Information structure

The Hunting Story is a visual stimulus (Vuillermet & Desnoyers 2013). This storybook has primarily been designed to elicit "associated motion" (henceforth AM) morphology, but can be used to examine any type of co-expression of a motion and a non-motion event. The visual stimulus comes together with a document (Vuillermet, in progress) describing the visual stimulus and its goals in details, instructions how to use the storybook (i.e.

"Information structure is concerned both with ‘mental states’ of speakers and hearers and with linguistic means used to convey these mental states. In other words, the linguist interested in information structure (IS), deals simultaneously with formal and communicative aspects of language. The main contrasts concern ‘new’, ‘accessible’ and ‘given’, as well as ‘topic’, focus,’ and ‘background’". (Skopeteas et al., 2006: 1)

''This document provides a set of descriptors to be used in describing the internal structure of the noun phrase across languages. As used by the author, a descriptor is a statement like, "There is no plural marker." The author refers to a coherent set of descriptors as a "checklist", which is roughly equivalent to "questionnaire" for other authors. In addition to developing the proposed general checklist in outline, the author discusses the criteria adopted for the evaluation of typological checklists.

This methodological guideline has been published in Language, Vol. 43, No. 2, Part 1 (Jun., 1967), by the Linguistic Society of America