Dilemmas and Paradoxes in Linguistic Fieldwork

The retrieval of data was never an issue that loomed large in standard textbooks on linguistics. It remained rather peripheral, even to scholars with a long experience in approaching linguistic data. Introductory textbooks teaching morphological or syntactic analysis are often very bad in this respect: they tend to depict raw data as a set of carefully selected and flawlessly transcribed forms. Thus they create a dangerous illusion in the minds of students unless the teacher provides a counterbalance by explaining and demonstrating how crucially important it is for the whole field of linguistics how the raw material used as input was retrieved in the first place