documentary linguistics

[to do: clean up my text, give it some proper footnotes from Quakenbush and Himmelmann at least, and republish on Linguistic Exploration.]

I guess it is fair to say that "descriptive linguistics" is accepted as a term distinct from theoretical and applied linguistics, although obviously there is a gradient. Perhaps we can refer to this as (overlapping) fields within the discipline, orthogonal to the usual division by level of representation: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics. There are also the "border fields" which do not belong to the linguistics discipline exclusively, but bring in additional methods from neighboring disciplines, e.g. computational linguistics.

So perhaps we can think of documentary linguistics as that subfield of descriptive linguistics as the subfield of descriptive linguistics that borders on the distinct and applied discipline of information technology use (not computer science research, which is what computational linguists often do).

The target audience of a language engineering environment for linguistic exploration would be professional and non-professional practitioners of documentary linguistics. Non-professionals would include language teachers and students in general, which professionals would include participants in professionally managed projects (including language teachers doing graduate research in applied linguistics) whose background may be linguistic sciences, education, professional editing, creative writing, information technology or something else.

J. Stephen Quakenbush. SIL International and Endangered Austronesian Languages.

[Note 5: The concept of “language documentation” as the product of “documentary linguistics” is discussed further below. The primary distinctive of language “documenation” is its focus on primary data, collected, annotated, and made available as “a lasting multipurpose record of a language.” (cf Himmelmann 2006:1).]

Awareness of the importance of language documentation has been growing worldwide over the past couple of decades along with awareness and concern over language endangerment. Language documentation has to do with producing a lasting record of representative samples of that language. As traditionally practiced by SIL, and indeed by the whole Western linguistic enterprise, language documentation has focused on the production of resources for the linguist or academician more than on resources that directly benefit speakers of the language being documented. In the tradition of early twentieth century American linguists Sapir and Bloomfield, field linguists have gone out to produce grammatical descriptions and text collections which would be published by major universities and academic publishing companies in order to advance the understanding of their fellow linguists. [Note 23: Bloomfield’s 1917 Tagalog texts with grammatical analysis is still considered a classic of this sort.]

In summary, language data on which much linguistic analysis and description is based has rarely been published as such. This is as true of SIL-published data on Austronesian languages as much as it is true of material published by other field linguists on less commonly studied languages around the world. Where language data has been published, it has usually not been “primary data,” but rather “secondary data” that has been edited, systematized or regularized in some way.

The past decade has seen increasing interest in the documentation of representative primary data in a form that will be permanently accessible to speakers and researchers in an electronic environment.26 Indeed, a new sub-discipline of linguistics has appeared bearing the name of Documentary Linguistics. The web-site of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages credits Nikolaus Himmelmann as a catalyst for the development of this discipline, citing his 1998 paper entitled “Documentary and descriptive linguistics.” In it, Himmelmann (1998: 116) states that

"The aim of a language documentation is to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community... This... differs fundamentally from... language description [which] aims at the record of a language... as a system of abstract elements, constructions, and rules."

Himmelmann, Gippert and Mosel (2006: v) specify that documentary linguistics is concerned with the “methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language or one of its varieties.”

Selected references

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2006. Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for? In Gippert, Himmelmann and Mosel, eds. Essentials of language documentation, 1-30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2002. Documentary and descriptive linguistics (full version). In Osamu Sakiyama and Fubito Endo, eds. Lectures on Endangered Languages: 5 (Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim, Kyoto, 2002)

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. Documentary and descriptive linguistics. Linguistics 36.161-195.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P., Jost Gippert and Ulrike Mosel. 2006. Editor’s preface. In Gippert, Himmelmann and Mosel, eds. Essentials of language documentation, v-vii. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.