Courses / Module

This module will benefit anyone who uses linguistic data in social scientific research, whether it takes the form of interviews, questionnaires, the collection of oral narratives, life histories or folkloric material. Social scientists typically use linguistic data without taking into account the way that the social relations of research, and the discursive forms employed, determine the nature and extent of the datea collected. We will critically examine the use of verbal and textual data in previous research, investigating the discursive and generic forms these data take, and exploring their bases in the social relations between researchers and informants. We will survey a range of methodologies for the collection and interpretation of oral and textual materials, with the object of enriching the depth and range of fieldwork interaction as well as that of the resulting data.