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Obtaining Linguistic Data

A.Many procedures are available forobtaining data about a lansuase. They rangefrom a carefully planned, intensive fieldinvestigation in a foreign country to a casualintrospection about one's mother tonguecarried out in an armchair at home.

B.n all cases, someone has to act as a sourceof language data ! an.informant. nformantsare "ideally# native spea$ers of a language,%ho provide utterances for analysis andother $inds of information about the lan!guage "e.g. translations, comments about

correctness, or &udgements on usage#. Often,%hen studying their mother tongue, linguistsact as their o%n informants, &udging theambiguity, acceptability, or other propertiesof utterances against their o%n intuitions. Theconvenience of this approach ma$es it%idely used, and it is considered the norm inthe generative approach to linguistics. But alinguist's personal &udgements are oftenuncertain, or disagree %ith the &udgements ofother linguists, at %hich point recourse isneeded to more ob&ective methods ofenuiry, using non!iinguists as

informants.The latter procedure isunavoidable %hen %or$ing on foreignlanguages, or child speech.

( Many factors must be considered %henselecting informants ! %hether one is%or$ing %ith single spea$ers "a common sit!uation %hen languages have not beendescribed before#, t%o people interacting,small groups or large!scale samples. Age,se), social bac$ground and other aspects ofidentity are important, as these factors are

$no%n to influence the $ind of languageused. The topic of conversation and the char!acteristics of the social setting "e.g. the levelof formality# are also highly relevant, as arethe personal ualities of the informants "e.g.their fluency and consistency#. *or largerstudies, scrupulous attention has been paidto the sampling theory employed, and in allcases, decisions have to be made about the

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best investigative techniues to use.D Today, researchers oten tape!record infor!mants. This enables the inguist's claims aboutthe language to be chec$ed, and providesa%ay of ma$ing those claims more accurate

"'difficult' pieces of speech can be listenedto repeatedly#. But obtaining naturalistic,good!uality data is never easy. eople tal$abnormally %hen they $no% they are beingrecorded, and sound uality can be poor. Avariety of tape!recording procedures havethus been devised to minimise the 'observer'sparado)' "ho% to observe the %ay peoplebehave %hen they are not being observed#.\ome recordings are made %ithout thespea$ers being a%are of the fact ! a proce!dure that obtains very natural data, thoughethical ob&ections must be anticipated.Alternatively, attempts can be made to ma$ethe spea$er forget about the recording, suchas $eeping the tape recorder out of sight, orusing radio microphones. A useful techniueis to introduce a topic that uic$ly involvesthe spea$er, and stimulates a natural languagestyle "e.g. as$ing older informants about ho%times have changed in their locality#.

. An audio tape recording does not solveall the linguist's problems, ho%ever. \peechis often unclear and ambiguous. herepossible, therefore, the recording has to besupplemented by the observer's %ritten

comments on the non!verbal behaviour ofthe participants, and about the conte)t ingeneral. A facial e)pression, for e)ample, candramatically alter the meaning of %hat is said.ideo recordings avoid these problems to alarge e)tent, but even they have limitations"the camera cannot be every%here#, andtranscriptions al%ays benefit from any addi!tional commentary provided by an observer.

*.Linguists also ma$e great use of structuredsessions, in %hich they systematically as$their informants for utterances that describe

certain actions, ob&ects or behaviours. ith abilingual informant, or through use of an inter!preter, it is possible to use translation tech!niues "'qo% do you say table in your lan!guage'#. A large number of points can becovered in a short time, using intervie%%or$sheets and uestionnaires. Often, theresearcher %ishes to obtain informationabout &ust a single variable, in %hich case a

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restricted set of uestions may be usedV aparticular feature of pronunciation, fore)ample, can be elicited by as$ing the infor!mant to say a restricted set of %ords. Thereare also several direct methods of elicitation,such as as$ing informants to fill in the blan$s

in a substitution frame "e.g. -see a car),or feeding them the %rong stimulus for cor!rection "'s it possible to say - no can see?).

| A representative sample of language,compiled for the purpose of linguisticanalysis, is $no%n as a corpus. A corpusenables the linguist to ma$e unbiasedstatements about freuency of usage, and itprovides accessible data for the use ofdifferent researchers. ts range and si}e arevariable. \ome corpora attempt to cover thelanguage as a %hole, ta$ing e)tracts frommany $inds of te)t_ others are e)tremely

selective, providing a collection of materialthat deals only %ith a particular linguisticfeature. The si}e of the corpus depends onpractical factors, such as the time available tocollect, process and store the dataV it can ta$eup to several hours to provide an accuratetranscription of a fe% minutes of speech.\ometimes a small sample of data %ill beenough to decide a linguistic hypothesis,! bycontrast, corpora in ma&or research pro&ectscan total millions of %ords. An importantprinciple is that all corpora, %hatever theirsi}e, are inevitably limited in their coverage,and al%ays need to be supplemented bydata derived from the intuitions of nativespea$ers of the language, through eitherintrospection or e)perimentation.

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