Seaira Lett is a Sophomore pursuing a joint major in Spanish and Linguistics. She was awarded a Spring 2019 Conference Grant which she used to attend the National Conference on Undergraduate Research.
Last semester (Fall 2018), students in Linguistics 485: Field Methods were given the amazing opportunity to conduct linguistic interviews with a speaker of the Bantu language Lulogooli, an understudied language. We learned about IRB procedures and requirements, expectations for research involving human subjects, and how to use elicitation sessions to study the syntax and morphology of a language that you aren’t familiar with.
After learning the basics, the time came for student groups to start conducting elicitation sessions, and everyone was nervous. For the first session, we had to make a list of around 100 words to ask the consultant to translate from English to Lulogooli. One student in each group had to be the elicitor, the person that spoke, one had to record, and one was in charge of transcribing the translations using IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). It was really intimidating to get in front of the class and talk to the consultant while being recorded, but after the first couple sessions, we mostly got used to it.
Once we had a little more experience preparing and conducting elicitation sessions, each group was assigned a grammatical feature to research, and my group’s topic was negation. Other topics studied were relative clauses, question formation, and ditransitivity of verbs. All of the groups had interesting and unique findings on their topic, which made the experience very rewarding, since we were actually contributing to the field of linguistics, though we also ran into phenomena that we couldn’t explain.
In my opinion, the most important quality a researcher should have is curiositybecause you have to try everything and always think of possible explanations or factors that should be tested. It's also important to ask questions in order to come closer to the solution. For example, during the first elicitation in which my group studied negation, the consultant used the same word in the same position to negate every sentence. We felt like we didn’t have any real findings and that we wouldn’t be able to continue with our topic, but the professors gave us suggestions about a lot of different factors to test. We ended up discovering that Lulogooli has four different ways to negate verbs, which is really surprising and uncommon; English only has one way to negate: notor another negative adverb like never.
I kept learning more about Lulogooli even after the semester was over. My professor invited me to keep working with our data as a paid research assistant and to participate in a linguistics reading group focused on Bantu languages. Reading linguistic articles on other Bantu languages helped me to understand what made Lulogooli unique, and I also recognized features that Lulogooli shared with other languages. Also, I read an article on negation in Bantu languages that completely changed my perspective on the research my group had done, which helped me to reconceptualize my presentation before presenting it again.
When I found out my group’s project was accepted to participate in the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), held at Kennesaw State University this year, I felt extremely intimidated. However, it turned out to be an incredible though challenging experience. My research partner and I had to find a way to present our research concisely and also to make it exciting and interesting to other people. I did this by emphasizing that negation in Lulogooli is a unique and also puzzling phenomenon. Another challenge was that we had to talk nearly non-stop for an hour, which really dried out our throats, but luckily I had brought a water bottle. It was really cool to see people interested in our research, and a lot of people complimented our project, which made me realize that it’s more important to be enthusiastic about your work and enjoy it than to worry about criticism.
These experiences doing and presenting research have been really valuable to me, and I never expected that I would love it as much as I did. I always thought I only wanted to work with Spanish (I’m a Spanish and linguistics joint major), but I learned that I also have a passion for understudied languages and syntax in general. I plan on using the methods I learned to conduct research for my honors thesis next year, and one of the amazing professors that taught Field Methods is going to be my advisor.
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