1,721,056 research outputs found
"Hey bonikalaa": language contact and experiences of Swahili among rural Datooga children
No full text<p>This talk explores Datooga-speaking children's knowledge, use, and experience of Swahili in a pastoral village in the Yaeda Valley.</p>Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change. Acknowledgement and citation: Mitchell, Alice. 2019. "Hey bonikalaa": language contact and experiences of Swahili among rural Datooga children. Talk given at the Rift Valley Network Webinar Series. 15/05/2019
A First Look at Riddles and Riddling in Gisamjanga Datooga
No full textAn overview of riddles and riddling in the Gisamjanga variety of Datooga.Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change. Acknowledgement and citation: Mitchell, Alice. 2020. A First Look at Riddles and Riddling in Gisamjanga Datooga. Talk given at the Rift Valley Network Workshop "Riddles of the Rift Valley: Variation and convergence in a verbal genre". 20/11/2020
Sociolinguistic language documentation in the Rift Valley: Current practices and future prospects
No full text<p>This talk discusses the notion of “sociolinguistic language documentation” developed in Childs et al (2014) and considers its relevance for linguistic research in the Rift Valley, past, present, and future.</p>
<p>Childs, Tucker, Jeff Good & Alice Mitchell. 2014. <a href="https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/handle/10125/24601/childs.pdf">Beyond the Ancestral Code: Towards a Model for Sociolinguistic Language Documentation.</a> Language Documentation & Conservation 8. 168–191</p>Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change.
Acknowledgement and citation: Mitchell, Alice. 2020. Sociolinguistic language documentation in the Rift Valley: Current practices and future prospects. Talk given at the Rift Valley Network Webinar Series. 08/04/2020
Beyond the ancestral code: Towards a model for sociolinguistic language documentation
Full text linkLanguage documentation is prototypically characterized as the collection of records of a language which can form the basis of traditional descriptive products such as lexicons, grammars, and texts (see, e.g., Himmelmann 1998:168–171). This follows from an emphasis by linguists and speaker communities on the so-called “ancestral code”—that is, the variety that is taken to be most representative of a given community’s traditions (Woodbury 2011). By comparison, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding what kinds of documentary products are required to adequately capture sociolinguistic aspects of language use.
This paper reports on the results of a workshop exploring theoretical and applied aspects of sociolinguistic language documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). SSA is special in being characterized by high rates of multilingualism and numerous vital “small” languages, where sociolinguistically informed approaches are likely to yield useful results for academic and speaker communities. More than sixty workshop participants, from Africa and elsewhere, organized into five working groups covering the following topics: conversational data and sociolinguistic documentation, documentation of culturally significant events, how languages acquire “value” in multilingual environments, social mechanisms fostering multilingualism, and documenting the relationship between language and culture.
Among the conclusions of the working group discussions were: (i) the value of natural conversation as a way of documenting a language’s sociolinguistic setting and culture, (ii) the importance of documenting actual language use without distorting the data to make it better reflect notions of language purity (and other ideological positions), (iii) recommendations for expanded metadata collection about speakers and the recording context so that sociolinguistic configurations affecting data collection can be more adequately recorded, (iv) the necessity of establishing strong interdisciplinary partnerships when the goals of documentation go beyond structural aspects of grammar and basic lexical data, (v) that documentation including information on sociolinguistic context can usefully inform language planning decisions in ways that traditional documentation cannot, and (vi) the need for more flexible training opportunities than are presently available.
A more general conclusion of the workshop was the importance of seeing more reflexive scholarship on the goals and practices of language documentation. This is crucial if we want to ensure that commonly employed idealizations such as “speaker community” do not inappropriately lead to documentary projects focusing on selections of speech events that are not an accurate reflection of the actual practices of those individuals whose speech is being documented
Riddles of the Rift Valley: A One-Year Update
No full textThis talk provides a progress update on a collaborative project on riddling traditions in the Rift Valley that a group of RVN members have been working on for the last year or so. We outline our goals and rationale for the project, give some background about how our online collaboration has been organised, and we then present initial findings on four dimensions of our Rift Valley riddle research: (i) communicative ecologies; (ii) discourse structure; (i) grammatical and linguistic properties properties; and (iv) conceptual and stylistic features.Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change.
Acknowledgement and citation: [put the full citation by which the presentation will be referred. Use this format: Mitchell, Alice and Andrew Harvey. 2021. Riddles of the Rift Valley: A One-Year Update. Talk given at the Rift Valley Network Webinar Series. 01/12/2021
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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