One part of doing fieldwork is discovering just what does not work while you're in the field. Several summers ago, after receiving some critical methodological remarks from a reviewer on a submission of mine, I started to seriously question just what works in my fieldwork.
We're all addicted to our past methods and sometimes we need a jolt to reconsider what we're doing in the field. I have a tendency to rely a lot of repetition among speakers because there is no literacy among most speakers in Triqui. There are three options for elicitation here, as it happens. One possibility is to just ask for speakers to provide a translation of a Spanish sentence, another is to have them see some image and describe it, and another is to have them repeat after another speaker who can read Triqui (my main consultants).
I rely a lot on the third method, but it's possible that Triqui speakers will overly mimic what the other speaker is doing when they are doing this. (There is a serious question as to what they would mimic - there is no non-tonal prosody in the language, but perhaps speech rate and optional pauses?) So, this logically leads reviewers and other linguists to suggest the first two options above. We can toss out the second option for anything that involves more carefully-controlled speech. If you are want to use identical nouns but change the verbs, for instance, this simply leaves way too much open to interpretation. Speakers will never provide the target sentence.
But what about the first option? This also often fails for various reasons. I'm in the process of looking at a large data set examining tonal changes with person morphology in Triqui across 11 speakers. We tried the translation method, but it regularly fails with speakers. Here's a transcription of one exchange:
Consultant: Cantaste una canción (You sang a song.)
Speaker: Ka³ra⁴³ ngo² chah³ (I sang a song.)
Consultant: Ka³raj⁵ ngo² chah³ (You sang a song.)
Speaker repeats consultant
Many fieldworkers might laugh at the following exchange - asking people to get personal pronouns correct in translation is a common issue. But if you're looking at how words change tone with personal pronouns, then it's important to get right.
There is an added issue though - we often assume that we can examine speech in translation because we assume strong bilingualism or a clear 1:1 mapping between words in a lingua franca and words in a language we're investigating in a field context. Sometimes neither can be found. In the same recording, we observe the speaker becoming confused when he has to distinguish between lavas 'you are washing' and lavaste 'you washed' in Triqui.
Consultant: Lavas la ropa. (You wash the clothing.)
Speaker: nan...[s]... (long pause)
Me: Nanj⁵ reh¹...
Speaker: Nan⁴³ (I wash)....(pause)
Consultant: Nanj⁵ reh¹ a⁴sij⁴ (You wash the clothing.)
Speaker repeats consultant
In this exchange, the speaker is caught off guard because he is either uncertain about the aspect marking of 'wash' (as the previous exchanges involved him producing it with the perfective prefix - ki³nanj⁵) or he is confused about the pronominal referents again. The result is the same though - the speaker ends up relying on repetition from another speaker/consultant.
If you have to rely on repetition, perhaps a way around it is to have speakers count between hearing a sentence and repeating it. If the concern over repetition in elicited speech contexts in the field is that speakers are likely to mimic, then counting before repeating might resolve this. The idea here is that counting takes time and auditory memory decays quickly. So, if speakers have to say "one, two, three" (or ngoj¹³ bbi¹³ ba¹hnin³ in Triqui), then their reproductions of the target sentences might more closely resemble long-term memory representations for the words in the short sentences. I owe this idea to Lisa Davidson (via one of our interesting Facebook/Twitter discussions).
But in practice this only kinda ends up working. Speakers can do this, but they end up sometimes forgetting the target sentence. So, you get exchanges like the following:
Consultant: Ka³ne³ ni²hrua⁴¹ reh¹ chu⁴ba⁴³ beh³ (Te sentaste mucho en la casa.)
Speaker: ngoj¹³ bbi¹³ ba¹hnin³... ka³ne³..... ka³ne³...
Consultant: Ka³ne³ ni²hrua⁴¹ reh¹ chu⁴ba⁴³ beh³
Speaker repeats consultant
In effect, it is hard to pay attention to reproducing specific sentences when you have to produce numbers first. So, the end result is to just repeat what the consultant has said. When you add the additional stress of being recorded to this (many speakers become nervous knowing they are recorded), this can produce pauses/errors in the elicitation.
So, what is the way around all of this? One thing we might address head on is the assumption of mimicry. We seem to believe that all speakers/participants, when asked to repeat words, will focus on the specific phonetic characteristics of the signal they heard instead of the content. Though, the jury on this is still out. I have found two papers that have addressed the question - Cole and Shattuck-Hufnagel (2011) and D'Imperio, Cavone, and Petrone (2014). In both cases, speakers were told to explicitly imitate the form of the speech signal and they mostly imitated pitch accents, but not F0 level. In a language where only level is adjustable (lexical tone is fixed), what predictions does this previous work make for Itunyoso Triqui? I'm testing this with a study I ran in 2019. There is no work on what tone languages speakers do in such tasks (and we have no idea about what happens when the concern is just getting the words right - not trying to imitate fine phonetic detail).
I wish I could find an ideal way to do careful elicitation that was immune to these concerns. In the meanwhile though, prosody-folks might consider a warning mentioned in DiCanio, Benn, and Castillo García (2020) - no method for the elicitation of prosody is immune to stylistic effects. Read speech is just as much a speech style as repeated speech and most languages have no writing system or literacy (Harrison 2007). That means that this methodological concern must be addressed as we look at prosodic systems across more of the world's languages.
References:
Cole, J. and Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2011). The phonology and phonetics of perceived prosody: What do listeners imitate? In Proceedings from Interspeech 2011, pages 969–972. ISCA.
D’Imperio, M., Cavone, R., and Petrone, C. (2014). Phonetic and phonological imitation of intonation in two varieties of Italian. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(1226):1–10.
Harrison, K. D. (2007). When languages die. Oxford University Press.
