{"id":3587,"date":"2007-06-28T22:01:30","date_gmt":"2007-06-28T22:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/06\/to-be-or-not-to-be-a-field-linguist-amy-cruickshanks\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:47:05","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:47:05","slug":"to-be-or-not-to-be-a-field-linguist-amy-cruickshanks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/06\/to-be-or-not-to-be-a-field-linguist-amy-cruickshanks\/","title":{"rendered":"To be or not to be a field linguist? Amy Cruickshanks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thoughts from a student after surviving our Field Methods course.<\/em>
\nThe decision to take this unit of study came easily to me. Having had Field Methods recommended by fellow linguistic-loving students as one of the best linguistics classes EVER!!!!<\/b> I was pretty much sold even before I knew the class was on offer. And as prior to this class the only world of linguistics I knew was a theoretical one with data being presented on a nice little platter for me to pick up and analyse with no thoughts or concerns as to how the data actually made its way to me in the first place, I thought it might make a nice change for me to personally go through the elicitation process. Plus, this way I didn’t actually need to deal with the sand and dirt that generally goes hand in hand with field work, as I could get some experience in the field right here in our beloved intransient Transient Building<\/a>.<\/p>\n


\nFeeling I was involved in contributing to the linguistic community as a whole, I enjoyed the classes right from the start, though I quickly started to understand that there was a whole lot more to this data collecting business than I had accounted for. Never before had I considered the seemingly endless hours of tedious transcribing that accompany a field linguist’s work, nor the challenge and time it takes to come up with elicitation techniques to ensure the data being gathered is actually the data being sought (whilst also making sure that the techniques did not have a soporific effect on the informant by being insanely insipid (hmm…nice alliteration there<\/em>).
\nAlthough at first, I must confess, I felt I could possibly be one of the worst field linguists ever to have attempted to gather data on a previously unstudied language, over time, as the informant and I got used to each other and my elicitation style improved, our communication and understanding increased, and by about half way through the semester I realized that I was actually making real progress, uncovering grammatical patterns in what had seemed like a great tangled web of a language with no logic about it whatsoever. Breakthrough had begun and continued from there on in.
\nBy the end of the semester, I found myself in a position I believe is common to many a field linguist out there – I was overjoyed at having made numerous discoveries about this intriguing language, but felt that there was so much more lying beneath the surface that was yet to be unearthed. And all that lay between me and these hidden gems was that my time had run out. My inaugural season as a field linguist was over.
\nAll in all I enjoyed this new facet of the linguist’s life, though am I ready to throw down my hat as a theoretical linguist and run into the field for the rest of my days? At this stage I would have to say probably not, but who knows what is just around the corner? And in the meantime, whenever I am analyzing data, I will stop for a moment and be thankful for the field linguist who went before me and made my studies possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thoughts from a student after surviving our Field Methods course. The decision to take this unit of study came easily to me. Having had Field Methods recommended by fellow linguistic-loving students as one of the best linguistics classes EVER!!!! I was pretty much sold even before I knew the class was on offer. And as … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experience"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3587"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4348,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3587\/revisions\/4348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}