Antw: Sign language 'fieldwork'

Thu Feb 2 07:47:10 UTC 2012

Dear Adam, dear all,

What you raise as a question, illustrates a deep fissure in the group
of linguists: There are colleagues whose "theory" "believes" that asking
a specific question to a speaker/signer of a certain language may bring
an answer which is undisturbed from subjective and social factors (i.e.
from politeness, accepting the question as a framework for the answer,
opening the speech community to the asking linguist etc.). 
Observed objectively from pragmatics, any such question constitutes a
situation of force for the speaker/signer: (S)he - consciously or
unconsciously - feels forced to accept the hypothesis "there is exactly
one correct answer to the linguist's question" (which is exactly also
the linguist's false previous hypothesis which does not take the
vagueness and context-dependency of language into consideration).
Therefore a speaker/signer who would answer: "oh, I am not sure, there
are several possibilities..." would appear as a person resisting to the
legitimate wishes of the linguist. I have been reported complaints by
deaf people who were considered as idiots because the rejected a single
answer on their sign language. 

Naturally, that does not mean that we as linguists must not use a
"question book" for research or we must not ask goal-oriented questions.
But the cautious and reflective use of these elicitation techniques and
the acceptance of a speech/sign community into which we should submerge
as "friendly strangers" with respect to the culture is indispensable for
research in real communication (i.e. communication in as natural as
possible context and linguistic analysis on the baiss of "neutrally"
recorded corpora).

Best Regards

Franz

University of Klagenfurt
Center for Sign Language and Deaf Communication
Funded by: Provincial government of Carinthia, Bundessozialamt
Kaernten
Head: Franz Dotter (hearing)
Collaborators: Elisabeth Bergmeister (deaf), Silke Bornholdt (deaf), 
Luzia Gansinger (hearing), Simone Greiner-Ogris (hearing) Andrea Grilz
(hearing, on maternity leave), Christian Hausch (deaf), Marlene
Hilzensauer (hearing), Klaudia Krammer (hearing), Christine Kulterer
(hearing), Anita Pirker (deaf), Nathalie Slavicek (hard of hearing),
Natalie Unterberger (deaf)
Homepage: http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/zgh
Fax: ++43 (0)463 2700 2899
Phone: ++43 (0)463 2700 /2821 (Franz Dotter),/2823 (Marlene
Hilzensauer), /2824 (Klaudia Krammer), /2829 (Christine Kulterer)
Email addresses: firstname.lastname at uni-klu.ac.at

>>> "Adam Schembri" <A.Schembri at LATROBE.EDU.AU> 2/2/2012 6:03 >>>
Hello SLLING-L and SLLS list members,

Recently, a language documentation colleague asked me why there were so
few sign language researchers conducting 'fieldwork'. She was reasonably
well-informed about the field, and could name a few sign language
linguists who were collecting data from micro-community/ 'village' sign
language communities (e.g., in Bali), or from macro-community sign
language communities in developing countries (e.g., Uganda), and
identified them as doing sign language 'fieldwork'. 

I could see her point, but I thought this was an interesting
perspective, because (without wanting to diminish the challenges of
those who work on sign languages in places like Bali and Uganda), I have
always considered myself an 'urban fieldworker' working on the sign
language varieties cities in Australia and the UK. I read the definition
below, and I feel that the Auslan and BSL corpus projects I have worked
on do (more or less) fit the bill:

Bowern (2008:7) “…what is ‘fieldwork’? My definition is rather broad.
It involves the collection of accurate data in an ethical manner. It
involves producing a result which both the community and the linguist
approve of. That is, the ‘community’ (the people who are affected by
your being there collecting data) should know why you’re there, what
you’re doing, and they should be comfortable with the methodology and
the outcome. You should also be satisfied with the arrangements. The
third component involves the linguist interacting with a community of
speakers at some level. That is, fieldwork involves doing research in a
place where the language is spoken, not finding a speaker at your
university and eliciting data from them". 

What do others think? Are many more of us 'fieldworkers' in Bowern's
sense than our colleagues realise?

Cheers,
Adam

-- 
Assoc. Prof. Adam Schembri, PhD
Director | National Institute for Deaf Studies and Sign Language
La Trobe University | Melbourne (Bundoora) | Victoria |  3086 | 
Australia
Tel: +61 3 9479 2887 | Fax: +61 3 9479 3074
|http://www.adamschembri.net/webpage/Welcome.html

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