Techniques in Complex Semantic Fieldwork

Abstract

The main goal of semantic fieldwork is to accurately capture the contribution of natural language expressions to truth conditions and to pragmatic felicity conditions, by interacting with native speakers of the language under investigation. Most semantic fieldwork tasks (including, for example, acceptability judgment tasks, elicited production tasks, and translation tasks) require the researcher to present a discourse context to the consultant. The important questions then become how to present that context to consultants and how to best ensure that the consultant and the researcher have the same context in mind. We argue that phenomena which rely on controlling for interlocutor beliefs are particularly well suited for the storyboard elicitation methodology. This includes “out-of-the-blue” scenarios, which we treat as a special type of discourse context that must also be controlled for. We illustrate these claims by presenting novel storyboards targeting the de re/ de dicto ambiguity and verum marking.

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