Linguistic Elicitation

Dans ce cours nous allons recueillir et organiser des données d’une langue peu décrite (probablement une langue autochtone) et nous allons utiliser ces données pour préparer des résumés descriptifs de la langue, formuler et tester des hypothèses concernant des phénomènes particuliers dans cette langue, et finalement développer des analyses de ces phénomènes.

Ce cours va inclure la discussion des données, l’élicitation en classe auprès d’un locuteur natif de la langue ciblée, ainsi que les rencontres en petits groupes avec ce locuteur, hors de la salle de classe. Nous allons aussi enregistrer et transcrire une histoire pour obtenir un échantillon du discours connecté. Cette histoire devrait aussi nous présenter plusieurs énigmes grammaticales que nous allons examiner plus profondément dans les séances d’élicitation.

This paper discusses a series of so-called “elicitation” games that encourage children to
talk in a situation that is as natural and relaxed as possible. Such games have played a
central role in language teaching and speech therapy, where they have been employed to
provide language training or to assess children’s linguistic development without putting
them under stress. Recently, such games have become more widely used in language
acquisition research. Here they are employed to obtain rich sets of language production
data from children who are too young to take part in controlled experiments on language
production. Moreover, they can be used in longitudinal studies where children are
recorded over longer periods of time and might develop strategies in experiments. Most
of these elicitation games target a specific construction or domain of grammar and so
language teachers, speech therapists and researchers spend a lot of their time developing
new games for each individual construction they would like to elicit from children. As
this can be very time-consuming, there is a demand for games that can be adapted to a
broad range of phenomena and situations (for instance, situations with one or several
players). In this paper, I will present three such games, which might be useful for
acquisition researchers, language teachers and speech therapists: the Bag Task, the
Picture-Pairing Task and the Puzzle Task. In addition, I will discuss the advantages and
disadvantages of using such games in a research context.

This chapter provides an overview of theoretical issues and core empirical findings in cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of syntax. Section 1 identifies key issues in syntax acquisition research: (i) the respective contribution of learners' input and innate predispositions for language acquisition;(ii) the time course of syntactic development; (iii) the role of learners’ age and potential implications for monolingual, bilingual and second language (L2) acquisition. Section 2 introduces methods for investigating syntactic development. Section 3 discusses the relative role of learners’ input and innate predispositions for syntax acquisition. This section presents (i) generative, Optimality Theory and usage-based approaches to syntactic development and (ii) the empirical findings on learners’ input that form the background for the debate between proponents of the different approaches. Section 4 focuses on the emergence of syntax. The following sections discuss the acquisition of core syntactic phenomena: questions and embedded clauses (section 5), passives (section 6), co-reference (section 7), and quantification (section 8). Each of these sections gives an overview of theoretical accounts and empirical findings; with a focus on monolingual first language (L1) acquisition. Age effects and differences between monolingual and bilingual acquisition are the focus of section 9. Section 10 discusses the empirical findings and their theoretical implications and highlights current trends.

This paper argues for the integration of child language data into language documentations projects and shows the benefits that the documentation of child language can have for (i) acquisition researchers, (ii) descriptive, theoretical and historical linguists, and (iii) members of language maintenance or revitalisation projects. Moreover, it discusses which implications different user requirements have for data collection and provides pointers to resources, tools and stimuli.

Teaching pragmatics and modality to beginners needs context to bring it to life: this paper presents insights drawn from consideration of obligatory evidential marking in Tibetan.

Beginners trying to form their first sentences in spoken Tibetan are faced with an obligatory choice of sentence-final auxiliaries. In a target-language-only (immersion) classroom, sophisticated teaching strategies are needed to convey the choices to the learner, since very little language is yet available at the beginner stage for explanations etc.

This paper briefly reviews similar language features in more major languages taught as a foreign language and also looks for inspiration from elicitation techniques used in the field by linguists
researching languages with this feature. Recommendations for teaching and materials design are then presented in a way that highlights their more general relevance for teaching other languages.

There is a long tradition in oral language examinations of employing structured interviews with pre-scripted, fixed examiner contributions. This chapter examines an alternative format, the semi-structured interview, in which examiners adapt their test plans around candidates’ input, in order to elicit target language and communicative skills related to a chosen level. The Trinity College London Graded Examinations in Spoken English (GESE) are the subject of study.

Formally calibrated to the Common European Framework of Reference (Council of Europe, 2001), GESE examinations are set out in 12 levels, which Trinity refers to as ‘Grades’ (e.g. ‘Grade 1’ to ‘Grade 12’.) By analysing video recordings of 32 spoken examinations from the 12 GESE levels, this research identifies a range of examiner techniques that have evolved as a result of the examiners’ training and experience in adapting test plans to elicit target language skills. 14 examples of different elicitation techniques were identified from 374 minutes of recorded material. Of particular interest is the finding that contrary to what we might expect from oral proficiency testing interviews, direct questions are only used part of the time, with examiners adapting and developing prompts, creating elicitation strategies that represent a range of conversation patterns and roles.

