http://hdl.handle.net/10125/5960 Thu, 20 Jun 2013 06:06:11 GMT 2013-06-20T06:06:11Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26197 This paper aims to share the experiences of heritage Mi’gmaq language learners who engaged in a summer Mi'gmaq-as-a-second-language class. Also participating in the class were linguists collaborating with the teachers to document and expand the multi-modal teaching method to a digital platform. In this method, teachers Mary Ann Metallic and Janice Vicaire fostered an atmosphere of equality between themselves and the students. The students were encouraged to learn horizontally from each other, as well as from the speakers around them in their day-to- day life. The method combines pictures, speaking, and minimal text in an optimally-challenging environment. The pictures encourage students to leave English outside the classroom and reduce the amount of word-to-word translation, thereby diminishing English's status as the default communicative language. There was no strict syllabus and the teachings catered to the students, focusing on material they wanted to learn. The absence of grading relieves the habitual school-related pressure to perform; students are self-motivated. This method could be extended to other Algonquian languages because of its effectiveness in simplifying polysyntheticity (see e.g. Baker 1996), and because it reflects the primarily oral status of the language in the community. The linguists made the following contributions to the program: (i) documentation of the program and adaptation into a digital platform; (ii) connecting intuitive speaker knowledge to meta- linguistic information about formal grammatical patterns; and (iii) documentation of the language for linguistic research and community interests. Linguistic research informed the data structure of the complementary digital program, developed to both complement the in-class instruction, as well as to increase accessibility for students living outside of the community. In our presentation, we introduce the method, its strengths and weaknesses as experienced by students, and provide suggestions for the implementation of such a program in your own community. Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26197 2013-02-28T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26066 The study of language began with the study of ancient written text. This practice has shaped and is still shaping our practices in language documentation. The way we conceptualise language and language use has implications for our documentary practices. We still focus on what we think can be written down and often disregard what we think cannot be written down. But, typically, when we speak, we cannot only hear each other but also see each other. Language is grounded in face-to-face interaction and speaking is a joint activity (Clark 1996). Language acquisition is a process that takes place in face-to-face contexts and our cognitive system automatically integrates both what we hear and what we see (McGurk & McDonald 1976). When we speak, we use our hands to gesture and the information provided in this visual, gestural modality is also integrated automatically in our mind. The gestures we use contribute crucially to our understanding of what speakers are communicating (Kendon 2004). Communities have developed alternate sign languages used in e.g. mourning practices (Kendon). Deaf people develop fully fledged sign languages in the manual modality (Meir et al. 2012). However, despite this basic multimodal nature of language use we often still do not document language to its full extent due to restricting our recordings to audio or restricting video recording to a few genres like story telling. In this talk I will exemplify the multimodal nature of language use, focusing on manual gesture in its various forms and functions from indexing to semantic specification, and discourse structure marking. I will discuss its implications for language documentation practices. The role of video recording and the way language use needs to be video recorded to provide useable material for linguistic and ethnographic documentation and analysis will be highlighted. A methodology for training the much needed video recording will be suggested which embeds the technical training of video technology and recording within a theoretically grounded understanding of language use. Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26066 2013-03-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26060 Kamchatka peninsula in the Far Eastern part of Russia is home to Itelmens – a small indigenous group. With a total population of 3000 people only 10 elders can converse in the Itelmen language, which belongs to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family. This paper will present an international project initiated by linguists, anthropologists and community members in order to document and preserve the Itelmen language. A central component of the project was a gathering of the speakers of the Itelmen language “Keepers of the native hearth 2012”, that was held in the summer of 2012 in Kamchatka. 