Description | Paper prepared for the 76th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Hyatt Regency San Francisco Hotel, San Francisco, California, U. S. A., 3-6 January 2002. The presentation is programed for Saturday, 4 January, at 15:20, as part of the special session "Papers from the Snake-Jaguar Project: The Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Meso-America"
Abstract
One of the techniques used on the Snake Jaguar Project for obtaining lexical material is the elicitation of theoretically possible roots to see if they are actually attested in word formation. This method requires a
considerable ínvestment of time and effort. In 2000, 1 spent nearly 85 hours during 21 days applying this technique with a speaker of Chichicapan Zapotec. I produced a total of about 37,500 stimuli, nearly 1 every 8
seconds, and obtained a total of 2,376 positive responses as a result, an average of about 28 per hour. In this paper, I describe the procedure followed and evaluate the results obtained, based on a sample of 280 roots: how many roots were produced, how many of them were new, and how many roots known from other sources were not picked up by this method. |