On the use of informants in field-work

Abstract

The point of this paper is an extremely simple and not at all a surprising one, one that is in no way new. It is essentially the following: the native speakers of any language know its structure and the linguist doing field work can make use of this knowledge in ways other than the obvious one of asking an informant to produce utterances, with little or no other direction. What I hope to do here is outline briefly a set of strategies or field-work techniques developed during the past two years in a field methods course at the University of Illinois. In particular, I will describe certain aspects of our research on Papago done in co-operation with Mr. Albert Alvarez, a Papago speaker, who served as assistant in the course during the academic year 1963-64.

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