30 Itelmen language enthusiasts, speakers and language learners gathered to create an Itelmen language environment, practice conversations, share their knowledge, and work on a unified audio-visual dictionary of the language. During the gathering memories about Itelmen life, life histories, knowledge about the natural environment and its use, and songs were recorded in the Itelmen language. The participants in the gathering discussed grammatical issues, orthography, dialects as well as questions of spatial terminology and deixis. The native speakers shared folk tales, watched videos, and recreated the ancient Itelmen ceremony of the first catch of salmon. “Keepers of the native hearth” were held in the early 1990s, but the purpose of those meetings was ethnographic recollections of traditional Itelmen life. This meeting gathered together the speakers of different Itelmen dialects who live far from each other and who do not have opportunities to meet and talk to each other. This specially created language environment appeared to be an effective effort for language revitalization. During just eight days of the gathering elders, who were reluctant and shy at the beginning started to converse in the Itelmen fluidly and more openly and the language learners had a chance to listen to life conversations and practice. This gathering came as a united effort of US anthropologists, US, Japanese and Russian linguists who have been working with the Itelmens for over 20 years. Community representatives – Itelmen language teachers and specialists played a major role in this event. All contributed to guiding the program and the content of the gathering. The collected materials will be used in the compilation of an audio-visual digital dictionary of the Itelmen language that will be available in the Itelmen, Russian, English and Japanese languages. Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26060 2013-03-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26196 The landscape is an important domain of human experience and activity. Ethnophysioraphy seeks to document the folk taxonomy and terminology for landscape features and components, as well as other cultural connections to land and landscape, including topophilia and sense of place. By landscape, we mean the larger components of the human environment, composed of very large features and places--features such as mountains, rivers, valleys, and forests. Voegelin and Voegelin (1957) recognized topography as a fundamental domain for language documentation. Ethnophysiography also includes landscape-scale water and vegetation features. Documenting linguistic aspects of the landscape domain is especially complicated because the landscape has few bona fide objects; rather, features are extracted from a continuous landscape in ways that themselves may vary across cultures and language. The use of ontological principles to clarify feature extraction and classification will be discussed. Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26196 2013-03-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26195 The Folk Taxonomy workshop will focus on practical collection of biological/environmental terms, and determination of effective classification systems. Several field methods will be practiced. Participants are not expected to have any background knowledge in biological or physical sciences in order to develop a reasonable level of confidence and success. Discussions will describe how to develop collaborations with topical experts and how to work effectively with such experts for mutual benefit. Additional topics that will be discussed as time permits are: Intellectual property rights, general/”universal” roles of classification, roles of evidence to support dictionaries, databases for folk taxonomy, likely ethical dilemmas, classifications for specialized categories. Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26195 2013-03-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26194 How can basic ethnobotanical skills aid linguists in the process of language documentation? Why is this important? In this course we will discuss methods that ethnobotanists use to document plant and animal names and the traditional knowledge associated with them (uses, phenological and ecological information, stories, songs, chants etc). Topics include collection of plants in the field, preparation of voucher specimens, metadata, herbaria, recording of traditional ecological knowledge, as well as a discussion of ethical issues that can arise. We will conclude with a discussion of the importance of collaborations between linguists and ethnobotanists, and the opportunities and challenges this can present. Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26194 2013-03-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26193 Oral history involves more than just turning on a tape recorder and asking an interviewee questions. Careful planning, research, listening, and establishing rapport are basic elements to a successful interview. In this class we will examine the method and value of preparing for and conducting life history interviews with people willing to ‘talk story’ about their experiences, as well as how to preserve, analyze, and disseminate these stories. Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26193 2013-03-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26192 Archived at the University of Nevada-Reno Special Collections department are the collected field materials of the late Sven Liljeblad, a Swedish folklorist who first arrived in the area of Fort Hall, Idaho in the 1940s. In work that spanned four decades, he recorded and made meticulous notes of a range of Northern Paiute and Shoshoni dialects, as well as Nez Perce. His slip files served as the primary source for the newly-published Northern Paiute-Bannock Dictionary (Liljeblad, Fowler, and Powell 2012). There remain many hours of audio recordings on various media—wire, gramophone, vinyl disc, and reel-to-reel—as well as notes, miscellany, and transcriptions in various states of completion. Most of the collection lacks basic metadata, leaving annotations and recordings in disparate areas of the archive without the benefit of cross-referencing. This paper reports on progress toward linking the audio recordings of just one body of materials—those of Northern Paiute storyteller, Pete Snapp (92 years old at the time of the ~1963 recordings)—to the available transcriptions and translations