{"id":8357,"date":"2015-05-09T07:00:20","date_gmt":"2015-05-08T21:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/?p=8357"},"modified":"2015-05-11T12:39:07","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T02:39:07","slug":"elicitation-methods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2015\/05\/elicitation-methods\/","title":{"rendered":"Elicitation Methods"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Schlossberg\u00a0recaps the April\u00a0Linguistics in the Pub, a monthly informal gathering of linguists in Melbourne to discuss topical areas in our field.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Topic: Elicitation Methods<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2011, LIP ran a discussion on techniques and activities used in the field by\u00a0linguists to elicit particular grammatical phenomena, compare cognition across\u00a0languages or simply record naturalistic talk-in-interaction. What is new today?\u00a0We would like to follow on the same idea and give the opportunity to present\u00a0activities which were successful or unsuccessful in the field. Of particular interest\u00a0would be activities using grammaticality judgments or aimed at analysing semantic\u00a0functions, such as aspect.<\/p>\n

A small but dedicated cohort representing linguists from Melbourne’s three linguistics\u00a0departments showed up at April’s LIP to discuss elicitation methodologies, moderated by\u00a0Giordana Santosuosso.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Santosuosso opened the discussion by presenting two elicitation methodologies she had\u00a0trialled in the field, one which had yielded successful results, and the other which had been\u00a0less successful. The latter, was a narrative elicitation games in which the participants\u00a0rolled a series of dice with basic images on them<\/a>, and put\u00a0the pictures which they rolled in a sequence in order to improvise a narrative based on the\u00a0images. The goal in this case was to elicit a TAM particle which was hypothesised to have\u00a0a sequential function. However, some participants had difficulty coming up with stories\u00a0based on the stimuli, and the ad-hoc nature of the tasks did not facilitate comparative\u00a0analysis between participants. It was suggested that it might be better to use the same\u00a0sequence of images for all participants.<\/p>\n

The second, more successful task, was a story-board elicitation task in which a series of\u00a0pictures depicting a story are shown to the participant. The participant is then told the story\u00a0in English (or presumably, the relevant contact language) and asked to tell the whole story\u00a0in their language. The target of this particular storyboard was to elicit whether there is a\u00a0contrast between deontic possibility (permission), circumstantial possibility (ability), and\u00a0deontic necessity (obligation). As this task provided a much richer prompt for the\u00a0participants than the story cubes, it was easier for them to formulate a narrative in\u00a0response. In addition, the homogeneity of the stimuli allowed for both intralinguistic and\u00a0(potentially) interlinguistic comparison.<\/p>\n

From this point, the discussion broadened to discuss the usefulness of elicitation tasks in\u00a0general. It was pointed out that in addition to being useful for comparative purposes, the\u00a0tasks produce a known context between speaker and linguist. It was pointed out that the\u00a0storyboard task contained a significant Eurocentric bias. One participant pointed out that to\u00a0maximise the participant’s knowledge of the context, it would be ideal to collect images at\u00a0the field site and use these to create a storyboard individually tailored to the linguistic\u00a0community one is operating in. While the consensus among the group was that in theory,\u00a0this would be ideal, in practice it might be difficult and time consuming to do, as well as\u00a0requiring a return trip to the field site, which is not always practical. Additionally, one\u00a0participant pointed out that while that would create the most maximally useful data for\u00a0language description, it removes one of the big advantages of the storyboard task as it\u00a0stands, namely producing data ideal for cross-linguistic comparison.<\/p>\n

An example of the latter scenario is the Frog Story, which has been used by linguists to\u00a0elicit narratives which have subsequently been used for comparative research in language\u00a0acquisition (Bamberg 1987) and motion event typology (Slobin 2004). Furthermore, it was\u00a0pointed out that even an elicitation task tailored to the community may still not yield a\u00a0narrative identical in structure to that of a spontaneous narrative in an informal setting. For\u00a0example, Foley (2003) has shown that narratives elicited through use of the frog story\u00a0were structurally different to spontaneous narratives.<\/p>\n

One participant then described an elicitation task which he had recently developed to run\u00a0at his field site, which had taken advantages of the cultural practices of the speakers to\u00a0yield as maximally naturalistic data as possible. He showed that there does not always\u00a0have to be a dichotomy between naturalistic data and elicited data. Another participant\u00a0said that they did not like the term ‘naturalistic’ when used in reference to elicitation tasks,\u00a0as the participants are still speaking natural language.<\/p>\n

Finally, it was argued that it might not necessarily matter if there are aspects of the data\u00a0which are not naturalistic, as long as the target of the research is. For example, it might not\u00a0matter to the researcher if the frog story narratives are not representative of\u00a0spontaneous narratives in narrative structure, if one is only interested in motion event typology.<\/p>\n

We thank all attendees for their enthusiastic participation and valuable contributions, and\u00a0look forward to the following LIP on May 19 on Literacy in the Field!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bamberg, M. (1987). The acquisition of narratives: Learning to use language<\/em>. Berlin: Mouton de\u00a0Gruyter.<\/p>\n

Foley, William A. 2003. Genre, register and language documentation in literate and pre-literate\u00a0communities. In Peter Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and Description<\/em> 1, 85\u201398. London:\u00a0Hans Rausing Endangered Language Project, School of Oriental and African Studies.<\/p>\n

Slobin, D. (2004). The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of\u00a0motion events. In S. Str\u00f6mqvist & L. Verhoeven (Eds.), Relating Events in Narrative:\u00a0Typological and Contextual Perspectives<\/em> (Vol. 2, pp. 219\u2013257). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence\u00a0Erlbaum Associates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Schlossberg\u00a0recaps the April\u00a0Linguistics in the Pub, a monthly informal gathering of linguists in Melbourne to discuss topical areas in our field. Topic: Elicitation Methods In 2011, LIP ran a discussion on techniques and activities used in the field by\u00a0linguists to elicit particular grammatical phenomena, compare cognition across\u00a0languages or simply record naturalistic talk-in-interaction. What is … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[66,4,50],"tags":[70,71,72],"class_list":["post-8357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentation","category-fieldwork","category-linguistics-in-the-pub","tag-elicitation","tag-fieldwork","tag-linguistics-in-the-pub"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8357"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8362,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8357\/revisions\/8362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}