This paper presents a set of Case Elicitation Games and Stimuli (CEGS). The aim of this elicitation tool kit is to encourage speakers to produce a broad range of case-marked forms in a variety of different syntactic contexts, including subjects, direct and indirect objects, prepositional phrases and noun phrases that are not selected by a verb or preposition. The games involve two tasks - the Puzzle Task and the Picture-Pairing Task (Eisenbeiss 2009, 2010). Both tasks are semi-structured and involve flexible procedures and an informal interactional setting. The same target words are used in different games and syntactic contexts, which allows for cross-context and cross-method comparisons. CEGS was designed to provide rich semi- naturalistic speech samples of speakers from the age of two years. It can complement spontaneous speech sampling and controlled experiments on the use and comprehension of case marking; and the games are particularly effective for children that are too young to take part in controlled production experiments on case acquisition. The picture stimuli described in this paper were designed for studies involving German children, but we will discuss how tasks and stimuli can be adapted to other languages or adult participants, and to speech therapy or language documentation contexts.

This chapter compares Hanks‟ (1990, 2005) „practice‟ approach to the demonstratives of Yucatec Maya based on the recording of spontaneously occurring interactions to the results obtained by the author with the elicitation questionnaire developed by Wilkins (1999). The study of the meaning and use of demonstratives represents particular challenges to linguistic data gathering because of their context dependency and the role of interactional factors such as attention sharing. The questionnaire study disconfirmed any direct impact of the location of the addressee on the choice of demonstrative and showed a systematic contrast between simple forms used for joint attention and augmented ones used for attention direction. It is argued that observation of spontaneous interactions and elicitation should be pursued in tandem.

Making students aware of their erroneous utterances effectively is a substantive issue in second language learning. Therefore, the present study set out with the aim of examining whether the corrective recasts could be more beneficial in comparison with elicitation in making the students notice their deviated past tense utterances. To effectuate the objectives of the study, 40 pre-intermediate English learners were recruited from Navid Language Center, Shiraz, Iran. They formed two experimental groups, each consisting of 20 male and female students. In each group, the incorrect past tense utterances were corrected by one of the afore-mentioned corrective moves. To gather the required data, the participants were assigned to perform a picture description task; moreover, a second task in which learners were given a set of scrambled pictures to sequence them in order to form a coherent story. For further analysis, for each testing session (pre-test, post-test) two tests were administered. The findings indicated that the students, corrected by corrective recasts, benefited far more than the students receiving elicitation; in addition, the findings proved that corrective recasts can raise the perceptual saliency of the target form; in addition, the contiguity of the learner’s utterance and the teacher’s recast will highlight the existence of an error and it could help the learners to notice the negative evidence, and also the gap between their own inter-language forms and that of target-language.

Traditional data collection methods in dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics have difficulty in gathering sufficient quantities of data from a sufficient range of localities to map variation and study patterns of historical change at a national scale. Dialectological surveys typically sample few informants per locality; sociolinguistic interview corpora typically sample a relatively low number of localities. By contrast, online surveys, whether browser-based or in the form of smartphone apps, allow researchers to gather much larger quantities of data very quickly. Such methods also typically achieve very different samples of the population than traditional methods.
We present results from data collected through such a smartphone app, the ‘English Dialects App’ (EDA) (Leemann, Kolly & Britain 2017). By asking users to self-report which variants they use in casual speech, we have collected data for 26 variables from over 40k speakers in the UK. Since 25 of these variables were also examined in the Survey of English Dialects (SED) (Orton & Dieth 1962), comparison of the EDA and SED datasets may be able to throw a light on patterns of dialect change in England over the past century. There are substantial differences between these two datasets, especially in certain regions. For example, most SED respondents in the south-west of England and along the south coast exhibited rhoticity, whereas in the EDA rhoticity has become a minority variant throughout this region. In this paper, we will investigate aggregate linguistic difference between the SED and the EDA across all 25 variables and try to disambiguate possible interpretations of these differences. In principle, linguistic difference between the two datasets could be the result of:
    • a difference in the sample populations of the two surveys;
    • a difference in the data collection methods used by the two surveys;
    • historically typical dialect change via isogloss movement;
    • or historically atypical dialect levelling, irrespective of the positions of isoglosses.
We will examine predictions from each of these hypotheses to distinguish between them. For example, if differences between the SED and EDA do not reflect historical change but merely a difference in sample populations, we should see smaller linguistic differences in the demographic subset of the EDA that most closely resembles the SED. If differences are due to the discrepancy in data collection methods, they should apply equally in all locations. If differences are due to isogloss movement, we should see them concentrated along historical isogloss bundles.
The result of such tests is that linguistic differences between the SED and EDA cannot be attributed solely to the difference of methods or sample populations, but must at least to some extent reflect historical change. This change does not, for the most part, appear to be driven by isogloss movement, but nor is it strongly associated with the socially or geographically mobile populations expected to drive levelling.

References
Leemann, Adrian, Marie-José Kolly & David Britain. 2017. The English Dialects App: The creation of a crowdsourced dialect corpus. Ampersand. doi:10.1016/j.amper.2017.11.001. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S2215039017300589 (27 November, 2017).
Orton, Harold & Eugen Dieth. 1962. Survey of English dialects. . 5 vols. Leeds: Published for the University of Leeds by E.J. Arnold.

This paper assesses the semantics of two homophonous markers, -in- and =in in Isbukun Bunun (Formosan, Austronesian). While both markers are used to express some kind of anteriority reading, there is no consensus about their semantic category. By presenting new empirical evidence, we offer an alternative analysis for both markers. We argue in detail that -in- is an existential past tense marker, which is in line with Jeng (1999) and De Busser (2009) but differs in many important details. We also suggest that =in is a discourse-level change-of-state marker, in contrast to the dominant view. This study not only suggests that temporal components can be associated with different categories cross-linguistically, but also has implications for analyzing similar markers in other Formosan languages.

Laboratorio de Fonética
Universidad del País Vasco. 2015.

Esta es una colección de 6 vídeos tutoriales que pueden ser empleados como material educativo en los cursos de fonética en el ámbito universitario. Tratan principalmente del cómo se puede obtener información desde las palabras aisladas, como se observa en las técnicas de los vídeos 1-2, pasando por datos obtenidos con participación del investigador, característica aún presente en los vídeos 3-4, hasta enunciados íntegros sin necesidad del investigador presente, tal como se ilustra en los vídeos 5-6. Se trata de establecer una reflexión entre la necesidad de identificar el grado de espontaneidad a la hora de brindar información por parte del hablante y la posibilidad (o la necesidad) de cuantificar los datos que se obtienen.

-Vídeo 1: Lista de Swadesh. https://addi.ehu.es/handle/10810/16080
-Vídeo 2: Elicitación preguntando por imágenes u objetos. https://addi.ehu.es/handle/10810/16081
-Vídeo 3: Lectura en voz alta. https://addi.ehu.es/handle/10810/16082
-Vídeo 4: Entrevista semidirigida. https://addi.ehu.es/handle/10810/16083
-Vídeo 5: Recabación a partir de tareas entre pares. https://addi.ehu.es/handle/10810/16084
-Vídeo 6: Grabación encubierta. https://addi.ehu.es/handle/10810/16085

In this document we will describe a semiautomated process for creating elicitation corpora. An elicitation corpus is translated by a bilingual consultant in order to produce high quality word aligned sentence pairs. The corpus sentences are automatically generated ...

In this document we will describe a semi-automated process for creating elicitation corpora.  An elicitation corpus is translated by a bilingual consultant in order to produce high quality word aligned sentence pairs.  The corpus sentences are automatically generated from detailed feature structures using the GenKit generation program. Feature structures themselves are automatically generated from information that is provided by a linguist using our corpus specification software.  This helps us to build small, flexible corpora for testing and development of machine translation systems.

We contrast elicitation and spontaneous speech data in French-speaking children with developmental language disorder and controls, with a focus on determiner phrase and gender agreement. Eight French-speaking children with developmental language disorder and age-matched or language-matched controls were compared on an elicitation task for complex noun-phrases with one or two adjectives (e.g., la petite maison verte ‘the small green house’) and a spontaneous speech sample of 200 utterances containing determiner phrases. Elicitation and spontaneous speech data revealed different profiles in French children with developmental language disorder compared to controls: elicitation tasks revealed specific difficulties with adjective agreement as well as high levels of global error, while spontaneous speech revealed mostly omission and substitution errors, often on determiners. Ultimately, both approaches to evaluating language abilities are complementary, but elicitation tasks might be the most useful tool for rapid identification of difficulties with determiner phrases and agreement in young French-speaking children.

La description de langues (ou de variétés de langues) peu étudiées et attestées essentiellement à l'oral pose de nombreux problèmes pratiques – et théoriques – au linguiste désireux d'entreprendre une telle tâche. Dans cet article, je discuterai quelques-uns de ces problèmes, que j'ai personnellement rencontrés au cours d'enquêtes de terrains consacrées à l'étude de divers dialectes occitans, du capverdien santiagais (créole afro-portugais des îles du Cap-Vert) et du koalib (langue kordofanienne du Soudan central).
Ces différents terrains me fourniront l’occasion d’aborder diverses facettes et enjeux de l’activité de description linguistique. Dans une première partie, j’insisterai sur les difficultés d’observation d’une langue en voie de disparition,
en me fondant sur mon expérience du domaine occitan (languedocien du Tarn). Dans une seconde partie, je traiterai des défis que posent au linguiste descripteur les situations de diglossie, en raisonnant sur deux cas : celui des dialectes Nord-occitans (en particulier marchois), soumis à la double pression normative du français et de formes plus méridionales d’occitan, puis celui des parlers ruraux capverdiens santiagais, où la norme locale est concurrencée par les variétés de référence que sont le santiagais urbain et le portugais européen. Puis, dans une troisième partie, je relaterai les difficultés que m’a posées la prise en compte du ton lors des premières missions que j’ai effectuées en terrain kordofanien sur le koalib. Enfin, dans le cadre de ma conclusion, je m’attacherai à faire une brève synthèse sur les possibles enseignements que l’on peut tirer de la série d’expériences que je présente dans cet article.