Linguistic Fieldwork ― A Practical Guide

Linguistic Fieldwork is a practical guide to all the steps in linguistic fieldwork, from planning where to go to applying for funding, to the first session on a new language to writing up the data and returning materials to communities. Field research is not like working in the lab with chemicals: both the field worker and their consultants are real people who interact in complex ways. Claire Bowern offers practical advice for negotiating those interactions in a way that produces research which is of benefit both to linguists and to language speakers, with extra guidance for those working with endangered languages. This revised and expanded second edition provides new content on the results of research, on prosody elicitation, on field experiment design, and on working in complex syntax.

Claire Bowern is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Yale University, USA. She is a field and historical linguist with a focus on the highly endangered languages of Northern Australia. She is past Chair of the Linguistic Society of America's Ethics Committee and Associate Editor at Language.