This proposal provides undergraduate student training and support in Documentary or Field Linguistics for the academic year and summer of 2010-2011. The planned workshops and training sessions will expose students to a rapidly growing subfield of linguistics, and provide a means for us to train students in basic field techniques which are not currently covered in the curriculum.
Two workshops will be held during the spring term, in early January and mid-March after spring break. Workshops will be open to undergraduates at University of Rochester and advertized through electronic means to other institutions in the Western NY area. The workshops are in response to an increasing demand and strong interest in the subfield of Field Linguistics.
" supported three events: two workshops, a summer field placement and summer training for undergraduates on contemporary language documentation and field linguistics practices. The grant was written in response to a rapidly growing interest in field linguistics and language documentation by the Linguistics undergraduates, and graduate students in allied fields such as computer science and cognitive science, at the University of Rochester. The Workshops were held in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Rochester in March and November 2012. The Workshops provided an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students in the Greater Western Upstate region (including western NY, Pennsylvania, northern Ohio and western Ontario) to learn about new and developing methodologies and practices in language documentation, an area of linguistics that is not generally taught in an undergraduate curriculum. For instance, Ted Supalla (Georgetown) led two sessions on his use of Elan software to develop an innovative system for annotating linguistic gesture in ASL in historical films of Signers. The March Workshop lasted two days and covered areas of contemporary documentation practices and methodologies by practicing field linguistics such as Claire Bowern, Ted Supalla, Wilson Silva, Jeff Good and Joyce McDonough. The first workshop was attended by about 40 participants from across the region, registration was closed at 40. The second workshop in November was attended by approximately 30 students. We plan to hold sessions modeled on these workshops in the fall of every year for juniors and seniors who will be taking the Linguistics fieldwork seminar (LIN389) in the spring term. The summer program took place in the summer of 2011, employing four students who worked with faculty on the organization, annotation and analysis of data collected in the field by linguists who, responding to a call, volunteered their unprocessed data for annotation and analysis. For instance, Jordan Lachler (Director of CILLDI, University of Alberta) worked with a Rochester undergraduate (now in a PhD program at Stanford) on Haisla sound files collected on the Queen Charlotte Islands to produce a phonetic sketch of the language. The field placement occurred in Summer 2012 in the Amazon region in Brazil. Field linguist Wilson de Lima Silva took an undergraduate with him to his Desano field station to work on the documentation of the Desano language and culture. The student prepared for this trip by working the previous summer on this grant, working with field data and learning documentation practices, he attended both Workshops and he took the field methods class in Linguistics. The success of this program demonstrate the viability and value of training and placing undergrads in language documentation field situations. This grant was supplemented internally by an ongoing lecture series called "Field Linguistics" funded by Linguistics at the University of Rochester. Recent speakers in this series have been Scott AnderBois, Nadine Borchardt, Claire Bowern, Joergen Bohnmeyer, Wallace Chafe, Jeff Good, Marianne Mithun, Scott Pauuw, Ted Supalla, Edward Vadja. The grant funded activity had three major impacts. First, it promoted new interactions among the colleges and universities in this region. For example, students (and faculty) from across the area attended the Workshops including Colgate, SUNY Buffalo, Syracuse, Cornell. The two day workshop filled very quickly. Linguists at SUNY Buffalo and Rochester are considering running a similar workshop on a biennial basis. The grant provided a ground for the organization of researchers working in language documentation and the sharing of resources in the greater upstate region. Second, the workshops exposed students from a diverse group of majors, including linguistics, experimental psychology and computer science to methodologies and techniques of contemporary language documentation practices from practicing field linguists. Third, we were able to give students exposure to a new area of linguistic research that increased their appreciation and understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity and provided a powerful methodology of quantitative practices in a social science. This has special impact at the University of Rochester because of the situation of Linguistics within a strong interdisciplinary language community, bringing together researchers from several disciplines and highlighting the prominence and value of linguistic diversity.
