The monolingual approach in American linguistic fieldwork
MargaretThomas
Boston College
Summary
In the first decades of the 20th century, fieldwork — collection of language data through direct interaction with
a native speaker — was foundational to American linguistics. After a mid-century period of neglect, fieldwork has recently been
revived as a means to address the increasing rate of language endangerment worldwide. Twenty-first century American fieldwork
inherits some, but not all, of the traits of earlier fieldwork. This article examines the history of one controversial issue,
whether a field worker should adopt a monolingual approach, learning and using the target language as a medium of exchange with
native speakers, as opposed to relying on interpreters or a lingua franca. Although the monolingual approach is not widely
practiced, modern proponents argue strongly for its value. The method has been popularized though ‘monolingual demonstrations’ to
audiences of linguists, which, curiously, are not wholly consistent with the character of 21st-century fieldwork.
A hallmark of early 20th-century American linguistics was its commitment to fieldwork. Sustained and meticulous linguistic
fieldwork — collection of language data by direct interaction with native speakers — was the basis on which Franz Boas (1858–1942),
his immediate intellectual descendants, and their students aimed to document the features of Native American languages and discover
relationships among them. Then in the 1960s, fieldwork ceded its foundational role in mainstream American linguistics. As the
attention of the discipline shifted to theory-building and debates about the nature of human linguistic competence, fieldwork was
largely replaced by psycholinguistic testing and the collection of grammaticality judgments and speakers’ intuitions through
introspection. However, fieldwork returned to prominence in the 1990s, recovering from what Newman and Ratliff (2001b: 1) represent as a long interval of neglect. The impetus for its revival was linguists’ recognition
that language loss was accelerating worldwide, and their hope that language documentation based on fieldwork could be the foundation
of an effective “salvage linguistics” (Newman 2009: 119, echoing a term used in Boas’s day
[Darnell 1998: 187]). Thus across a mid-century hiatus, fieldwork has again become a
major preoccupation within the study of language in the U.S., attracting public and professional attention and institutional support.
Fieldwork in the 21st century inherits certain assumptions and practices from the first, Boasian, wave. But it also introduces
significant conceptual and technical innovations.
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