Volume 3, Issue 2 -

This paper revisits the language contact situation in the Indian border town-village of Kupwar originally reported by Gumperz and Wilson (1971. Convergence and creolization: A case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian border. In D. Hymes (ed.), Pidgnization and creolization of languages , 151–168. Cambridge: CUP). The study presents evidence for morpho-syntactic variation and complexification in the contact varieties of the local languages, Marathi and Kannada. Similar patterns of variation are adduced from contact varieties of Marathi and Kannada from historical data as well as present-day border villages which, like Kupwar, have been traditionally bilingual. The synchronic and historical data point out methodological and theoretical limitations of the original study. The variation and complexity observed in the Kupwar varieties allow for a reconsideration of the notion of intertranslatability or isomorphism in convergence areas. While suggesting a possible geographically defined micro-linguistic area at the Marathi-Kannada frontier, the paper indicates that the recent re-drawing of state boundaries along linguistic lines may have initiated divergence in this convergence area.

Linguists continue a longstanding debate about the best methods for data gathering for language description and documentation. Under discussion is whether data gathered through elicitation of targeted structures through translations from a contact language or elicitation of grammaticality judgments gathers data to accurately represent the structure of language or if it is necessary to integrate these elicitation methods with the analysis of naturalistic speech to produce reliable and reproducible data sets. Given that language data is central to the development of language science and that language science feeds into studies of human cognition and behavior, the stakes are high that we get our data right and that means we need to get our methods right. Based on fieldwork and analysis that I conducted on Meitei, a Tibeto-Burman language of Northeast India, I compare results from gathering information using targeted elicitation and data gathering that integrates hypothesis-driven text-based and topic-based elicitation. I will show how mini-elicitation schedules can be derived during text analysis and how such schedules provide clearer clues to language structure than elicitation based on pre-constructed questionnaires based on a non-language specific understanding of language universals.

Based on personal experience during long term fieldwork in Ladakh, this article will discuss a special technique for field research. It will emphasise the need to access the speakers’ creative unconsciousness by applying the time-consuming ‘ping-pong game’, that is, by confronting every speaker with real language data, by rechecking each speaker’s statement with at least one other speaker, and by feeding back evaluations from a second or third speaker to an original speaker and back in an almost endless repetition. A special focus here will be on the collection of compounds showing the phenomenon of consonant migration and on data gathering with respect to verb semantics and verb valency.