A Guide to Stimulus-Based Elicitation for Semantic Categories
Majid A.
Fieldwork is the collection of primary data outside of the controlled environments of the laboratory or library, and is the province of many scientists: biologists, geologists, anthropologists, as well as linguists. Traditional linguistic fieldwork has relied heavily on elicitation and observation, with a view to producing a grammar, dictionary, and texts. This is often accompanied by mining texts, i.e., narratives by speakers, for naturalistic examples. This sort of data can fruitfully elucidate lexical and constructional resources within a language, their formal properties, the kinds of expressions that occur, and so on. The article sets out a guide to the various stages of constructing a non-linguistic stimulus set in order to investigate semantic categories within a language. This should furnish a novice to this field with some of the key concepts and issues so that they can construct their own study. The focus in this article is how to use non-linguistic stimuli for a more thorough investigation of local semantic categories. Semantics is at the heart of linguistic description. The field linguist attempts to identify the sound units that convey distinctions in meaning - the lexical and grammatical classes that can be grouped together and distinguished for function, and so on. The bulk of this article sets out a guide to the various stages of constructing a non-linguistic stimulus set in order to investigate semantic categories within a language. This should furnish a novice to this field with some of the key concepts and issues so that they can construct their own study.