PLENARY PANEL
Frederick Barcelo
Culture Bearer and Translator
Bugkalot [ILK]
Nick Bringas
School Head
Itneg [ITI]
Maria Dolores Dican
Community Member
Ibatan [IVB]
Rodessa Galao
Translator
Ibaloy [IBL]
Facilitator
Maria Kristina S. Gallego
Department of Linguistics, University of the Philippines Diliman
What can linguists learn from language users in documenting a language?
The experiences of northern Philippine language communities
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Recent developments in the field of linguistics push for close collaboration between the linguist and the community in such works as language documentation and revitalization, where community members are taking the lead in the projects.
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The discussion will be led by Dr. Kristina Gallego, Chair of UP Diliman Department of Linguistics.
This panel discussion also features language users from selected communities in northern Philippines, who will share their insights and experiences from working with linguists in documenting and describing their own languages:
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Frederick Barcelo, culture bearer and translator, Bugkalot [ILK]
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Nick Bringas, school head, Itneg [ITI]
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Maria Dolores Dican, community member, Ibatan [IVB]
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Rodessa Galao, translator, Ibaloy [IBL]
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The discussion will revolve around how they have come to do language work in their respective communities, what they have learned from their experiences, what sorts of methods worked for them and their contexts and what did not, and their future plans for the documentation and description of their languages. From the discussion, linguists are encouraged to reflect on the impact of doing fieldwork in communities, how they can refine their methods and practices in language documentation, and how to move towards a community-centered approach for linguistic work.
WORKSHOP 1
Eva Huber
University of Zürich
Zürich, Switzerland
Aireen Arnuco
De La Salle University
Manila, Philippines
Using ELAN in Language Documentation
​This workshop will introduce participants to ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator), an annotation tool developed in the early 2000s by the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. It is used in linguistics to annotate spoken language or sign language such as naturalistic conversations, narratives, and interviews for the purpose of documenting language and analyzing language use. It is also used in other fields in the social sciences, humanities, cognitive science, communication, etc. The workshop offers participants a practical tutorial through the basic features of ELAN such as tiers, attributes and types, controlled vocabularies, and modes. Using a video file, participants will explore the functions of ELAN such as opening a new file, creating tiers and tier hierarchies, and annotating the file through segmentation and transcription. Participants are advised to bring their own laptops and to download ELAN ahead of time from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan/download. The workshop can only accommodate 15 participants. Interested participants may register here.
BIONOTES
Eva Huber is a PhD student at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She got her Bachelor’s in English Linguistics and Literature from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) and her Master’s in Computational Linguistics from the University of Tuebingen (Germany). In her PhD, she uses computational methods to study how children acquire morphosyntax across typologically diverse languages. Since 2022 she’s been involved in a corpus building project in the Philippines. The aim of this project is to document and analyze children’s acquisition of Batangas Tagalog.
Aireen Barrios is associate professor of the Department of English and Applied Linguistics, De La Salle University. She is also a member of the Executive Board of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines. She serves as the local director of the Language Development of Batangas Tagalog (BATA Project), a collaboration between the University of Zurich and DLSU, and as the local investigator of the project Realizing Leibniz’s Dream: Child Languages as a Mirror of the Mind by the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin.
WORKSHOP 2
Vincent Christopher Santiago
Department of Linguistics
University of the Philippines Diliman
Quezon City, Philippines
Francisco
Rosario, Jr.
Department of Linguistics
University of the Philippines Diliman
Quezon City, Philippines
Divine Angeli
Endriga
Department of Linguistics
University of the Philippines Diliman
Quezon City, Philippines
Decolonizing Philippine Linguistics: Where are we? Where can we go?
​In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in decolonizing the field of linguistics; from letting minoritized languages inform grand linguistic theorizing to more community based approaches to language work. This workshop aims to give its participants the chance to join the discussion and chart how and where we can contribute to decolonizing linguistics as practiced in the Philippines. We will give an overview of the clear decolonial impulses in past work of the UP Department of Linguistics. Participants will then be asked to reflect on and take stock of how their respective HEIs (higher education institutions), government offices, advocacy groups, etc. have done similar efforts at decolonizing language description, language documentation, curriculum development, and instruction. The output of this workshop will be a capsule project proposal that participants can bring back to their institutions for possible future implementation.
BIONOTES
Vincent Christopher A. Santiago is currently an Instructor at the UP Department of Linguistics. His research interests include language documentation and description, acoustic phonetics, and dialectology. He has presented his research in the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society Conference, the Philippine Linguistics Congress, and various other conferences and colloquia. He is also a member of the Linguistics Society of the Philippines.
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Francisco C. Rosario, Jr. is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of the Philippines - Diliman. He is also taking his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the same institution. He has taught undergraduate linguistics courses and Bahasa Indonesia/Malaysia and conducts research primarily on the structure of the Pangasinan language, as well as the interface of language, culture, and society.
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Divine Angeli P. Endriga is an Assistant Professor at the UP Department of Linguistics. She is also taking her doctorate in Linguistics in the same institution. Her research interests and publications are in the fields of typology (structure of Philippine languages), language documentation, verbal morphosyntax, dialectology, Filipino as a second/foreign language, Philippine lexicography, and translation.
WORKSHOP 3
Roger Stone
SIL Philippines
Quezon City, Philippines
Levi Cruz
Translators Association of the Philippines
Quezon City, Philippines
Help! My grammar leaks! Finding a leak-fixing tool in FLEx
​"All grammars leak." —  Edward Sapir​
When writing a morphological description, it’s easy to fill in all the blanks of a verb paradigm chart and using the eyeball test on a limited set of verbs, conclude that it adequately describes the language. But what if there are unknown leaks not covered by our beautiful paradigms? What if there are wordforms, even lots of wordforms, that we have never considered and which our verb paradigm charts can’t actually handle? ​​
One way, and possibly the best way, to find leaks is to encode morphological data in FLEx (Fieldworks Language Explorer) and then use one of the automated parsers built into FLEx (XAmple or HermitCrab) to test the model on a large dataset of wordforms from natural texts. The verbs that don’t parse will expose descriptive leaks. Through iterative testing and tweaking of the model we get closer and closer to a leak-free grammar. This workshop will be an introduction to setting up affix templates in FLEx to use one of the morphological parsers on a dataset.