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The Linguist 15 FEATURES often still unclear and will not be finalised until later. What matters at this stage is to gain some initial insights that we can use to build our understanding of the language, rather than to get everything right. The next step is to go deeper and analyse every word or word-form, doing a word-by- word translation of what is said. For this, I ask the teacher to translate each word in isolation. For example, my first Mosetén recording started yäe yäerä' yoshropaiyeyak. I wrote down the Mosetén text in an approximate spelling. The overall translation of this chunk given by my teacher was 'I will thank you'. The word-by-word translation was given as follows: yäe yäerä' yoshropaiyeyak I I will I thank you This is where the analysis of the language starts: we are now in a position to look at the elements of the sentence and find out a few things: yäe seems to mean 'I', i.e. it is most likely a first person singular pronoun. That Yäerä' translates as 'I will' indicates that the rä' element means something along the lines of 'will'. It could be a future-tense marker, or it could indicate the speaker's intentions without being a direct reference to the future tense. This is for us to find out, firstly by looking through the remainder of the text to see if there are other instances of this form being used. We can then work with our teacher to try to find instances of rä' being used in other situations. For example, we could ask 'how do you say "you"?', and get the answer mi. We can then ask: what does mirä' mean? And can you give me an environment in which it is used? Thus we gain a rough idea of how a structure is used. Yet, it may take many weeks of work before we understand the exact function of rä'. Thus, by starting to identify the first structures, we gradually build up our understanding of the language. Notice here that the element yäe is repeated, which could be a false start or repetition (something very common in spoke n language), but could have grammatical relevance. Again, this is something I will note down to look at later when I have more data. We can then move on to the word yoshropaiyeyak. It is a long word, translated as an entire clause: 'I thank you'. It is very likely, therefore, that it contains some structure (morphology). To find out what the structure is, I ask the teacher to translate 'I thank him'. He says yoshropaiyete. By contrasting the two elements, I am able to see that when the object is 'you' the ending of the word is yak, while when the object is 'him' the ending is te. Again, I search for similar forms elsewhere in the text and talk to the native speaker about these. This is the beginning of the process of finding out how the grammar of a language works. The next steps include building a bigger corpus of texts (in my experience at least 10 hours of different text recordings and ideally much more than that), working with many different speakers and continuously testing different hypotheses about how the language works. Putting the pieces together Fieldwork can be a rocky road, with inevitable setbacks and structures that prove difficult. One has to be careful not to transfer ideas about how European languages work on to other languages: often things are very different from English in the languages of the world, and one of the important outcomes of linguistic fieldwork is to understand what possible forms human language can take. In Mosetén, for example, the rä' element is not, in fact, a future marker, but rather a marker indicating an irrealis (something that has not taken place). It took many different texts and situations that the element was used in to get to this conclusion. There are many other ways in which linguistic fieldwork can be conducted, including finding out about specific aspects of a language (rather than aiming to write a grammar), and studying language contact phenomena or first-language acquisition. Sometimes circumstances mean that we have to conduct monolingual fieldwork, for example when there is no common language. In that case, translations are not as easily accessible and it may take much longer to gain an understanding of the language. NATIVE SPEAKERS An indigenous man in the Amazon (left); and Jeanette conducts fieldwork with speakers of Pirahã (below)