Fieldwork Forum (FForum)

Breath of Life is a one-week workshop developed here at Berkeley and co-hosted by Berkeley and the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival every other summer. It is generally attended by 50-60 California Indians, along with about 20 faculty and grad student mentors from here and elsewhere who work closely with the Native participants.

We will talk about the history of this venerable workshop, which has been held here since the early 1990's, and about the upcoming one this summer, June 3-9.

I will also describe the duties and pleasures of being a mentor, in hopes of attracting some of the Fforum folks to be part of it!

This meeting will be a discussion of (slides of) a presentation delivered by Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia) at the 42nd meeting of the Northeast Linguistics Society (NELS). The slides can be found here. The presentation is a counterargument to Evans and Levinson's proposal that Universal Grammar is inconsistent with linguistic diversity.

Southern Zapotec is an areal-genetic grouping of 8-10 languages with certain common (both inherited and diffused) features including head-marking, leftheadedness, VSO argument order, historical deletion of unstressed vowels, a lack of plural marking, prefixed classifiers, and inclusory contructions containing quantifiers, among others. These languages are extinct in some communities, relatively vibrant in others, and threatened to some degree in most or all. The vibrancy varies both according to community and to generation, with the shift taking place (now and earlier) relatively quickly in some towns, such that many children acquired Spanish mostly from Zapotec-dominant speakers who themselves spoke accented Spanish, somewhat akin to the formation of Hiberno English. Most speakers today are bilingual in Zapotec and Spanish. When speaking Spanish in the Southern Zapotec region one will encounter second language speakers with varying degrees of a Zapotec accent, but likewise monolingual Spanish speakers also display influence from Southern Zapotec in their use of Spanish, for example through a calqued construction to form polar questions, which speakers of other varieties of Spanish misunderstand and perceive as ungrammatical. This talk will catalog many of the ways (from phonetics through pragmatics) that Southern Zapotec languages have influenced regional Spanish.

In the context of language endangerment, sociolinguistic research can be difficult without the existence of what were once vital speech communities. In this presentation, I discuss the recoverability of some forms of variation in Hupa, a California Athabaskan language, through a combination of fieldwork with remaining speakers, and a mining of past texts, recordings, and archived sources for comparison. In this way, some dialectal, stylistic and generational differences in Hupa storytelling can yet be observed.

Chechen (Nakh, Nakh-Daghestanian, Caucasus) data shows the equipollent aspectual oppositions, and a range of different aspectual types (focalized and durative continuous, iterative, habitual, iterative habitual, focalized, and durative continuous habitual, etc.). A huge number of synthetic and analytic tense forms (more than 40 forms) require the speaker to make precise distinctions. Chechen verb morphology allows no default meaning of any category. Chechen also has an equipollent evidential system with a witnessed/unwitnessed distinction and no default unmarked category.

One feature of the Mesoamerican linguistic area is the use of relational nouns. These are often manifested as body part words in many languages throughout Mesoamerica. For several Zapotec languages, it has been claimed that locatives are historically or synchronically derived from body part terms, but that the locative forms have all been grammaticalized as prepositions. In this presentation, I explore the use of Choapan Zapotec body part locatives to address whether these should be categorized as nouns or prepositions in Choapan. Though body part locatives are phonologically the same as their non-locative counterparts, phonological realizations have little to do with syntactic category. Applying diagnostics from Lillehaugen and Sonnenshein (in press), I assess the morhpological and syntactic properties of body part locatives in Choapan, and how they differ from or pattern with regular nouns and prepositions. I will demonstrate that body part locatives in Choapan Zapotec are morphologically and syntactically nouns, and not prepositions.

Linguistic fieldwork can take us to places very unlike those in which we usually live and work -- to places in which our usual assumptions, habits, and expectations do not apply; and to places in which the social and material resources available to us may be very different, or very limited, compared to our familiar home environment. Therefore, a crucial part of preparing ourselves for a successful linguistic fieldwork project is (a) assessing the ways that our project may impact our health and safety, and (b) taking appropriate steps in advance that will enable us to maximize our health and safety once we undertake our fieldwork project. The goals of this talk are two: (1) to outline the key areas of consideration regarding our health and safety during fieldwork -- including our physical, mental, and social health; and (2) to provide a set of strategies for preventing and solving problems that may arise during fieldwork in any of these health areas. This talk is based primarily on my fieldwork experiences over the last 17 years in Amazonia -- in both solo and team-based projects -- but the core content is generalizable to a variety of fieldwork situations, undertaken anywhere in the world.