Difference between revisions of "Trondheim Workshop in Language Description and Documentation"

Revision as of 12:07, 19 May 2010

September 6th - 9th 2010

© Jørn Adde The Trondheim Workshop in Language Description and Documentation

© Dorothee Beermann

addresses aspects of language description and documentation. A special focus lies on comparative Bantu studies and the description of tone.
Courses cover practical issues relating to speech and text annotation and methodological aspects of conducting semantic fieldwork, techniques for eliciting data and the interaction between methodology and theory development.

The courses are open to 20 students on the first comes first served basis.

WORKSHOP PROGRAM

STUDENT ACCOMMODATION

The LDD has made a group reservation at the Trondheim Youth Hostel which allows us to offer very reasonably prized single rooms for the workshop period.

For a reservation of a room at the Trondheim Youth Hostel please send a short mail to: ldd.workshop

If you prefer to book a room in one of the many hotels in Trondheim you find more information at [Trondheim's Offical Website

MORE ABOUT THE LECTURES AND THE LECTURERS

Bantu

Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi is a professor at Uppsala University and one of the main researchers of Swahili and Bantuistics in the Nordic countries

 more information soon

Tone

Constance Kutsch Lojenga is a lecturer at Leiden University and an expert in the phonetics/phonology of African languages

more information soon

Semantic Fieldwork

Henrik Bergqvist was the first PhD-student to graduate from the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP) at SOAS, University of London, having documented Lakandon Maya. He is currently a post-doc at Stockholm University investigating inter-subjective perspectives in the grammar of Meso- and South-American languages.

Semantic field work includes a number of issues that relate to methodology, data collection, and analysis.

As a separate branch of the linguistic enterprise, language documentation emphasizes the process of data collection and the annotation of data as central concerns that are treated as separate from the analytical aspect of language documentation.

There are some important implications of such a view that may benefit a wider and deeper semantic analysis of lesser described languages.

The lectures of this workshop will focus on the problem of translation in a documentation context and the role of metadata in the annotation of language materials resulting form language documentation.

Some important differences between language description and language documentation will also be discussed as a motivation for the central issues discussed in the lectures.

Text Annotation Online

Dorothee Beermann is an assoc. professor at NTNU. Her fields of research are syntax and lexical semantics. She has specialised in the use of online data basing for Language Description and Language Documentation

Text Annotation or Interlinear Glossing (IG) is one of the most common methods used by linguists across fields.

This is not so surprising since IG results from a long tradition of aligning natural language text with one

or several lines of annotation consisting of a short-hand that indicates the text's internal grammatical structure.

IG is the main means to communicate linguistic data, making Interlinear Glosses the main currency of modern linguistics.

Yet, we as linguists do not share a common understanding concerning the function of IG neither in our daily research nor in our publications.

In this course we treat Interlinear Glosses as a language resource (unfortunately not yet a common assumption).

We discuss linguistic annotation standards, depth of annotation and data pertinence.

We will learn how to build small corpora, and how to be more conscientious about metadata.

The creation of reusable data and practices of data and knowledge sharing will be addressed.

We will make use of practical examples from different languages to show how to build pertinent and reusable linguistic resources.

The participants will be introduced to the online database TypeCraft and to methods of language documentation online.

Praat

Wim van Dommelen is a professor at NTNU and the head of the phonetics section at the Department of Language and Communication Studies.

This course will give a short introduction to the use of the programme Praat in the annotation and instrumental analysis of speech.

The first part will deal with the task of mapping linguistic units (like phrases, syllables, phonemes) onto the physical speech signal.

In order to be able to perform such a task we need to acquire some knowledge about the acoustic properties of the speech signal.

Apart from the technical aspects of speech annotation, the main challenge is the variability of the speech signal.

It will be discussed how to deal with this variability using phonemic or phonetic transcription.

The second part of this course will focus on the acoustic analysis of the speech signal. We will look into:

• vowel and consonant duration

• vowel quality

• intonation and tone

Please note that instrumental analysis is a demanding task. Therefore, it may be necessary to reduce the number of issues.

For your convenience, the second part of the programme will be flexible and may be changed on the basis of your current research interests.

Community Oriented Language Documentation for the Ghana-Togo-Mountain Groups

Felix Ameka is a assoc. professor at the Department of African Languages and Cultures of Leiden University and an Associate Researcher at the MPI, Nijmegen

In this tutorial we will pay attention to the question “who is language documentation for?”, and discuss the efforts we are making in

collaboration with some Ghana-Togo-Mountain communities to generate documentation products. In the first part we will introduce the

sociolinguistic context of the GTM languages-their multilingual character and the limited domains of use of the community languages.

In the second part we discuss the challenges and unintended consequences of designing orthographies, producing literacy primers,

dictionaries and grammars. We will also consider issues of language use in education in these communities.

Digitial Resources, Lexica, Grammars - Who needs what?

more information soon

WORKSHOP LOCATION

Norwegian University of Science and Technology - Dragvoll campus

The LDD workshop is located at Dragvoll the campus of the Humanities (Det humanistiske fakultet (HF)) and the Faculty of Samfunnsvitenskap and Teknologiledelse (SVT) of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

At the Dragvoll campus you find next to the University library also a book store, a kiosk with a post service, a Mensa, and a coffee shop.

A map of the campus can be found HERE.