OLAC Record oai:scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu:10125/42012

Metadata
Title:		Beyond the text: Diversifying documentary corpora
Bibliographic Citation:		Heston, Tyler, Heston, Tyler; 2017-03-03; The past two decades have seen an explosion in the quantity of documentary materials available on minority languages from around the world, including especially documentation of naturally occurring speech events, or texts. Texts have proven themselves a valuable and versatile basis for research, though like any type of data, they are not equally suited to all types of research questions. In this presentation, I draw on my own experiences of fieldwork in the Pacific to articulate a case for the value of experimental data, and in particular, the crucial importance of controlled phonetic data as part of any well-rounded corpus. One of the key challenges to phonetic research is the sensitivity of phonetic variables to subtle differences in environmental factors (Gordon 2003, Maddieson 2001). Controlling for all possible confounding effects arising from adjacent segments, syllable position, prosodic position, and speech rate in a corpus composed of naturally-occurring data alone requires a prohibitively large corpus (Maddieson, 2001), though through careful elicitation design, data of equal or better quality for phonetic research can be obtained with a fraction of the time and effort. A key methodological tool for studying phonetics is the use of frames—a phrase that is relatively neutral semantically, allowing a large range of lexical items to occur in the same position (e.g., “Say ____ again”). Recording minimal pairs in the same frame is a simple but powerful technique allowing one to control for both segmental and prosodic organization simultaneously, allowing a true comparison of the sounds in question. The use of controlled data is perhaps even more crucial for studies of prosody than segmental research, given the proliferation of segmental, morphosyntactic, discourse, and even affective factors that influence the prosodic contour of each utterance. Elicitation of short, phonetically-controlled sentences has proven itself as particularly useful strategy for prosodic research, both in studies of word prosody (Yakup & Sereno 2016, Garellek & White 2015) and research on intonation (Himmelmann & Ladd 2008, Jun & Fletcher 2015). While naturally occurring texts are an immensely useful and important aspect of any documentary project, they do not invalidate the benefits of other types of data. Phonetic elicitation contributes directly to the goals of documentary linguistics to create diverse and lasting language records, allowing exploration of aspects of a language that remain otherwise intractable. For these reasons, the inclusion of controlled phonetic data is a necessary and profitable component of any documentary corpus. References Garellek, Marc & James White. 2015. Phonetics of Tongan stress. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 45(1). 13–34. Gordon, Matthew. 2003. Collecting phonetic data on endangered languages. Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 207–210. Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. & D. Robert Ladd. 2008. Prosodic description: An introduction for fieldworkers.; Kaipuleohone University of Hawai'i Digital Language Archive;http://hdl.handle.net/10125/42012.
Contributor (speaker):		Heston, Tyler
Creator:		Heston, Tyler
Date (W3CDTF):		2017-03-03
Description:		The past two decades have seen an explosion in the quantity of documentary materials available on minority languages from around the world, including especially documentation of naturally occurring speech events, or texts. Texts have proven themselves a valuable and versatile basis for research, though like any type of data, they are not equally suited to all types of research questions. In this presentation, I draw on my own experiences of fieldwork in the Pacific to articulate a case for the value of experimental data, and in particular, the crucial importance of controlled phonetic data as part of any well-rounded corpus. One of the key challenges to phonetic research is the sensitivity of phonetic variables to subtle differences in environmental factors (Gordon 2003, Maddieson 2001). Controlling for all possible confounding effects arising from adjacent segments, syllable position, prosodic position, and speech rate in a corpus composed of naturally-occurring data alone requires a prohibitively large corpus (Maddieson, 2001), though through careful elicitation design, data of equal or better quality for phonetic research can be obtained with a fraction of the time and effort. A key methodological tool for studying phonetics is the use of frames—a phrase that is relatively neutral semantically, allowing a large range of lexical items to occur in the same position (e.g., “Say ____ again”). Recording minimal pairs in the same frame is a simple but powerful technique allowing one to control for both segmental and prosodic organization simultaneously, allowing a true comparison of the sounds in question. The use of controlled data is perhaps even more crucial for studies of prosody than segmental research, given the proliferation of segmental, morphosyntactic, discourse, and even affective factors that influence the prosodic contour of each utterance. Elicitation of short, phonetically-controlled sentences has proven itself as particularly useful strategy for prosodic research, both in studies of word prosody (Yakup & Sereno 2016, Garellek & White 2015) and research on intonation (Himmelmann & Ladd 2008, Jun & Fletcher 2015). While naturally occurring texts are an immensely useful and important aspect of any documentary project, they do not invalidate the benefits of other types of data. Phonetic elicitation contributes directly to the goals of documentary linguistics to create diverse and lasting language records, allowing exploration of aspects of a language that remain otherwise intractable. For these reasons, the inclusion of controlled phonetic data is a necessary and profitable component of any documentary corpus. References Garellek, Marc & James White. 2015. Phonetics of Tongan stress. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 45(1). 13–34. Gordon, Matthew. 2003. Collecting phonetic data on endangered languages. Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 207–210. Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. & D. Robert Ladd. 2008. Prosodic description: An introduction for fieldworkers.
Identifier (URI):		http://hdl.handle.net/10125/42012
Table Of Contents:		42012.pdf
		42012.mp3
Type (DCMI):		Text
		Sound
OLAC Info
Archive:		Language Documentation and Conservation
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/ldc.scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:		Pre-generated XML file
OAI Info
OaiIdentifier:		oai:scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu:10125/42012
DateStamp:		2017-05-11
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for simple DC format
Search Info
Citation:		Heston, Tyler. 2017. Language Documentation and Conservation.
Terms:		dcmi_Sound dcmi_Text