Idi Field Methods, LSA Linguistic Institute

This course was an introduction to linguistic field methods offered at the Linguistics Society of America's Summer Institute in 2011, held in Boulder, Colorado.

Language Consultant: Wasang Baiio

The class worked from scratch with a speaker of the Idi language, spoken in Western Province, Papua New Guinea. The students had one month to discover as much as possible about the structure of the language, at all levels - phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic - through a combination of structured questioning and working with texts that were recorded from the speaker. The emphasis was on how to discover the systematicity of an unknown language on its own terms, through asking the right questions as its architecture gradually emerges. By the end of the course the goal was to present a collective mini-description of the language with accompanying archived materials.