Abstract
This chapter summarizes the practice of carrying out dialogue-focused experiments during linguistic fieldwork with endangered Permic idioms. The aim of the chapter is to discuss the methodological aspects of designing and carrying out experiments in the field using different methods.
This research was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic research (grant No. 16-24-17003).
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Notes
- 1.
For detailed description of referential communication tasks method see Sect. 3.4.
- 2.
The photo was made by Olga Pozdnyakova.
- 3.
The experiment took place in Shamardan, Udmurtia, Russian Federation in 2015. One of the participants, Director (D), explained the other participant, Matcher (M), how (s)he should move figures through a landscape model. This experiment and the method used (referential communication tasks) will be described in Sect. 3.4.
- 4.
I took this photo in Shamardan (Udmurtia, Russian Federation) in 2010.
- 5.
I have the impression that rural multilingual speakers of endangered languages often have to actualize the situations with which they are familiar when speaking their mother tongue. If they cannot do this, it can be difficult for them to start speaking their mother tongue in the presence of a stranger. This may be due to the fact that in the situation of “good” multilingualism, every idiom is tied to a concrete sphere of life (everyday communication, mass media, school etc.).
- 6.
Corpus of spontaneous Beserman speech, which is more than twice larger, contains only three examples of case compounding.
- 7.
While working in the field I just ask the participants to sit in such a way that they cannot see each other but can hear each othersʼ voices.
- 8.
The cards for the experiment were drawn by Timofey Arkhangelskiy, the photo was taken by me.
- 9.
During the training part of experiment the participants are given a task like that they will get before the main part but much simpler. I will describe the procedure of running an experiment in Sect. 3.4.3.
- 10.
The photo used as background was taken by Olga Pozdnyakova. The pictures placed on the poster during experiments were drawn by Tatiana Panova.
- 11.
This photo was taken in Shamardan in January 2010 by me.
- 12.
All photos here and below were taken by Olga Pozdnyakova.
- 13.
A very rough English correlate of the constructions we wanted to obtain would sound like “The beauty of her face surprised me”.
- 14.
The pictures used in the experiment were drawn by Tatiana Panova; the photo was taken by myself.
- 15.
Hypothesis is a standard demand for every type of (psycho)linguistic experiment. One conducts them to prove the hypothesis H1 and to decline the opposite hypothesis H0 (or vice versa).
- 16.
This was the idea of Iulia Zubova, who conducted this game to obtain dialogues with focus particles.
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Usacheva, M.N. (2021). Dialogue-Focused Experiments in the Field: Advantages and Disadvantages (A Permic Experience). In: Agranat, T.B., Dodykhudoeva, L.R. (eds) Strategies for Knowledge Elicitation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79341-8_3
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