The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork

This book offers a state-of-the-art guide to linguistic fieldwork, reflecting its collaborative nature across the subfields of linguistics and disciplines such as astronomy, anthropology, biology, musicology, and ethnography. Experienced scholars and fieldworkers explain the methods and approaches needed to understand a language in its full cultural context and to document it accessibly and enduringly. They consider the application of new technological approaches to recording and documentation, but never lose sight of the crucial relationship between subject and researcher. The book is timely: an increased awareness of dying languages and vanishing dialects has stimulated the impetus for recording them as well as the funds required to do so. The handbook is an indispensible source, guide, and reference for everyone involved in linguistic and cultural work. Review from previous edition a welcome addition to laying the groundwork for stronger documentation practices. Marcus Smith, Studies in LanguageIntroduction ; PART I: DATA COLLECTION AND MANAGEMENT ; 1. Audio and Video Recording Techniques for Linguistic Research ; 2. A Guide to Stimulus-based Elicitation for Semantic Cetegories ; 3. Morphosyntactic Analysis in the Field, a Guide to the Guides ; 4. Linguistic Data Management ; PART II: RECORDING PERFORMANCE ; 5. Sociolinguistic Fieldwork ; 6. Reasons for Documenting Gestures and Suggestions for How to Go About It ; 7. Including Music and the Temporal Arts in Language Documentation ; PART III: COLLABORATING WITH OTHER DISCIPLINES ; 8. Anything Can Happen: the Verb Lexicon and Interdisciplinary Fieldwork ; 9. Understanding Human Relations (kinship systems) ; 10. The Language of Food ; 11. Botanical Collecting ; 12. Ethnobiology - Basic Methods for Documenting Biological Knowledge Represented in Languages ; 13. Technology ; 14. Fieldwork in Ethnomathematics ; 15. Cultural Astronomy for Linguists ; 16. Geography - Documenting Terms for Landscape Features ; 17. Toponymy: Recording and Analysing Placenames in a Language Area ; PART IV: COLLABORATING WITH THE COMMUNITY ; 18. Ethical Issues in Linguistic Fieldwork ; 19. Copyright and Other Legal Concerns ; 20. Training Linguistics Students for the Realities of Fieldwork ; References ; Index of names ; Index of Topics