Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

324 Ulrike Mosel
guage. Some changes, however, are definitely not caused by interference from
English (see § 5.1.1 and § 5.2.1).
In order to make sure that the edited texts were written in a way that the
community would accept, we established the following work flow:
1. recordings by the linguist and native speakers
2. transcriptions by native speakers (by hand) 1
3. checking the transcriptions by the linguist
4. reviewing the transcriptions by the linguist together with native speakers
5. writing up the corrected transcriptions by the linguist (by hand)
6. editing the transcriptions by native speakers (by hand)
7. checking edited versions by the linguist
8. reviewing the editorial work together with the editor
9. typing up transcriptions and editions in Germany by linguists
10. proofreading and making revisions on the print-outs, independently done
by two teachers
11. checking and comparing the two revisions by the linguist
12. meeting of the linguist and the teachers to discuss the revisions and decide
on the final versions
13. typing up the final versions in Germany by the linguist
14. final proofreading in Germany and printing
The two comparable subcorpora of oral and edited legends of the Teop Language
Corpus consist of 40 legends which were narrated by 25 people (12 women
and 13 men). The transcriptions contain 31,909 words, the edited versions
31,294 words. These figures are surprising; one would expect the written versions
to be much shorter than the oral ones (see Tannen 1982a: 41), because
they do not contain false starts as in (2a) and make less use of repetitions and
lengthy parataxis as in (10a). But as the examples below show, the reduction
of repetitions and the compression of clauses to nominalisations or serial verbs
(§ 5.2) is compensated by creative elaborations (§ 5.4).
4 Lexical changes
The editors consistently replace Tok Pisin or English loanwords like taem ‘time,
day’, stori ‘story’ and island by the Teop translation equivalents vuri ‘time,
1 For security reasons and because of the lack of any electricity we worked without computers
in the field until 2008.