Theoretical Linguistics

Block 3
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:20 pm (NY)
(7:00-8:20 pm, Kyiv/St. P)

Language documentation and conservation is the scientific field concerned with the creation of multipurpose, longterm durable records of the linguistic diversity and creating resources from that record for the continued use of that linguistic diversity. Future engagers with this record should be able to read easily, understand clearly, admire thoroughly, and use extensively (even for those purposes unanticipated by the documenter) this record for a wide variety of objectives. In this course you will learn the fundamentals of language documentation which center around the building of a documentary corpus (guided by the “Boasian trilogy” tradition: dictionary, grammar, and a collection of texts. You will learn to harness the power of modern technology (hardware and software) for the purposes of planning, performing, managing metadata for, and archiving a documentary corpus. We will discuss the relationship between language documentation and other fields, including linguistic description, language typology, historical linguistics, cultural anthropology, ethnobotany, and oral history. In this course, you will learn to DO language documentation. The full syllabus can be accessed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EFPn6mtbLezFc5Bd14q-Z8lUr8Rakpa0JL2h4olOvEM/edit?usp=sharing