Language Documentation Slides

The attachments to this page are the slides from my 2013 LSA Summer Institute (Ann Arbor) class on language documentation. It was a 4 week, 8 lecture class designed to introduce students to the principles of language documentation. Here is the blurb:

This four-week course will cover a selection of the software, hardware, and stimulus kits/surveys which are most useful in documenting languages. The course will begin with an overview of software tools for organizing language data, including Toolbox and Elan, and hardware (e.g. audio and video recorders) for making recordings. Week 2 will focus on tools related to grammatical documentation (e.g. in the writing of reference grammars) and will include the use of structured stimulus kits, questionnaires, and tools for organizing transcripts and analytical data. Week 3 will focus on corpus planning and the collection of narratives and conversational data. Week 4 will concentrate on software and techniques for lexical elicitation, along with collection archiving. Each class will have a practical component and class participants are encouraged to bring their own data sets; however, data samples will also be available for those who need them. Some familiarity with general linguistics is presumed.