A Practical Epistemology for Semantic Elicitation in the Field and Elsewhere
Jürgen Bohnemeyer · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015
This chapter sketches a classification of semantic elicitation methods based on an analysis of the sources of evidence semanticists can draw on and the principal components of elicitation: a stimulus, a task, and a response. The stimulus may be a target language utterance, a contact language utterance, a linguistic representation of some state of affairs, a nonlinguistic representation of some state of affairs, or a combination of any of the above. The response may consist of a target language utterance, a judgment of well-formedness, truth conditions, and so forth, or again a linguistic (e.g., paraphrase) or non-linguistic (e.g., demonstration, acting out) representation of some state of affairs. Possible tasks can be defined as mappings between stimulus and response types. There are arguably only seven principal types of linguistic elicitation techniques. Applications of all of these to semantic research are illustrated with examples from fieldwork.