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#fieldwork2019 posts

These are a few of my favorite things about Oaxaca

posted 02 Jul 2019 by mayhplumb | tags: #fieldwork2019 #personal

I’m home in Austin now. My 2019 fieldwork is complete.

Fieldwork is complicated for me, as I imagine it is for many researchers. It is simultaneously the best part of my job and the most stressful. Research in the field is hard, and by the end I’m mentally exhausted. Traveling is hard for me, and usually after a month I’m emotionally exhausted. But overall, spending time in Oaxaca is one of the greatest blessings of my life (I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t make me happy). This post is a collection of things I love about Oaxaca, drafted slowly over the past five weeks.

What do we mean by "present" tense

posted 25 Jun 2019 by mayhplumb | tags: #fieldwork2019 #mays-qualifying-paper #tense-aspect-mood #zapotec

In Tlacochahuaya Zapotec, the “tense” of a verb (which I’m actually going to call the “TAM”) is indicated by a prefix, for example ‘Juan talks’ is rni Jwan with r- at the beginning, while ‘Juan is talking’ is kani Jwan with the prefix ka-. In a previous post, I looked at how verbs are divided into categories based on which TAM prefixes they use for “past” and “future”.

Recently in my research, I’ve been focusing on that r- prefix in rni Jwan ‘Juan talks’. I want to figure out what the r- means, which is a harder question that it might sound!

Lessons in fieldwork self-care

posted 13 Jun 2019 by mayhplumb | tags: #fieldwork2019 #personal #self-care

This summer is my fifth research trip to Oaxaca, and over the years I’ve developed a few ways to remedy stress and homesickness. To be clear, I love Oaxaca. It is a pleasure and a privilege to come here every year. But fieldwork is hard, and because the essence of my research is so tied up in my daily life, I need to be really conscious about taking breaks and de-stressing.

Some of my self-care is in the little things that I pack. I always bring some nail polish, because it encourages me to take little moments for myself.

Early research on Tlacochahuaya Zapotec pronouns

posted 11 Jun 2019 by mayhplumb | tags: #fieldwork2019 #pronouns #zapotec

One of the first things you learn when studying a language are the pronouns — the it’s and they’s and we’s of a language. We use pronouns like variables, so that we can refer to different people and objects without using their full names. Some of the pronouns of English are shown below. For the purpose of this table, I chosen the pronouns that I use most frequently/naturally.

Metadata: Hundreds of recordings, but what are they about?

posted 06 Jun 2019 by mayhplumb | tags: #archiving #data-management #fieldwork #fieldwork2019

At the end of each day of fieldwork, I sit down and “deal with my data”. No matter how tired I am, no matter how much I want to put it off, it’s an essential part of my daily routine. The first thing I do is back up my recordings. And while my files are transferring, I go over my notes and make sure that all of my metadata is in order. Metadata is all the information about how the recording was made — who was there, where we were, what we talked about, what audio recorder I used, etc. Metadata is data about data, and it’s a crucial aspect of good data management.

Studying Tlacochahuaya Zapotec "tense"

posted 04 Jun 2019 by mayhplumb | tags: #fieldwork2019 #mays-qualifying-paper #tense-aspect-mood #zapotec

The current focus of my research is “tense” in Tlacochahuaya Zapotec. That’s what I’ll be writing my Qualifying Paper about next fall, and it’s the primary focus of my fieldwork this summer.

I put “tense” in quotes because what we colloquially call “tense”, linguists break down into three smaller categories: tense, aspect, and mood (abbreviated together as TAM; click the words to get pop-up definitions). These three categories are often very intertwined — it’s almost impossible to talk about one without the other two. So what I’m actually researching right now is TAM in Tlacochahuaya Zapotec.