33.3356, Field Linguist Spotlight: Samson Lotven

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3356. Mon Oct 31 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3356, Field Linguist Spotlight: Samson Lotven

Moderators:

Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everett at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2022 03:26:37
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Field Linguist Spotlight: Samson Lotven

 
On Puzzles and Fieldwork
Samson Lotven, PhD

By the end of my undergraduate program at the University of Missouri, my
impression of linguistics, driven especially by my experiences with Dr. Vicki
Carstens, was that linguistics was linguistic fieldwork. And so, armed with
generative grammar and the International Phonetic Alphabet, I went out in the
world to find and solve puzzles. This is the story of three such puzzles.
Through these and other investigations, I have come to view myself primarily
as a field linguist, and I feel lucky to find myself among such curious folks.

The power of the puzzle. In Changwon, S. Korea, I found I puzzle I couldn’t
solve. “Not noon, noon,” my co-worker repeated as I failed to appreciate or
replicate the difference between the South Kyungsang words for ‘eye’ and
‘snow’. I had set up these language exchanges where I would help her with
English for half of the meeting, and she would help me with Korean for the
other half. They were some of my earliest experiences with linguistic
fieldwork—a practice I would later replicate in my Vietnam workplace. “Noon.
Nooon. Noon?” I tried in vain.

A satisfying solution to my puzzle, I would later find out, come through
understanding that the southeastern varieties of Korean are tonal. But at that
point, I was (1) lacking the familiarity with tone to recognize it, (2)
lacking the typological, theoretical, and fieldwork understanding to create a
methodology around solving the puzzle in front of me, and (3) lacking the
experience in interpreting what a speaker means when they don’t have the
linguistic training to express it. 

Yet, the power of the puzzle persisted for years, and crucially, the unknowing
was more compelling than any answer.

The deepening puzzle. While working with Dr. Samuel Obeng, Dr. Kelly Berkson,
and a speaker of the Togolese language Gengbe, midway through my graduate
education at Indiana University, I came across a good puzzle. What triggered
some High tone verbs to surface with Rising tone? 

By this time, the previous puzzle was nearly a decade behind me and this one
required research, both of the language (and related languages) and of the
phenomenon (the typology of tone and of depressor consonants). As is common in
fieldwork, especially on tone, the investigation had to consider the theory,
methodology, and typology of multiple subfields of linguistics. When Rising
tone showed up, did that have to do with lexical specification, syntactic
position, phonological shape, and/or phonetic implementation? 

In the end, the answer was yes! In addition to phonetic and phonological pitch
lowering effects triggered by some consonants, verbs and nouns, surfaced with
Rising tone in different syntactic environments (naturally), and treated a
different set of consonants as pitch depressors (voiced obstruents vs. voiced
consonants). But the power of research isn’t in the quality of the answer.
It’s in the quality of the questions that come next—the compelling unknown.

The never-ending puzzle. My dissertation on Zophei, a South Central
Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Chin State, Myanmar and by thousands of
Hoosiers, was nearly complete. I had discussed the phonetics and phonology of
consonants and vowels, as well as proposed a vowel shift account of some of
the differences between the three dialects. And as I prepared to wrap things
up, the COVID19 pandemic suddenly changed my timeline, and I had another year
to work. So, I added one last chapter, what ended up being my favorite
chapter, and my favorite puzzle: the tone system of Lawngtlang Zophei. 

The most compelling question I had was, “Do verbs in Zophei have lexical
tone?” I set up and executed a data collection plan that involved identifying
different contexts for different kinds of tonal behavior, then trying lots of
verbs in those contexts. It turns out Zophei verbs do have lexical tone, its
just neutralized in many contexts. The chapter revealed layers of tonal
phenomena and word to tease some of the “regular” phonological tone behavior
apart from the widespread grammatical tone. I also engaged in the most
intensive background research I’ve been a part of. I had been crossing my
fingers for a paper called “Tone in South Central Tibeto-Burman”, but since
that piece didn’t exist, I wrote it into the chapter and am publishing it as a
standalone paper. 

This is where I say, “In the end, I learned…” but really the dissertation
research is just the beginning. Its stated goal was to provide relevant
questions and paths to answering them in a collection of previously
undescribed languages, to offer a glass of compelling unknown to the reader,
as well as to myself.

On field linguists. In my journey, I have gone from a traveler, wondering how
to make sense of the various languages I encountered, to a field linguist,
trained to develop a path through any research involving language. And I have
met a lot of field linguists along the way. 

The call of the field linguist is different from the call to any one subfield
of linguistics—it is the call to all subfields of linguistics, the drive to
account for the widely-available and often-evadable, wild language data. Like
bird watching, in the field, you may know what you could see, but not when or
where you’ll see it. So, how can you prepare for what you might encounter
unless you are prepared to consider, at least, issues in phonetics, phonology,
morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, historical
linguistics, typology, and human geography? 

Field linguists are unafraid of the unruly, accustomed to the search, and
deeply committed to the puzzle. That’s why, as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down
travel and access to ‘the field’, field linguists adapted. For some, the
adaptation was technological, and like fables of improvised palatography
equipment in the research days of yore, the field became virtual. But for
others, the adaptation was introspective and definitional.

Beyond research, even in the best of times, there are not enough employers
that know to ask for a field linguist, though they should. What industry or
field of study doesn’t deal with human communication? Trained to be experts on
all manner of language data collection, organization, and analysis, where do
all those who assert themselves as field linguists go? The answer I have found
is everywhere. 

There are field linguists walking around with and as phonologists and
syntacticians, adding to the scope of data that our theories account for.
There are field linguists in faculty and staff positions in Anthropology,
English, Speech Sciences, and Area Studies departments, enriching all
sciences. There are field linguists politely telling sociologists, economists,
social media corporations, and venture capitalists that their language data
can’t be interpreted in the ways they expected. And yes, there are still field
linguists sitting in cafes and borrowed dining rooms (and in front of computer
screens), describing and analyzing the intuitions of minority language
speakers around the world, and training those speakers to do the same. Field
linguists, chameleon-like, adapt. 

And there are field linguists everywhere.






------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2022 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
                   https://crowdfunding.iu.edu/the-linguist-list

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3356	
----------------------------------------------------------