[Lingtyp] fieldwork on deixis

[Amalia Horan Skilton]

Dear all,

In the spirit of the Legos suggestion, in recent (post thesis) work I have
found that having speakers play with marbles leads them to produce large
numbers of demonstratives in a very natural setting (I'm present but don't
direct the activity at all).

Adult speakers of Ticuna (a language isolate; Brazil, Colombia, Peru) who
are playing marbles with their children produce demonstratives in about 35%
of all turns. This is comparable to the number of demonstratives obtained
with tasks that are less natural and specifically designed to elicit
demonstratives (e.g. the model-building task reported by Kuntay & Ozyurek
2006). Certainly a game of marbles is not as highly controlled as the
Wilkins questionnaire, but it makes a good complement to more controlled
tasks.

I've also tried similar tasks with Legos, but found marbles more effective.
The reasons being:

- Legos can be distinguished from each other by color and/or shape, and my
participants tended to refer to them using definite descriptions concerning
the color/shape. Marbles have uniform surface appearance and therefore can
only be contrasted using deictic or other spatial language.

- Legos are not mobile. Marbles are. They can move toward/away from the
participants, producing opportunities for reference to entities that are in
motion (important in some demonstrative systems). Likewise, they roll
around and get lost and trapped under things, producing many scenarios for
reference to invisible entities, for spkr drawing addr's attention to
something that only spkr is attending, etc.

- People given Legos tend to use them to build structures independently
unless (and in my experience, even if) they are explicitly told to
collaborate. If you want attention-directing sequences, you need a
collaborative task (such as finding something you have lost).

Citation: Küntay, Aylin C, and Asli Özyürek. 2006. Learning to Use
Demonstratives in Conversation: What Do Language Specific Strategies in
Turkish Reveal? Journal of Child Language 33(2): 303–320.

best,
Amalia

Amalia Horan Skilton
NSF SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University of Texas at Austin & Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Nijmegen
http://sites.utexas.edu/amaliaskilton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20200226/7d9587c2/attachment.htm>