Field Project Report 2 for Ling 600.01 Phonetic Theory
Report due by 1:00 on Monday of Week 4 if you want feedback and otherwise at the beginning of class on Tuesday of Week 4.
This report on "typical word shapes" should be about one or (at most) two single-spaced pages.
Provide a description of the "typical" word of the language and the range of word lengths observed. Begin your description by making an organized list of all the words that you have elicited and successfully transcribed to date, arranged in columns by length in number of syllables, and in rows by length in number of "segments" (where "segment" is defined by major class features). Below the description write a few sentences describing how you came up with the table, and a summary statement of what it tells you about typical words of the languages. You can see an example report from a hypothetical field project using an unidentified speaker of one variety of American English here.
One way to go about figuring out the word lengths is to go through the forms you elicited in the first two sessions, and weed out those that seem obviously to be phrases rather than words. Then analyze the remaining words in terms the same major class features that we used in the take-home lab exercise. Apply the same principles to come up with an initial guess about the number of syllables. Then in the next session, query your consultant, eliciting judgments about the number of syllables and the syllable boundaries. You may be able to elicit these judgments directly, if your consultant has a clear idea of what a syllable is in his or her language. Alternatively, you might ask your consultant to repeat each word back to you, pausing between its "parts". You can illustrate this using English examples such as sit (has only one part [sɪt], which I can't divide), sister (has two parts, [sɪs] + [tə]), assistant (has three parts [ə] + [sɪs] + [tnt]).
After you have done this, you can then ask yourself the questions: Did the consultant give consistent answers regarding the syllable counts? What about the consultant's answers about syllable boundaries? Were these consistent as well? If the answer is "yes", indicate syllable boundaries in the transcription. Otherwise, be content with syllable counts, as illustrated in the example report from a hypothetical field project for American English.