5th ZADAR LINGUISTIC FORUM
March 21-24, 2018, Zadar, Croatia
The Department of
Linguistics at the University of Zadar hosts another event dedicated to some
crucial topics in the domain of Language Studies. The 5th ZADAR LINGUISTIC FORUM: Language Documentation and the
Treatment of Spoken Language consists of a doctoral conference and a spring school, which will be held from
the 21st to the 24th
March 2018. This four-day event will be focused on language documentation
and on the elaboration of spoken language data with special emphasis on
methodologies and tools used in this domain.
Language endangerment is a well-known issue and the
disappearance of many undocumented languages is a loss that many scholars of
different domains have denounced. Less dramatic but nonetheless urgent is the
need to consider spoken language as crucial in achieving better understanding
of linguistic phenomena related to discourse and to the emergence of
grammatical features. Language documentation and, more generally, the ability
to gather, manage and analyse spoken language are two areas which display an
increasing importance in applied linguistics and linguistics in general: they
are at the core of this spring school and PhD conference.
The doctoral
conference will open the event on the 21st March. Doctoral students
are invited to submit abstracts for participating at the conference on subjects
including, but not limited to the topics of language documentation and of
spoken language research.
A 3-day training
school will follow the conference from the 22nd to the 24th
March. It will provide a unique opportunity for participants to get acquainted
with some basic software used in language documentation and get some practical
hands-on experience on how to collect, record, transcribe, and analyze spoken
data. Experienced researchers working on language documentation and on the
treatment of spoken language will be in charge of three courses that will guide
the participants through the first steps in the use of several tools for the
acquisition, treatment and management of spoken language data with a special
attention to the issues connected to language documentation. The event is thus
aimed at doctoral students of linguistics and related disciplines (Croatian and
Slavic Studies, English Studies, German Studies, Italian Studies, etc.),
doctoral researchers who investigate different aspects of language and young
researchers, but graduate students interested in language documentation are
also encouraged to apply.
COURSES
Vincenzo Galatà, Ph.D. (ISTC-CNR, Padua)
Best practices in language
documentation: designing, building and managing your corpus of spoken data
Contrary to a common belief, building a corpus for spoken language documentation and research is a time-consuming and costly work that goes far beyond the “simple” collection of a certain number of recordings. Indeed, the construction of a corpus of spoken data opens up a myriad of options from which the researcher can choose, and there are many variables at play during the whole process of corpus design, collection, acoustic elaboration and management of the data. In this course we will address, and learn how to deal with, the different aspects of this process also with hands-on sessions involving the use of open-source software.
Eugenio Goria, Ph.D.
(University of Bologna)
The use of ELAN in language
documentation: transcribing and annotating spoken corpora
This course will provide an introduction to the basic functions of ELAN and is conceived as a set of practical tutorials. Particular attention will be given to the typical issues arising at the first experience with the study of spoken language materials. At the end of the course, the participants will be able to use ELAN to: make a transcript, create a multi-level set of annotations, build a small corpus and perform various types of corpus searches.
Assistant
professor Zvjezdana Vrzić
(University of Rijeka)
Introduction to FLEx -
software for language documentation
The workshop will present the possibilities and the use of the Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx), open-source software for creating dictionaries and interlinearizing texts. The participants will get to know how to make their own professional looking dictionaries, perform morphosyntactic text annotation and simply export lexical and text files into other software applications for language documentation and annotation.APPLICATION AND ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
The participation
to the meeting can follow two modalities:
●
conference + training school;
●
only training school.
The attendance of
the training school is limited to 30 participants while the slots available for
oral presentations at the conference on the first day will be a
total of 15. The papers will be selected on the basis of two criteria: 1) quality of the proposal, and 2) relevance for the topic of the
conference. After the selection, the authors whose paper is ranked after
the first 15 on the basis of the aforementioned criteria will be invited to
participate at a poster session.
Papers are formal
presentations of original research, lasting a total of 20 minutes (15 minutes
for presentation and 5 minutes for discussion). Posters offer an opportunity
for an individualized, more informal presentation and discussion of the
research.
English and
Croatian are official languages of the workshop. Authors should apply for
presenting at the conference by submitting an abstract of their presentation.
Abstract proposals (200 – 400 words) may be submitted either in English or in
Croatian and English. Each presenter may submit only one abstract proposal,
co-authored by one or more authors. Abstract proposals should be carefully
checked and proofread. All accepted abstracts will be subsequently available in
an electronic form.
Applicants for
both the school and the conference should fill in the application form
available at the Zadar Linguistic Forum website.
The deadline for
abstract submission is December 31, 2017.
Authors will receive a notification of acceptance no later than 31 January
2018. Registration of participants will be open from 1 February 2018 until
28 February 2018.
All participants will receive a certificate of participation that may be used at
their home institutions for the assignment of ECTS credit.
