Worksheet for Syntactic Fieldwork

The purpose of this blog post is to present a general template for a syntactic fieldwork session. I will not talk specifically about syntactic elicitation, or methodology or particular constructions that you could investigate. 

The intended audience is anybody (graduate students, undergraduate students, faculty) who plans to do syntactic fieldwork. In principle, you should have a plan for each fieldwork session (e.g., July 12, 2026, morning). In a separate blog post, I give a sample worksheet as a model. 

1. Metadata

Metadata is information about data. One purpose is to help you to contextualize your data when you revisit it years later. Another purpose is to help you to archive it, because most archives (e.g., ELAR) require basic metadata. Generally, the more information, the better. You may not have to include all the information on every worksheet, if it is constant for the whole field trip (e.g., language, place). Here are some fields that you should consider including:

Session: date, time, length of session

Place: country, town, specific location 

Languages: language being studied, language of communication

Participants: consultants, translator, visitors, names, genders, approximate ages, 

Technical: audio and video equipment, settings, any relevant software (Praat, ELAN, FLEx)

2. Topic

Your topic should be a phrase that indicates what you intend to look at on that day. Here are some examples:

a. Subject relative clauses.

b. Serial verb constructions.

c. Temporal adverbs.

d. Logophoric pronouns.

e. Subject pronouns.

f. Relative clause constructions.

3. Methodology

There are many different ways of obtaining syntactic data. How are you going to obtain your data? Are you going to be looking at examples that you have transcribed in oral texts? Are you going to be using pictures or storyboards or other visual stimuli to elicit data? Are you going to use a translation task (translate from Setswana to Cua)? Will you be using a standard questionnaire designed specifically for your topic? Will you be eliciting acceptability judgments? Here are some possible methodologies that you could list:

a. Transcribing and translating oral texts.

b. Investigating constructions from oral texts.

c. Translation task (e.g., from Setswana into Cua).

d. Back-translation task (e.g., from Cua back into Setswana).

e. Acceptability judgment task.

f. Truth-value judgment task.

g. Storyboard-based elicitation.

h. Visual stimuli-based elicitation.

i. Standard questionnaire.

j. Question-response elicitation.

4. Research Questions

This is a broad category that includes generalizations you are working on, the hypotheses you are testing, the theoretical questions you are trying to address, the diagnostics that you are applying and also the kinds of syntactic variables that you will be looking at. For example, if you are looking at relative clauses, you may have found that subject relatives are formed differently from object relatives, so you want to get further data to illustrate this difference in order to understand it better. As part of that investigation, you may want to look at both singular and plural number marking on the heads of relative clauses.

5. Detailed Session Plan

The detailed session plan will depend on the descriptions you have given above in (1-4) in metadata, topic, methodology, and research questions. Assuming that you will be doing some syntactic elicitation, the following questions are relevant: What are the specific sentences that you will be looking at? What kinds of minimal pairs do you want to establish? What are the contexts that you will use to elicit those sentences? That is, you should list the specific stimuli that you will use in as much detail as possible. 

But you should also be prepared for serendipitous discoveries and unexpected dead ends. You should be flexible enough to handle whatever comes your way. If you make an interesting and unexpected discovery in the middle of your session, take time to record and investigate it.