Assessing linguistic legacy materials: socially embedded meaning-making beyond philology and hermeneutics

Presented by Tobias Weber at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024 All acts of documentation are of intrinsic communicative nature, whereby the documenters (and their consultants) put observations on record that they consider important in subsequent communicative events. This can involve archiving, discussing, analysing, disseminating and proliferating these observations and making them accessible to other interested parties. Language documentation, thus, involves different layers of communication and meta-communication embedded in the artefacts as outputs of the documentation efforts. This paper deals discusses how we can engage with these different layers of communication, as well as the relevant literacies and competencies to access and interpret language documentation outputs, and linguistic legacy materials as a particular example. Legacy materials are all artefacts of language documentation – language samples, stimuli, documents, metadata – where the documented events are too far from the present day for them to be recreated from memory. In many cases, documenters and/or consultants cannot be asked directly and the artefactually contained observations take primacy over memory and renarrations. This poses challenges in the reconstruction and contextualisation of the observation, rendering the re- assessment of legacy materials an interpretation that goes beyond the reading and deciphering of texts (hermeneutics) and a comparative contextualisation as in philology. These challenges are not exclusive to legacy materials since learning from past documentation can inform present-day practices and guide reflections on metadocumentary linguistics, as all artefacts from current documentation projects will turn into legacy materials within the next 100 years. Current documentary practice places emphasis on thorough descriptive and technical metadata, as well as the contextualisation amidst (indigenous) processes of knowledge generation. Yet, to fully understand (legacy) materials, we would need access to the mental processes of the involved parties and socio-cultural (and historical) embeddings in the negotiation of meaning. Conceptualising language artefacts as discursive, communicative entities in social contexts keeps them as active parts in processes of meaning-making in the past, present, and future.