Today, I enjoyed talking to the Fieldwork Forum about Word Order in Ende.
Title: Sentence structure in Ende: just what the linguist ordered?
Abstract: Ende is a Pahoturi language spoken in southern Papua New Guinea. Speakers of Ende generally smiled and laughed “Yes, that’s okay!” when I scrambled their words into various orders. Is there free word order in Ende or were my experts simply very agreeable? To explore this question, I set aside the elicitations and looked at three types of non-elicited data with varying formality (1) oral texts, (2) written texts, and (3) translated texts. Throughout the talk, we will discuss some challenges of eliciting syntactic judgments, methods for finding order in a handwritten corpus, and the pros and cons of working with elicited, oral, written and translated data.
Note: From 9:30-9:40, as we wait for everyone, I will play some video clips of daily life in a Papuan village.
Title: Sentence structure in Ende: just what the linguist ordered?
Abstract: Ende is a Pahoturi language spoken in southern Papua New Guinea. Speakers of Ende generally smiled and laughed “Yes, that’s okay!” when I scrambled their words into various orders. Is there free word order in Ende or were my experts simply very agreeable? To explore this question, I set aside the elicitations and looked at three types of non-elicited data with varying formality (1) oral texts, (2) written texts, and (3) translated texts. Throughout the talk, we will discuss some challenges of eliciting syntactic judgments, methods for finding order in a handwritten corpus, and the pros and cons of working with elicited, oral, written and translated data.
Note: From 9:30-9:40, as we wait for everyone, I will play some video clips of daily life in a Papuan village.
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