Linguist’s multi-layered data and the linguistic community’s polyphony
- Maurizo Gnerre
Abstract
Conditions under which linguistic fieldwork is undertaken and conducted vary very much on a large set of parameters. Each linguist who has done field research perceives the relevance of all these ‘non-linguistic’ dimensions for the quality of the ‘linguistic’ data collected. Beyond the relations established with local people, any possible research track is built, at least in part, on several factors, including the presence or absence of other people (either government agents, missionaries, or researchers, say, linguists, anthropologists, or biologists), or the existence, quantity and quality of texts written in, or on, the language being studied, and several others. All these factors represent, for the fieldwork and data collection, an interwoven set of imponderabilia, a term used by Malinowski to refer to some dimensions of culture. In the remaining part of this paper I will outline, even if in a cursory way, the ‘secret history’ of two articles of mine, quite different one from the other, putting them under scrutiny. Each one reflects a specific history of imponderabilia and data ‘given’, ‘taken’, and re-interpreted.
Keywords: ethnographic linguistics, field linguistics, fieldwork, data collection, imponderabilia, polyphony
How to Cite:
Gnerre, M., (2008) “Linguist’s multi-layered data and the linguistic community’s polyphony”, Language Documentation and Description 5, 29-59. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd249
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