RECORDINGS AND PDFS FROM THE 4TH ICLDC ARE NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE!
Master Class Information
Master Classes are included in the cost of registration and offer an opportunity to learn more about in-depth topics as they relate to language documentation. Master Classes will be offered each afternoon of the conference (Thursday, Friday and Saturday); the detailed schedule will be announced later.
Classes are offered at three levels of expertise to ensure that all ICLDC attendees can learn something new:
Classes are offered at three levels of expertise to ensure that all ICLDC attendees can learn something new:
- Non-specialist (suitable for those with little or no experience in linguistics)
- Intermediate (suitable for those with some graduate-level study in linguistics)
- Advanced (suitable for those with a PhD in linguistics and beyond)
Master Class:
What is Linguistics? How Can It Contribute to Language Documentation and Conservation? Level: Non-specialist Instructor: Patricia Shaw, U British Columbia Linguistics offers a framework of concepts and tools to help understand the way different languages are organized into patterns. What makes every language unique is how its patterns are structured to become a vehicle for the particular world view and cultural identity of the people who speak that language. It’s also the case that all human languages share certain components of structure. Consequently if a community wants to educate their children to be bilingual, it’s really helpful to know - even though two languages may sound really different - which aspects are in fact essentially similar, and which aren’t. Class participants will explore these issues by analyzing “data” from various endangered languages around the world. Participants are particularly encouraged to raise questions from their own language contexts. Patricia A. Shaw is the Founding Chair (1996-2014) of the First Nations Languages Program at University of British Columbia, and a Professor of Anthropological Linguistics with particular interests in sound systems; the interface of phonology with phonetics and morphology; literacy and oral traditions; language contact and change. She has worked in close collaboration with members of several critically endangered language communities to record and analyze extant grammatical and cultural knowledge, to teach research skills and archiving methodologies, to develop pedagogical materials for language revitalization, and to teach First Nations languages at UBC and in various BC communities. |
Master Class:
Introduction to First Language Acquisition for Language Conservation Level: Non-specialist Instructors: William O'Grady & Kamil Deen, U Hawai'i Mānoa This class will focus on facts and research in the field of first language acquisition that are relevant to language revitalization programs, especially those involving full and partial immersion programs targeting child learners. William O'Grady is professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; his areas of specialization include language acquisition and language revitalization. |
Master Class:
Introduction to Second Language Acquisition for Language Conservation Level: Non-specialist Instructor: Theres Grüter, U Hawai'i Mānoa This class will provide an introduction to basic concepts in Second Language Acquisition, including the notion of cross-linguistic influence/transfer from the mother tongue, the role of age and other individual difference variables such as motivation and aptitude, as well as external factors relating to input and the linguistic and social environment. Theres Grüter is an assistant professor in the department of Second Language Studies at UH Mānoa. Her research investigates how language users of various types, including child and adult bilinguals and second language learners, acquire and process structural aspects of language. She is an Associate Editor of Applied Psycholinguistics, and co-directs the UH eye-tracking laboratory. |
Master Class:
Elicitation and Documentation of Verb Alignment & Argument Structure Level: Intermediate Instructor: Andrew Koontz-Garboden, U Manchester DOWNLOAD PRE-WORKSHOP READINGS ADDITIONAL ONLINE READING DOWNLOAD CLASS HANDOUT The class examines how to go about collecting data for the purposes of documenting and describing the morphosyntactic alignment and verbal argument structure in an understudied language. The class begins with a bird's eye view of major issues in alignment and argument structure, with the goal of considering the kinds of data that should be collected for the purposes of documentation, description, and further study. Methods for data collection are discussed, alongside positive and negative properties of the various methods. Case studies throughout the discussion are drawn from Ulwa (Misumalpan; Nicaragua). Andrew Koontz-Garboden (PhD, Stanford University) is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at The University of Manchester. His interests are in the morphosyntax/semantics interface and the implications of crosslinguistic variation for its nature. He is a field linguist with interests in language documentation and description, and has done extensive work on the Misumalpan language Ulwa. |
Master Class:
Elicitation and Documentation of Tense & Aspect Level: Intermediate Instructor: Juergen Bohnemeyer, U at Buffalo DOWNLOAD PRE-WORKSHOP READINGS DOWNLOAD CLASS SLIDES DOWNLOAD CLASS HANDOUT All languages seem to have provisions for the representation of time in their lexicons and discourse structures. But evidence has been mounting in recent years that the ways in which the representation of time is inscribed into the grammars of different languages varies substantially. The aim of his course is to review this evidence and introduce some empirical and analytical tools that facilitate the study of tense-mood-aspect systems in the field. Jürgen Bohnemeyer (Ph.D. 1998, Tilburg University) is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He specializes in semantic typology, the crosslinguistic study of semantic categorization. His research focuses on the semantic typology of representations of space, time, and events. |
Master Class:
Elicitation and Documentation of Deixis Level: Intermediate Instructor: Sarah Cutfield, Australian National University DOWNLOAD PRE-WORKSHOP READINGS Describing the semantics of deictic categories such as demonstratives can be an intimidating task for even experienced field linguists. This class will equip students with valuable insights and skills to begin this task by: - covering recent developments in demonstrative typology and theory - surveying attested types of demonstrative semantics and paradigm structure - reviewing qualitative and psycholinguistic elicitation methods. Sarah Cutfield has conducted documentary fieldwork with Aboriginal language communities for the past 13 years. Her 2012 Ph.D. dissertation was on the semantics and morphosyntax of demonstratives in the Dalabon language, and she recently collaborated with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics on a typology of demonstrative semantics. Sarah's other research interests include ethnobiology, contact languages and language politics. |
