Help with documentation

[Haley De Korne]

Hi Dale, 
Great, great question!  
What comes to mind is that socioling theory has produced useful models like 'participation frameworks' (Goffman), 'speech event' (Jakobson) & 'ethnography of speaking' (Hymes), among others.  I'm not aware of any taxonomies though (and what with the infinite range/ creativity of language, any taxonomy would be incomplete anyways I should think, and probably very culturally relative).

Something like Hymes' 'SPEAKING' model (Wikipedia's summary of this ain't half bad, if you're not already familiar with it (and pressed for time, which I guess you are): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Hymes#The_.22S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G.22_model) might be a basis from which to categorize or even elicit a range of communicative events.

If you wind up making your own 'massive list' or model I'd love to see what you come up with!
All the best for your great (as usual) work,
Haley




--- On Sun, 4/3/11, Dale McCreery <mccreery at UVIC.CA> wrote:

From: Dale McCreery <mccreery at UVIC.CA>
Subject: [ILAT] Help with documentation
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Date: Sunday, April 3, 2011, 12:34 AM

Hello ILAT,

I have a question for all of you.  First, some background.

For the last two months I've been working documenting the Sgüüx̱s
language, or South Tsimshian so that they can eventually teach it locally.
 By the end of April I will have worked through a Coast Tsimshian
dictionary looking for cognates, and will have gone through the Dictionary
Development Process template from SIL recording not just vocabulary, but
everything that I can think of in terms of ways of expressing concepts
without specific vocabulary, work-arounds for things that aren't common,
different ways to use words, etc.  As we work we're also getting an idea
of groups of vocabulary, and common ways of saying things, and trying to
expand on those.

That said, even though I suspect that by the end of the month we'll have
as much of the vocabulary of the language, both roots and set phrases
 etc)
as the elder will be able to give us with the methods we're using, I feel
there's a gap in our documenting that we need to fill if at all possible.

While we've been able to get quite a few of what I call conversation
scripts - the normal way to introduce yourself, the whole conversation,
the way to give and accept gifts, a lot of set phrases for speeches, and
things like that, I think that there are so many other conversations that
we really have missed, and just from our conversations in English I get
the impression that a lot of these common social encounters are handled
quite differently by speakers of Tsimshian.

So - Is there something like a massive list of common types of social
interactions, or a textbook I could find that would teach me how to
recognize them in a language, and how to go about documenting them? Sort
of like a list of semantic domains, but for conversations?

We only have
 one speaker left, and she is 97, so I really want to make the
absolute best use of our time recording together.

Thank you all in advance for any advice you might have!

Dale McCreery
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