The Purpose of Field Linguistics PDF

THE PURPOSE OF FIELD LINGUISTICS Field linguistics is primarily a way of obtaining linguistic data and studying linguistic phenomena. 1 It involves two participants: the speaker (or speakers) of a language and the linguistic res...

THE PURPOSE OF FIELD LINGUISTICS Field linguistics is primarily a way of obtaining linguistic data and studying linguistic phenomena. 1 It involves two participants: the speaker (or speakers) of a language and the linguistic researcher. The means of carrying on investigation is the most direct possible, by personal contact. The speaker of the language, the informant, is the source of information and the evaluator of utterances put to him by the investigator. Hence this approach to language study has also been called the informant method and might also be called the contact method (Hockett 1948:119). Field linguistics can be carried on anywhere, not just in the field, as its 1 The term field linguistics is not to be confused with anthropological linguistics which, accord- ing to Carl F. Voegelin (19596, 1961) is coordinate with five other aspects of linguistics, namely, theoretical, psychological, critical, communicational, and comparative. Anthropological linguis- tics "comprises the analysis... of either a wholly unknown language or of some unknown part of a language that is known in other parts" (19596:122). Under this term is stressed the dis- covery part of linguistic research, whether it be of whole linguistic systems (that is, grammars), of certain aspects of these systems (for example, phonemic systems), of differentiation over an area or through various classes of society (for example, dialectology). Hoijer's definition is even more at variance with our concept of field linguistics: anthropological linguistics is that "area of linguistic research which is devoted in the main to studies, synchronic and diachronic, of the languages of peoples who have no writing" (Hoijer 1961:110). 1  2 The Purpose of Field Linguistics name implies. A "field archeologist" must go out to where he expects to collect his data, but a linguist can bring his source to himself. Thus, some field work is done by bringing jungle dwellers to a city and is conducted in an office instead of a lean-to. Field linguistics is generally thought of as work done on languages which have either never been studied before or only poorly, but field work can be done on any language for any purpose. Thus, when a person teaches Vietnamese with the aid of a native speaker of that language—because he himself has less than a native control of the language—and seeks to learn something about the language that the available descriptions give no help on, he is engaged in field work, brief though it may be. But if one wants to restrict the term "field work" to more prolonged or more intensive investi- gations, one can still say that the teacher in our illustration was conducting language research under field conditions. In this book field linguistics will be applied to the more or less intensive study of linguistic behavior. Field linguistics has played an important part in man's study of lan- guage. If we had to depend only on the written records of language, our knowledge would be severely restricted indeed. Fortunately, for several centuries now inquisitive men, some more talented and careful than others, have personally collected data about little known languages and dialects. Not infrequently the investigations were characterized by theories about the origin and nature of language and the relationships between languages. As inquires about language became more and more sophisticated, there was an increase in the direct study of living languages. Oftentimes this was of dialects of the cultural languages or of their culturally less important "sister" languages. And although it was a long time before some language scholars could look upon the "primitive languages," as they were known, with any degree of seriousness, there was nonetheless a considerable amount of research in non-Western languages. Some of this was quite good even by our present standards. But since the beginning of this cen- tury the amount of field work engaged in has risen dramatically. It is not coincidental, moreover, that this same period saw an equally dramatic development in the science of language. In fact, the history of linguistics cannot be told without proper recognition being given to the contribution made by linguists working on living and for the most part non-Western languages. The coming of age of linguistics has in no way diminished the impor- tance of linguistic field work. If anything, the need is even greater, because we see its value more clearly. There is today no need to justify linguistic field work in general. There are literally hundreds of individuals currently engaged in some form of field linguistics. The money being expended in this research amounts to several millions of dollars each year. By way of 3 The Purpose of Field Linguistics illustration, however, there are four ways in which field linguistics can serve some important purpose. 