The monolingual approach in American linguistic fieldwork

Author(s):  
Margaret Thomas

SummaryIn the first decades of the 20th century, fieldwork — collection of language data through direct interaction with a native speaker — was foundational to American linguistics. After a mid-century period of neglect, fieldwork has recently been revived as a means to address the increasing rate of language endangerment worldwide. Twenty-first century American fieldwork inherits some, but not all, of the traits of earlier fieldwork. This article examines the history of one controversial issue, whether a field worker should adopt a monolingual approach, learning and using the target language as a medium of exchange with native speakers, as opposed to relying on interpreters or a lingua franca. Although the monolingual approach is not widely practiced, modern proponents argue strongly for its value. The method has been popularized though ‘monolingual demonstrations’ to audiences of linguists, which, curiously, are not wholly consistent with the character of 21st-century fieldwork.

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-104
Author(s):  
Galina V. Fedyuneva ◽  

The article presents an analysis of the lexical composition of the newly discovered Zyryan-Russian dictionary of the 17th century and clarifies its place in the history of Komi lexicography. The article solves the problems of classification of lexicographic monuments and systematization of approaches to their description, and reveals gaps in research that has not been conducted since the mid-20th century. The currently known lexicographic monuments of the Komi language are limited to the dictionary materials of D.G. Messerschmidt, F.I. Stralenberg, G.F. Miller, P.S. Pallas and I.I. Lepekhin; the materials were collected during their expeditions in the 1720s–1770s. Unlike the church monuments of the Old Komi language of the 14th–17th and 18th centuries, the materials have not yet received a thorough archaeographic description, textual analysis and cultural and historical interpretation. The new Zyryan-Russian dictionary, discovered as part of the manuscript collection of the monk Prokhor Kolomnyatin and accurately dated (1668), is the earliest monument in the history of Komi lexicography today. The dictionary is interesting because it belongs to the period almost undocumented by written evidence and differs from all existing monuments in its dialect basis. The article describes the structure of the dictionary, thoroughly analyzes the lexical composition and presents most of its content, and reveals parallels with the dictionary materials of other monuments. The Russian-Komi dictionary-phrasebook that I.I. Lepekhin found and published in his Diary Notes is considered in more detail. Later V.I. Lytkin reprinted and deciphered the phrasebook, as well as made commentaries on it in his Old Permic Language (1952); thus, it became an auxiliary material for the reconstruction of the Old Komi language of the 14th–17th centuries. The dictionary dates back to the 18th century, although it has not been subjected to serious cultural-historical and chronological attribution. The newly discovered monument, unlike Lepekhin’s dictionary created by the type of translated old Russian dictionaries-phrasebooks based on the Russian questionnaire, reflects the live Komi-Zyryan language of the second half of the 17th century. It does not contain typical phrases, phrases from dialogues and connected texts that are typical of translated phrasebooks. There is only a certain tendency towards a thematic presentation of the material, although not always consistent. Like the dictionary materials contained in the draft papers of Russian and foreign travellers of the 18th century, the vocabulary of the new dictionary was written by the author of the collection directly from the words of a native speaker (or native speakers) of the Komi language in order to fix it and, apparently, was not intended for communicative use. Unlike the existing dictionary materials, which often contain short lists of Komi numerals, the new dictionary contains a consistent detailed money vocabulary list, from “denga” to “thousand rubles”. Numerical values are given in the Cyrillic numeral system using letters, which is undoubtedly of interest for ethnohistorical research and Russian paleography.


Author(s):  
Laurie Massery ◽  
Claudio Fuentes

The following research investigates the effect that unprescribed1 conversation with native speakers of the target language had on learners' L2 listening comprehension skills at the beginning (n=21) and advanced intermediate levels of Spanish (n=27). Treatment groups completed two-thirty-minute conversations with native speakers via videoconferencing throughout the semester, while the control groups carried out unilateral oral exams using the Canvas course management system. Data was collected using the Avant Stamp Test, an online testing program that is based on the national standards outlined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (i.e., ACTFL). The results of the study revealed that learners at the Intermediate I (InterI) level significantly improved as a result of the oral interactions, while the Intermediate II learners (InterII)—who possessed more developed grammatical and lexical skills, as well as overall experience in L2 than their Intermediate I level counterparts—did not significantly improve as a result of the treatment. Although many of the studies in this area of inquiry emphasize the need for guided instruction, explicit strategy and lexical recognition in aural development, it is argued here that unprescribed conversation with native speakers—a much less contrived and more authentic approach to aural acquisition—can also significantly improve listening ability in L2. Therefore, with the present study, the authors contribute to current literature in Second Language Acquisition that centers on aural development and the role of native speaker interaction in learners' auditory growth.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas A. Lester

