The Documentarist Turn

The documentarist turn, i.e., the growing impact of documentary concepts and practices within general linguistics, has increased awareness of the empirical foundations of our discipline, accompanied by an appreciation of the value of observable linguistic behaviour. Today, there exist well-annotated, audiovisual data collections for many—if still far from enough—endangered or un(der)described languages across the world, each striving to present a “lasting, multipurpose record of a language” (Himmelmann 2006). Documentary data is increasingly supporting theory-building on a larger scale, which is where the present volume steps in: What does the shift towards more diverse, ecologically valid data types mean for synchronic and diachronic linguistic analyses and typological generalizations? This question is addressed by this volume’s far-ranging contributions on academic and societal affordances (Part I), interrelations between corpus design and avenues of research (Part II), as well as synchronic (Part III) and diachronic (Part IV) research questions.