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The study of language variation examines how language varies between and within different groups of speakers, shedding light on how we use language to construct identities and how social contexts affect language use. A common method is to identify instances of a certain linguistic feature - say, the zero copula construction - in a corpus, and analyze the feature’s distribution across speakers, topics, and other variables, to either gain a qualitative understanding of the feature’s function or systematically measure variation. In this paper, we explore the challenging task of automatic morphosyntactic feature detection in low-resource English varieties. We present a human-in-the-loop approach to generate and filter effective contrast sets via corpus-guided edits. We show that our approach improves feature detection for both Indian English and African American English, demonstrate how it can assist linguistic research, and release our fine-tuned models for use by other researchers.
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Collecting Texts in Endangered Language: The Chickasaw Narrative Bootcamp
While data collection early in the Americanist tradition included texts as part of the Boasian triad, later developments in the generative tradition moved away from narratives. With a resurgence of attention to texts in both linguistic theory and language documentation, the literature on methodologies is growing (i.e., Chelliah 2001, Chafe 1980, Burton & Matthewson 2015). We outline our approach to collecting Chickasaw texts in what we call a ‘narrative bootcamp.’ Chickasaw is a severely threatened language and no longer in common daily use. Facilitating narrative collection with elder fluent speakers is an important goal, as is the cultivation of second language speakers and the training of linguists and tribal language professionals. Our bootcamps meet these goals. Moreover, we show many positive outcomes to this approach, including a positive sense of language use and ‘fun’ voiced by the elders, the corpus expansion that occurs by collecting and processing narratives onsite in the workshop, and field methods training for novices. Importantly, we find the sparking of personal recollections facilitates the collection of heretofore unrecorded narrative genres in Chickasaw. This approach offers an especially fruitful way to build and expand a text corpus for small communities of highly endangered languages.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1263699
- PAR ID:
- 10039007
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Language documentation and conservation
- Volume:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 1934-5275
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 522
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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