International Summer School on
Language Documentation and Description

School of Oriental and African Studies, London

22 June - 3 July 2009

Documenting special vocabulary

The lexical stock of a language can be subdivided into semantic domains, each of these being closely related to one or more socio-cultural practices. Research on special vocabularies (SV), such as those denotating flora, fauna, kinship, illness, colours, topography and technology, is particularly useful for linguists and anthropologists, and for historians as well. It often reveals many aspects of the cultural heritage shared by the members of a linguistic community and inevitably raises a number of important theoretical issues related e.g. to the 'nature-nurture' and the 'linguistic determinism' debates. For historical linguists, the study of SV offers interesting perspectives for differentiating between inherited (ancient) traits and innovations, but also for detecting traces of contact between communities and elaborating theories about migration patterns and primitive homelands. For both practical and theoretical lexicographers, a thorough knowledge of the SVs of a language is essential both for compiling, writing and editing of a dictionary of the language, and for analyzing and describing the semantic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic, relationships within its lexical stock. Furthermore, the documentation of SV in its cultural context is an important aspect of the documentation of a language. SV reflects the ongoing interaction between a group of people and its natural and socio-cultural environment and contains precious information about the cultural knowledge and skills the group has acquired over time (i.a. perception, conceptualization, folk categorization), most of which will disappear when its language dies.

The aim of this course on SV is (1) to give several examples of a contextualized descriptive and comparative approach to the documentation of SVs (in particular ethnobiology, games (cricket!), technology) taken from languages spoken in different parts of the world, (2) to discuss important methodological and theoretical issues, and (3) to present a variety of applications, with documentaries as teaching support.