#ld&c

Descriptive grammars take a lot of time to write, often based on years of fieldwork by the author. For many languages they are the only major source of information we have about how the language works. Although a grammar takes a lot of effort to produce, it’s not often made clear where the data come from, who the author worked with, or whether the data can be accessed by other people. Barbara Kelly, Andrea Berez-Kroeker, Tyler Heston and I decided to explore just how people are talking about their method of work and their research data in descriptive grammars. We have all done work in language documentation and description, and felt like there was a gap in how linguists talked about their work with each other and what they wrote in published grammars. This work is now published in the latest volume of Language Documentation & Conservation.

A survey of 50 published grammars and 50 dissertations

We looked at 100 grammars published between 2003 and 2012. We assessed how transparent they were in their data collection methods, looking at whether they explicitly mentioned things like how many people they worked with, and the recording equipment used. We also looked at whether researchers link from the grammar to the original example. This is important because it means that it’s possible to revisit the original recording or example.

Some of the findings:

Fewer than a third of grammars mentioned the equipment used to collect data or software used to analyse it

For over 2/3rds of the grammars we have no idea where the data used in the analysis is now

Over half of the grammars do not include any metadata for the examples, meaning it’s unclear where they came from, if they’re elicited or whether they were written or recorded.

We can be optimistic about the future; dissertations performed better than published grammars, suggesting that a newer generation of scholars are aiming for greater transparency in their research

We don’t think linguists are doing bad research, we just think that we need to make the work we are doing clearer.

Abstract

Language documentation and description are closely related practices, often performed as part of the same fieldwork project on an un(der)-studied language. Research trends in recent decades have seen a great volume of publishing in regards to the methods of language documentation, however, it is not clear that linguists' awareness of the importance of robust data-collection methods is translating into transparency about those methods or data citation in resultant publications. We analyze 50 dissertations and 50 grammars from a ten-year span (2003-2012) to assess the current state of the field. Publications are critiqued on the basis of transparency of data collection methods, analysis and storage, as well as citation of primary data. While we found examples of transparent reporting in these areas, much of the surveyed research does not include key information about methodology or data. We acknowledge that descriptive linguists often practice good methodology in data collection, but as a field we need to build a better culture with regard to making this clear in research writing. Thus we conclude with suggested benchmarks for the kind of information we believe is vital for creating a rich and useful research methodology in both long and short format descriptive research writing.

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