In:The Documentarist Turn: From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations
Edited by Sonja Riesberg, Uta Reinöhl and Birgit Hellwig
[Studies in Language Companion Series 240] 2026
► pp. vii–x
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Table of contents
Preface
Chapter 1.Nikolaus Himmelmann and the documentarist turn
Birgit Hellwig
Uta Reinöhl
Sonja Riesberg
Part I.Research context
Chapter 2.The development of language documentation in Indonesia
Luh Anik Mayani
Katubi
Chapter 3.Collaborative research: Language documentation and the documentarist turn in Western New Guinea
Yusuf Sawaki
Hugo Warami
Apriani Arilaha
Jeanete Lekeneny
Boas Wabia
Chapter 4.Diversifying science: Insights of native- and non-native-speaker collaborations in linguistic descriptions
I Wayan Arka
Chapter 5.From the audible to the meaningful: The role of listener/speakers in making sense of 60 years of Dalabon recordings
Nicholas Evans
Manuel Pamkal
Chapter 6.Language archives in context
Felix Rau
Chapter 7.Science in public: The representation of language documentation in science communication
Tobias-Alexander Herrmann
Kai Kaspar
Stephan Packard
Part II.Documentary corpora
Chapter 8.Taking language use seriously: On the importance of multimodality and interaction in documentary practices
Mandana Seyfeddinipur
Pamela Perniss
Claudia Wegener
Chapter 9.The multimodal turn in corpus building: Lessons from language documentation and sign language corpora
Anastasia Bauer
Sonja Gipper
Tobias-Alexander Herrmann
Jana Hosemann
Simona Sbranna
Chapter 10.Multimodal communication in historical perspective: Gestures and visual prominence in Pharaonic Egyptian monumental inscriptions
Silvia Kutscher
Chapter 11.Reflections on literacy in language documentation
Melanie Schippling
Chapter 12.More diachronic than you think: Historical depth within language documentation corpora and its potential to mitigate two major biases in
linguistics
Uta Reinöhl
Chapter 13.Songs in Eipo, Yale, Awiakay and Meakambut,
four Papuan languages
four Papuan languages
Volker Heeschen
Darja Hoenigman
Chapter 14.Transcription practices and (the documentation of)
metalinguistic knowledge
metalinguistic knowledge
Katherine Walker
Birgit Hellwig
Dagmar Jung
Part III.Synchronic perspectives
Phonetics, phonology, and prosody
Chapter 15.Pauses, parts of speech, and word order: A comparative corpus study on 27 languages
Frank Seifart
Chapter 16.Intonation contour length as a quantification of macro-rhythm
Constantijn Kaland
Chapter 17.The phonetics and phonological behaviour of vowel length
in Meto
in Meto
Kirsten Culhane
Owen Edwards
Chapter 18.Prosodic effects on glottal stop realization and voice quality variation in a corpus study of Tahitian
Janet Fletcher
Adele Gregory
Morphosyntax
Chapter 19.High animacy does not favour zero over pronouns —
especially for objects
especially for objects
Geoffrey Haig
Stefan Schnell
Chapter 20.A global view on the Ausrichtungsaffix and the deep
differences between nominalization-derived versus applicative-derived
diathesis in Austronesian
differences between nominalization-derived versus applicative-derived
diathesis in Austronesian
Daniel Kaufman
Chapter 21.What’s a passive in Besemah?
Bradley McDonnell
Chapter 22.The acquisition of symmetrical voice systems: Comparative notes on Tagalog, Indonesian, and Totoli
Maria Bardají
Rowena Garcia
Christoph Bracks
Evan Kidd
Discourse structure
Chapter 23.On syntactic uniformity and the functional effects
of verbal DPs
of verbal DPs
Katharina Haude
Chapter 24.Information structure and the agent-first preference: A corpus‑based case study of a free word order language
Eva Schultze-Berndt
Chapter 25.Bridging demonstratives in recognitional use
Petra B. Schumacher
Klaus von Heusinger
Chapter 26.Hierarchical discourse structure in spoken narratives
Isabel Compes
Jakob Egetenmeyer
Katja Hannß
Part IV.Diachronic perspectives
Chapter 27.Language change in real time: Investigating conversational priming in repetitional responses
Sonja Gipper
Eugen Hill
Pascal Coenen
Chapter 28.On similarity, mistake, and belief revision: The case of yimarne(k) in Kunbarlang
Ivan Kapitonov
Caroline Gentens
Chapter 29.Grammaticisation of medial speech verbs: A case study from Yali (West-New Guinea)
Katharina Gayler
Sonja Riesberg
Chapter 30.Of Malays, Moluccans and Papuans: The development and spread of Malay in Papua
Antoinette Schapper
Chapter 31.On the origins of Javanese negators
Alexander Adelaar
Epilogue
Chapter 32.Epilogue: Episteme and techne
Stephen C. Levinson
