Worshop on linguistic questionnaires
November 9th and 10th
University of Paris Diderot
(provisional) Program
Thursday, November 9th9:30-10 / Welcome, introduction
Aimée Lahaussois / Aimée Lahaussois
HTL/CNRS
10-11 / keynote: Birgit Hellwig
11-11:30 / break
11:30-12 / A questionnaire for articles: a report / Laura Becker
Leipzig University
12-12:30 / An online questionnaire for collecting valency data / Jerzy Gaszewski
University of Wroclaw
12:30-14 / lunch
14-14:30 / Video elicitation of negative directives in Alaskan Dene languages: reflections on methodology / Olga Lovick
First Nations University of Canada
Siri G. Tuttle
Alaska Native Language Center
14:30-15 / Storyboards vs. Picture-aided Translation: A case study xon the typology of comparison / Golsa Nouri-Hosseini
University of Gothenburg
Elizabeth Coppock
University of Gothenburg
15-15:30 / Automatic construction of a lexical typological questionnaire / Daria Ryzhova
NRU Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Denis Paperno, Loria/CNRS,
15:30-16 / break
16-16:30 / SES and word comprehension: a touchscreen study / Scaff Camila, LSCP, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL, Univ. Paris Diderot
16:30-17 / Adapting experimental visual stimuli protocols for wider use / Natalia Cacéres
University of Oregon
Friday, November 10th
10-10:30 / A mixed type of questionnaire for describing participial systems: designing, testing, polishing / Ksenia Shagal
University of Helsinki
10:30-11 / Approaches to questionnaires from a cross-dialectal perspective: Towards ‘best practices’ / Jozina Vander Klok
University of Oslo
Thomas J. Conners
University of Maryland
11-11:30 / break
11:30-12 / A visual stimulus for eliciting Path of motion: design, use and diffusion / Marine Vuillermet
DDL/CNRS
Anetta Kopecka
DDL/CNRS – Université Lyon 2
12-12:30 / An experimental video databank for eliciting aspectuo-temporal contrasts the field / Patrick Caudal
LLF/CNRS
Robert Mailhammer
Univ. Western Sydney
12:30-14 / lunch
14-15 / keynote: Lila San Roque
15-15:30 / discussion
Abstracts
A questionnaire for articles: a report
Laura Becker (), Leipzig University
Overview The present paper addresses a questionnaire developed to investigate the use of articles (definite/indefinite/specific). Intriguingly, within semantic fieldwork materials and methodological discussions, this area does not yet seem to be covered (e.g. Moravcsik (1990); Goddard & Wierzbicka (1994; Bochnak & Matthewson (2015); or the questionnaire collection from the MPI-EVA, Leipzig). In this talk, I will give an overview of the different contexts tested, the applicability of the questionnaire across languages, how it relates to other methods applied in semantic fieldwork and how corpus data can be integrated into the questionnaire to improve
elicitation.
Contexts covered by the questionnaire The contexts the questionnaire is designed to investigate are: (i) anaphoric use, (ii) bridging, (iii) cataphoric use, (iv) situationally unique referents, (v) absolutely unique referents, (vi) pragmatically specific referents, (vii) deictic non-identifiable referents, (viii) deictic identifiable referents, (xi) predicative use, (x) pseudo-predicative use, (xii) generic use, (xiii) nonspecific use, (xiv) genitive/associative constructions, (xv) instruments, (xvi) conventionalized NP expressions, (xvii) NP with superlative, (xviii) NP with next/last/first/only etc., (xix) existential constructions. In addition, outside of specific contexts, the compatibility with nouns from different semantic classes (person, animate, place, abstract noun, mass noun) are suggested to test their general compatibility with the determiner in question systematically. Although the questionnaire has been used to investigate the use of articles in different languages, it covers all major values of referentiality and can, in general, be used for studying definiteness/referentiality in languages without articles as well.
