Volume 19 (2025)

Åshild Næss, Sebastian Sauppe

The world’s linguistic diversity is severely underrepresented in research on cognitive and neural aspects of language processing, with great consequences for our understanding of the relationship between language, cognition, and the human brain. The practical challenges of carrying out neurophysiological (but also behavioral) experiments under fieldwork conditions is one factor that contributes to this lack of diversity, and meeting them necessarily requires the integration of experimental work in a larger descriptive and documentary context. This paper discusses these challenges and how they may be met, based on the authors’ experiences in carrying out an EEG study on sentence comprehension in Solomon Islands. It argues that reconciling the requirements of experimental studies with those of working with speech communities in the field is certainly challenging, but can be achieved with coordination and a realistic assessment of the resources required. Moreover, while field-based experimental research should not compete with descriptive and documentary linguistic work as a means of supporting a community in maintaining and developing their language, it can be beneficial in promoting a sense of the value of the language that is not based on its status as endangered, but rather on its specific linguistic features that contribute to insight into human language more generally.

Pablo Fuentes, Sonia Vita-Manquepi

This article provides a descriptive guide to the documentation of Chedungun, the regional variant of Mapudungun (ISO 639-2 code arn) that is spoken by the Pewenche people. The 15-hour documentation is currently deposited in the Endangered Language Archive (ELAR) and corresponds to Phase One of a long-term initiative that is currently progressing to a postdoctoral project (Phase Two). Both phases are supported and funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme. Since the objective of the project is to document the endangered migratory lifestyle and language of the Pewenche people, we will reflect on how the territorial inaccessibility imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic challenged the project’s elemental strategy, which relied on several documentary journeys to the lands that are seasonally occupied by the Pewenche during the summer for transhumance purposes. We will show why the collaborative workflow sustained by self-documentation practices evolved from an auxiliary tool to a regular and essential element of the team’s current and future projects.

Samantha Rarrick, Reza Arab

We collaborated to investigate humor in the existing corpus of Kere (ISO639-3: sst). This collaboration was a useful test of the Kere corpus and led to the rediscovery of unarchived video recordings, which contained important contextual information. These videos had been deprioritized in the original deposit, but they contained important information that could be used as both data and metadata. We propose the term contextual clips for incidentally-collected recordings which have been deprioritized in some way. Contextual clips may be more naturalistic and offer an effective way to supplement written metadata and other contextual information. Our experience investigating humor also revealed that collaboration as a process can serve as a means to test a corpus. Working across disciplines helped identify future user needs, such as missing contextual information that may not be obvious to a researcher familiar with the corpus. Collaborative research may thus be an elegant solution to some of the known issues in mobilizing corpora. We encourage other researchers who manage corpora to identify contextual clips they may have, evaluate why the files were deprioritized originally, and to consult with communities on how to manage individual files.

Nico Lehmann, Vahid Mortezapour, Jozina Vander Klok, Zahra Farokhnejad, David Müller, Elisabeth Verhoeven, Aria Adli

We present a new corpus design for multi-lingual corpora that involve intra-speaker variation in different situational-functional contexts, including primarily spoken but also the written mode, with the aim towards enhancing language documentation efforts and resources. We illustrate how this comparative design and the resulting cross-culturally applicable data collection procedure has been successfully realized in order to build the Lang*Reg corpus (Adli et. al. 2024), which currently includes five languages from three different language families: German, Persian, Southern Kurdish, Yucatec Maya and Javanese. For each of these languages, the same native speakers were asked to produce language in two types of activities that naturally occur in all the respective cultural contexts: telling a story to a friend, and talking freely with various interlocutors (friend, stranger, taxi driver, university professor). Moreover, our design included the storytelling in two modes, which allows for the comparison between spoken and written modes of the same language user. We show how Lang*Reg provides a versatile resource for many purposes – in particular research into register due to the variety of situational contexts involved, we show how German and Persian exploit the right periphery for different register distinctions, and we invite others to use this resource. At the same time, we show how the methodology developed can be used as a template to complement language resources by creating comparable intra-individual, multi-purpose data sets.

Samantha Rarrick

The field of language documentation continues to grow, but an historic split between sign language documentation and spoken language documentation persists. In order to fully understand the linguistic context within a community, it can be necessary to overcome this split by designing language documentation projects to address threatened and unreported languages across modalities. Additionally, these two subfields can lend insights to the other both with respect to the analysis of individual languages and best practices for language documentation Drawing on an example of parallel projects to document and describe a spoken language and signed language of Papua New Guinea, this paper provides recommendations for researchers in similar situations. Benefits and practicalities of team-based research and extensive use of video recordings are discussed as essential for creating holistic language documentation with outcomes which are useful and appropriate for an entire community. Because many endangered and minority spoken languages are used in areas where there is little existing knowledge and documentation of signed languages, this situation is unlikely to be uncommon and this type of work has potential to further sign language linguistics, typology, and best practices for language documentation across modalities.

Andrew Cowell, Chase Wesley Raymond, Maisa Nammari

This paper examines polar questions in Arapaho, from several perspectives. First, examples are given of consultants’ elicited Arapaho glosses for Englishlanguage questions, along with consultant commentary and language ideologies on the proper forms. Of note is the consultants’ preference for negative polar questions. Next, a series of native-speaker-produced bilingual curricular materials are examined, considered as idealized question models outside the context of a specific focus on polar questions. Again, negative versus positive polar questions are compared. Following is a study of polar questions in conversation. Finally, we offer a close examination of one variety of polar questions – requests for verification – using a conversationanalytic approach to examine positive and negative polar questions. The speakers’ generalized ideologies about the preferability of negative polar questions are not supported by the corpus data. However, the data show that there is a preference for negative polar questions in situations where otherwise dispreferred responses may occur. Secondarily, use of negative questions is linked to politeness behaviors, where allowance for a dispreferred or negative response is a key feature of question construction. The study then notes that consultants seem to interpret elicited polar questions as potentially referring to very generalized public audiences. Without overtly saying so, they default to the “safest” and most “polite” usage – negative polar questions. The paper illustrates the challenges of elicitation in the domain of pragmatics, the varying outcomes one gets from variable data sources and methodologies, and the value of micro-level and multi-modal analysis of natural conversation.