Back at the office

It has been about a month since I left Honduras and ever since I've been working on different strategies for best handling the large data set - that is, how do I get the most convenient overview of all the words, phrases, sentences and texts that I collected from my Garifuna consultants. During elicitation sessions (when the linguist sits down with the consultant to ask about words, phrases etc. in their her/ his language)  I like to use a notebook and not the laptop because I think that the laptop adds a kind of unnecessary barrier between the speaker and myself - also, I like to be able to see the tings that I deleted - this is an old fieldworker's trick - on a computer, if you delete something it will look more or less like this                             .... an empty space - but on a page of paper in a field notes book, it will look like this nidiba gub bu'bugürü 'I will follow you (immediately)' - this is a quote from my field notes, and apart from telling how to say 'I will follow you' in Garifuna, it also reminds me that I was struggling a bit with hearing the difference between g and b in the speech of my main consultant. This fact in turn tells me that perhaps the Garifuna b and g somehow have more in common than, say, the English equivalents - this has to be analyzed at some point and go into the Garifuna grammar in a section called "Articulatory Phonetics" or something like that.

At the end of the day I would then type all of the entries in my field notes into an Excel spread sheet - this results in two things: 1) I get a searchable database of my elicited data, although a pretty rudimentary one, and 2) I get the data through my mind one more time and am able then to make an initial analysis by putting in hyphens in the examples. So, the small example above would look something like this ni-di-ba bu-'bugürü 'I will follow you'. I didn't add glosses to the spread sheet - partly because there is a limit to how much time you have for each task when you are in the field, and partly because a lot of the time I did not yet have the required analysis ready to be able to know what each and every part of an example actually was.

The other thing I did and always do is to build a dictionary data base in Toolbox - this is standard in linguistic fieldwork and is helpful in more than one way. I use the dictionary database to get a overview of the lexical items (words) that I have documented so far, but also for transcribing longer texts and semi-automatic glossing, but let me get back to that some other time.

So, it shouldn't be long now before you will start seeing some of the fruit of all that hard work. I was working on my verb data for a long while and I have to say that it is not entirely straight forward, but then it almost never is - or rather, it never is. So I'm not going to give you anything on verbs just yet; instead I am going to go slowly over the nominals and their parts. The first bit will be on possession, and after that I plan to do a paper on number, and then maybe one on adpositions which are quite complex in Garifuna.

Data analysis

Sometimes I find it a bit overwhelming a task to formulate grammatical analyses of the data that I'm working on; I guess I don't know where to start because there is so much interesting stuff to write about. So, I have to force myself to focus on a particular part of the grammar and ignore the rest for the time being. But how does one go about choosing that particular part of the grammar that would be interesting to zoom in on? An apriori approach might work where, without necessarily knowing a terrible lot about the language, you choose a part of speech for focus on. Of course this needs to be a part of speech that you have actually attested in the language in question; however, it might be that you later find out, that what you thought to be adjectives, were actually stative verbs with the same meaning as adjectives in most Indo-European languages - this doesn't really matter, as long as you make sure to go back and correct your anlysis once you realize that these verbs which you initially thought were a separate part of speech, actually behave in the same way as all other verbs; so maybe they take the same inflexional morphemes as other verbs, are replaceable by verbs in any given phrase and show identical prosodic features as other verbs.

Getting under the skin of Garifuna grammar

This project is well under way and the workings of Garifuna grammar are becoming clearer to me every day now. During the first couple of weeks I did elicitation with two male speakers shy of 80 years of age both from this community of Triunfo de la Cruz, Tela. After that I decided to start recording some narratives of which I have now gathered about 10 with the kind and patient help of my consultants / teachers / narrators men and women. In total I have worked with two men and 3 women so far. As is often the case, things were very nice and neat as long as I was still only doing elicitation - verbal paradigms would unfold before my eyes on the pages of my note book page after page and all parts of speech would behave more or less nicely - but then when starting to transcribe and analyze more naturally occuring speech things got complicated - but also more interesting because there are verbal constructions I never get in elicitation but which are very frequent in the narratives.

The most puzzling items at the moment are certain elicited verb constructions which I used to think were past tense but which I often get glossed as both past and present, that is I am either given the same construction twice, one with present glossing and one with past, or I simply get a construction which I am told may be either present of past; my thoughts on this: two possibilities 1) in certain transitive verbs present vs. past is inferred from context, 2) my consultant is undersensitive to the semantic distinctions of tense. I will try and elicit these constructions from other speakers than my main consultant from whom I have hitherto gotten these puzzling items, and then see if everybody agrees about them. Unfortunately I cannot give any examples at the moment since I am not close to my data - (except for the external HD backup which I carry with me at all times! )

This is the first fieldtrip where I am using Toolbox for semi-automatic interlinear glossing and I am enjoying it very much!

By the way, I find the combination of proximity to the ocean, for seafood and bathing, potential consultant living all around and the access to power and running water, to be the ideal setting for linguistic fielwork.

