Methodology and Citation - The State Of The Art In Linguistics, SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 26/02/2016

http://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/
This seminar titled "Methodology and Citation: The State of the Art in Linguistics" was given by Lauren Gawne as part of the Linguistics Departmental Seminar Series at SOAS University of London on 17 November 2015.

Find out more about this event at http://goo.gl/09CRLc

The notion of reproducible research has received considerable attention in recent years from physical scientists, life scientists, social and behavioural scientists, and computational scientists. Within linguistics there is growing awareness of the importance of producing a coherent corpus for analysis. Within descriptive linguistics we have been encouraged to consider that data collected with documentary methods should be used to enable verification of descriptive claims based upon them (Himmelmann 1998). The last decade has provided a wealth of literature on good practice in language documentation, including (but no means limited to) Gippert, Himmelmann & Mosel (2006), Bowern (2008), Chelliah & De Reuse (2011) and Thieberger (2012). The result is that linguists in this field are more aware of good methodological practices for data collection than ever. 

In this paper I present a survey of 271 journal articles, 50 published descriptive grammars and 50 grammar-based dissertations with regard to how explicitly authors discuss their data collection methods, and what kinds of information they include. The publications surveyed are from a ten year period from 2003 to 2012. Journal articles come from nine journals selected for breadth of geography, linguistic subfield, and theoretical approach. While there are some examples of strong methodologically-driven writing, the majority of authors do not include key documentary metadata or methodological information. The result is that it is often difficult or impossible to verify or reproduce descriptive linguistic claims, making descriptive linguistics one of the few social sciences to not require researchers to back up claims with an explicit statement of methodology.

This research is part of a larger project to improve the quality of methodological description and citation of primary data in linguistics. This talk offers practical suggestions for researchers at any career stage to improve description of methodology in their own research. I also discuss ways we can improve our practice and expectations as a whole discipline.

References

Bowern, Claire. 2008. Linguistic fieldwork: a practical guide. Basingstoke [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chelliah, Shobhana L., and Willem J. De Reuse. 2011. Handbook of descriptive linguistic fieldwork. London: Springer.
Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, & Ulrike Mosel. 2006. Essentials of language documentation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. "Documentary and descriptive linguistics." Linguistics no. 36:161–195.
Thieberger, Nicholas. 2012. The Oxford handbook of linguistic fieldwork. Oxford: Oxford University Press.