Lexicography in Fieldwork

Abstract

Within descriptive linguistic fieldwork, as we define it ( Chapter 2), lexicography or dictionary writing can be considered a tangential activity. This might seem surprising in view of the modern fieldworker’s adoption of the Boasian trilogy, which considers that, for a language to be documented or described, we need a grammar, a collection of texts, and a dictionary (Evans and Dench 2006:10, 12; Dixon 2007). These three components would typically be compiled from fieldworkers’ notes, wordlists, grammatical elicitations, and texts.