Field Phonetics

Field phonetics and documentary linguistics

Field phonetics in my view is the investigation and documentation of the speech patterns of a linguistic speech community, the relationship of the sounds to each other within a linguistic system, how they work together and the the phonetic nature of the contrasts and prosodies within the system. It has its basis in linguistic phonetics, but is focused on the nature of the system rather than on individual sounds.

The Toy Game:   A technique for collecting prosodic data in the field based on the Map Task, called  Toy Game and a one page Toy Game protocol. Like the Map tasks the Toy game is intended to The toy game makes use of objects that are familiar to speakers in real world (3-dimensional) space and can be set up in particular to elicit directionals. 

© joycemcdonough 2012