Making progess

A sorely overlooked aspect of fieldwork is the physical conditions under which the scientist must work. Even though I am in a semi-urban environment with such luxuries as electricity, internet access close by and nice toilets, I still endure the tropic hazards of insect bites which are particularly unpleasant for me being as I am allergic to most insect poisons including mosquitoes and ants. Also, I am just getting over a nasty case of stomach flu -a constant risk for the delicate Northern European stomach I suppose. It is interesting to observe, that, as far as I know, Hondurans who go to Denmark or the US hardly ever have stomach issues - but then, they struggle with other hazards such as the biting cold in winter and even sometimes in summer.

It rained and stormed for a while because it is now officially the rainy season - but so far it has stopped, knock on wood, and work is progressing - it becomes more difficult to work when it rains because 1) we must work indoors where the heat is unbearable and 2) recordings become distorted - so I'm a happy fieldworker as far as weather is concerned.

I am currently looking to recruit a person to transcribe and translate recordings independently - I figure it cant hurt; if the person just does a half decent job it will be useful data in some way. First, this person must own their own computer because I don't think I have funds for buying one at this point, and second the person must be using the language on a daily basis - those to factors rolled into one person are not that easy to come by, but probably more so here than in other places where indigenous languages are spoken.

Recording texts

I am about 3 weeks into this year's fieldseason and my main efforts at this point are centered around text collection. So far we have recorded a whole bunch of both mythical and personal narratives and quite a bit of conversation. On a typical day we transcribe and translate about 10 min of text but I expect that this rate will accelerate as both I and my main speaker assistant get more trained. Afternoons are spent recording more texts and analyzing texts that have been transcribed and translated. I want to move into other genres such as task description where interlocutors perform a task while explaining what they are doing. I also want to translate songs. I might also do some of the Max Planck stimulus games for specific purposes.

2013 fieldwork season

A new fieldwork season is just about to begin for me as I head to Honduras for the second time as part of my PhD research on the Garifuna language.

So many questions, both grammar related and methodological, are running around in my head (and cutting in front of each other in the line because they all want to be dealt with first). I would have liked to include a sample of these questions here, but they are still so disorderly and vague (and completely rude) that I cannot possibly know where to begin - I will get back to you on this crucial matter. 

The other important matter which is on my mind right now is whether I will find that the same people I worked with last are available to work with me once again. Although I do plan to expand somewhat the group of Garifuna speakers to consult this time to enhance representativity in terms of age, gender, occupation etc.

More on these matters and more when I have been at it for a little while...

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.