1. There is still a dearth of basic information about the languages of the world. We are not even certain exactly how many languages there are. The more we learn, the greater the number becomes. About thirty years ago a very rough estimate put the number between 2500 and 3500 (Gray 1939:418), but a more recent guess was that it was between 4000 and 7000 (Ferguson 1964). In West Africa alone, where some people thought there were 300 languages, field work led one investigator to raise the number to "well over 500" for 15 countries south of the Sahara from Senegal to the Cameroun, and there certainly are areas more linguistically diverse than this one (Ladefoged 1964:xiii). There are, of course, languages all over the world which are disappearing with the passing of their monolingual speakers or with the assimilation of their speakers into a dominant society through bilingualism. For example, of the 181 North American Indian languages in use today, 49 have fewer than 10 speakers of whom most are over 50 years old (Gursky 1963; see also Chafe 1962, 1965). We shall be the poorer for not having studied the dying languages. As for linguistic descriptions of one type or another, most languages are hardly known. Even the 11 languages which together account for over one half of the world's population are inadequately described (Ferguson 1964). The other languages suffer more acutely. It is too much to expect all languages of the world, or even all languages spoken by one million or more people, to be fully described, but descriptions of specific aspects of grammar (for example, sound systems, grammatical categories, clause types) for many languages are realizable. The gathering of all this informa- tion is incontestably the business of linguists. 2. Field work is indispensable for the development of linguistics. As put by F. G. Lounsbury (in C. F. Voegelin 1950:299), "The recording and description of every one of these [dying languages] is as important to the science of linguistics as is natural history to the science of biology. When the 'natural history' of language is fairly adequately written,... we can look forward to much more of a 'science of general principles' in lan- guage than we now possess." The following paragraphs reveal only a few ways in which field work can lead to the development of linguistics. Linguistic research can contribute data toward the understanding of > language universals. There have been recent attempts to delineate some of these universal characteristics of language (Greenberg 1963), and field work since these publications has already challenged some of the assertions (Ladefoged 1964). When languages have been described and the informa- tion about them is easily retrieved, there will be less excuse than there is today for statements such as "There are many languages where... , " , "There may be languages in which... ," and "The possibility that some  4 The Purpose of Field Linguistics languages do not clearly distinguish..." Thus, until K. L. Pike had done field work on Campa, an Arawak language of Peru, it had been held, even by him, that there were no languages in which contiguous syllables could have primary stress, but Campa has series of three and occasionally of even four primary stresses, such as ——-—-—' (Pike and Kindberg 1956). Even more significant is recent concern with the identification and use of language universals in the stratificational and generative-transfor- mational models of language (Teeter 1966). There is also a direct relation between field work and language descrip- tion. The more field work, the more information we will have about the variability of language. This information will reduce the amount of time " required for arriving at the distinctive structures of languages being de- scribed. The Campa case serves to illustrate this point. It presented special difficulties to the investigators because they "were not psychologically prepared to recognize the nature of the system when the evidence began to appear" (Pike and Kindberg 1956:415). Progress is spiral and cumula- tive. As put by John Lyons (1962:127):... the history of science is full of examples to support the opinion that the actual cannot be properly described, perhaps not even recognized, except in the framework of what has previously been envisaged as possible. At the same time, of course, the sphere of what is thought of as possible is being constantly revised under the impact of discoveries made in the description of actual languages. The field is also the laboratory of the linguist. First, because in his at- tempt to write a grammar which will be comprehensive, he must test every generalization. This is done by checking statements with informants and with texts. The texts can be studied away from the field, but their validity as a measuring rod is itself a matter to be decided after some field analysis. This means that without proper precautions, a linguistic generalization may be valid only for a specifiable corpus and not for the language as a whole. Secondly, the field serves as a laboratory for all of linguistics insofar as all theories and generalizations are tested by new data. Without these data we will not easily discover the Achilles' heel of whatever theory may be in vogue. Field work is also an antidote for excessive theorizing. Theorizing be- comes excessive when the same problems or the same data are looked at again and again at the expense of ignoring other significant issues. 