Day two of elicitation; I’ve gotten in just over two hours of work, and I’m already over an hour behind on processing the data…
I’m very happy with my informants so far. I’ve worked with three; for the purposes of this blog they’ll be J., C., and G. All three show significant dialect variation, unsurprisingly. A brief word about dialects: The language that I’ve been referring to as Twi is locally considered to be a dialect of a larger language called Akan. There are several other dialects in this family, with the largest two being what I’ve previous called Asante Twi (here, usually just Twi, but occasionally Asante – the latter is properly an ethnonym) and Fante (again, an ethnonym). The two are very close: I can already list most of the regular sound changes between the two, and have only discovered one significant grammatical difference. For the most part they’re mutually intelligible, which is as good as a test as exists for dialecthood as opposed to language-hood.
I had come intending to work on Twi, as previously mentioned, but as it turns out my various speakers so far are all more comfortable with Fante. J. and C., in particular, are not really Twi speakers at all, while G. studied Twi for about four years at the tertiary level and is thus fluent in both. G., so far, is a linguists dream to work with, in that he studied linguistics as an undergrad and can often anticipate the questions I need to ask. It’s also very rewarding because, as I discover new facts about the language, I can share my excitement with him.
I’ve only had one session each with J. and C. C. speaks the most divergent dialect – I was having a significantly hard time picking up on some of his pronunciations. J. seems to speak practically textbook Fante, and, though she has no linguistic training, is very much capable of getting right to the point of the elicitation. One of the worst problems, in elicitation, is when speakers don’t understand how to deal with ungrammaticality: Both J. and G. will readily correct me if I try to say something wrong, while C.’s response is usually to nod vigorously to show that he understood what I meant. If I’m lucky, he’ll then go on to say the sentence that I was trying to say; if not, my ungrammatical attempts will go completely uncorrected. Less than helpful.
I’m preparing for my first elicitation sessions today. I’m eager to get started – it feels like I’ve been here forever laying groundwork for this, already, and now finally I get to start.
For those who don’t know: I’m here to do fieldwork on a language called Twi, spoken by a large percentage of the population in this area of Ghana. In particular, I’m going to be working on Serial Verb Constructions (SVC) and their various forms, though obviously I’ll look into anything else interesting that comes up. SVCs are a very common cross-linguistic phenomenon that we don’t have in English at all, wherein multiple verbs are used in one sentence to express a single predicate, without any sort of subordination (if, because) or coordination (and). To give an example: The predicate “to bring” is often broken down into the verbs take come, so that the full sentence might look something like “I take book come.” to mean “I bring the book.”
There are a lot of interesting questions about SVCs in Twi that I would like to find answers for. Here are just a few:
- What semantic categories of SVC exist in Twi? Many SVCs can express, for instance, resultative (“I paint the house red.”) or sequential (“I cooked then food then ate it.”) meaning.
- How do they interact with tense/aspect marking? Which verb gets marked? How do these interact semantically with the categories above?
- How to adverbs attach to the SVC? Which verb do they modify (or can you choose)?
- How many verbs can you get in a sentence?
- How do SVCs interact with multiple-part verbs? Many verbs in Twi come in two separable parts. For instance, “to sing” is expressed as “to nyom“, lit. “throw song”; the notion of a conversation being on a particular topic is expressed as “dzina __ so” “stand __ on”, where the topic comes between the two parts.
Those are just a few of the questions I’ll be starting to look into today. This first session, though, is mostly about establishing a baseline: There are several distinct dialects of Twi, and there’s a high probability that my speakers today will speak a different one than what I’m familiar with, so I’ll have to spend some time confirming the vocabulary I already have built up.
Can’t wait to get started.
Well, as noted on Twitter, Murphy got me: Three days before I was due to leave, my computer died (a battery issue), taking with it my saved passwords. Problematic, when one wants to long into one’s blog…
But, thanks to efforts on the part of my father, I have the password again, and can begin (semi-)regular updates here (for the three of you that might possible ever check this).
So, anyhow, greetings from Accra, Ghana! I’ve spent the last three days acclimatizing, holed up in the International Students Hostel (ISH, pronounced “ish”, always, to my amusement). Up until today I’d been rather reliant on my contact at Ashesi College, who we may as well just call Auntie – enough people around here call her that anyway. The problem was, of course, that without a cellphone I was reliant on her showing up at ISH every so often; if she missed a meeting, well, then, I was out of luck.
And so today I undertook an expedition to remedy this problem; already just owning a cellphone in this country has increased my independence and hence my comfort level ten-fold. And for those of you not familiar with non-American cellphones: Phones are a hundred times more awesome outside of the US. It’s nice to finally experience first-hand how they have come to be such a disruptive technology. When you can buy a totally unlocked phone for 35 Ghana Cedi (about $28) at any one of a number of retail locations, then buy the SIM card independently from whatever street-vendor (and whatever network) you choose, and then top up minutes practically anywhere… It’s easy, cheap, ubiquitous.
Tomorrow I’ll be (hopefully) starting some music lessons on gyil, and then later on moving in with a host family. I met the family just this evening, and am greatly looking forward to spending time with them. More on this later.
(A brief technical apology: I’m deeply sorry the background color of the header image above doesn’t match the background of the page. Yes, it drives me crazy, too. No, I likely can’t do anything about it until I’m back in the States. Bah.)
Just a quick first post, to populate this blog with something. Soon, I’ll be blogging my experience doing linguistics research on Twi in Accra, Ghana, and eventually other stuff, hopefully conlang-related.