What led to progress- collection of lexical items
- working mainly with nouns
- repetition and review
- repetition! using multitudes of frames for every noun we have
- systematicity in elicitation of words by syllable structure and in different contexts (isolation, sentence-medial)
- our organisation, using spreadsheets extensively, as well as use of existing materials as a guide (although we've found ourselves disagreeing with the existing materials annoyingly often)
- analysis of bisyllabic words, separating them into 4 tonal contours
- organization of the data, putting likes with likes
- simply noticing things
- avoidance of transcription detail
- consistent elicitation of paradigms
- continuous discussion and consideration of interpretations of what we are hearing
- noting down the elicited verb forms in a spreadsheet and staring at them
- not sure - I can't keep up
- an excellent speaker
What do you understand the least- is there a tonal contrast?
- inconclusive evidence for tonal contrasts
- how many contrastive tones / tone melodies there are
- what the "underlying"tone pattern of any word is
- how context (especially intonation) affects the tone pattern of a word
- what contrasts matter
- how phonetics and stress interacts with tone
- frequently my transcription conflicts with the "official" version, and I find it's because I'm transcribing stressed/high vowels with H
- contextual neutralisation of tone contrast
- monosyllabic nouns tend to vary quite a bit
- the segmental system is extremely difficult because of variability
- hard to distinguish glides both from vowels and from consonants
- glides / long vowels and their effects
- what causes tone sandhi, what to look for as possible reasons, for differences between tones on words in isolation and in context
- syllable structure
- grammatical use of tone
- phonetic description
- verb tone
- tone
- everything
Things learnt during the first week- elicitation methodology: isolation and in various contexts
- methodically alternating words in isolation and in frames
- the need for constant review and cross-checking
- phonology isn't all about (strict) minimal pairs
- even experienced linguists have difficulties with tone
- there is much disagreement between very educated people on their topic of choice
- the use of spreadsheets and databases was inspiring
- the need for spreadsheets to assist in preparing words and frames for elicitation and comparison
- it is less important to identify the tones on words than it is to discover that two words are prosodically the same or different
- clustering tonal constrasts by pairwise similarity/differences seems more efficient as an initial strategy than focusing on getting the tonal transcription "right"
- the importance of abstracting pitch from segments - how to "hear" pitch
- how to hear tone, and the importance of segments and telling the difference between pitch and contours
- learned sometimes to listen to less -- often pitches that are not completely identical are nevertheless likely to be the same tone
- knowledge about how different segments can affect tone
- it is hard to get natural data
- improved my fieldwork methodology, which was lacking more than I thought
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