Summer School and Workshop 2011

There was an International Summer School on the "Theory and Methods of Language Documentation" in September 2011 at the University of Regensburg, Germany. The major goal of this summer school was  to introduce advanced students of linguistics (BA, MA and doctorate level of linguistics) into the theory and methods of language documentation. The goal was to acquire the knowledge and competence to conduct one's own documentation projects with regard to endangered language. Funding of this summer school has been provided mainly by the Volkswagen Foundation. Additional support came from the Vielberth Foundation of the University of Regensburg.

What is language documentation?

Language documentation has become a sub-discipline of linguistics since the mid-90ies when linguists across the continents started to look for answers against the massive disappearance of minority languages all over the world of which no records and no descriptions such as grammars and dictionaries exist. The main goal of language documentation is to create a representative corpus of recordings or texts which are presented and processed in a way that non-speakers of this language can understand these recordings and texts. These corpuses of endangered languages allow linguists and other researchers of the humanities to understand how the language was used within the specific social and cultural context of the language community even when there are no fluent speakers left in the next decades.

Language documentation and corpus linguistics?

This Summer School will include a workshop "Language Documentation meets Corpus Linguistics: how to exploit DOBES corpora for descriptive linguistics and language typology?" This workshop will take place at the end of the summer school (September 27-28, 2011). The goal of this workshop is to bring together documentation linguists and corpus linguists in order to discuss and explore the question how DOBES corpora – and there are more than 50 digital corpuses right now in the archive of the MPI in Nijmegen– can be used and exploited for descriptive (and typological) purposes by means of corpus linguistic methods. This workshop is open to all participants of the summer school. There will be a separate announcement for this workshop on the DOBES list and on LinguistList.

Where and when?

The summer school lasted 10 days (including the two days workshop) from September 19-28, 2011 at the University of Regensburg, Universitätsstrasse 31, D-93053 Regensburg.

Who and what?

The most important aspects of language documentation were covered in seminar-like teaching units which alternate in focusing on more theoretical aspects and on more practical/ technical aspects of language documentation. For most of the topics to be dealt with there were practice units which allowed students to apply the methods and tools on real language data and with real Native speakers of mostly non-Indo-European languages.

Organizers

Principal organizers were Annette Endruschat of the Institut für Romanistik and Johannes Helmbrecht, Chair of General and Comparative Linguistics.

Download Program Summer School (PDF/50kB)

Organizers

Principal organizers were Annette Endruschat of the Institut für Romanistik and Johannes Helmbrecht, Chair of General and Comparative Linguistics.

Invited speakers

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Mosel (University of Kiel)
Dr. Roland Meyer (University of Regensburg)

There was an international workshop "Language Documentation Meets Corpus Linguistics: how to exploit DOBES corpora for descriptive linguistics and language typology?" at the University of Regensburg, September 27-28, 2011.

The major goal of this workshop was to bring together documentary linguists and corpus linguists in order to explore and discover ways how DOBES corpora – and there are more than 50 digital corpora in the archive of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nimegen by now - can be automatically or semi-automatically exploited for descriptive linguistics and language typology?"

The workshop topic is a hot topic in the linguistic community – in particular among the documentary linguists who are also interested in descriptive linguistics and typology. During the last 10 years the Volkswagen Foundation has funded more than 50 documentation projects all over the world and other comparable funding initiatives e.g. in Great Britain and the US have funded large and smaller sized documentation projects as well. The results of these projects are large and digitally available data repositories containing audio and video recordings, transcribed and glossed text collections of all kinds of text genres and text types, and lexical data bases. Most of the linguists who were involved in the collection of these data are not only interested in the data collection itself, but also in language description or comparative linguistics (typology and historical linguistics). The question then arises how these corpora can be used in linguistic research.

The workshop "Language Documentation Meets Corpus Linguistics – how to exploit DOBES corpora for descriptive linguistics (and language typology?)"  addressed the following questions:

• How should a corpus look like? Principles and problems  of the creation of a representative text corpus
• What kinds of information should be included in the corpus: the question of annotations
• What kinds of searches does a descriptive linguist need?  Search procedures and possibilities
• Technical questions: how to apply corpus linguistic methods on DOBES corpora
• How reliable and significant are concordances of DOBES corpora – the unpleasant question of statistics in linguistics
• The linking of the descriptive grammar with the text corpus

Download Workshop Program (PDF/64kB)

Software

Here you can find all the software needed during the courses.

• Adobe Premiere Elements (free trial version)
• Arbil
• ELAN
• EMACS
• Fonts: Charis, Doulos
• iMovie (Mac)
• jEdit
• Praat
• Speech Recorder
• TMPGEnc (free trial version)
• Toolbox (Shoebox)
• Total Commander
• Transcriber
• Transcriber Import
• Download IPA chart

Papers (Summer School)

Here you can download the papers and material provided by the docents of the summer school.

We have collected the documents of every docent in a ZIP-archive. You need the password which has already been used during the summer school to open the documents. (To get this password simply write an e-mail to one of our student assistants.)

Marina Leiger
Johanna Spieler
Sarah Thanner
Ilenia Tonetti

This list is not completed yet.

• Drude
  Language Endangerment and Language Death (RAR/870kB)
  Language Endangerment and Language Death - Readings (RAR/482kB)
  File Management (RAR/1.1MB)
  Annotation Tool Shoebox (RAR/2.3MB)
  Annotation Tool Shoebox - Readings (RAR/1.4MB)
  Toolbox and Total Commander Files (ZIP/56kB) 
• Eschenberg, Hartmann and Jung (Revitalization) (ZIP/68MB)
  Presentation Slides (ZIP/2.7MB) 
• Ferreira and Draxler (ZIP/431MB)
• Hartmann (Lexicography) (ZIP/17MB)
  Teaching Materials (ZIP/11MB)
  Presentation Slides (ZIP/14MB)
  
• Helmbrecht (ZIP/8.1MB)
  Presentation Slides (ZIP/2.9MB)
• Jendraschek (ZIP/8.6MB)
  

• Mosel (ZIP/1.2MB)
  

• Schwiertz and Draxler (ZIP/10MB)
  New Material by Schwiertz (ZIP/875kB)
  
• Seifart (ZIP/15MB)
  Additional Material (ZIP/2.7MB)
  
• Sloetjes (ZIP/2.3MB)
• Trilsbeek (ZIP/4.3MB)
  Presentation Slides (ZIP/2.8MB)

Papers (Workshop)

Here you can find the abstracts of the workshop. You will need the same password to open the ZIP-file.

• Workshop Abstracts (ZIP/192.5kB)

Photos

A lot of participants and also the organizators of the Summer School have taken photos during their stay in Regensburg. We would like to collect all these pictures in order to provide them to all participants.

An e-mail with a link to the online album has been sent to all participants by mail. No other people have insight in this album.

If you have any problems entering the online album or want to provide additional photos please contact Johanna Spieler.