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.