Eliciting narratives through a film: Pear Stories

Author : Wallace Chafe

Publication date : 1975

Questionnaire URL : http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/chafe/pearfilm.htm

Bibliographical references :

Chafe, Wallace. 1980. (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex .

Goals

"The goal has been to present cinematically a series of more or less natural events to multiple viewers, who are then asked to verbalize what they remember." (Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara; http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/pear-film)

Protocol summary

"The Pear Story is based on a silent video clip. Native speaker consultants are asked to tell the story of the video in their own words. The video clip is found in the Pear Story Website by Dr. Mary S. Erbaugh (www.pearstories.org)." (Typological Tools for field linguists, https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/stimulus_kits.php)

Development context

"A six-minute film that was produced at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975 and shown to speakers of a number of languages, who were asked to tell what happened in it. In the meantime it has been used in a variety of other studies across other languages". (Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara; http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/pear-film)