[Lingtyp] fieldwork on deixis

[Michael Daniel]

Dear all,

my students are going to do a field study to collect basic information on
the use of three deictic pronouns in Rutul, Lezgic, East Caucasian; and
would like to ask for advice. This is a system of three demonstratives, but
we are not sure whether this is a person- or distance-oriented system or
something else. None of them speaks the language (while they have a fairly
good understanding of Rutul grammatical system). The corpus is by far not
big enough to provide evidence (as is probably often the case with
demonstratives). Grammaticality and appropriateness judgments in artificial
settings are not consistent.

Can you indicate successful field / experimental studies that deal with
this and are specific about their protocol and experiment design? Among
other options, we were considering using David P. Wilkins questionnaire
<http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/download/1999_The_1999_demonstrative_questionnaire_this_that.pdf>,
but it does not provide guidelines on best practices of how to apply it
(apparently, that was the author's intention). We have some ideas, but
wanted to ask - and discuss these ideas - with anyone who has experience in
using this or another questionnaire on deictic pronouns. We would also be
grateful for additional references in the literature.

You may as well reply to my personal email, with copies to the students (in
the copy above),

Michael Daniel
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