Abstract Language learners are highly sensitive to statistical patterns in the input. When a target language provides the option to include or omit a grammatical form, learners have been shown to make decisions quite similar to native speakers. For example, learners opt to include or omit the complementizer that (as in I know (that) Steffi likes hot tea). This phenomenon has been explained in terms of a universal suite of cognitive mechanisms which support native and learner performance alike. Both learners and native speakers choose to include the complementizer when they are producing more complex or unexpected structures. The present study attempts to generalize these findings to another domain of “optional” grammatical markers, namely, relativizers (as in the hot tea (that) Steffi likes). I analyze all instances of optional relativizer use in a corpus of spontaneous learner speech produced by Spanish and German learners of English. Both of these languages have obligatory relativizers. A two-step generalized additive regression modeling technique (MuPDAR) that predicts learner choices based on native-speaker choices demonstrates that native speakers use greater shares of the relativizer in complex and disfluent environments, while learners show the exact opposite tendency: they prefer to drop the relativizer in complex and disfluent environments. These findings are discussed based on differences between complementizers and relativizers, and in terms of the limited universality of optional grammatical marking in learner speech.


Author(s):  
Timothy Read ◽  
Elena Bárcena

MOOCs are presented in this article as a fundamental change in the access to education in the world. While not necessarily a completely new invention, the technological context was ripe for them to take off and become established as an important step forward in providing open education for a large number of people. It is argued that MOOCs, if correctly structured and managed, can harness the best of both formal and informal learning, to help students develop their receptive, productive and interactive language competences. It is, therefore, possible to talk about Language MOOCs, or LMOOCs, as a sub-field within MOOC research and practice. Activities that revolve around collaboration and peer review, resting upon basic linguistic notions of the target language, while arguably not as fruitful or enjoyable as direct interaction with native speakers, can still greatly motivate students to experiment with new language and become more proactive than they would in other learning environments. Furthermore, while focussing on the mistakes of other students, they are implicitly reviewing and refining their own comprehension and production. If mobile assisted language learning, or MALL, is talked about as the application of mobile technology to language learning, then given the potential of such technology to increase both the access of students to LMOOCs and also provide them with complementary tools for the courses, we can begin to talk about Mobile Assisted LMOOCs, or MALMOOCs. In this chapter, the nature of LMOOCs is discussed together with the potential role of mobile devices, argued to be the digital equivalent of the Swiss army knife, offering a rich and flexible way of interacting with the real world based upon the array of sensors present and the apps that can be installed on them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Meng ◽  
Beatrice Szczepek Reed

Language learners' requesting behaviour has been the focus of pragmatic research for some time, including that of Chinese EFL learners, who constitute a large proportion of English speakers globally. The present study replicates elements of Wang (2011), focusing on the use of formulaic expressions and exploring the differences between advanced Chinese EFL learners and native speakers of English with regard to the use of request formulae. The study also investigates whether significant exposure to the target language in country is connected to a more native-like use of request formulae. Wang's Discourse Completion Task was adopted to elicit request utterances from three groups of participants: advanced Chinese EFL learners studying in China (at home students) and in the UK (study abroad students), respectively, and native speakers of British English. The findings show that, although in some respects study abroad students in the UK employed request formulae in a more native-like manner compared to at home students in China, neither group showed close approximation to the request behaviour of the native speaker group. The findings are discussed in the context of current debates, including interlanguage variations, interactional competence, and native speaker norms and intelligibility.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (8) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Lyu Xiaoxiao

<p>The phraseology is part of the linguistic studies on phrases, proverbs, idioms, proverbs and other units of syntax totally or partially fixed. It is the reflection of a certain tradition and idiosyncrasy of society. The native speaker recognizes the phraseological units in the praxis of speech without difficulty. However, because of their idiomaticity and the sociocultural divergence between two linguistic communities, Spanish sayings and expressions cannot always be understood by the Chinese speakers. Students of Spanish as a foreign language have difficulty recognizing the non-literal meaning of an expression, the use of this type of expression in language teaching develops communicative competence, linguistics competence, sociolinguistics and pragmatics competence. Then, when producing a bilingual dictionary, it is not enough to translate it into the target language, but rather to contrast the two languages in order to inform non-native speakers of unknown elements, such as historical and cultural backgrounds, uses, and their frequency of application, variants, etc.</p>


