A visual stimulus for eliciting associated motion

Abstract

Pictures and video stimuli help investigate specific semantic domains and/or grammatical categories. Such stimuli not only help to collect more occurrences of a given (possibly rare) morpheme in a semi-spontaneous setting, but also allow the study of variation across speakers and diversity across languages. The paper describes a stimulus in the form of a storybook, A Hunting Story, specifically conceived to elicit associated motion (AM) morphemes in Ese Ejja, an Amazonian language with a complex system of 14 such morphemes. The pictures of the storybook therefore represent an Amazonian setting, and the scenario incorporates the main parameters established in the AM literature (such as path/directionality, temporal relation, moving argument), as well as less frequent ones (such as aspectual realization). The paper describes the data collected from 14 speakers of Ese Ejja as well as data collected with the same stimulus in other languages, including languages with no morphological AM system.