Seeking

two speakers of a Native language of the Americas as assistants for a linguistics course
at Georgetown University, January May 2016. 6 hours per week $18/hr.

The Department of Linguistics of Georgetown University in Washington D.C. is offering work for
two speakers of an American indigenous language during the Spring Semester 2016.

The work is as an assistant for a course called Linguistic Field Methods (description below)

Georgetown Linguistics will pay the two speakers during approximately 15 weeks for 6 hours
per week each @ $18/hr. The speakers must be fluent in a native language of the Americas (as
their maternal language) and be competent in English.

The class meets Tuesdays from 9:30am 12:30pm, and the person would also offer 3 office
hours in addition to the class time.

If interested or have questions contact Dr. Mark Sicoli: Mark.Sicoli@georgetown.edu

LING-404 Linguistic Field Methods (Spring 2016)
In this course in Linguistic Field Methods students develops skills in language documentation and
description through practical work with native speakers of a language they are unfamiliar with.
Students work to understand the structure of a non Indo-European language that is less commonly
studied in the academy. The class will involve both the elicitation of linguistic data in oral interviews
using English as a contact language, and also introducing students to more direct elicitation methods
using prompts, props, and multimedia that try to avoid coloring speakers responses by the influence of
a contact language. Students will develop skills in linguistic analysis, and in the art of crafting linguistic
descriptions that can provide for a robust corpus of language data with the richness and flexibility to
be taken up by researchers with different theoretical interests in the future. A goal of language
documentation for the field of linguistics is to provide data from as many of the 6-7000 languages of
the world that will no longer be spoken at the end of this century. Students will also focus on the
dialogic process involved in the production of linguistic knowledge by engaging speakers as a source
of utterances to study, and relying on their metalinguistic awareness, judgments, and reflection on
their language. This course also introduces students to inscription methods used in fieldwork,
including the latest technologies of audio and video recording, transcription, and digital archive
building. In the end the aim is to sharpen ones skills in linguistic analysis and in the process to
produce rich descriptions of as much of the language as possible. Prerequisites for the class are
previous courses at Ling Tier I and Tier II levels, or permission from the instructor. The course is open
to undergraduate and graduate students. The aim of the course will be to produce a grammatical
sketch of the languages phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, with grounding in the
discourses of fieldwork interactions.

Linguistics 404 will be useful to any student who foresees doing fieldwork in any area of linguistics or
wants to learn how data are collected to help inform their use of linguistic data from the academic
literature, and growing world of language archives and linguistic corpora. All students will participate
in fieldwork tasks and are expected to attend at least 1 hour of office hours per week that speakers will
schedule outside of class time. There will be frequent oral and written progress reports on the class
work, and a final report on aspects of the language. Students are encouraged to form teams to work
together on specific aspects of language that contribute to the overall representation of the language
we develop over the duration of the course.