33.3142, Featured Linguist: Scott DeLancey

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3142. Sat Oct 15 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3142, Featured Linguist: Scott DeLancey

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Editor for this issue: Joshua Sims <joshua at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2022 18:48:04
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Scott DeLancey

 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon

Given the theme “Return of the field linguist”, I guess I’ll talk about how
“the field” is often where you find it. But first maybe a little about why I
went looking.
When I was trying to decide about going to university, after a “gap year” or
so as a wandering hippy, my father (an English prof) gave me his copies of
both Sapir’s and Bloomfield’s Language and suggested that that might be
something I’d like. I read them both and decided that indeed that was
something worth going to college for. Cornell in those days had a very
self-consciously Structuralist department (Hockett was still there), so I was
brought up to be suspicious of that newfangled stuff coming out of MIT (as
indeed I still am). The Linguistics major required study of a non-European
language, and since I started college in the middle of the year, I had to wait
until summer to start a language. Cornell had intensive summer programs in
Chinese, Japanese, and Tamil, in rotation. My freshman year it was Chinese, so
that’s what I started, and that’s how I ended up in Trans-Himalayan. I took
several Classical Chinese classes from Prof. Mei Tsulin, who convinced me of
the need to know something about Tai languages in order to understand the
early history of Chinese. So after I graduated I joined the Peace Corps and
went to Thailand to teach English and learn Thai. I was teaching in Phrae, and
nearby was Ban Dong, one of two villages where the Ngwi language Mpi is
spoken, and my first fieldwork experience involved bicycling over to Ban Dong
to collect Mpi vocabulary.
 After Thailand I started grad school at Indiana, where I could study Tibetan.
But even more exciting,  my advisor, LaRaw Maran, was a Kachin from Myanmar,
and from my first semester there he started teaching me all about Jinghpaw.
(This is sort of an inversion of the traditional concept of “fieldwork”, as
the source for the language I was studying was formally my teacher. On the
other hand, whatever the formalities of the situation, if you don’t see the
person showing you their language for your research as your teacher, you’re
doing it wrong).
That was my introduction to “hierarchical” verb agreement, which has
fascinated me ever since. I also started working with some local Tibetan
refugees on the Lhasa variety, including Thubten Anyetsang, whose Little Tibet
restaurant in Bloomington is worth a trip, and who first introduced me to the
real world of evidentiality. My first job after the Ph.D. was at Colorado,
where again there were local Tibetan speakers to work with. During my second
year at Colorado Tom Givón, just hired at Oregon, called me up to recruit me
to the program he was building there.
 In the meantime my sister had been working in the Northwest Territories on
Native issues, and had married John T’seleie in Rádeyîlîkóé/Fort Good Hope. So
the summer before I started at Oregon I took my family up to Rádeyîlîkóé and
spent the summer studying K’asho Go’tine (then called the “Hare” dialect of
“Slavey”) with Therese Pierrot and Vicki Orlais. It was Vicki who first
explained mirativity to me (“lõ is there because you didn’t know”), although
it took me a few years to understand why that was important.
In Oregon I met Yungdrung, who was finally able to get across to me a dim
understanding of the Lhasa Tibetan evidential system (among many other
things). I also met folks from the Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Klamath Tribes,
and began to think both about these languages and about language
revitalization, which at the time was still more a dream than the reality
which it has become. One of my favorite memories is when my sister and
brother-in-law came to visit and I took John out to meet Archie Benn, one of
the last first-language Tututni speakers. When I told them that we linguists
considered their languages to be related they were both quite skeptical, but
after a fascinating couple of hours of exchanging vocabulary they convinced
themselves that, indeed, they were linguistic cousins. Later during the 1990’s
the Klamath Tribe officially introduced me to Celia Langell, the last person I
know of who remembered a lot of specifically Modoc forms.
And, of course, speaking of “the Field”, we have to talk about Field Methods
classes, which for so many of us are so much more than just classes. My first
Ph.D. student, Carol Genetti, found her dissertation project in Tom Givón’s FM
class on Newar. In Nepal Carol met a Sunuwar speaker, Tangka Raj Sunuwar,
brought him back to Oregon to study English and work with us for another FM
class. Sunuwar is a Kiranti language, along with Jinghpaw one of the four
subgroups most essential to the comparative morphological reconstruction of
hierarchical agreement that I did for my dissertation, and at last I had a
chance to hear a Kiranti language myself.
In 2006 Gwen Hyslop attended the first Northeast Indian Linguistics Society
(NEILS) conference in Guwahati in 2006, presenting work on Kurtöp from another
Field Methods class. Gwen’s enthusiastic report of the conference inspired me
to attend the next one, where I began work on Bodo and started to make the
contacts which have allowed me to conduct and supervise fieldwork across
Northeast India. On my first visit my host, Prof. Jyotiprakash Tamuli, asked
me to do a demonstration field methods class for his MA students, and that’s
how I was introduced to the Bodo language, and met Prafulla Basumatary, who
served as our speaker. The Northeast is astonishingly multilingual, with well
over 100 languages representing four major families. As a result university
students as well as community language activists have a very enthusiastic
interest in linguistics. When in India I spend far more time helping these
folks than chasing down data myself, with the result that whenever I visit
there are young linguists lining up to show me what they have found – the
field is brought to me.
 My favorite story along this line starts with my long-term conviction that a
postverbal 2nd person agreement form found in some NEI languages was cognate
with a 2nd person prefix found elsewhere in the family. (When I tell this to
outsiders I have to find some way to convince them that this was important to
me, but you will all understand). To prove the point I needed a language with
a postverbal form that was demonstrably derived from an auxiliary
construction. I suspected that such a language might turn up in Manipur. In
2009 and then again in 2010 I was invited to give a set of lectures at Manipur
University. The second time, when I walked into the Linguistics Department,
Prof. Yashawanta Singh gave me a copy of his just-published grammar of
Koireng, which as it happens has exactly the form I was looking for. Literally
moments later Prof. Madhubala Devi, the department head, handed me a
dissertation which one of her students had just written. It was Hemabati
Kongkham’s grammar of Moyon, which also had exactly the form I was looking
for. The next day a PhD student, Koninglee Wanglar, invited me to come to his
village in Chandel talk to the elders about language development. One of the
elders, Egbert Khartu, had written and locally published a grammar sketch of
his language, Monsang, which also had the evidence I needed. So in the end I
was able to prove my point without needing to do any direct fieldwork on my
own.
Recently I had a chance to go “back” to two fields I had only known from
books. Besides Jinghpaw and Kiranti, two other essential witnesses for my
comparative dissertation in 1980 were Rgyalrong, in Sichuan, based on a field
description by Jin Peng, and Chepang, in Nepal, based on fieldwork by Ross
Caughley. During the teens I had an undergraduate student, Gyu Lha, from
Sichuan, whose first language was a close relative of Jin’s Rgyalrong. And I
had a Ph.D. student, Marie-Caroline Pons, who was writing a grammar of
Chepang. In the winter of 2019 I visited both Gyu Lha in her home village in
Aba Prefecture and Marie-Caroline at her field site in Chitwan, and so was at
last able to actually meet people who speak two more of the languages which
were so essential to my reconstruction work back at the beginning 40 years
ago. If you are reading this – and certainly if you have read all the way to
the end – then surely I don’t need to convince you of the value of the
Linguist List to all of us. Why not make a contribution now?







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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3142	
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