Virittäjä ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jussi Ylikoski

Artikkeli tarkastelee yhtäältä 125 vuotta täyttävän aikakauslehti Virittäjän historiaa fennougristiikan valossa, toisaalta fennougristiikan historiaa Virittäjän valossa. Päähuomio on erityisesti suomen etäsukukielten tutkimuksessa. Virittäjässäkin fennougristiikkaa ovat tyypillisimmin edustaneet konkreettiset pyrkimykset suomen ja sen sukukielten menneisyyden valaisemiseksi: keskiössä ovat olleet toisiinsa kietoutuneet etymologia ja äännehistoria sekä niiden kehyksiksi hahmotellut kantakielet eri vaiheineen ja kontaktikielineen. Tämän fennougristiikan kovan ytimen lisäksi Virittäjässä ovat kuitenkin aina olleet näkyvissä myös tieteenalan suuremmat kehykset: yhtäältä pohdinnat siitä, miksi ja miten tällaista tutkimusta harjoitetaan, toisaalta halu kertoa fennougristisen tutkimuksen tuloksista myös suurelle yleisölle. Erityisesti Suomi ja täällä etenkin Virittäjä ovat ympäristöjä, joissa suomalais-ugrilaisten kielten tutkijat ovat kerta toisensa jälkeen eksplisiittisesti pohtineet olemassaolonsa tarkoitusta. Vaikka ala mielletään usein kielihistorian tutkimukseksi, fennougristit ovat aina harjoittaneet myös synkronista kielentutkimusta; myös suomen sukukielten uhan­alaisuuteen ja vähemmistökielten puhujien oikeuksiin on kiinnitetty huomiota jo 1800-luvulta lähtien. Artikkeli keskittyy lähinnä Virittäjän ensimmäiselle vuosisadalle, mutta 2020-luvulle tultaessa fennougristiikka ja sen ilmenemismuodot Virittäjässä ovat muuttuneet lehden yleisilmeeseen verrattuna suhteellisen vähän. On the history of Uralic linguistics in Virittäjä The article provides an account of Virittäjä, the major journal of Finnish linguistics established in 1897, and its relation to the study of Uralic languages during the first 125 years of the journal’s history. At its most typical, the study of Uralic languages has been a branch of historical-comparative linguistics aiming to pursue the distant past of Finnish and other Uralic languages: etymology, historical phonology, questions of proto-languages and their chronology and geography as well as language contacts. Beyond this hard core of Uralic linguistics, Virittäjä has continuously provided a forum for discussing the larger frameworks of the discipline: questions of why and how Uralic linguistics is conducted in the first place. Virittäjä has also provided a forum for Uralicists to communicate the results of their research to scholars of Finnish and the wider general public. Moreover, Finland in general and Virittäjä in particular have traditionally been places where Uralicists have pondered and discussed the purpose of their own existence. In addition to historical linguistics, Uralicists have also engaged in synchronic linguistics, and from as early as the 19th century they have also paid attention to language endangerment and the linguistic rights of minorities. This article focuses mainly on the first century of Virittäjä’s history, though by the 2020s Uralistics and the manifestations of the discipline in the pages of Virittäjä have remained largely unchanged.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962098449
Author(s):  
Malami Buba

The colonial encounter between the Hausa and the British produced multiple layers of experiences both for the coloniser and the colonised. In addition to its violent history of conquest and domination, it created a ‘text’ of learning through which ideas of ‘mixing truth with falsehood’ were presented, localised and propagated as counterweight to the dominant Muslim epistemology. Mediating and navigating these spaces require deeper understanding and the skilful weaving of divergent epistemologies of the world. In this article, the role of the ‘native speaker’ as a cultural broker is explored.


Author(s):  
Elena A. Moshina ◽  

This study aimed to determine the motivating and archaic conceptual signs of the macroconcept “earth/land” through data analysis of etymological and historical-etymological dictionaries, as well as to demonstrate the solidity (syncretism) of native Old English speakers’ perception of this macroconcept. Cognitive analysis of linguocultural facts and a profound study of national mentality through language data determine the relevance of this study. The motivating and archaic conceptual signs of the macroconcept “earth/land” have not previously been the subject of a separate research. The main methods applied in the paper are descriptive, conceptual, comparative, and interpretative. The study revealed that the macroconcept “earth/land” has a long history of development. In addition to motivating signs, its structure comprises symbolic signs that go back to ancient mythology. As early as at the beginning of its development, the macroconcept “earth/land” was reflected in native speakers’ consciousness through a large number of conceptual signs (14 signs are represented by the semantic components of earth and 20 signs are represented by the semantic components of land), suggesting high importance of this macroconcept in English linguoculture. The identified conceptual signs form a rather extensive mental structure, which includes several, inextricably linked, blocks: ‘earth/land-space’, ‘earth/land-substance’, ‘earth/landproperty’, ‘earth/land-people’, ‘earth/land-material world’. The etymological analysis of dictionary definitions of the words earth and land as well as determination of the components of their lexical meaning allow us to demonstrate the diversity of English speakers’ ancient ideas about earth/land and the syncretism of these ideas within mythological consciousness.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 73-84
Author(s):  
Gabriel Galdino

In the history of international relations, the association between developing countries occurred on a reduced scale until the mid-twentieth century. This article takes a historical and economic approach about the formation of the movements characterized as South-South Cooperation, including the emergence of the BRICS in the 21st century.


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