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.
References
Agar, Michael
2009 Ethnography. In
Culture and Language Use [
Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights 2],
Gunter Senft,
Jan-Ola Östman &
Jef Verschueren (eds), 110–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.


Ameka, Felix K
2008 Constructing and describing meanings. Plenary lecture presented at the West African Languages Congress, University of Education, Winneba.
Bernard, H. Russell
2006 Research Methods in Anthropology. Lanham MD: Altamira Press, Rowman & Littlefield.

Blench, Roger
2010 The sensory world: Ideophones in Africa and elsewhere. In
Perception of the Invisible: Religion, Historical Semantics and the Role of Perceptive Verbs,
Anne Storch (ed.), 275–296. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.

Bouquiaux, Luc & Thomas, Jacqueline M.C
(eds) 1992 Studying and Describing Unwritten Languages. Dallas TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Bowern, Clair
2007 Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan.


Casagrande, Joseph B. & Hale, Kenneth
1967 Semantic relationships in Papago folk definitions. In
Studies in Southwestern Ethnolinguistics: Meaning and History in the Languages of the American Southwest,
Dell Hymes &
William E. Bittle (eds), 165–193. The Hague: Mouton.

Chelliah, Shobhana L. & de Reuse, Willem J
2011 Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork. Dordrecht: Springer.


Childs, G. Tucker
1993 Lexicography in West Africa: Some problems and issues.
Lexikos 3: 13–28.

Childs, G. Tucker
1994a African ideophones. In
Sound Symbolism,
Leanne Hinton,
Johanna Nichols &
John J. Ohala (eds), 178–204. Cambridge: CUP.

Crowley, Terry
2007 Field Linguistics: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: OUP.

Cruse, D. Alan
1986 Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: CUP.

Diffloth, Gérard
1972 Notes on expressive meaning.
Chicago Linguistic Society 8: 440–447.

Dimmendaal, Gerrit J
1995 Studying lexical-semantic fields in languages: Nature versus nurture, or where does culture come in these days.
Frankfurter Afrikanistische Blätter 7: 1–28.

Dingemanse, Mark
2012 Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones.
Language and Linguistics Compass 6(10): 654–672.


Dingemanse, Mark, Blythe, Joe & Dirksmeyer, Tyko
Dixon, Robert M.W
2007 Field linguistics: A minor manual.
Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 60(1): 12–31.

Enfield, Nick J
2003 The definition of what-d’you-call-it: semantics and pragmatics of recognitional deixis.
Journal of Pragmatics 35(1): 101–117.


Enfield, Nick J
2009 The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances. Cambridge: CUP.


Enfield, Nick J., Kendrick, Kobin H., de Ruiter, Jan Peter, Stivers, Tanya & Levinson, Stephen C
2011 Building a corpus of spontaneous interaction. In
Field Manual, Vol. 14,
Kobin H. Kendrick &
Asifa Majid (eds), 29–32. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Everett, Daniel L
2001 Monolingual fieldwork. In
Linguistic Fieldwork,
Paul Newman &
Martha Susan Ratliff (eds), 166–188. Cambridge: CUP.


Franklin, Karl J
1971 Some comments on eliciting cultural data.
Anthropological Linguistics 13(7): 339–348.

Garvey, Catherine
1977 The contingent query: A dependent act in conversation. In
Interaction, Conversation, and the Development of Language,
Michael Lewis &
Leonard A. Rosenblum (eds), 63–94. New York NY: Wiley.

Geurts, Kathryn Linn
2002 Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Hellwig, Birgit
2006 Semantics: Field work methods. In
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics,
Keith Brown (ed.), 180–183. Oxford: Elsevier.


Kockelman, Paul
2010 Language, Culture, and Mind. Cambridge: CUP.


Levelt, Willem J.M., Roelofs, Ardi & Meyer, Antje S
1999 A theory of lexical access in speech production.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(1): 1–38.


Lydall, Jean
2000 Having fun with ideophones: A socio-linguistic look at ideophones in Hamar, Southern Ethiopia. In
Proceedings of the XIV International Conference of Ethiopian Studies,
Baye Yimam,
Richard Pankhurst,
David Chapple,
Yonas Admassu,
Alula Pankhurst &
Birhanu Teferra (eds), 886–91. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University.

Lyons, John
1977 Semantics, Vols 1–2. Cambridge: CUP.

