Roseanna Hopper and Dr. Janis Nuckolls, Department of Linguistics and English Language
With my ORCA grant, I set out to investigate the performance qualities of ideophones, a category of words marked by a specific speaking style in Ecuadorean Pastaza Quechua. I planned to use software to determine phonetic properties of the words and compare to the rest of speech. I also wanted to look at gesture as a part of the performance involved in using ideophones. I planned to gather data from acquaintances in Ecuador by recording stories, conversations and definitions of the words, which was a strategy used by Dingemanse while working with Siwu (2011). I used audio recordings for the most part but also made video recordings as well.
When I went to the field to do research, I successfully carried out some parts of my plan, but I also encountered many problems. I spent most of my time there gathering data and trying to learn the language well enough to understand and speak it better. I worked a lot with one speaker and had a difficult time finding other people who were as happy to speak and teach Quechua to me and as skilled at speaking and telling stories. She is knowledgeable in many ways and has also worked with Dr. Nuckolls a lot in the past. I gathered almost 200 GB of recordings during my three months spent in Ecuador, and worked with about 10 Quechua speakers total.
One of the problems I encountered in the field was that I didn’t have a good setting for making recordings. If I had been in Provo, I probably could have used a sound-proof room on campus to make high quality recordings for phonetic analysis. Despite my high-quality recording equipment however, I was often competing with the sound of the rain or background music from other people in the neighborhood when I was making recordings, so the more fine-grained phonetic details usually didn’t make it through. I also realized that I’m not sure how to go about doing this type of analysis in Praat, and was surprised to find nothing about this in the research I had done and the readings I prepared for my coursework in Ecuador.
Another problem I have encountered while carrying my project out has been a sheer lack of time. Since I was so concerned about gathering data and studying the language while in the field, I did not spend very much time transcribing it. When I did try to transcribe recordings, I was frustrated by my lack of Quechua comprehension, the slowness of the task, and my lack of knowledge about how to transcribe best to fit my research needs. When I returned from the field, I found that I didn’t magically have more time (as in, 4-6 hours a day) to dedicate to transcription and phonetic analysis in order to process the data the way that I wanted to, since I was in school full time and working three different jobs.
Despite the difficulties that have made it difficult for me to make full use of the data I gathered, I learned a lot and have used my work on this project in other ways as well. I can draw some preliminary conclusions in relation to ideophones in Quechua that both support the work of Dr. Nuckolls and challenge some of the statements made by Dingemanse. For example, Dingemanse uses the “folk definitions” task in Siwu to show that for this language, ideophones are easy to elicit and many speakers agree on the definitions of a large and fairly standardized category of words. However when I tried this task repeatedly in Quechua with several speakers at several different times (and different word lists), I encountered much more difficulty. I had to perform the words in a certain way to get a definition sometimes, or people would have to use an example or a Spanish cognate rather than describing the meaning in Quechua. Sometimes the speakers would use an example sentence in Spanish and then add the Quechua word, which indicates something about its usage as well. I also noticed that while “performance” and performative features occur most clearly while people are using ideophones, these features of storytelling also occur along with any other words, depending on the speaker and the enthusiasm for the story they were telling. This made me change my mind a little bit about how performance might be used in general during storytelling, a question which deserves a lot more attention in the future.
I have also had the chance over the past year to work with Dr. Nuckolls and two other students who were in the Ecuador Study Abroad program in 2011, when I first went there. We have met weekly in order to lay out a phonology of Pastaza Quechua, which will result in a published paper. I was able to use some of my time in Ecuador specifically to ask questions of speakers and clarify the things we were working on, as well as using the general knowledge of the language that I gained while I was there to contribute to our paper. It was very gratifying to work on in part because we started out with a very simple descriptive mechanical idea, but realized that there are actually principles and rules present in the language’s phonology that are made manifest by comparing the ideophonic vocabulary with the rest of the language. I presented this paper with Dr. Nuckolls, Joey Stanley and Elizabeth Nielsen in Boston this January during the annual conference of the Linguistics Society of America, and it will be published in the journal of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA).
Overall I am very grateful that I was able to carry out this project and learn so much more about the research process. One of the most important lessons I have learned is how much time research requires; I realized this both in my struggle to find time to interpret the data I gathered, and while working with Dr. Nuckolls and my fellow students to write a 12-page phonology paper over the course of an entire school year. The data I gathered will be available both to Dr. Nuckolls and to the archive of the SSILA so that others will be able to do more work with it as well.
References
- Dingemanse, Mark. The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu. Nijmegen: Radboud University Nijmegen, 2011.