[Lingtyp] fieldwork on deixis

Wed Feb 26 15:36:00 UTC 2020

Dear all — Let me add to Anna’s post that there is an entire battery of instruments we developed back in the old Nijmegen Space project for the collection of data on demonstrative use. They are listed here:

http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/?s=Demonstrative

Contrary to what Michael’s query implies (which already mentions the Wilkins questionnaire), each instrument comes with a detailed field manual entry that discusses its designed use. 

Now, one of these tools is a task Nick Enfield and I developed to overcome one of the principal shortcomings of David’s questionnaire, namely, that it relies on scenarios the speaker has to imagine, such that it is impossible to naturalistically draw the speaker’s attention to the referent, since the speaker will in reality always already be aware of the referent. 

To deal with this problem, we developed the Hidden Color Chips task:

http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/2001/hidden-colour-chips-task/

Unfortunately, this task is fairly involved, and I’m not sure anybody other than Nick and me ever wound up collecting data with it. I do believe that Nick published a paper based on the data he collected.

HTH! — Juergen

> On Feb 26, 2020, at 2:37 AM, Anna Margetts <anna.margetts at monash.edu> wrote:
> 
>  
> I would recommend the elicitation tool designed by David Wilkins, especially for distinguishing person-based from distance-based demonstrative systems.
> 
> Wilkins, David. 1999a. The 1999 demonstrative questionnaire: “this” and “that” in comparative perspective. In David Wilkins, ed. 
> Manual for the 1999 field season. Version 1.0. Nijmegen, MPI for Pycholinguistics. 1-24.
>  
> The questionnaire should be downloadable from the website of the MPI in Nijmegen. This entire book is discussing cross-linguistic 
> work with this elicitation tool:
> 
> Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-42428-8 — Demonstratives in Cross-Linguistic Perspective Edited by Stephen Levinson , Sarah Cutfield , 
> Michael Dunn , Nick Enfield , Sergio Meira , David Wilkins
> 
> 
> 
> Regards, 
> 
> Anna
> 
> 
> On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 at 04:34, Jessica Katiuscia Ivani <jivani at isfas.uni-kiel.de> wrote:
> Dear Michael,
> you can use lego blocks to create different scenarios and let the speakers describe the contexts and the spatial relations between the tokens. Robert Schikowski (University of Zürich) has used this method for Chintang (Tibeto-Burman), I attach a picture of one of his models. You can find information about the methodology and further inspiration on this MA thesis by Tyko Dirksmeyer. 
> I have also used lego blocks during my fieldwork experiences (on Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman), in addition to other materials, and they have been extremely useful.
> Best,
> Jessica
> 
> <photo_2020-02-25_18-10-11.jpg>
> 
> 
> 
>> On 25. Feb 2020, at 17:36, Michael Daniel <misha.daniel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 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, 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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-- 
Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
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