Putting Fieldwork on Indigenous Languages to New Uses is a São Paulo School on Advanced Sciences, supported by the São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP), and will be held from March 21th to April 6th, at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.
The purpose of this school is twofold: (i) to introduce early career researchers to the latest developments in data collection and linguistic research on native languages, and (ii) to pave the way for new uses of linguistic fieldwork, with mutual benefits for both linguists and the indigenous populations. Drawing on the vast experience of the researchers of the several partner institutions in documentation, corpus linguistics and formal linguistic theory, we will present/discuss possibilities not previously pursued: extensive comparison across native languages to build taxonomies and phylogenetic models of transmission, oral corpora and a new objective and unbiased grammatical terminology, reflecting the speakers' original intuitions and potentially revealing truly universal building blocks of language and cognition. All these new tools should feed into literacy projects for the local communities, raising their own meta-linguistic and cultural awareness (in a non-intrusive way).
We expect students form several universities of Brazil, Argentina, Great-Britain, Australia and United States to attend, resulting in about 100 students.
Courses:
— Languages and cultures of Brazil
— Introduction to phylogetic methods in Linguistics
— How to work on digital oral corpora syntactic annotation
— Experimental and computational methods in Phonology and Morphology
— Music, Language, and Documentation in Australia
— Experimental semantics, number and language
The workshop is mainly directed to postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students. Master's degree students are also invited to apply, although their acceptance is not prioritary. In order to apply for attendance, an abstract for a poster presentation is requested.
Participants with approved works will be provided flight tickets to the workshop city (Campinas).
The workshop welcomes works on indigenous languages in any subfield of linguistics, being it formal or functional, theoretical or experimental. Abstracts will be evaluated by two members of the organizing committee according to the following criteria: relevance of the topic, presence of theoretical orientation, proper research design, results, textual features and contribution to the field.
Abstracts should be no more than 1 page, minimum 12pt size font and 1 inch margins. Abstract submissions should be sent through EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pfilnu2016).
Additionally, please submit to our email (pfilnu@gmail.com) the following documents:
a) A letter of intention
b) A university transcript
c) Your CV
Submissions deadline: 15-February-2016
For more information, go here.