Master Class:
Elicitation and Documentation of Intonation Level: Intermediate Instructor: Sun-Ah Jun, UCLA DOWNLOAD PRE-WORKSHOP READINGS This course will show students how to elicit and document intonation of unknown or unfamiliar languages. Students will learn basic principles of analyzing intonation in the framework of the Autosegmental-metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology, and how to prepare sentences to test various hypotheses before finalizing a model of intonation. Sun-Ah Jun is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She received her Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 1993 and has been teaching at UCLA since. Her research focuses on intonational phonology and transcription, prosodic typology, language acquisition, and the interface between prosody and subareas of linguistics. |
Master Class:
Elicitation and Documentation of Valency-Changing Constructions & Processes Level: Advanced Instructor: Marianne Mithun, UC Santa Barbara Languages show tremendous variation in the arrays of valency-changing constructions they offer speakers and the circumstances under which each is used. Discovering the functions of alternatives can be a delicate undertaking, because these are often below the consciousness of speakers, they can depend on larger discourse contexts and speaker intentions, and they can be easily distorted by the bilingual context of elicitation. This workshop will explore the kinds of syntactic, semantic, and discourse functions such alternatives can serve and strategies for uncovering them. Marianne Mithun is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She works with a number of communities engaged in documenting and revitalizing their traditional languages, and is interested in all aspects of language, especially morphology, syntax, discourse, prosody, and their interrelations, and the processes which shape languages over time. |
Master Class:
Elicitation and Documentation of Definiteness & Quantification Level: Advanced Instructor: Peter Jenks, UC Berkeley DOWNLOAD CLASS HANDOUT This class will survey semantic distinctions which have been claimed to exist for well-studied languages, including definiteness, specificity, weak versus strong quantification, and referential versus bound variable readings of pronouns. We will then examine the different ways that these distinctions are encoded in the languages of the world. Finally, we will introduce a number of syntactic and semantic diagnostics that will enable the documentarian to identify these different nominal interpretations both with elicitation and in texts. Peter's research focuses on the syntax and semantics of nouns and noun phrases in East and Southeast Asian and African languages. A major focus of his work is nominal interpretations in Thai, a language he was exposed to while growing up in Thailand. He has also done extensive research on Moro, a Kordofaninan language of the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, working with an immigrant family in the United States, and conducted two summers of in situ fieldwork on Moken, an Austronesian language spoken by sea nomads roaming the islands of Thailand and Burma. Photo by Stephanie Shih |
Master Class:
Elicitation and Documentation of Evidentiality Level: Advanced Instructor: Lev Michael, UC Berkeley In recent decades, we have seen an explosion of descriptive, typological, and theoretical work on evidentiality. This course will briefly survey typological and theoretical approaches to this subtle and exciting grammatical category, and examine a number of open empirical and analytical questions regarding the social and interactional functions of evidentiality, and it relationship to grammatical categories such as epistemic modality and mirativity, with which it has often been associated. We then turn to empirical approaches to studying evidentiality, including a variety of elicitation-based and corpus-based methods, discussing the advantages and pitfalls of each. Lev Michael is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. With a methodological grounding in language documentation and anthropological linguistics, his research focuses on the socio-cultural dimensions of grammar and language use, typology, language contact in South America, and the historical linguistics of Arawak, Tukanoan, Tupí-Guaraní, and Zaparoan languages. He has carried out fieldwork with speakers of Aʔɨwa (isolate), Iquito (Zaparoan), Matsigenka (Arawak), Máíhɨ̃ki (Tukanoan), Muniche (isolate), Nanti (Arawak), Omagua (Tupí-Guaraní), and Sápara (Zaparoan). In his engagement with Amazonian indigenous communities, he is also involved in language revitalization, and in training and collaborating with community linguists. |
Master Class:
Elicitation and Documentation of Tone Level: Intermediate Instructor: Bert Remijsen, U Edinburgh DOWNLOAD PRE-WORKSHOP READINGS DOWNLOAD AUDIO SAMPLES DOWNLOAD DINKA EXERCISE DOWNLOAD POWERPOINT INSTRUCTOR'S NOTE: Please bring your laptop to class if you can! Ear-based methods and quantitative analysis are both very useful in the study of tone. In order to combine them, we need to understand how the auditory perception of pitch relates to the fundamental frequency pattern that gives rise to it. Crucial to this relation is the notion of tonal alignment. In this master class, I will explore this notion from phonetic and phonological angles, point out key findings in the experimental and typological literature, and illustrate the issues with many sound examples. Bert Remijsen (PhD, Leiden University) has investigated several languages in which a tone contrast is found alongside one or more other suprasegmental contrasts. Earlier on, he studied languages that combine tone with a stress contrast: Ma`ya (Austronesian, Indonesia) and Papiamentu (Carribean creole, Dutch Antilles). Since 2005, he has focused on Dinka and Shilluk (Nilo-Saharan, South Sudan), which present independent contrasts of vowel length, tone, and voice quality. He works for the University of Edinburgh. |
Master Class:
Elicitation and Documentation of Topic & Focus Constructions/Processes Level: Advanced Instructor: Judith Aissen, UC Santa Cruz DOWNLOAD PRE-WORKSHOP READINGS DOWNLOAD HANDOUT We will begin by clarifying what the terms 'topic' and 'focus' refer to, drawing on examples from spontaneously produced speech. This material will, first, provide a guide to the identification of topic and focus in text material. But second, it will serve as a basis for developing strategies to elicit analogous examples in the fieldwork context. Judith Aissen is Research Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz. She has worked on various problems in the syntax of Mayan (especially Tzotzil), including ones related to phrase structure, voice, wh-movement, and information structure. She has taught workshops on a wide range of topics to linguists working on indigenous languages of Mexico and Guatemala, |