[Lingtyp] Query: Approaches to genre/register analysis in under-documented oral-culture languages

[Paolo Ramat]

Hi Alexander (+ others),
you write "I'm curious if there have been focused efforts along these lines
for under-documented/minority/low resource languages that don't have much
in the way of a written tradition" . Europe is plenty of minority (and
partially endangered) languages that only in the last decades have
experienced a (partial) revival and are still under-documented but rich in
oral tradition.
I'm familiar with the Italian situation: minority languages have been
officially recognized by the State. From Google, s.v. 'minoranze
linguistiche in Italia':
 Le minoranze linguistiche riconosciute e *tutelate dalla legge* sono
dodici: lingue delle popolazioni albanesi, catalane, germaniche, greche,
slovene e croate e di quelle parlanti il francese, il franco-provenzale, il
friulano, il ladino, l'occitano e il sardo
Of course, the sociolinguistic status of these minorities may be very
different:Occitan and Greek, Slovenian and Croatian are nowadays spoken by
a very restricted number of people, whereas Sardinian (with its varieties)
is --more or less-- 'spoken' by 1.500.000 individuals.
You'll find the same situation in France, Germany, Spain etc.
What I want to say is that not only Atong, Andamanese, Akawaian etc.
present the  situation you are looking for. The (mostly) European
Dialectology has a long tradition of studies dealing with the kind of
problems you refer to.
Best,
Paolo

Prof. Dr. Paolo Ramat
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Socio corrispondente
'Academia Europaea'
'Societas Linguistica Europaea', Honorary Member
Università di Pavia (retired)
Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS Pavia) (retired)

piazzetta Arduino 11 - I 27100 Pavia
##39 0382 27027
347 044 98 44


Il giorno gio 20 apr 2023 alle ore 08:21 Anvita Abbi <anvitaabbi at gmail.com>
ha scritto:

> Randy Lapolla is very right. I found a very distinct past tense marker in
> narration which was absent from my grammar data bank. Examples are given in
> the sources I cited in my earlier mail.
> Anvita
>
> On Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 10:44 AM Randy LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Alex,
>> It is important when doing fieldwork or working on any natural language
>> data to look at different genre, as the grammatical patterns can be quite
>> different. A famous example is Hopper and Thompson’s famous 1980 paper on
>> transitivity, which was based only on narratives. They later (2001)
>> published a second paper in which they reported looking at conversation,
>> and found the generalizations they posited in 1980 only held for narrative.
>>
>> In my own fieldwork I had found that procedural texts often show
>> different patterns from narratives and conversations.  In the attached file
>> I give some examples.
>>
>> All the best,
>> Randy LaPolla
>>
>>
>>
>> On Apr 20, 2023, at 2:38 AM, Alexander Rice <ax.h.rice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> Howdy folks
>>
>> A good bit of the ink that gets spilled in corpus linguistics is spent on
>> sussing out lexical and structural correlates of *written* genres and
>> registers in English (and, I would guess, other western-European majority
>> languages), e.g., Biber and Conrad's: *Register, Genre, and Style*
>> (2009).
>>
>> I'm curious if there have been focused efforts along these lines for
>> under-documented/minority/low resource languages that don't have much in
>> the way of a written tradition.
>>
>> Say you have a minority language community that does a lot of oral
>> storytelling, the kinds of stories they tell might be grouped in genres
>> based on the content of said stories (such as creation stories vs. personal
>> life experience stories), and you want to see if perhaps certain
>> lexico-syntactic, phonetic, or discourse phenomena might be more typical in
>> one of the type of story compared to the other.
>>
>> If you've done work like this, or have come across work of this type, I'd
>> be very appreciative of any references you might have.
>>
>> best,
>> --Alex
>>
>> --
>> Alexander Rice, (he, him, his)
>> <https://www.su.ualberta.ca/services/thelanding/learn/pronouns/>, Doctoral
>> Candidate
>> Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta
>> 3-27 Assiniboia Hall
>> https://sites.google.com/view/arice
>>
>>
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