Linguistic Data Collection: Field Methods

Linguistic Data Collection: Field Methods is a Cognitive Science class taught by Linnaea Stockall.

This course requires prerequisites.

Course Description
What do you do when you're confronted with a completely new language? The goal of linguistics is to understand the fundamental structural properties of human languages; most linguists work toward this goal by studying languages that they themselves know well, or by working from published grammatical descriptions. But what do you do when no description exists, or when you need information that isn't in the description, or when you want to document a language that's never been documented before? In this course, we will develop a description of an unfamiliar language by eliciting data from a native speaker. We will cover many different aspects of the language, from the set of sounds to word formation principles to possible arrangements and rearrangements of words in sentences. Prerequisite: At least one course in linguistics or psychology of language.