Volume — 1999 (13 entries)
Story Book Stimulus for The Elicitation of External Possessor Constructions and Dative Constructions (“The Circle of Dirt”)
How involved in an event is a person that possesses one of the event participants? Some languages can treat such “external possessors” as very closely involved, even marking them on… More →
Hypotheses Concerning Basic Locative Constructions and the Verbal Elements Within Them
Languages differ widely in terms of how they encode the fundamental concepts of location and position. For some languages, verbs have an important role to play in describing situations (e.g.,… More →
Event Representation and Event Complexity: General Introduction
How do we decide where events begin and end? In some languages it makes sense to say something like Dan broke the plate, but in other languages it is necessary… More →
1999 Demonstrative Questionnaire: “This” and “That” in Comparative Perspective
Demonstrative terms (e.g., this and that) are key to understanding how a language constructs and interprets spatial relationships. They are tricky to pin down, typically having functions that do not… More →
Eliciting Contrastive Use of Demonstratives for Objects Within Close Personal Space
Contrastive reference, where a speaker presents or identifies one item in explicit contrast to another (I like this book but that one is boring), has special communicative and information structure… More →
Deixis and Demonstratives
Demonstratives are key items in understanding how a language constructs and interprets spatial relationships. They are also multi-functional, with applications to non-spatial deictic fields such as time, perception, person and… More →
Ethnography of Pointing Questionnaire
Pointing gestures are recognised to be a primary manifestation of human social cognition and communicative capacity. The goal of this task is to collect empirical descriptions of pointing practices in… More →
“Locally-Anchored Spatial Gestures”: Historical Description of the Local Environment As a Gesture Elicitation Task
Gesture is an integral part of face-to-face communication, and provides a rich area for cross-cultural comparison. “Locally-anchored spatial gestures” are gestures that are roughly oriented to the actual geographical direction… More →
Picture Series for Positional Verbs: Eliciting the Verbal Component in Locative Descriptions
How do different languages encode location and position meanings? In conjunction with the BowPed picture series and Caused Positions task, this elicitation tool is designed to help researchers (i) identify… More →
General Questions About Topological Relations in Adpositions and Cases
The world’s languages encode a diverse range of topological relations. However, cross-linguistic investigation suggests that the relations IN, AT and ON are especially fundamental to the grammaticised expression of space.… More →