A theory is only as good as the data: casting a wide net in
A theory is only as thorough as the data: Casting a wide net in Kabardian and Ahtna documentation The documentation available for any particular language can heavily influence the scope of linguistic theory. As such, comprehensive documentation must capture a variety of types of language use. Here w...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.556.5533 http://www.hrelp.org/events/LDLT2/applebaum_berez.pdf |
| Summary: | A theory is only as thorough as the data: Casting a wide net in Kabardian and Ahtna documentation The documentation available for any particular language can heavily influence the scope of linguistic theory. As such, comprehensive documentation must capture a variety of types of language use. Here we consider two “genres ” of documentary data: those based on elicitation or prompted speech, and those consisting of spontaneous, naturally occurring connected discourse. We present case studies from two unrelated polysynthetic languages, in which only a combination of documentation techniques facilitates meaningful contributions to typology and language description. Our first case study is from Kabardian, a North West Caucasian language, spoken predominantly in the Russian Federation and Turkey. In Kabardian, many grammatical roles may be relativized, including obliques like place and instrument (Colarusso 1992). However, the frequency of occurrence of the oblique roles roughly follows the Keenan-Comrie (1977) accessibility hierarchy, which means that many hours of narration may not contain a single example of relativization of, for example, instrument. When these forms are elicited, however, speakers judge such constructions to be quite natural. Without elicitation, a description of relative clauses based only on Kabardian narrative |
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