Malinowski, Bronislaw
1923 The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In
The Meaning of Meaning,
Charles Kay Ogden &
Ivor Armstrong Richards (eds), 296–336. London: Kegan Paul.

Manes, Joan
1980 Ways of defining: Folk definitions and the study of semantics.
Forum Linguisticum 5: 122–139.

Mathiot, Madeleine
1967 The place of the dictionary in linguistic description.
Language 43(3): 703–724.


Mathiot, Madeleine
1979 Folk-definitions as a tool for the analysis of lexical meaning. In
Ethnolinguistics: Boas, Sapir and Whorf Revisited,
Madeleine Mathiot (ed.), 121–260. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

McNeill, David
1992 Hand and Mind. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Mithun, Marianne
1982 The synchronic and diachronic behavior of plops, squeaks, croaks, sighs, and moans.
International Journal of American Linguistics 48(1): 49–58.


Moshi, Lioba
1993 Ideophones in KiVunjo-Chaga.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 3(2): 185–216.


Newman, Paul & Ratliff, Martha
(eds) 2001 Linguistic Fieldwork. Cambridge: CUP.


Noss, Philip A
1999 The ideophone: A dilemma for translation and translation theory. In
New Dimensions in African Linguistics and Languages,
Paul F.A. Kotey (ed.), 261–272. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press.

Nuckolls, Janis B
2000 Spoken in the spirit of gesture: Translating sound symbolism in a Pastaza Quechua Narrative. In
Translating Native Latin American Verbal Art,
Joel Sherzer &
Kay Sammons (eds), 233–251. Washington DC: Smithsonian Press.

Okpewho, Isidore
1992 African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.

Payne, Thomas E
1997 Describing Morphosyntax. A Guide for Field Linguists. Cambridge: CUP.

Perchonock, Norma & Werner, Oswald
1969 Navaho systems of classification: Some implications for ethnoscience.
Ethnology 8(3): 229–242.


Pole, Leonard M
1982 Decline or survival? Iron production in West Africa from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.
Journal of African History 23(4): 503–513.


Prietze, Rudolf
1908 Die spezifischen Verstärkungsadverbien im Haussa und Kanuri.
Mittheilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen 11(3): 307–317.

Rattray, Robert S
1916 The iron workers of Akpafu.
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 46: 431–435.


Samarin, William J
1967a Determining the meaning of ideophones.
Journal of West African Languages 4(2): 35–41.

Samarin, William J
1967b Field Linguistics. New York NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Samarin, William J
1969 The art of Gbeya insults.
International Journal of American Linguistics 35(4): 323–329.


Samarin, William J
1971 Survey of Bantu ideophones.
African Language Studies 12: 130–168.

Schegloff, Emanuel A., Jefferson, Gail & Sacks, Harvey
1977 The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation.
Language 53(2): 361–382.


Schlegel, Joh. Bernhard
1857 Schlüssel der Ewesprache, dargeboten in den grammatischen Grundzügen des Anlodialekts. Stuttgart.

De Schryver, Gilles-Maurice
2009 The lexicographic treatment of ideophones in Zulu.
Lexikos 19: 34–54.


Silverstein, Michael
1981 The Limits of Awareness. Austin TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

Vidal, Owen Emeric
1852 Introductory Remarks. In
A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language,
Samuel Ajayi Crowther (ed.), 1–38. London: Seeleys.

Voeltz, F.K. Erhard & Kilian-Hatz, Christa
(eds) 2001 Ideophones [
Typological Studies in Language 44]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.


Weinreich, Uriel
1962 Lexicographic definition in descriptive semantics. In
Problems in Lexicography,
Fred W. Householder &
Sol Saporta (eds), 25–44. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press & The Hague: Mouton.

Werner, Oswald
1993 Short take 10: Semantic accent and folk definitions.
Cultural Anthropology Methods 5(2): 6–7.


Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Badenoch, Nathan
2022.
Silence, Cessation and Stasis: The Ethnopoetics of “Absence” in Bit Expressives.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 32:1
► pp. 94 ff.

Nuckolls, Janis B.
Thompson, Arthur Lewis, Thomas Van Hoey & Youngah Do
2021.
Articulatory features of phonemes pattern to iconic meanings: evidence from cross-linguistic ideophones.
Cognitive Linguistics 32:4
► pp. 563 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.