Fieldwork and Language Documentation

CLA updates

May 8, 2022

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Thanks to Ronald Sprouse, we have a new website with a new look! Much of the content remains the same, but there's a new blog, project spotlights, and collection spotlights. The first posts are by Andrew Garrett; graduate students Rebecca Jarvis and Katherine Russell, and their collaborator Timothée Kouadio; and Zachary O'Hagan. We'll be inviting others to contribute in the future. Our catalog and the pre-archive continue to function as before. Stay tuned for more new content in the coming months!

Talwani selected as SURF L&S Fellow

March 30, 2022

Jasper Talwani (class of 2023) was just selected as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow. This grant awards $5,000 for his proposed 8-week summer research project that will describe and analyze valency-changing suffixes in Highland Chontal, a language isolate of Oaxaca, Mexico, including a language revitalization workshop with Chontal collaborators in Santa María Zapotitlán. These funds will go to research expenses including equipment for community auto-documentation projects and the production and printing of pedagogical materials. He will produce his senior thesis on the basis of this collaborative research.

CLA updates

March 27, 2022

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Madeline Bossi has archived 51 new file bundles of recordings and notes from elicitation sessions on Kipsigis (Southern Nilotic; Kenya) with speakers Linus Kipkoech, Victor Mutai, and Kiplangat Yegon. See file bundles 2019-26.102 through 2019-26.152 here. The work dates from June 2021 through March 2022, and the bundles include useful descriptive titles (e.g., "Grammatical elicitation: Converbial phrases and complementation") and descriptions.

CLA updates

March 14, 2022

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Hannah Sande, with the assistance of Julianne Kapner, has added 63 file bundles of audio and video recordings of elicitation, texts, and other activities related to work with speakers of Guébie (Kru; Côte d'Ivoire). The new bundles -- see 2014-15.081 through 2014-15.144 -- stem from in-person and virtual fieldwork done in 2018 and 2019, and also include other activities such as translation.

dos Santos presents at SSILA

January 26, 2022

Wesley dos Santos presented at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) last Sunday, January 23. The slides for his talk, "For a Realis and Irrealis Account of Ko and Po in Kawahíva," are available here.

CLA updates

January 16, 2022

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Anna Lewington has archived two cassettes of sound recordings of stories, songs, and music in Matsigenka (Arawak; Peru), from fieldwork conducted for her (1985) MA thesis "The Implications of Manioc Cultivation in the Culture and Mythology of the Machiguenga of South Eastern Peru" (St. Andrews). Justin Spence (PhD 2013) has added over 220 new file bundles to the collection Materials of the Hupa Language Documentation Project (see items 821-1044, from 2009-2010; and 1484-1497, from October to December 2021). The materials stem from a longtime collaboration with speaker Verdena Parker. See Calques from October 8, 2021 for more details!

Lapierre files dissertation

January 9, 2022

Congratulations to Myriam Lapierre, who filed her doctoral dissertation last month:

"Towards a Theory of Subsegmental and Subfeatural Representations: The Phonology and Typology of Nasality"
Committee: Sharon Inkelas, Lev Michael (co-chairs), Larry Hyman, Darya Kavitskaya, Susan Lin

Managing Lexicography Data: A Practical, Principled Approach Using FLEx (FieldWorks Language Explorer)

Christine Beier
Lev Michael
2022

In this chapter, we describe a methodology and workflow for developing lexical resources for underdocumented languages in the context of language documentation projects dedicated to one or both of the following goals: (1) to create and distribute a dictionary to a user community; and (2) to create a multipurpose extensible lexical resource that forms an integral part of a language docu- mentation and is interdependent with other components of the project, including a text corpus and grammatical analyses. In particular, we describe a...

Covert hyperraising to object

Amy Rose Deal
2017

I argue in this paper that Nez Perce has covert hyperraising to object: the DP in the highest A-position of a finite embedded clause covertly moves into an object position in the matrix VP. Implications of the Nez Perce facts include the following: The distribution of hyperraising cannot be regulated purely in terms of Activity (Chomsky 2001), but it cannot be regulated purely in terms of Intervention (Halpert 2016), either. CPs that are transparent for hyperraising may be opaque for other phi-Agree (viz complementizer agreement, A scrambling). My analysis follows Chomsky's 2001...

Who has more? The influence of linguistic form on quantity judgments

Gregory Scontras
Kathryn Davidson
Amy Rose Deal
Sarah E. Murray
2017

Quantity judgment tasks have been increasingly used within and across languages as a diagnostic for noun semantics. Overwhelmingly, results show that notionally atomic nouns (Who has more cats?) are counted, while notionally non-atomic nouns (Who has more milk?) are measured by volume. There are two primary outliers to the strict atomicity-tracking pattern. First, some nouns, like furniture, show primarily cardinality-based results in some studies, indicating atomicity, but nevertheless show systematic non-cardinality judgments in other studies, with comparison based instead on value...