Classic questionnaire vs. storyboards Semantic questionnaires that involve the translation from e.g. English into the target language have been strongly debated in terms of liability. In order to elicitate more natural data, the storyboard method, using pictures/visual material based on which the informant has to tell little stories, has been proposed. With respect to a very specific grammatical topic, however, storyboards did not prove to be
very practical, be it because informants could not make sense of the pictures, or because crucial details could not be manipulated in such an open production task. Therefore, I propose that a questionnaire involving the transfer from English example sentences into the target language under the guidance of the linguist, who must discuss alternatives with the informant, should be viewed as a licit method in semantic fieldwork concerned with more grammatical and not, e.g., lexical structures. One example to illustrate why a systematic test of the conditions in question is necessary comes from Limbum (Grassfields Bantu, Cameroon). Testing for what might be called a definite article in the language, it turned out to be crucial to test different noun types for their
compatibility with that marker, since abstract nouns appeared to be incompatible with it in general, independent of the context used. With storyboards (or any kind of free elicitation) which would rather feature prototypical animate protagonists with concrete, visually presentable objects, this observation could have easily been missed. Therefore, the questionnaire is designed in a way that different types of referents occur in subject and object positions using different sentence structures (as is possible in the target language) to consider grammatical effects that might remain unnoticed otherwise.
Combining the questionnaire and corpus data In order to make the questionnaire less dependent on the English example sentences whenever possible, it has been combined with data from a parallel corpus study based on movie subtitles (constituting a second part in the project the questionnaire has been developed for). In addition to combining two different empirical strategies, the sentences from the movie subtitles could be presented together with the movie sequence. Thus, for those sentences (at least 2 per condition), the visual support made the elicitation less dependent on the English sentence. Also, this method could distract the informants (who in
general liked those “movie-based tasks” most) and add diversity to the elicitation session.
Adapting experimental visual stimuli protocols for wider use
Natalia Cáceres, University of Oregon
Stimuli based studies are presented as being easy to implement with a brief period of familiarization given that, in principle, no specialized knowledge is sought (Majid 2012:56, Hellwig 2006:331).
In this paper, I discuss the use of a particular subtype of video stimuli for which fieldworkers have reported that it is precisely the medium and the unfamiliar contents of video stimuli that represent an impediment for their successful use in geographically remote communities.
Two categories of visual stimuli-based protocols can be identified: those that are to be used as a discovery tool for the grammatical strategies a language uses and those that are supposed to elicit an effect of a stimulus on language production (as opposed to a simple description).
An example of the latter is the Fish Film protocol which tests the hypothesis that main clause grammar in many languages is sensitive to ATTENTION DETECTION, a cognitive process established via 30+ years of cognitive psychology experiments (reviewed in Wright & Ward 2008). This protocol was first tested in English. With almost 100% accuracy, English speakers coded a cued element in the video stimuli as grammatical subject (Tomlin 1995, 1997 and others) with an active sentence when an agent is cued (The red fish ate the blue fish) and a passive sentence when it is the patient that is cued (The red fish was eaten by the blue fish). Similar significant results were reported for 15 other languages with very different grammatical structures in main clauses (e.g. Japanese [Hayashi et al. 2002], Malagasy [Rasolofo 2006], and Burmese [Soe 1999]). These results however have not been replicated with populations of languages traditionally spoken in remote locations, which are not written or taught in school through books. Fieldworkers informally report that this is in part because the stimulus is not culturally appropriate in that there are too many novel elements in it (animated drawings, watching events on a screen) and also because the cue is not adapted to efficiently orienting the speakers’ attention (the cue in the shape of a black arrow tends to be identified as an additional participant in the event).
When we find that this kind of protocol does not work out of the context for which it was originally designed, does it mean that we are faced with people whose cognition is different or that we do not know how to get at their cognition using the tools we use with students from western universities in industrialized towns?
