Storyboards for modal meanings

Author : Kilu von Prince

Publication date : 2018

Bibliographical references :

Some of these storyboards have been featured in the following publications:

• Kilu von Prince, Ana Krajinović, Anna Margetts, Nick Thieberger, Valérie Guérin. 2019. Habituals in Oceanic languages of Melanesia. STUF - Language Typology and Universals, 72(1):21–66.
• von Prince, Kilu and Krajinović, Ana and Krifka, Manfred and Guérin, Valérie and Franjieh, Michael. 2018. Mapping irreality: Storyboards for eliciting TAM contexts. In Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2018.
• von Prince, Kilu. 2018. Paradigm-induced implicatures of TAM markers: The case of the Daakaka distal. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21.

Goals

The following four storyboards have been created in the context of the MelaTAMP project at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin by Kilu von Prince for the elicitation of specific modal contexts. They can be downloaded from the links to zenodo.org added below:

1. The "Festival" storyboard elicits counterfactual conditionals of the past and of the future.
2. The "Fat pig" storyboard targets specific and non-specific relative clauses.
3. The "Red Yam" storyboard is designed to elicit an indicative conditional such that the protasis refers to the present, and the apodosis to the past. It also targets expressions of epistemic possibility and necessity.
4. The "Bananas" storyboard targets false-belief reports.

Protocol summary

For instructions on how to work with storyboards, I recommend:

Strang Burton and Lisa Matthewson. Targeted construction storyboards in semantic fieldwork. In Ryan Bochnak and Lisa Matthewson, editors, Methodologies in Semantic Fieldwork, pages 135–156. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Development context

These storyboards were developed in the context of the MelaTAMP project, hosted at HU Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation from 2016 to 2019. The goal of the project was to learn more about tense, aspect, modality and polarity in Oceanic languages, based on pre-existing corpus data and on additional elictations based on storyboards. A particular focus was on the realis/irrealis distinction, other work concentrated on perfect aspect, habituality, expressions of possibility and timitive/apprehensive structures. Project members: Kilu von Prince (PI), Manfred Krifka (PI), Ana Krajinović (PhD student), Stephan Druskat (Research Software Engineer), Annika Tjuka and Lena Weißmann (both student assistants).