175-428 Seminars in Descriptive Linguistics

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37.5 points of second/third-year linguistics and applied linguistics subjects. In particular years, depending on the nature of the advanced topic, students may be recommended to have completed an introductory subject relevant to this topic.

A program of advanced seminars on topics related to language documentation especially focusing on new technological tools. The 24 hour course will be split into eight lecture and discussion sessions on topics related to language documentation and 16 hours of practical work with a corpus of linguistic data. Students may either bring their own data to the class or use a sample data set. Students will work with a set of language data and learn how to transcribe a selection of data with time-alignment, interlinearise them and create a lexicon from the corpus established. Students will work with concordance and regular expression tools. Readings and tutorial discussion will cover some broader issues involved in language documentation. Students will be encouraged to prepare reports on their experience of the tools for web-publication. Topics to be discussed include: Is Language Documentation something new? If so, what distinguishes this thread in linguistic methodology from earlier methods? What constitutes documentation? Well-formed linguistic data-implications for fieldwork. Using current tools as part of a workflow from fieldwork, through analysis to archiving and presentation formats. Digital archiving of linguistic data. Ethics and language documentation.

• communicate intelligibly and economically their understanding of debates within this area;

• understand the social and cultural context of the construction of identities in and through language.

Three practical assignments of 500 words each 40% (due over the course of the intensive) and an essay of 3500 words 60% (due at the end of the semester).