This course introduces concepts in corpus development that help the data to be reused by the creator or by others and to be archived and adapted for larger, comparative studies which may range over geographical space or time to permit the analysis of linguistic change in real time. The course will address the importance of robust collection, the coding and storage of specific demographic, situational and attitudinal metadata and reusable annotation as well as practical issues such as preparing for Institutional Review Board oversight to permit data sharing among linguists.

This course provides an introduction to linguistic field methods. Working with a speaker of a language that the class does not know, we will attempt to determine as much as possible about the structure of the languages, including the phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic systems. This will be done using a variety of structured elicitation techniques, with non-verbal prompts, and by analyzing texts that we will elicit from the speaker.

This course introduces participants to the methodology of collecting semantic/pragmatic data in collaboration with theoretically untrained native speaker consultants.

Data that may inform semantic/pragmatic theorizing are typically quite complex, consisting of one or more grammatical sentences that are uttered in an appropriately designed context, and a native speaker’s judgment about the acceptability or the truth of the sentence(s) uttered in that context.