Documentary Linguistics and Community Relations

Not too long ago, I listened to parts of a radio series on science. An episode on physics, and the role of theory and empirical work in physics, particularly caught my attention. The speaker was arguing for the core nature of empirical work within physics, and the need to focus on empirical work over theory, broadly speaking, in order to make advances at this time. He argued that theoretical advances would occur only with advances in empirical research. This discussion about physics made me think about debates in linguistics over (at least) the last half-century around empirical research on languages. In linguistics, as in physics, there have been debates about the balance between theory and empirical work. In the world that I will characterize with the term fieldwork , with its focus on empirical work, the field of documentary linguistics has once again brought to the fore many of these controversies. Documentary linguistics has an empirical goal: focusing on the collection and archiving of data, with the development of principles relating to collection, archiving, and analysis of a diverse corpus. In documentary linguistics, like much work in science more generally, there are concerns about accountability and replicability. In these ways, documentary linguistics continues the tradition of regarding linguistics as a science, with a concentration on its empirical aspects. In documentary linguistics, the focus has been on data gathering and management over deep data analysis and description, at least for a point in time. See Himmelmann (1998, 2006), Austin (2010), and Woodbury (2003, 2011), among others, for detailed discussion of documentary linguistics. The person talking about physics on the radio program made no mention of another concern that is often associated with documentary linguistics—one that has also been an