Essentials of Language Documentation / Edition 1

by Jost Gippert, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Ulrike Mosel

Overview

Language documentation is a rapidly emerging new field in linguistics which is concerned with the methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language. This volume presents in-depth introductions to major aspects of language documentation, including overviews on fieldwork ethics and data processing, guidelines for the basic annotation of digitally-stored multimedia corpora and a discussion on how to build and maintain a language archive. It combines theoretical and practical considerations and makes specific suggestions for the most common problems encountered in language documentation.

Key features

textbook

introduction to Language Documentation

considers all common problems

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110184068
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	03/15/2006
Series:	Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] , #178
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	434
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jost Gippert, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main, Germany; Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany;Ulrike Mosel, Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, Germany.

Table of Contents

Editors' preface

Ch. 1: Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for? (Nikolaus P. Himmelmann)
Ch. 2: Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis (Arienne M. Dwyer)
Ch. 3: Fieldwork and community language work (Ulrike Mosel)
Ch. 4: Data and language documentation (Peter K. Austin)
Ch. 5: The ethnography of language and language documentation (Jane H. Hill)
Ch. 6: Documenting lexical knowledge (John B. Haviland)
Ch. 7: Prosody in language documentation (Nikolaus P. Himmelmann)
Ch. 8: Ethnography in language documentation (Bruna Franchetto)
Ch. 9: Linguistic annotation (Eva Schultze-Berndt)
Ch. 10: The challenges of segmenting spoken language (Nikolaus P. Himmelmann)
Ch. 11: Orthography development (Frank Seifart)
Ch. 12: Sketch grammar (Ulrike Mosel)
Ch. 13: Archiving challenges (Paul Trilsbeek, Peter Wittenburg)
Ch. 14: Linguistic documentation and the encoding of textual materials (Jost Gippert)
Ch. 15: Thick interfaces: mobilizing language documentation with multimedia (David Nathan)

Abbreviations and resources
References
Indexes:
Language Index
Subject Index

Editorial Reviews

"Anyone intending to go into the field to document a language should read this book thoroughly before proceeding. It will not tell them what to collect, but could save them endless intellectual frustration. It is a worthy addition to the small but growing number of books on linguistic fieldwork."
Anthony P. Grant in: Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute 14.3/2008

From the Publisher