Beyond the ancestral code: Towards a model for sociolinguistic language documentation
Beyond the ancestral code: Towards a model for sociolinguistic language documentation
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超越祖先的代码：走向社会语言学语言文档模型
DOI：
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发表时间：
2014
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Alice Mitchell
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
G. Childs;Jeff Good;Alice Mitchell
语言文档的典型特征是语言记录的集合，它可以构成传统描述性产品（如词典、语法和文本）的基础（例如，参见 Himmelmann 1998：168-171）。这是因为语言学家和语言社区强调所谓的“祖先代码”，即被认为最能代表特定社区传统的多样性（Woodbury 2011）。相比之下，人们相对较少关注了解需要什么样的纪录片产品来充分捕捉语言使用的社会语言学方面。
本文报告了一次研讨会的结果，该研讨会探讨了撒哈拉以南非洲 (SSA) 社会语言学语言文献的理论和应用方面。 SSA 的特殊之处在于多语言使用率高和众多重要的“小”语言，其中社会语言学方法可能会为学术界和演讲者社区产生有用的结果。来自非洲和其他地方的六十多名研讨会参与者组成了五个工作组，涵盖以下主题：对话数据和社会语言学记录、文化重大事件的记录、语言如何在多语言环境中获得“价值”、促进多语言的社会机制以及记录语言与文化之间的关系。
工作组讨论的结论包括：（i）自然对话作为记录语言的社会语言环境和文化的一种方式的价值，（ii）在不扭曲数据的情况下记录实际语言使用的重要性，以使其更好地反映语言纯度的概念（和其他意识形态立场），（iii）建议扩大有关说话者和录音背景的元数据收集，以便可以更充分地记录影响数据收集的社会语言配置，（iv）当目标实现时建立强有力的跨学科伙伴关系的必要性文档的重要性超出了语法和基本词汇数据的结构方面，(v) 包含社会语言背景信息的文档可以以传统文档无法做到的方式有效地为语言规划决策提供信息，以及 (vi) 需要比目前可用的更灵活的培训机会。
研讨会的一个更普遍的结论是，看到更多关于语言文献的目标和实践的反思性学术研究的重要性。如果我们想确保诸如“演讲者社区”之类的常用理想化不会不恰当地导致纪录片项目侧重于选择演讲事件，而这些事件不能准确反映那些演讲被记录的个人的实际做法，这一点至关重要。
Language documentation is prototypically characterized as the collection of records of a language which can form the basis of traditional descriptive products such as lexicons, grammars, and texts (see, e.g., Himmelmann 1998:168–171). This follows from an emphasis by linguists and speaker communities on the so-called “ancestral code”—that is, the variety that is taken to be most representative of a given community’s traditions (Woodbury 2011). By comparison, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding what kinds of documentary products are required to adequately capture sociolinguistic aspects of language use.
This paper reports on the results of a workshop exploring theoretical and applied aspects of sociolinguistic language documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). SSA is special in being characterized by high rates of multilingualism and numerous vital “small” languages, where sociolinguistically informed approaches are likely to yield useful results for academic and speaker communities. More than sixty workshop participants, from Africa and elsewhere, organized into five working groups covering the following topics: conversational data and sociolinguistic documentation, documentation of culturally significant events, how languages acquire “value” in multilingual environments, social mechanisms fostering multilingualism, and documenting the relationship between language and culture.
Among the conclusions of the working group discussions were: (i) the value of natural conversation as a way of documenting a language’s sociolinguistic setting and culture, (ii) the importance of documenting actual language use without distorting the data to make it better reflect notions of language purity (and other ideological positions), (iii) recommendations for expanded metadata collection about speakers and the recording context so that sociolinguistic configurations affecting data collection can be more adequately recorded, (iv) the necessity of establishing strong interdisciplinary partnerships when the goals of documentation go beyond structural aspects of grammar and basic lexical data, (v) that documentation including information on sociolinguistic context can usefully inform language planning decisions in ways that traditional documentation cannot, and (vi) the need for more flexible training opportunities than are presently available.
A more general conclusion of the workshop was the importance of seeing more reflexive scholarship on the goals and practices of language documentation. This is crucial if we want to ensure that commonly employed idealizations such as “speaker community” do not inappropriately lead to documentary projects focusing on selections of speech events that are not an accurate reflection of the actual practices of those individuals whose speech is being documented.