3. Other disciplines besides linguistics depend on linguistic field work for data, experimentation, and problem formulation. Anthropology is one discipline which early recognized its dependence on it. The two sciences— anthropology and linguistics—in fact developed in the United States each supporting the other. The importance of language to ethnographic field 5 The Purpose of Field Linguistics work is first of all that of a tool. As put by Boas (1911:60): "A command ; of the language is an indispensable means of obtaining accurate and thorough knowledge." (Other ethnographic field workers, however, have argued among themselves about the skill that they ought to demonstrate in the use of the "tool language," some pushing for fluency and others for a minimum control necessary in interviewing. 2 ) For a long time the collection of texts in the native language constituted a considerable part of ethnographic field work. The text publications of Franz Boas, for example, run up into thousands of pages (White 1963). Ethnographic texts are an important source of explicit information about the culture being studied (Radin 1949). They also serve as a stimulus for particular investigations, for in the process of translating the texts the ethnographer sometimes discovers valuable clues. Thus, Suttles discovered a set of kinship forms in his texts which could not have been elicited by the genealogical method, because they cannot be used with possessives (1965 : 161; see also Lounsbury 1954:226). Radin (1949) points out anothervalue of text collection. By being able to write down and then read the text with a fairly good approximation to the informant's pronunciation, the ethno- grapher gives the impression of understanding what he has obtained. En- couraged by this comprehension, the informant, who perhaps has hitherto been psychologically at a great distance from the investigator (or the race or class represented by him), becomes more interested in giving him information. Anthropologists are concerned today with many problems—historical, structural, and functional—which must be studied linguistically. What, for example, are the correlations between various aspects of cultural be- havior and semantic structure; the relation of perception to linguistic structure; the semantic structures typical of specific cultures or universal in all cultures? For each problem there may be necessary a specific set of data obtainable only from native speakers. For such work investigators must be sophisticated in both anthropology and linguistics. But anthropology is not the only science to profit from the techniques of linguistics. Bloomfield once said (1925:1): "The science of language... is most closely related to ethnology, but precedes ethnology and all other human sciences in the order of growing complexity, for linguistics stands at their foot, immediately after psychology, the connecting link between the natural sciences and the human." All that has happened in the intellec- tual world since then has only confirmed his assertion. Today linguistics cannot be ignored by philosophers, logicians, psychologists, or theolo- 2 For example: Mead 1939; Lowie 1940; Beals 1957; P. Bohannan 1958 a, b; McEwen 1959. For a statement as strong as Boas' see Radin 1949.  6 The Purpose of Field Linguistics gians. Some of the questions they pose to linguists can be answered on the basis of what we already know about language and its use. Others must await further research. 4. Finally, field work is necessary if linguistics is going to be applied practically to human affairs. For example, with the eclipse of the colonial era and the rise of new nations, there is an urgent need for language plan- ning and "language engineering." Nations need to determine how many languages are spoken within their boundaries, which ones should be used for education and other purposes, and how they are to be adapted to modern life (Le Page 1964). Some of these languages, like Arabic, have an ancient literature but are fragmented by dialects. Others, like recently resuscitated Hebrew, must be fully equipped for the scientific era. Trade languages, like Malay, Fula, and Sango, must be standardized. There are also vernacular languages which only recently have been raised to official status. For example, the declaration of Pashto as an official language of Afghanistan along with Persian in 1935 (Shafeev 1964) meant the estab- lishment of an Afghan Academy for the purpose of carrying out research on the Pashto language, folklore, and literature. The academy has also sponsored the publication of Pashto classics, folklore collections, gram- mars, and dictionaries. In this century we shall undoubtedly see a whole series of linguistic revolutions, some the effects of political developments but others the re- sult of the population explosion. If "minor" languages were so classed because of the number of their speakers, some of them are becoming less "minor" because of the population explosion. They will demand more and more attention from linguists or linguistically trained people.