Field Methods in Linguistics—Writing Intensive

Cross listed with Lingst 4870W/7870 and Anthro 4870W/7870

At a time when many of the world’s languages are under threat, language documentation is more important than ever. Field Methods in Linguistics, the capstone of the Linguistics major, gives students hands-on experience with real linguistic fieldwork. Working with a speaker of an understudied language, students learn to elicit, record, and evaluate linguistic data, and they use what they collect to discover how the language works.

Much of our class time is run as a lab. Students interview the language consultant, design questionnaires, transcribe speech using the International Phonetic Alphabet, and annotate audio recordings with professional software such as ELAN. Working in small research teams, students describe the sound system, word structure, and basic sentence structure of the language, analyze a recorded narrative, and pursue a research topic of their own. Teams revise their written reports through multiple drafts, and the semester ends with a mini-conference where each team presents its findings.