legacy materials

[jess tauber]

Bill Poser wrote:

>The idea that one can simply gather an unanalyzed corpus
and store it away, which some people are promoting, is
I think quite fallacious.  It encourages people to bypass
the interactive data gathering and analysis that is likely
to produce the greatest insight, and all too often it seems to
be associated with projects that expend an awful lot of time and
money to obtain a very small amount of data.<

Yet this was one of the reasons a grant proposal to work with the last Yahgan speakers was rejected- the reviewer *knew* that the linguistic community had all relevant information about the language, and that further work with live speakers was useless. Even though the purpose of the fieldwork was to gather data about conversational pragmatics- sorely lacking in all of the extant archival materials.

And now, with only one speaker left, and linguists being forbidden access by her granddaughter who loathes academics, it may be too late. I'd sure like to give this anonymous reviewer a piece of my mind- and a few carefully folded fingers.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net