The process of documenting and describing the world's languages is undergoing radical transformation with the rapid uptake of new digital technologies for capture, storage, annotation, and dissemination. While these technologies greatly enhance our ability to create digital data, their uncritical adoption has compromised our ability to preserve this data. Consequently, new digital language resources of all kinds—lexicons, interlinear texts, grammars, language maps, field notes, recordings—are proving difficult to reuse and less portable than the conventional printed resources they replace. This article is concerned with the portability of digital language resources, specifically with their ability to transcend computer environments, scholarly communities, domains of application, and the passage of time. We review existing software tools and digital technologies for language documentation and description, and analyze portability problems in the seven areas of content, format, discovery, access, citation, preservation, and rights. We articulate the values that underlie our intuitions about good and bad practices, and lay out an extensive set of recommendations to serve as a starting point for the community-wide discussion that we envisage.

Everyone's life has a pivotal moment, a moment when, had things gone otherwise, we would be someone other than the person we turned out to be. In the case of Ken Hale that moment may have been in the life, or rather the death, of his grandfather. A Dartmouth alumnus, class of 1903, and, at the time of his death, chairman of the Illinois Bell telephone system, Floyd Orlin Hale suffered a fatal stroke while attending a Dartmouth-Yale football game. The inheritance occasioned by that untimely death enabled Ken's father to do something he had always wanted to do—exchange commercial banking in Chicago for ranching in Arizona. Ken Hale was six years old when Robert Locke Hale and his wife, Mary Adelaide, moved from Chicago to a ranch in Canelo, Arizona.

This article presents a test of the proposal that a subgroup of children with GRAMMATICAL-SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT (G-SLI) have optional movement (the REPRESENTATIONAL DEFICIT FOR DEPENDENT RELATIONS (RDDR) account, van der Lely 1998) by investigating WH-movement in fifteen G-SLI subjects and twenty-four younger children matched on language abilities (LA controls). The RDDR/optional movement account predicts that G-SLI subjects would have deficits with both WH-operator and Q-feature movement and therefore would have particular problems producing object questions. We elicited 36 questions balanced for subject and object questions and WH-words (who, which, what). The G-SLI subjects were significantly impaired in producing WH-questions, showing particular difficulties with object questions in relation to the control children. The majority of G-SLI subjects (80%) evinced both WH-operator and T/Q-feature movement errors whereas only one control child (4%) did so, yet on occasion all the G-SLI subjects used appropriate movement operations to satisfy the WH-criterion. We conclude that the RDDR account whereby movement is optional is consistent with the findings of correct and incorrect WH-question formation. Thus, this first test of the RDDR account of G-SLI is supported by the findings. We discuss the possible underlying nature of a grammar that could cause such optionality, the implications for normal and impaired language acquisition, and the generalizability of the findings to other groups of children with SLI. We propose that in the face of no movement, the WH-word and, on occasion, do are merged in situ in the CP, and function as an interrogative adjunct.