Universität zu Köln

Working with texts(Discourse & Conversation Analysis)

Nikolaus P. Himmelmann

Universität zu Köln & Center for Endangered Languages Documentation, UNIPA (Manokwari)

Universität zu Köln

Two major ways for collecting data in the field

• Elicitation of words or phrases (sentences), often done with structured questionnaire

• Recording and analyzing natural speech, i.e. record “texts”

Universität zu Köln

Two major types of ‘text’ data

• monologue: single speaker, e.g. narrative (folkstory, personal story, etc.), speech

• polylogue (dialogue): more than one speaker, major example: conversation (of 2, 3, 4, n people), interview

“pure” monologue rare (mostly during formal speeches), otherwise often hearer feedback (ya, mm, oh ya, etc.)

Universität zu Köln

Two major uses of ‘text’ data

• as a source for naturally occurring examples for grammatical phenomena, e.g. clause with intransitive predicate, relative clause construction, inflected verb form, order of adjective and noun, etc.

• as an object of study in itself– structure of narrative discourse: how are participants

introduced, reference tracking, episode boundaries, temporal grounding, etc.

– structure of conversational exchanges: turn taking, repair, question-answer, ending

Universität zu Köln

Ways of generating ‘text’ data

• ask people to tell a story or ask permission to record an ongoing conversation

• use of “props” (pictures, films, etc.) for people to talk about. This is particularly helpful if one wants to get comparable data from different speakers/languages.

Universität zu Köln

Widely used props

• Pear film (Chafe et al. 1980, 1994)• Frog Story• Space games• MPI Nijmegen video clips: put-series, reciprocals• QUIS-set from Uni Potsdamand many more!

ALL AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNETsee, for example, http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/

Universität zu Köln

Two major uses of ‘text’ data

• many grammatical topics best studied in context, i.e. on the basis of texts, for example:- voice alternations (when do you use dibeli,

when membeli)- use of pronouns and deictics, switch reference

systems (anaphora)- word order variation- information structure (topic, focus)- agreement