Amazonian Linguistics Summer School

Complementary Information

Outcomes

The linguistics summer school offers a learning space and exchange among students, professors, researchers and speakers of Peruvian native languages, focusing on the education of professionals to prepare them for language documentation and collective creation of an academic product that can be publicly spread at the end of the experience.

The course will deal with the linguistic and cultural diversity of Peru, with emphasis on Amazonian languages. At the end, students will be familiar with the basic principles and methods of linguistic field work and will get a general overview of the linguistic diversity in Peru.

Methodology

The course addresses the various areas involved in the process of documenting and describing a little-known language. During the first part of the course, topics will be presented at PUCP in lectures delivered by a first-class team of professors.

The course will be complemented by a field trip to Pucallpa in which students will be introduced to a current research project conducted by the university, and they will have the chance to collaborate on it through well-defined tasks related to the different aspects of the linguistic research such as data collection, processing and analysis.

In addition, the course will include the use of digital audio and video recording equipment, the analysis of linguistic structures of different levels (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics), the theory of transcription, the design of alphabets and the use of linguistic software.