A hunting story: eliciting associated motion through guided narrative

Author : Vuillermet, Marine & Desnoyers, Antoine

Publication date : 2013

Bibliographical references :

Vuillermet, Marine & Antoine Desnoyers. 2013. A hunting story -- Yendo a cazar: A visual stimulus for eliciting constructions that associate motion with other events. Linguistic Department, UC Berkeley, ms.

Goals

"Pictures and video stimuli are useful to investigate specific semantic domains and/or grammatical categories, especially for comparative work. The AM [Associated Motion; see Development context below for details] storybook was specifically conceived to elicit AM morphemes, i.e. morphemes which encode a back-grounded motion to a main action. This is the reason why all the pictures illustrate main actions that occur within a journey – e.g. checking the rifle before leaving, waving to the family while leaving, greeting friends while walking, etc.

Analyzing the data collected with the AM stimulus should:
(a) result in a better understanding of the semantic features of each AM morpheme and of the system as a whole (inventory)
(b) permit to investigate the discourse use of the morphemes;
(c) allow comparison across consultants – according to their age, gender and level of
fluency ;
(d) help crosslinguistic comparisons, also in terms of inventories and discourse use." (Vuillermet & Desnoyers, 2013 : 1)

 

 

Protocol summary

The entire experience consists of five instructions, completed by the same consultant. Depending on her research interests, the researcher may attend the first two only or follow the entire protocol. The instructions are discussed in details in the document associated to the Hunting Story.

  • Instruction 1 – ‘Here is a hunting story’: Discovering the story with the researcher
  • Instruction 2 – Re-telling the story with an itinerary in mind
  • Instruction 3 – How did the speaker like it?
  • Instruction 4 – Telling a complementary similar story
  • Instruction 5 – The Pear Film

Development context

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. a suggested protocol), a questionnaire designed to express feedback on the kit, suggestions for glossing AM morphemes and a basic bibliography on AM.

It was developed during a one-year postdoctoral study at the University of Berkeley, financed by the Fyssen Foundation.


Please contact me at marinevui[AT]yahoo.fr if you want to use the stimulus, so that I can keep track of the users and the languages surveyed.

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