Article published in:
Language Documentation and Endangerment in AfricaEdited by James Essegbey, Brent Henderson and Fiona Mc Laughlin
[Culture and Language Use 17] 2015
► pp. 215–238
Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork
Informal paraphrases by native speaker consultants are crucial tools in linguistic
fieldwork. When recorded, archived, and analysed, they offer rich data that can
be mined for many purposes, from lexicography to semantic typology and from
ethnography to the investigation of gesture and speech. This paper describes
a procedure for the collection and analysis of folk definitions that are native
(in the language under study rather than the language of analysis), informal
(spoken rather than written), and multi-modal (preserving the integrity of
gesture-speech composite utterances). The value of folk definitions is demonstrated
using the case of ideophones, words that are notoriously hard to study
using traditional elicitation methods. Three explanatory strategies used in a set
of folk definitions of ideophones are examined: the offering of everyday contexts
of use, the use of depictive gestures, and the use of sense relations as semantic
anchoring points. Folk definitions help elucidate word meanings that are hard
to capture, bring to light cultural background knowledge that often remains
implicit, and take seriously the crucial involvement of native speaker consultants
in linguistic fieldwork. They provide useful data for language documentation
and are an essential element of any toolkit for linguistic and ethnographic
field research.
Published online: 22 October 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.17.09din
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.17.09din
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