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Paper abstract:

Keywords: Dungan, linguistic corpora, field linguistics

Based on the authors’ ongoing project on Kazakhstani Gansu Dungan, the paper argues that creating a linguistic corpus with the purpose of grammatical description and documentation of an understudied language is more accurately interpreted as a process of negotiation at the crossroads of the initial vision and adaptability into what comes up. Here, we follow Mosel’s (to appear) division of linguistic corpora into corpora of major languages and language documentation corpora, focusing only on the latter and addressing two methodological issues from the viewpoint of negotiation. First, discourse on corpora remains strongly teleological in a forward-looking sense: A linguistic need, such as documentation of a linguistic variety, is identified, and the created corpora with its scope of materials offers a solution to the issue. This, however, may be a mere ‘backwards projection’. As we will illustrate with Dungan, corpus design often evolves within the external constraints the project faces so that the end result crystallizes only post factum and not infrequently shaped even by pure serendipity. Second, the existing discourse and practice on corpus design runs the risk of both downplaying the ‘fuzzy boundaries of languages’ (see Weber and Horner 2012) and extracting idealized forms of languages. Many earlier descriptions of Dungan treat it largely as an ‘ordinary dialect of Mandarin’ (see e.g. Lin 2012), yet our documentation has shown that Kazakhstani Dungan has become a contact language intertwined with Russian where separating borrowing, code-switching, and code-mixing remains a challenge and possibly an unfruitful task. To address the issue, in the context of Dungan, we propose the notion of a ‘corpus of communicative activities’. Rather than trying to extract an essentialized ideal Dungan language, this approach embraces the everyday discourse practices of the Dungan people. It is argued that the approach is broadly applicable particularly in the multilingual Central Asian context.

References

Lin Tao (林涛). 2012.东干语调查研究 [A Study of the Dungan Language in Central Asia]. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press.

Mosel, Ulrike. To appear. Corpus building for under-researched languages: A practical guide. In Firmin Ahoua, Dafydd Gibbon, and Stavros Skopeteas. Linguistic Fieldwork and Language Documentation: A Course Book on Foundational Skills.

Weber, Jean-Jacques & Horner, Kristine. 2012. Introducing Multilingualism: A Social Approach. London and New York: Routledge.