Linguistic Fieldwork (review)

This elegant and impressive volume provides dramatic proof that after a long period of neglect, field linguistics is back in. The book contains a substantive introduction by the editors (1–14) and twelve essays describing the personal and methodological approaches to fieldwork by a number of distinguished linguists: Larry M. Hyman, Marianne Mithun, Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, the late Ken Hale, David Gil, Nancy C. Dorian, Shobhana L. Chelliah, Daniel L. Everett, Fiona McLaughlin, Thierno Seydou Sall, Ian Maddieson, Keren Rice, and Nicholas Evans. This is not a how-to/discovery-procedure manual about elicitation techniques or the analysis and processing of collected data. Rather, the focus is on general and personal issues about the delights and difficulties of carrying out linguistic research in the field.

I shall first touch on two important themes and then comment on but three of these excellent offerings in accordance with my background and interests. This decision in no way implies that the remaining articles are unworthy of careful scrutiny; I have found all the offerings to be outstanding contributions.

Whether one calls an ‘informant’ an ‘informant’ or uses one of the common alternatives (‘consultant’, ‘speaker’, ‘teacher’, ‘interlocutor’, ‘source’, ‘subject’, or ‘assistant’), fieldwork involves working in some capacity with one or more of them Newman and Ratliff remind us that ‘informant’ is the traditional term for this individual in linguistics and anthropology, but because of the negative association of this designation with ‘informer’, it was frowned upon by researchers who did not wish any stereotyping to engender negative profiling of the ‘natives’. Only two of the essays, probably for the aforementioned reason, retain the long-standing term ‘informant’. Both, coincidentally, happen to be by Africanists: Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, well-known for his work on Turkana, and Larry M. Hyman, a Bantu specialist.

Let me now take up the matter of learning to speak the language under investigation. There can be little doubt that learning to speak the language being studied enhances the fieldwork experience and its published end product(s) by improving the linguist’s acceptance within the given speech community and by leading him or her to a deeper penetration of the structure of the language. N, working on a Chadic language, Tera, elicited data through the medium of Hausa, but he observes with 20-20 hindsight: ‘the linguistic research per se would have been much more effective and insightful if I had put serious effort into learning Tera from the very beginning’ (5). This is also the viewpoint of Daniel L. Everett’s ‘Monolingual field research’ (166–88), which provides numerous reasons, a major one being that the linguist’s intuition is more quickly sharpened. However, Fiona McLaughlin’s Pulaar informant, Thierno Seydou Sall, coauthor of ‘The give and take of fieldwork: Noun classes and other concerns in Fatick, Senegal’ (189–210), describes an experience in which Sall’s uncle criticized him for his poor teaching ability since McLaughlin was not learning to speak his language properly (205–6). (Sall’s contribution is particularly rewarding since his is the only description of fieldwork written from the perspective of an informant/consultant [204–10].)

Turning to the essays themselves, Larry M. Hyman’s ‘Fieldwork as a state of mind’ (15–33) makes a solid case that the fieldworker’s state of mind can ‘appreciate the “puzzle” without translating the discussion into formal theoretical terms’ (29). Hyman’s personal experience as a fieldworker in Nigeria and Cameroon contributed to his astute observation that the field linguist, in struggling to find out the burning issues of his or her language, should study related languages or dialects since they would help clarify what was, in fact, interesting. He puts it aptly when he suggests that languages have a story to tell and that the linguist’s primary task is to discover and explain it.

David...