For the first category of video-stimuli, reports of failed experiences have led to efforts in rendering the contents as culturally neutral as possible to allow data collection in the largest array of languages independently of cultural differences (e.g. the Trajectoire video, Ishibashi et al. 2006). This indeed facilitates identification of the depicted scenes. However, having designed and conducted two different pilot protocols similar to the Fish Film, I have observed that providing cultural familiarity is not sufficient in helping speakers unfamiliar with producing language for non-communicative means to produce a response on demand that could be equated to spontaneous speech influenced by the stimuli.
I argue that in order to conduct protocols of the second category, we must modify them so as to neutralize variables that depend on the prior experience of experimental subjects (in absentia communication, being able to accurately identify an event in an animated video, produce a timed response to a stimulus, not to construct sequential narratives or behavioral explanations). Such an effort would help field linguists in obtaining comparable results in the field to those that can be obtained in a lab, ultimately providing the field of linguistics with a more representative sample of languages to feed into theories of human behavior.
An online questionnaire for collecting valency data
Jerzy Gaszewski, University of Wroclaw, Poland;
The paper presents a questionnaire used for collecting data on valency in a set of languages (in my study the languages of Central Europe). The output of the informants are sentencesinstantiating valency patterns of individual verbs in the analysed languages.
I make use of two modes of data collection that cancel out each other’s methodological
weaknesses. Version A provides the informant with an example sentence in the contact
language (I have English in this function). The informant translates the sentence into their native language, and matches the parts of the original and the translation as in the example(filled with Hungarian data):
original sentence: I thanked those people for their help.
translated sentence: Megköszöntem azoknak az embereknek a segítségüket.
element corresponding to ‘thanked’: megköszöntem
basic form of this element: köszön
element corresponding to ‘those people’: azoknak az embereknek H_dative
basic form of this element: ember
element corresponding to ‘for their help’: a segítségüket H_accusative
basic form of this element: segítség
notes: ‘meg-‘ as a prefix also denotes ‘perfect’ tense
(black – stimuli for the informant, red – provided data, green – grammatical tagging)
The sentences are simple and relate to real-life situations so that informants can imagine thetranslations being used. A single verbal meaning (‘thank’ above) is represented by at least 2sentences differing in the lexical content of the argument phrases and tense. The divisions ofthe sentence are then tagged for grammatical markers (adpositions and cases).
Version B provides the informant with a verb in their language (drawing on the same set of verbal meanings). The informant creates example sentences with the verb on their own andtranslates them into English. These sentences then undergo division according to valency structure and tagging for grammatical markers.
The questionnaire is dynamic in several ways. When relevant, informants are able (and
encouraged to) provide multiple translations for a single stimulus sentence or verb, which allows variation in valency marking to surface. Furthermore, the exact content of the stimulican vary. This is in fact necessary in version B, which targets each language separately. Lastly,what I present is a ready questionnaire for a particular project, but the questionnaire’ssoftware allows for easy creation of new versions tailored to other studies of valency. Thesefeatures are possible because the questionnaire operates as an online application accessed bythe informants, which accounts for its limitations too. For example, access to the Internet andliteracy in native language are rather trivial requirements in the investigated area, this is not soin all language communities.
On the theoretical level, the paper discusses the details of selection of data for the analysis. Valency offers a fine illustration of this general problem. Since any language has hundreds orthousands of valency carriers in its lexicon, making principled choices is absolutely essential.In picking the verbs I combined the objective factor of corpus frequency of verbs and thepresence of oblique valency markers (the focus of the study). These criteria were appliedindependently to a subset of the languages involved in the study and the resulting lists ofverbal meanings (which overlapped to a considerable extent) were combined.