First two weeks - basic stuff

I am about to finish my second week of elicitation with my consultant whom I got into contact with on my first day out in the community of Triunfo de la Cruz to the west of Tela. I got referred to him by the president of the patronato of Triunfo to whom I was directed by a friend of my wife's. The funny thing is that the first moment I hear the guys name even before seeing him I knew that he was one of the tree people who worked with me in 2007 when I was doing a paper at the MA level and living here for 7 months.

So far we have been working on the basics of noun morphology, number, possession, gender and locative markers among other things, adjectives and their gender marking and more recently verbal morphology. There is differential number marking as in many American languages and I'm trying to find out if there is also dif. obj. marking - so far the picture is obscured by some parallel constructions; so, there are basically two ways of saying 'I will smell the coconut' - one that involves a feminine gender object indexer on the verb stem which is the same as for 'I will smell the woman' and one that involves a 'prepositional pronoun' with no marking on the verb - it's too early to tell. I'm thinking that from next week some time I will start working with one more informant in addition to this guy - somebody with whom I also worked 5 years ago; I have reasons to believe that his speech is more conservative - partly because he is not part of a circle of "intellectuals" / school teachers which sort of includes my current informant and partly because he uses the original uvular /r/ that Garifuna used to have, while most Garifuna speakers in Honduras have switched to the Spanish /r/ - also, he is a bit older. In any case it will be nice to get data corroborated or to get competing possiblities. Something that continues to elude me is use of special 1sg possessive words - so basically 1sg.pos is supposed to be n- prefixed either directly to a noun or to a 'possessive classifier / pronoun' but sometimes I get yudi or yegü and these do not have counterparts in the rest of the paradigm -´this means that I'm not even sure if they are morphologically complex.

So, all is good and work is progressing - I want to start recording and transcribing natural speech soon, probably short stories or other monologues when I have almost been through the mayor parts of speech.

Supplies

Yesterday night a tired but excited fieldworker arrived at the airport of San Pedro Sula and was greeted by wife and relatives.

Today he took a small but vital step towards commencing fieldwork - stocking up on office supplies. All tasks are best undertaken using the appropriate tools, so I headed into town to get note books, pens, battery charger, rechargeabel batteries etc.

In half an hour we are heading out to Tela, the place this project will be based this season, and tomorrow morning I will be heading out to Triunfo de la Cruz to make the create the first contacts. I plan to visit the local "patronato", i.e. the local authorities in that community - first of all to inform them of the work I would like to do in the community, and hopefully to get some vital contacts from them to get to speakers interested in working with me.

We are also visiting old school mates of my wife who speak Garifuna - this could also proove a valuable entry into the Garifuna speaking community.

Hopefully I will be able to begin the actual fieldwork in the course of the next few days.

Workflow

When undertaking any task, scientific or otherwise, it is always a good idea to have a plan that states which tasks you are going to do, and in which order it would be most convenient to do them. But there are different levels of detail in such plans, or lists of  tasks; some take a bird eye's view and helps get a look at the entire state of things and to see if anything important is missing somewhere; I like to call this bird eye's view plan my Game Plan. At a different level of detail we have the kind of plan that states every little detail that should be taken care of - this kind of plan almost tells you when to breathe and when to go to the little linguist's room and will take you though all the steps from first sitting down with the speaker(s) who was agreed to work with you and until your data are safely stored on your labtop and backed up on your external HD; this kind of detailed and operational plan I like to call my Work Flow. Traditional linguistic fieldwork workflows are somewhat simple since they basically only involve the linguist asking questions to the speaker, receiving an answer which is then written down in the notebook before asking a new question etc. A modern workflow may also involve such tasks as these but would involve many other important tasks in addition, such as:

• informing the speaker of the purpose of the research 
• the inteded uses of the data
• the speaker's rights related to the data and their use
• obtaining the speaker's signature on an informed consent form 
• explaining how elicitation works
• explaining what kind of questions you will be asking and their purpose 
• turn on recording equipment
• checking recording equipment is working properly by listening with headphones
• properly position external microphone
• document the circumstances surrounding the recording, i.e. write meta-data
• transferring raw recordings to labtop
• enter elicited data into dictionary database and text editor for analysis

If you plan to record naturally occurring speech apart from elicited speech you further need to:

• make any necesary revisions to recordings for transcription
• link media files to annotation files in a transcription program
• transcribe, translate and interlinear glossing

The most time consuming and tedious of all of the above mentioned task is without any doubt transcribing and glossing. On the other hand these are also the most helpful and valuable kind of annotations you can make because they essentially make the data you collected available to other non-speakers, laymen and researchers alike.

So, how do you transcribe a stream of speech without speaking the language - the answer is of course "with the help from a speaker". Of course, if the speaker is willing to learn how to use a transcription program then this eases the process because he just needs to be equipped with a computer and a set of headphones. But in many cases this is not possible; there might not be enough time for him to learn how to transcribe, there might not be any orthography used for writing the language, there might not be any litterate speakers, the speaker you are working with might be an elderly person who might not be geared towards computers. So, in these cases the transcription setup needs to enable two people (you and the speaker) to listen to the recording at the same time in order to arrive at a common understanding of what is being said.

