Using Matching Tasks in Semantic Fieldwork
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/sfm.v5i2.193807Abstract
We discuss an elicitation technique we call a matching task, a type of acceptability judg- ment task. In this task, the consultant is asked to judge a target language sentence under an intended (“matching”) interpretation given in the contact language. This is particularly useful for eliciting pol- ysemous items when the contact language contains more specific lexical items. The matching task has been crucial to the results in our joint semantic fieldwork (Močnik and Abramovitz 2019), where we needed to control the interpretation of a polysemous verb in order to study its individual readings. In this paper we discuss the “behind the scenes” problems with eliciting a polysemous item, how the matching task fares compared to the standard elicitation tasks, and speculate as to why it was neces- sary for us to use it, suggesting a set of circumstances under which this task could be useful to other linguistic fieldworkers.
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