Trondheim Workshop in Language Description and Documentation
September 6th - 9th 2010
500x226px
500x226px The Trondheim Workshop in Language Description and Documentation
addresses aspects of language description and documentation.
A special focus lies on comparative Bantu studies and the description of tone.
Courses cover practical issues relating to speech and text annotation and methodological aspects of conducting semantic fieldwork, techniques for eliciting data and the interaction between methodology and theory development.
The courses are open to 20 students on the first comes first served basis.
Contents
WORKSHOP PROGRAM
| September 6th-9th | Mondag | Dienstag | Mittwoch | Donnerstag |
| 9:30-12:00
|
11:00-12:00
Keynote: tba Felix Ameka |
Abdulaziz Lodhi |
Semantic Fieldwork
Henrik Bergquist
Tone Constance Kutsch Lojenga' |
Comparative Bantu
Absulaziz Lodhi
Text Annotation Online Dorothee Beermann |
| 13:15 - 15:30
|
Semantic Fieldwork
Henrik Bergquist |
Tone
Constance Kutsch Lojenga' |
Text Annotation Online Dorothee Beermann |
Final Session
Digitial Resources, Lexica, Grammars - Who needs what? Discussion |
| 17:15-19:00
coffee break 18:00-18:15 |
Case Study
Community Oriented Language Documentation for the Mountain-Togo Languages Felix Ameka |
Practical Workshop
Praat Wim van Dommelen |
Practical Workshop
Praat Wim van Dommelen |
sponsored
Workshop Dinner |
STUDENT ACCOMMODATION
The Trondheim Youth Hostel
The LDD has made a group reservation at the Trondheim Youth Hostel which allows us to offer very reasonably prized single rooms for the workshop period.
For a reservation of a room at the Trondheim Youth Hostel please send a short mail to: ldd.workshop
If you prefer to book a room in one of the many hotels in Trondheim you find more information at [Trondheim's Offical Website
MORE ABOUT THE LECTURES AND THE LECTURERS
Bantu
more information soon
Tone
more information soon
Semantic Fieldwork
Semantic field work includes a number of issues that relate to methodology, data collection, and analysis. As a separate branch of the linguistic enterprise, language documentation emphasizes the process of data collection and the annotation of data as central concerns that are treated as separate from the analytical aspect of language documentation. There are some important implications of such a view that may benefit a wider and deeper semantic analysis of lesser described languages.
The lectures of this workshop will focus on the problem of translation in a documentation context and the role of metadata in the annotation of language materials resulting form language documentation. Some important differences between language description and language documentation will also be discussed as a motivation for the central issues discussed in the lectures.
Text Annotation Online
Text Annotation or Interlinear Glossing (IG) is one of the most common methods used by linguists across fields.
This is not so surprising since IG results from a long tradition of aligning natural language text with one
or several lines of annotation consisting of a short-hand that indicates the text's internal grammatical structure.
IG is the main means to communicate linguistic data, making Interlinear Glosses the main currency of modern linguistics.
Yet, we as linguists do not share a common understanding concerning the function of IG neither in our daily research nor in our publications.
In this course we treat Interlinear Glosses as a language resource (unfortunately not yet a common assumption).
We discuss linguistic annotation standards, depth of annotation and data pertinence.
We will learn how to build small corpora, and how to be more conscientious about metadata.
The creation of reusable data and practices of data and knowledge sharing will be addressed.
We will make use of practical examples from different languages to show how to build pertinent and reusable linguistic resources.
The participants will be introduced to the online database TypeCraft and to methods of language documentation online.
Praat
This course will give a short introduction to the use of the programme Praat in the annotation and instrumental analysis of speech.
The first part will deal with the task of mapping linguistic units (like phrases, syllables, phonemes) onto the physical speech signal.
In order to be able to perform such a task we need to acquire some knowledge about the acoustic properties of the speech signal.
Apart from the technical aspects of speech annotation, the main challenge is the variability of the speech signal.
It will be discussed how to deal with this variability using phonemic or phonetic transcription.
The second part of this course will focus on the acoustic analysis of the speech signal. We will look into:
- vowel and consonant duration
- vowel quality
- intonation and tone
Please note that instrumental analysis is a demanding task. Therefore, it may be necessary to reduce the number of issues.
For your convenience, the second part of the programme will be flexible and may be changed on the basis of your current research interests.
Community Oriented Language Documentation for the Mountain-Togo Languages
more information soon
Digitial Resources, Lexica, Grammars - Who needs what?
more information soon
WORKSHOP LOCATION
The LDD workshop is located at Dragvoll the campus of the Humanities (Det humanistiske fakultet (HF)) and the Faculty of Samfunnsvitenskap and Teknologiledelse (SVT) of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
At the Dragvoll campus you find next to the University library also a book store, a kiosk with a post service, a Mensa, and a coffee shop.
A map of the campus can be found HERE.