INVESTIGADORES
GOLLUSCIO lucia Angela
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Collaborative fieldwork without a speaking community: the case of extremely endangered languages
Autor/es:
GOLLUSCIO LUCÍA
Reunión:
Workshop; Documentation of Endangered Languages (Dobes) Program Workshop; 2009
Institución organizadora:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Resumen:
Field researchers all agree on the positive results of cooperative fieldwork with a speaking community. In this paper, I focus on a less explored and often overlooked collaborative fieldwork relationship: that weaved between linguists and key consultants when documenting a dying language without a territorially-based community. These few speakers have often experienced diaspora and their invisibilization as migrants in large cities.The paper presents the results of a DoBeS-rooted field research on Vilela, an extremely endangered South American language. I focus on the retelling, recording, transcribing, translating, and annotating of a Vilela story of origin with the two elderly speakers located within the framework of the Chaco Languages DoBeS Project. This narrative, the only available piece of discourse of lenght in Vilela, was collected, transcribed (with a Spanish-oriented orthography) and not always reliably translated by a White physician in Chaco, 1889 (Llamas 1910).After describing the methodology, I examine the linguistic findings of this two-year fieldwork. In particular, I analize some phonetic-phonological features that are absent in Lozano (1970); the links of the lexicon with contemporary Vilela and new lexicon; some basic vocabulary, morphological markers and word formation resources (reduplication, nominal incorporation) that are also present in Machoni's Lule and Tonocote grammar (1732); as well as some verb sequencing and clause combination strategies. This joint research has also enabled us to better understand the fragility of Vilela's current situation in light of the painful history of these people, as poetically narrated in this story. Finally, it highlights the scientific role that the last speakers play in contributing to the knowledge of their language, the population movements, and linguistic contact in a multicultural and muntilingual area.