using EUDICO Linguistic Annotator (ELAN). In so doing, conceptually linked elements from different places in the archive are time-aligned in an XML format that can be archived alongside the digitized version of the audio files. One goal has been to preserve the integrity Liljeblad's work while making it accessible for in-depth study of the language by both linguists and community activists. Part of this process has involved developing tiers (annotations) for the original transcriptions, translations, and footnotes associated with the Pete Snapp Tales, while adding tiers for native listener responses, intonation units, and other previously unannotated elements of the recordings. The content of the Tales includes both traditional and historical narratives of great value to the community. An overarching goal of the project is to facilitate access to that content for members of the community. Only 13 of the more than 30 tales recorded from Pete Snapp have been found to carry any annotation whatsoever. This material has been incorporated into our ELAN database and will become a permanent part of the Liljeblad collection. The next obvious step in the digital re-documentation process will be to provide more complete annotations for all the Tales, with the help of native speakers and local technical assistants, and to migrate the materials into a searchable database from which lexical and grammatical information can be found and used. Liljeblad, Sven S., Catherine S. Fowler, and Glenda Powell. 2012. Northern Paiute-Bannock Dictionary. University of Utah Press. Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26192 2013-03-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26191 Arbil is a tool developed at The Language Archive at MPI-PL (Author, 2012) for creating metadata that describes research data, such as audio or video files, allowing research data files to be easily searched once they are archived. Arbil was originally developed for the DOBES community to replace the IMDI Editor. The core needs expressed by this group was viewing and editing the metadata when in the field and being able to edit more than one metadata file at once. Indeed, Arbil is fully functional offline, provides tabular editing, and for robustness stores only text metadata files. For moving metadata and associated resources into an LAT archive, the structure is exported from Arbil and then uploaded into LAMUS (Broeder et al., 2006). Arbil was originally designed for IMDI metadata (Broeder and Wittenburg, 2006). This format has been in use for many years, and it has many fields so that it covers most needs, but also may confuse researchers and slow down the workflow with many fields to fill in. This issue has been addressed by CLARIN (Váradi et al., 2008). CLARIN provides flexible metadata fields, allowing a custom profile to be designed for each project - only the relevant metadata fields need to be offered to the end user, greatly simplifying the process of creating metadata. Arbil has now been updated to support both IMDI and Clarin metadata formats. Some users prefer to use a web application to view and edit their metadata. Many of the workflow concepts used in Arbil apply in a web environment as much as they do in the well-known desktop application. For this reason the concepts and components within Arbil are being adapted for use as modules in both environments such as the metadata table and the metadata profiles used in CLARIN metadata. This will pave the way to greater flexibility in tools such as LAMUS. Because of the flexible design of Arbil, some of its components such as the metadata table have been utilised in KinOath Kinship Archiver (Author, 2011). This application builds on the core functions of Arbil, onto which it adds an XML database to provide fast searches. Also, a plugin layer has been introduced which is being migrated back into Arbil. Therefore there will be much more powerful searches available as plugins without compromising the original design of the application. References Author. 2012. Metadata Management with Arbil. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference On Language Resources And Evaluation (LREC 2012) Satellite Workshops, pages 72–75. Istanbul. http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/ 11.LREC2012%20Metadata%20Proceedings.pdf Author. 2011. KinOath, Kinship Software Beta Stage of Development. Talk presented at Atelier d’initiation au traitement informatique de la parenté. salle 3, RdC, bât. Le France. 2011-12-16. D. Broeder and P. Wittenburg. 2006. The IMDI metadata framework, its current application and future direction. International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 1(2), pages 119–132. T. Váradi, S. Krauwer, P. Wittenburg, M. Wynne, and K. Koskenniemi. 2008. Clarin: Common language resources and technology infrastructure. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’08), pages 1244–1248, Marrakech. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/ pdf/317_paper.pdf. D. Broeder, A. Claus, F. Offenga, R. Skiba, P. Trilsbeek, and P. Wittenburg. 2006. LAMUS : the Language Archive Management and Upload System. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), pages 2291–2294, Genoa. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). www.lat-mpi.eu/papers/papers- 2006/lamus-paper- final2.pdf. Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26191 2013-03-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26190 Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic, iso‐639‐3 kal) is an Inuit language spoken in Greenland and is the official language of the country. In this presentation we discuss a collaborative project initiated by the Greenland Language Secretariat (Oqaasileriffik) to create a bilingual Kalaallisut‐English dictionary, aimed at two groups of users, Kalaallisut speakers who are learning English and English speakers learning Kalaallisut. We discuss the content and format of the dictionary, the underlying principles upon which it is being created, and the collaborative process itself. This collaborative project involves researchers from Greenland and the US. The dictionary, intended to include something in the order of 25,000‐35,000 entries, aims to provide the necessary information for both sets of users to both comprehend and produce both languages. The two languages are typologically distinct and there is limited correspondence between what counts as a word in each language. Kalaallisut is highly polysynthetic with very productive derivational and inflectional morphology, providing challenges for what constitutes a lexical entry versus which forms are one‐off creations by speakers. Language learners need information not only about word meaning, but also about “word” creation. By the same token, much of the grammatical information included in English words is encoded in Kalaallisut suffixes, providing challenges for Kalaallisut speakers learning English. The team began its work by establishing a core set of principles including: 1. The dictionary is based on the modern standard language, as currently spoken, with all entries approved by the Greenland Language Council (Oqaasiliortut). 2. The dictionary is usage‐driven. 3. The dictionary does not replace a reference grammar but provides an internal word grammar, i.e., it includes necessary and sufficient information for a user to generate correct word forms in both languages. 4. Irregular, unpredictable or otherwise not transparent forms need to be included. 5. The dictionary should include all necessary information for proper usage such as collocations, style and register information These principles are illustrated with sample entries from both languages. Entries are created through a collaborative process, but final approval of all material rests with Oqaasiliortut, the Language Council, which is part of the Greenland Self‐ Government. This particular project illustrates not only the importance of the concrete linguistic entries, but also the significance of the collaborative process of dictionary making, and the approval process, which is controlled by the local government. Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26190 2013-03-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26189 Conference program for the 3rd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation. Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26189 2013-02-28T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26188 Kaipuleohone is the University of Hawai‘i digital archive for audio and video recordings as well as photographs, notes, dictionaries, transcriptions, and other materials related to small and endangered languages. It was founded in 2007 to address the need for a dedicated repository for language data collected by researchers affiliated with UH. Since its inception the archive has digitized, described, and safely housed several hundred language recordings, including the personal collections of renowned linguists Derek Bickerton and Robert Blust. Kaipuleohone conforms to international standards for digital archives and is a member of the Open Language Archives Community. Digital files are stored at high resolution and are curated by ScholarSpace, the DSpace repository of UHM. Metadata conforms to the standards of OLAC, Open Archives Initiative, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. This poster presents four aspects of Kaipuleohone: the history of the archive, the details of the current collection, the archive’s ties to the ongoing academic program at UH and the Language Documentation Training Center, and future plans to expand the archive’s outreach mission to language communities in the Asia-Pacific region. Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26188 2013-03-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26187 Closing ceremony of the 3rd ICLDC, including comments by Andrea Berez, Victoria Anderson, Lyle Campbell and William O'Grady. Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26187 2013-03-03T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26186 Captain and navigator of renowned Hawaiian voyaging canoes, Chad Kālepa Baybayan presents on the history of deep-sea voyaging, exploration, and oceanic wayfinding, the indigenous system of orientation and navigation at sea. He also talks about the efforts to use these experiences to revitalize a once dynamic maritime culture by educating through a native world view, beginning with learning using the language of the host culture, as well as steering connections through an experience that explains the symbiotic relationship between land, sea, sky, science, and culture. Introduction by Larry Kimura. Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26186 2013-03-03T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26185 Opening ceremony of the 3rd ICLDC, including opening oli by Lokelani Ferguson; remarks by Andrea L. Berez, Victoria Anderson (conference co-chairs), Chancellor Tom Apple, Vice Chancellor Brian Taylor, Associate Dean Kimi Kondo-Brown, NFLRC Director JD Brown, and Linguistics Chair Kenneth Rehg. Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26185 2013-02-28T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26184 There are many reasons to see linguistics and biology as connected sister fields. Both draw their inspiration from the stunning diversity in their respective worlds, developing evolutionary accounts of change and diversification, and the dialogue between historical linguistics and evolutionary biology has been going on since the famous correspondence between Darwin and Schleicher. in the 1860s. A substantial part of any language is devoted to the description of biological phenomena, so that we cannot give a complete account of how any language functions without examining how it represents these in its vocabulary, grammar and phraseology. And, in an era when there is increasing appreciation of how much small-scale speech communities know about the natural world that have yet to be ‘discovered’ by mainstream biology, the study of little-documented languages is a natural key to unlocking the full dimensions of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Despite the natural affinity between these two fields, the potential for fruitful collaboration has waned in recent decades. Compared to the heyday of interaction from the 1960s to the early 1980s, when studies of ethnobiological terminology flourished under the aegis of Berlin and his colleagues, representative journals like Ethnobiology now contained negligible amounts of linguistic material. A possible explanation for this is that the Berlinian paradigm for the ethnobiology/linguistics connection became so focussed on its own ‘taxonomocentric’ set of questions – about universals of folk taxonomic structure, and about the relations of linguistic categories at various levels to those found in the natural world – that a whole series of other research questions were put aside. In this talk I will resuscitate a number of these, illustrating my argument with examples drawn from fieldwork in northern Australia and southern New Guinea. These include: (a) the use of non-morphological criteria in constructing categories, including similaries of sound (bird calls), behaviour (bird nesting patterns), gait (kangaroos and wallabies) and cosociality (some bird sps) (b) ecological relations, including habitat, diet, succession (c) behaviour, including cache defence, mating, migration and nesting (d) utility for humans, including food, medicine, material for manufacture, but also as information signalling (e.g. birds, insects, ‘calendar flowers’), route guides and fire management The above topics are organised by type of information, but while discussing them I will also investigate the linguistic dimension of how this is encoded, including the use of gait verbs, reduplication, various types of derivational morphology in nouns, and ‘sign metonymies’ signalled by gender alternations. By examining the coevolution of human knowledge about the natural world, and the linguistic means for expressing it, I will show that the two fields of linguistics and ethnobiology are ripe for reengagement across a broad range of questions. As McClatchey (2012:297) has put it: "The ethnobiologists and other scientists are waiting for the linguists to call." Introduced by Nicholas Thieberger Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26184 2013-02-28T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26183 Kinship -- the relations of nurturance and belonging forged in the course of reproducing human communities -- is central linguistic and cultural conservation. A cultural/linguistic phenomenon to be sustained in its own right, it is also an important context to be aware of when doing linguistic work. This masterclass will cover basic information necessary to study and study within kinship systems. First, we will cover 'classic' kinship theory, including classic taxonomies of kinship terminology (especially 'Hawaiian', 'Eskimo' and 'Iroquois' and 'Omaha' systems -- the most common systems), how to create well-formed kinship diagrams (the 'circles' and 'triangles' approach) as well as shorthand notation for kinship systems. We will also discuss the standard method for eliciting kinship systems, how best to record genealogical information in the field, and some tips on the practicalities of kinship research. Finally, we will discuss special topics you might encounter in the field -- specialized terms for siblings, dealing with taboos on the names of the dead, teknonymy, ethnonyms, specialized terms for residence, avoidance terms, and so forth. In the second half of the class we will cover current theory in kinship. Advances in anthropological theory have replaced traditional theories of kinship with a more generalized theory of relationality -- how human beings create social relationships more broadly. A brief introduction to this work will help familiarize you with forms of relatedness that might not look like 'kinship' in the standard Western sense but which are still an integral part of social relations (joking avoidance partnerships, milk brotherhood, etc.). Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26183 2013-02-28T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26182 Music in one or another of its myriad and constantly developing forms is found in all known human cultures. This workshop will provide a broad overview of the closely interwined human capacities for music and language, areas of disciplinary overlap (and disjunction) between (ethno)musicology and linguistics, and a summary of the academic history of (ethno)musicology. We will also discuss methods and tools for musicological documentation, and workflows for creating, documenting, annotating and providing local access to musical recordings created during fieldwork. Prospective participants are invited to contact the presenter beforehand with any particular questions they may wish to discuss with the group, and come prepared to share aspects of their actual or planned research pertaining to music and other performing arts. Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26182 2013-03-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26181 A crucial goal in language development, particularly for community-based planning, is determining which type of development activities and products could contribute most effectively to language revitalization. Lewis and Simons (2011) propose a tool for projecting effective language development known as the Sustainable Use Model (henceforth SUM). In this paper, we use SUM to evaluate language development activities among the Tsakhur of Azerbaijan, who are split between communities with stable orality and those experiencing some disruption in intergenerational language transmission. This paper focuses on the work of a group of concerned individuals in Tsakhur communities where the language is most viable. SUM evaluates language vitality based on the Extended Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (Lewis and Simons 2010), an adaptation of Fishman’s GIDS (1991), and identifies five types of societal conditions—functions, acquisition, motivation, environment, and differentiation—inherent to each level. According to this model, language development activities should be designed to address specific conditions of a given vitality level in order for the language to progress to the next level. The communities we examine exhibit conditions typical of sustainable orality. Tsakhur functions as the primary means of oral communication and is acquired by children at home, while written communication is in Azeri and Russian. The community understands the benefits of oral language for cultural identity, but lacks motivation for using written language, even though government policy supports language development. Current language development efforts focus on literacy and addressing the fear of diminishing oral transmission. In addition to formal literacy development, community members, with the help of an international development organization, are addressing motivations for written and oral use of Tsakhur by focusing on products promoting cultural identity, such as a book of proverbs, a recipe book, and a film about coming of age. They are also beginning to explore digital media literacy products, such as websites and texting. Our evaluation using the Sustainable Use Model affirms that products enhancing cultural identity are appropriate for the community’s level of language vitality, but that, in order to motivate the next childbearing generation to transmit oral language and to use literacy, more language products should be targeting adolescents and young adults. We further propose that SUM will be a useful tool for the Tsakhur and other communities to understand how societal conditions relate to language vitality, predict the effectiveness of specific development activities, and make effective decisions about future activities and products. Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26181 2013-02-28T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26180 The interlinear glossed text (IGT) is a complex object, the complexity of its structure depending on factors such as origin, intended use, languages involved etc. Developing tools and workflows for integrated linguistic analysis environments calls for particular attention to those aspects which in many common cases can be disregarded as insignificant; thus, collaborating for ELAN–FLEx integration was particularly motivating for this paper. IGT is often conceived of as a tree: the root node corresponds to the whole text, subdivided into smaller units (sentences, words, morphemes). Each unit has a number of associated annotations, generally one per information type, like sentence translation, part-of-speech label, morpheme gloss. However, an IGT can easily amount to a large set of trees. Unresolved ambiguities of all kinds are one reason for it. Each pair of alternative analyses (e.g. two concurrent parses of a word) implies two distinct trees, identical except for the node in question and all its descendants. The more ambiguities arise, the more underlying trees should be posited. Still, all trees in such a tree family stem from a single analyzed object (transcript, original orthographic representation). Storing entire trees for each combination of relevant alternatives being utterly inefficient, a more compact storage model is needed. Turning to the media dimension, an accurate transcript of a spontaneous discourse is most often unsuitable for a grammatical analysis without some preprocessing (normalization) dealing with various speech errors, incomprehensible fragments etc. to produce a grammatically correct and coherent text for subsequent grammatical analysis – whereas the “raw” transcript feeds phonological and possibly discourse analysis. We thus get two distinct texts, interconnected but giving rise to independent (families of) analysis trees; only one of them is linked directly to the media timeline. In some scenarios, more than one media-based timeline emerge which need to be interlinked (cf. BOLD framework: sound annotations to sound events; retelling experiments, e.g. pear stories; sign languages translated from/into spoken languages). The reference axis may not be properly a timeline (text, path through a complex graphic image). One should mention further complicating factors such as multi-speaker and multi-lingual settings, collaboration and versioning. The overall structure (an XML sketch will be presented) might grow unreasonably complex for any specialized analysis component to handle. It may thus be efficient to use an intermediate repository, e.g. a unified underlying RDF representation [Nakhimovsky et al. 2012], to which all changes made in specific tools are merged. References Bow, Cathy, Baden Hughes and Steven Bird. 2003. Towards a General Model of Interlinear Text. Nakhimovsky, Alexander, Jeff Good, Tom Myers. 2012. Interoperability of Language Documentation Tools and Materials for Local Communities // Digital Humanities 2012. Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26180 2013-03-01T00:00:00Z