[Lexicog] Digest Number 458

[Claire Bowern]

I basically agree with what Bill said. If you use elicitation to 
increase the materials available in syntax, for example, I see no harm 
in doing the same for morphosyntax and word formation. Like all tools 
for getting language data, they have some problems (e.g. elicitation 
obliterates frequency and most discourse information) and some 
advantages (e.g. acquiring information that might not otherwise come up 
in a small corpus).

I've gone digging for lexical items in several different ways on fieldwork:

1. (an idea I got from Ken Hale) guessing words on the basis of related 
languages, e.g. I had Nyulnyul and Nyikina lists and wanted cognates in 
Bardi. I knew the sound changes reasonably well so I'd ask "you got a 
word like X?" where X would be what I'd predict the Bardi word to be on 
the basis of the forms in the other languages.

2. Exploring partially productive morphology and morphology with 
unexpected semantic effects. e.g. there's a suffix -iidi in Bardi which 
means 'expert at' - an ilmiidi is someone who's good at singing ilma (a 
type of traditional song). It occasionally has unexpected effects (so a 
baarliidi is a paperbark expert, ie a bank manager, a malarriidi is a 
'wife-expert', i.e. an adulterer, and a marririidi 'sister-expert' (I 
guess by analogy with malarriidi) is someone who commits incest. I 
wouldn't have got most of those -iidi words without exploring how 
productive it is; certainly marririidi is not something that the old 
ladies I was working with would have volunteered or would have come up 
in most of the narratives we were recording.

3. testing productivity by back-translation, just like checking syntax.

Of course, all translation and elicitation is subject (to a greater or 
lesser extent) to interference from the elicitation language, and yes, 
there are problems with calquing and interference and rule 
overgeneralisation. However, these problems aren't limited to this type 
of elicitation. People will still calque even if they are aren't being 
prompted, and you can get people to overgenerate morphology even without 
prompting with the forms (e.g. get English speakers to generate past 
tenses with ring/rang, sing/sang, etc, and get them to form the past 
tense of ping and you can get them to say "pang").


So yes, I'd use it, I have used it and it was very useful, but it's also 
subject to the same problems inherent in working on a language that's no 
longer in active use.

All the best,
Claire


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