research. Over the course of the project we will consider the variety of goals of documentation and the various audiences for it now and in the future, within both communities and academia. This project will be directed primarily at describing the language in its own terms, but we will also consider the bi-directional relationships between documentation and typology, and between description and linguistic theory.

Keywords: Field Methods, Language Documentation and Description, Morphosyntax

Instructors

Marianne Mithun (Hale Professor)

University of California, Santa Barbara

Marianne Mithun is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interests include morphology, syntax, discourse, prosody, and their interrelations; language contact and language change; typology and universals; language documentation; and language revitalization. Her work has included special focus on languages indigenous to North America and languages of the Austronesian family.