Archiving and using corpora [1/4] (FieldLing 2022)

This post accompanies a lecture given on “Archiving and using corpora” as part of the FieldLing 2022 “International School in Linguistic Fieldwork” hosted by CRNS in Paris (INALCO). Outline: – Context– Why archives– How to archive– Ethics of archiving Context Archiving in linguistics is a topic that comes out of a recent history of the

Descriptive and documentary linguistics in a pandemic: a bibliography

As descriptive and documentary linguists have processed adapting their research practices to a global pandemic, a number of presentations and papers have come out. Since I’ve been teaching about fieldwork, I’ve collected a list of the works on this topic I’ve seen so far (with some annotation). The list is broken down in three sections:

What is a Lexical-Functional approach to Barayin Morphosyntax?

Last month, I had a book published on a fairly niche topic: Barayin Morphosyntax: A Lexical-Functional Approach. In the words of Facebook friend Jon Laurion, “I had to look up the definition of most of the words in the definition of Barayin Morphosyntax.” I’m not sure the blurb on the book cover or website is

Language Ideology & Literacy in Barayin

Last year, I wrote a short blog about one of the recordings from the Barayin language documentation corpus I worked on in 2017. In that recording, Moussa Adou talks about the status of the language, and why literacy is important. There was another speech recorded that same day by another Barayin speaker who was actually

Language Documentation as a Scientific Enterprise

I’m leading the Introduction to Language Documentation & Description course for graduate students at SOAS this term. I recently gave a lecture on why creating a corpus of annotated texts is useful, or even essential, for describing the grammar of a (previously unstudied) language. Most of my own descriptive analysis has been about a language

Is Barayin an endangered language?

Most of my research has been on Barayin, a language spoken by about 5000 people in the Guera region of Chad. My research has included two small grants for documenting endangered languages, and now I am preparing to submit a manuscript on the language to a book series called Studies of Endangered Languages. What is

But what is said will remain

As part of my study of the Barayin language, I spent four months in Chad in 2017 mostly recording videos of people speaking their language, thanks to a generous grant from ELDP. Those videos are all archived and available online through ELAR. Several of the videos are of the main person who taught me about