Summer 2022 Fieldwork by the Numbers

During June (last week) and July (the entire month) of 2022, we (Andrea, Olivia and I) did fieldwork on Cua, an endangered central Khoisan language spoken in southeastern Botswana. We did the fieldwork in Gaborone and Diphuduhudu.

This work is part of a four-year NSF grant to document Cua:

https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1760980&HistoricalAwards=false

In summer 2019, Zach and I went to Botswana and did preliminary work on Cua. That work is summarized here:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2019/08/summer-2019-fieldwork-by-numbers.html

The grant was disrupted during 2020 and 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Summer 2022 is the first year I have been able to resume the grant activities. I selected two students from NYU to help me with the research, one undergraduate student and one graduate student.

The main goal of the research in the summer 2022 was a grammatical sketch. In 2019, Zach and I had made progress on other goals (e.g., lexicon, transcribing clicks, tone, oral texts, finding consultants), so this summer I wanted to develop a solid knowledge of the basic syntax of the language.

We did not do any work with oral texts in summer 2022, and so we did not do any work with ELAN either.

In the following summary, I give the numbers characterizing our research for summer 2022:

1. 3,681 sound files of lexical items, phrases and sentences

(for a total of 5,832 sound files for 2019 and 2022).

2. 244 notebook pages of grammar and lexicon notes.

3. Rough drafts of four grammar chapters.

4. 535 new photos (for a total of 832 photos).

5. Two video interviews (76 minutes).

6. 174 new lexical items (for a total 821 lexical items in FLEx).

7. Development of five teams of consultants (2 people each).

I will comment on these items below:

1. We recorded all the words and phrases that we elicited. This procedure allows one to go back and check transcriptions. The basic methodology is given here:

http://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2017/04/recording-onto-your-computer.html

2. Two and a third notebooks were filled. The topics covered include: lexicon, PGN markers, pronouns, plural markers, imperative/subjunctive, reciprocals/reflexives, juncture morpheme, tense/aspect, negation, modality, adverbs, postpositions, coordination, passive, causative, copulas, serial verb constructions, demonstratives, adjectives, numerals, quantifiers, possessors, relative clauses, subordinate clauses and questions.

3. The four rough draft chapters are about relative clauses, possessors, pronouns and questions.

4. Most of the photos were taken by Andrea. They are mostly of our local surroundings in Diphuduhdu. We did not take dictionary photos during this trip.

5. The two video interviews were in Setswana and English (not Cua). In them, we asked two residents of Diphuduhudu about language use in Diphuduhdu.

6. All lexical items were entered into FLEx.

7. One of our explicit goals this summer was to try to develop different teams of consultants. We found that different teams have different strengths. Our core team was the Porwanes (Rre Porwane and Mma Porwane). But we also developed teams of younger speakers who brought different strengths to the work.