I have done some experimenting with different setups for this kind of work:
      
One involves two high quality headsets (such as the Sennheiser HD-280 pro or the Beyedynamic DT 770 pro) and a splitter that channels the sound into both headsets; soundwise this setup is ideal because it employs high quality closed headsets which is always the best way to transcribe. On the downside, I have found that some people get uncomfortable wearing headphones for extended periods of time, especially if they're not used to wearing headphones (many speakers of endangered languages have never even wore headphones before in their life). I have also found that wearing closed headphones makes communicating difficult - and you need to both hear what the speaker is saying to be able to type it in and to be able to make analyses while transcribing and glossing. 
     
The other setup simply involves a set of speakers allowing the both of you (and everybody else in the vecinity) to hear the recording. The obvious advantages of this setup lies in that you avoid the above mentioned problems. The serious downside is that you just can't get the same kind of accurate accustic transfer from sound file to your ear as when you use closed headphones - a milder downside is that good quality loudspeakers such as the Roland Cakewalk MA-15DCW weigh almost 7 kg and they are even compact versions capable of the same output as larger stationary studio equivalents.

It may be hard to believe that there is such a big difference between closed headphones and loudspeakers; recently a colleague objected to my insistence that one of the above two setups is strictly necesary in order to do proper transcription suggesting that "you might as well just use the built-in speakers of your labtop when you don't need to do any fine tuned phonetic transcription and analysis". To this I would reply "not true!" - you really need to set down and hear the difference in order to really appreciate it. And of course, for a large part transcribing with loudspeakers, or perhaps even low grade headphones is not a problem - it is when you get to that final maybe 10 % of instances when you, and even the native speaker, as hard as you try are unable to make out what is being said. I've had this experience transcribing English, and also Danish, my native language, let alone when I was transcribing Nawatl, Tol and Garifuna which to me are exotic languages that I mostly have non-speaker knowledge of.

For the current project I will be using the second setup, the one with the loudspeakers, but I will also have by Sennheiser 280s with me in the field in order to better resolve doubts and for when I'm listening on my own.

Fieldwork prep

As is the case with most linguistic projects which are based on data collected in the field by the linguist himself, this project must begin with data collection. But much work needs to get done before data can actually be collected, without counting the experience from earlier fieldwork which is of invaluable advantage to the fieldworker. So, as I write this text my preparations for fieldwork are already well advanced, as should they be since I leave for the field next month.

At a first glance the task of mounting a linguistic field project may seem quite straight forward: speakers of the language under study must be consulted in order to extract lexical and grammatical information which may then serve as the object of linguistic analysis. There are an array of guides, manuals and handbooks available for consultation on all aspects of linguistic fieldwork and language documentation making aspiring as a language documenter more attractive and accesible than ever before.

At a second glance, when viewing the acutual operationalization of the theory of the above mentioned books of reference, mounting a linguistic field project appears much more daunting than at first; the guides to fieldwork give all sorts of good and very valuable advice on the countless tasks of linguistic fieldwork such as: asking good questions during elicitation sessions, making high quality portable audio and video recordings, beheaving in an ethically responsible way, involving the speech community in decisions affecting the documentation / conservation of their own language, making practical arrangements in the field in the areas of logistics as well as food and board etc. But as far as I am aware there is no guide to the nitty gritty nuts and bolts, behind the scene, before the show prep work that just needs to get done and which always gets done without anybody paying much attention to it - it's simply not interesting because it doesn't involve any theory or any data - it doesn't even take place in the field! It's like you're interested in rock music and you like going to rock concerts and you play in a band and you're really into everything that had to do with rock music - you read Rolling Stone and watch MTV 24-7, and then some guy comes up to you and starts yapping about budgets for concerts, leases on concert arenas, fire escapes etc. etc. OK maybe its not exactly the same, but what I mean is that all of this "boring" stuff is not easy to do if it's the first time. 

One of the tools that I have used and am also using for the present project is a spread sheet that works as an advanced to-do-list which is based in part on Language Surveys in Developing Nations - it is an older publication and much of the advice is not directly applicable to smaller projects like my own, but one of the authors, Ferguson I believe (I don't have the book with me in this moment), sets up an administrative apperatus based on 3 seperately manageable parts: 1) Professional, 2) Technical and 3) administrative. The professional part treats everything that has to do with academic content; linguistic theory and method and linguistic data - in short, everything that has to do with analysis; the technical part  treats everything that has to do with purchase, testing and maintenance of equipment, i.e. recorders, microphones, wires, headsets, computers, software and recording / transcription workflows (in this last respect this intersects with the Professional part.) The Administrative part deals with research permits from national and local authorities, informed consent forms, application for and handling of funds (receipts and books), travel arrangements, insurance etc. Within each spread sheet one can make several sheets; one entitled "tasks", one for "workflows",  one for "shopping list" etc. As you start making these spread sheets, you will notice that there are a lot of intersecting points - e.g. does computer software such as Toolbox go into Technical or Professional? It is a piece of software that has technical sides to it but learning how to use it and making decisions about the files one creates in it is a Professional issue.

I think this is a practical way to prepare for fieldwork because it allows me to isolate one part of preparation which makes immediate sense to me, although without completely forgetting about the other parts. Make sense? If not, then maybe a different system works for you.