Fieldwork

I conduct fieldwork on Na (a.k.a. Naxi, Moso, Mosuo), a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in China.

Fieldwork is an exceptional personal experience. From a scientific point of view, "field phonetics" offers an opportunity to take the phonetics lab to the field, to the places where the languages at issue are spoken, instead of bringing the languages into the laboratory. Fieldwork does have special constraints; it also has major advantages. It allows for an observation of day-to-day interactions among native speakers, and also allows the investigator to evaluate with some precision the effect of language contact/bilingualism on the speakers who serve as language consultants. The observations suggested by observation by ear (especially during the transcription of narratives) can be put to the test without delay, setting up focussed phonetic experiments. Designing experiments to capture fine aspects of the linguistic competence of subjects who are unfamiliar with tests of all kinds proves feasible, and very useful for making headway in research. It is also possible to collect, week after week, sizeable corpora of excellent quality, using state-of-the-art equipment that used to be available only in phonetics laboratories. Long recordings of continuous speech (the story of the speaker's life, folk tales, episodes of the life of the village) have been realised while the speaker was carrying the electrodes of a glottograph, or a ferromagnetic transductor (placed on one nostril, to study nasality), without any difficulty, due to the fact that the speakers had had the time to get accustomed to these somewhat impressive but fully innocuous techniques. The materials thus collected lend themselves to an approach that makes use of the tools (e.g. statistical tools) developed for the study of large corpora of the better-known languages (national languages, such as English, Spanish, German, Chinese, French, Italian, etc.). Field linguistics gives an extremely broad perspective on various branches of linguistics. It enables the researcher to relativise debates such as those of phonetics and phonology, two disciplines whose tête-à-tête is sometimes too exclusive to be really fruitful.

You can consult (in French) the 2002 report of an "Innovating Project" supported by Université Paris 3: "First-hand research on rare languages", as well as the 2003 report.

Village of A Ser	Village of Fengke	Village of Yongning	Laze language	Naxi schools

Fieldwork on the Na language rests on a collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; in Yunnan, the partners of the project are Pr. Guo Dalie (head of the Ethnology Centre of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences) and Pr. He Xueguang (Librarian of the Yunnan Institute of Political Sciences), as well as the Dongba Culture Research Centre and the Dongba Culture Museum of the city of Lijiang. Thomas Pinson has been working on Naxi for years, and is currently preparing an enlarged version of his Naxi-English dictionary. In Yongning, my main research partner is Latami Dashi, Vice-director of the Ninglang research centre on ethnic cultures.

As an anecdote, here is an article (in two instalments) published in a Hong Kong newspaper, about my field research. (In Chinese.) First instalment, and second instalment, in JPEG format; or in PDF.

A research paper published in 2006: "Tonal reassociation and rising tonal contours in Naxi".