Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

Introduction 7
Beyond
Evans analyzes three multilingual narratives recorded in northern Australia,
arranged on an increasing scale of linguistic difference (sister dialects, closelyrelated
languages, unrelated languages). He examines the functions that such
heteroglossia plays in the hands of accomplished storytellers, including framing,
locale, and identification of the author of quotations. His paper concludes
by examining the possible role of embedded multilingual material in keeping
alive textual passages from languages that have otherwise been forgotten, and
calling for more principled and far-reaching documentation of these virtuosic
multilingual practices.
Mosel examines the process of putting oral narratives into writing, within the
framework of the Teop documentation project. Teop is an Oceanic language
spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. While previous research on the
contrast between written and spoken European languages takes the written
language as the point of departure and focuses on the question of what is
special about the spoken language (e.g. Miller and Fernández-Vest 2006), Mosel’s
investigation asks what the editors actually do when putting the oral narratives
into writing and thus tries to understand the metalinguistic process of
rewording the content of spoken narratives. The author concludes that the editorial
work goes beyond the goal of producing reading materials. It is useful
for both language maintenance (especially supporting the preservation of the
vernacular lexicon and grammar, and thus the expressive potential of the language)
and scientific purposes.
Stilo describes his project Atlas of the Araxes-Iran Linguistic Area. It covers a
highly diverse area in the Middle East, involving heavy contact phenomena
and a multitude of shared isoglosses among some 70 languages/dialects from
six language families and genera: Kartvelian, Armenian, Turkic, Iranian, Semitic,
and Daghestanian. Some 350 phonetic, morphological, syntactic and
lexical features are covered. The paper includes examples of selected features
with isoglosses on the map showing the distribution of each feature. It demonstrates
how a flexible database can be applied as a template for other complex
linguistic areas − the Gran Chaco or Amazonia, among others.
References
Crevels, Mily & Hein van der Voort. 2008. The Guaporé-Mamoré region as a linguistic area.
In Pieter Muysken (ed.), From linguistic areas to areal linguistics (Studies in Language
Companion Series 90), 151–179. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.