Methods and data

This grammatical analysis is based on a database of texts of different types, such as narratives, procedural texts, that has a sequence of actions or steps to do something as well as interviews

5Most Amri Karbi villages have either Assamese or Khasi names, with the exception of the village Marme.

and conversations. To complement the data that comes from natural discourse, elicited data were also gathered. Elicited data were used in the beginning of the project and then for the analysis of phonology. Later elicitation was used based on the existing natural data in order to clarify and understand phenomena found in the natural data and as a way to build the word paradigms. I have used a questionnaire to explore negation (Miestamo 2019), and some questions that were given at the end of grammatical topic chapters in Describing morphosyntax (Payne 1997) and Basic linguistic theory (Dixon 2009, 2010). The questioner and questions were used as tools to explore specific grammatical topics and were not only translations of sentences from one language to another. To enrich the data, I have recorded a Pear film (Chafe 1980),a technique that is widely used by field linguists. A Pear film is a six-minute film, that a language consultant watches and describes what happens in it.

In addition to the intentionally documented data, I have used data coming from my observation and interaction with people, which in turn includes heard and overheard data of what people say.

As for the information provided in this chapter, the data was either recorded or documented in notes or found in the literature or online resources. The sources are given whenever applicable.

Most of the recorded data have been collected from native speakers during my fieldtrips. I stayed for a two and a half year period in North East India from 2013-2015 and visited Amri Karbi villages either from Shillong (where I was based most of the time) or Guwahati (where I stayed occasionally). I would also invite language consultants either to Guwahati or Shillong to work with me on transcription of the recorded data. Then after moving to Finland, to do my PhD I made two fieldtrips to India: one two-week visit in January-February 2016 and a second three-month stay in January-March 2017. Besides fieldtrips I kept long distance communication with the community members via emails, Facebook messenger, Skype and WhatsApp. During my time in Helsinki, one of my language consultants, Ms. Babani Marme, came to Finland twice as a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki for one month each time: September-October 2016 and April-May 2018.

The language data was transcribed and analyzed using the software Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) and some parts of data were also transcribed in ELAN. For phonetic analysis, Praat software (Boersma&Weenink 2013) was used. The data was either audio recorded or both audio and video recorded. There are two hours and thirty-four minutes of transcribed natural data; there are also several hours of recorded audio and video data that were not

transcribed but were used for this thesis to supplement the transcribed data. The transcribed data consists of data recorded from thirty speakers (see Appendix 2 and Appendix 3) from different Amri Karbi villages, both in Lower and Upper Amri areas. The choice of consultants was usually deliberate, so that the grammar could represent the language of the entire community. Besides dialectal variation, the balance among language consultants was sought in relation to gender, age, religion, education and occupation.

Besides data recorded for this project, the New Testament translation that was published in 2013 and the Amri Karbi-Assamese-English dictionary (Ms. Babani Marme, in preparation) were used as resources.

The research was conducted according to the ethical principles for research with human participants issued by the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity TENK, specifically:

a) The researcher respects the dignity and autonomy of human research participants.

The rights laid down in the Finnish Constitution (1999/731, Sections 6–23) are held by everybody. These include the right to life, personal liberty and integrity, freedom of movement, freedom of religion and conscience, freedom of expression, protection of property and the right to privacy.

b) The researcher respects material and immaterial cultural heritage and biodiversity.

c) The researcher conducts their research so that the research does not cause significant risks, damage or harm to research participants, communities or other subjects of research.

In accordance with these principles, prior to the recording sessions, the language consultants were asked to give consent by signing two copies of the consent form, one of which was given to a language consultant. The form reserves the right for a language consultant to withdraw their consent at any time. Before signing the consent forms, the content of the form was always explained orally by me or by one of my accompanying language consultants. There are two language consultants who were recorded by giving the oral consent only, as the written form was not available at the time. That is why, these two consultants are not identified by their name. Children were not recorded for the research, but I made notes of my observation of adults’ speaking to children.

Most of the Amri Karbi language material will be archived, possibly in the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR).