Preserving cultural knowledge and doing linguistic research in the collaborative Teop Language Documentation Project

Presented by Ulrike Mosel at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024   This presentation shows how the documenta,on of cultural, historical, and ecological knowledge of the Teop people and corpus-based linguis,c research has successfully been combined in a collabora,ve language documenta,on project. From the very beginning of the project in 1994, a team of Teop speakers in Bougainville (Papua New Guinea) decided on the content and the form of the documentation. They did the recordings and transcriptions, wrote texts without previous recordings, edited the texts they regarded as suitable for publica,on, and translated all texts. Two Teop artists contributed drawings for the folk tales and the texts about plants, animals, and the material culture. My task was to organize the finances and the workflow in Bougainville and in Germany. For security reasons the Teop people did not want me to bring a computer un,l 2009, so that the typing of Teop texts in Word and ELAN and the compila,on of the Teop-English dictionary in Toolbox had to be done by myself and research assistants in Kiel. The total size of the in ELAN annotated Teop texts is 254 693 words; the size of the transcribed oral texts is 132 396 words and the size of edited texts 122 657 words. Both texts collections comprise folktales, texts about the history and customs of the Teop people, and descriptions of plants, animals, and the material culture. 40 edited folk tales were published in a monolingual schoolbook (2007) and 15 historical texts in a bilingual book (2014). The texts on the material culture, plants and animals have not been published yet in book form, but text excerpts and their transla,ons are found in the encyclopedic ar,cles of the digital Multifunctional Teop-English Dictionary (2019). The various genres and registers of the texts are considered in my corpus-based grammatical research for which I systematically search the in ELAN annotated texts for grammatical constructions by using Regular Expressions. Such searches do not only find data for a particular research question, but also unexpected data that contradict hypotheses and lead to new research ques,ons. The results of my recent research include: • Nouns, verbs, and adjectives are only distinguished by their optional modifiers. • The ellipsis of arguments is context dependent and not determined by grammatical rules. • Teop does not have tenses; how the described situations in a text are temporally related • Teop belongs to the rare languages that have a propositional negator.