Video elicitation of negative directives in Alaskan Dene languages: reflections on methodology
Olga Lovick, First Nations University of Canada,
Siri G. Tuttle, Alaska Native Language Center,
In the investigation of positive and negative directives in the Alaskan Dene languages Koyukon, LowerTanana, and Upper Tanana (Tuttle & Lovick 2014, Lovick & Tuttle 2015), one of the most strikingresults is that, while positive directives are relatively common, negative ones re extremely rare, yetexhibit a great variety of forms. The form of negative directives seems to depend on several factors,particularly on whether the prohibited act violates social norms. In order to determine whether this is actually the case, and to better understand the variety of forms, more data was required. Initially, we attempted elicitation of phrases such as “don’t chop wood” (which would not violatesocial norms) and “don’t grab a man around the wrist” (which is considered taboo), but it appeared that speakers defaulted to a simple form which further discussion revealed to be rather impolite.Instead, we created video clips of university students performing activities that are considered tabooand activities that are merely foolish or (mildly) dangerous. We showed these clips to several elders perlanguage and asked them to pretend that the student was their grandchild: How would they advisethem? We kept this instruction simple and vague so that elders were able to respond in a manner thatthey deem appropriate to the situation.In this paper, we want to critically evaluate our approach. In favor of using this methodology is that we were able to collect a variety of both direct andindirect negative directives. Our consultants very much enjoyed this work, responding freely and offering much commentary. Additionally, unlike in textual analysis, we were able to recognize indirect negative directives for what they are. We also know in each instance whether the prohibited action is considered taboo or not. The collected data is thus very rich.
There were however also several problems with our methodology. The students in the videos
were all in their early 20s and our consultants were of the opinion that people of that age should know better than to behave so inappropriately. (Recruitment of children to act in these videos was not possible for cultural reasons.) But most importantly, just the fact that we tried to elicit negative directives results in “unnatural” data -- to tell someone not to do something is itself an attack of an individual’s positive face (Brown & Levinson 1987; see also Lovick 2016 for more discussion of this issue) and speakers avoid it, preferring non-linguistic cues. Interestingly, the fact that the students were non-native worked in our favor, since white people breaking a taboo is less upsetting than native people doing so. In spite of these caveats, we found this methodology helpful, not to mention fun and engaging. While recording of natural everyday interactions certainly would be preferable, using video stimuli for the elicitation of negative commands yields very rich data in field situations like ours, where the native language is no longer used on a daily basis. Tailoring our videos to the cultural groups we work with lets us ensure that we capture relevant cultural distinctions. Yet even though the “taboo” activities shown in the videos are specific to Northern Dene groups, we believe that the videos could easily be adapted to other cultural groups.
Storyboards vs. Picture-aided Translation: A case study on the typology of comparison
Golsa Nouri-Hosseini, University of Gothenburg,
Elizabeth Coppock, University of Gothenburg,
This work (a) presents a novel questionnaire for eliciting comparatives and superlatives of quality and quantity, (b) suggests guidelines for creating visual elicitation stimuli, and (c) reports on a study comparing two visual elicitation methods, storyboards and picture-aided translation, showing that picture-aided translation might work better than storyboards for some purposes. Storyboards are a series of pictures which tell a story, and the participants are invited to tell the story in their native language, based on the pictures. In picture-aided translation, each picture is accompanied by a written sentence, and participants are asked to give translations based on both the picture and the text. Storyboards are advocated by Matthewson (2015), in contrast to direct elicitation (when the context is verbally provided to the participants), since they elicit more natural, spontaneous utterances, minimize the influence of the contact language, and obviate the need for verbal context description, which minimizes the risk of misunderstanding of the context. However, storyboards pose heavy cognitive burdens on the participants’ memory and this can result in discomfort for the participants and failure to elicit the target constructions. Therefore, we conducted a systematic comparison of storyboards and picture-aided translation, to see whether the presence of text makes data elicitation better or worse.
In our study, we included two different stories: the ‘What Matters’ story, which we developed, and the ‘Bake-off’ story from Totem Field Storyboards. The ‘What Matters’ story was developed through pilot studies on Swahili, Kagulu, Mixtec, Swedish, Persian, and Arabic. Problematic stimuli were modified after each pilot test. The image shows a sample of the changes.