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The linguistics encyclopedia 164
Possessed nominals should be elicited using pronominal possessors: my eye; your
eye…my eyes, your eyes, etc. One should try a couple of dozen or so basic words in
different semantic categories for their possessed forms. If they all inflect according to the
same pattern, the linguist can assume the language is regular. Differences in inflection
among nouns indicate complications and most probably a system of noun classes.
Now the fieldworker is ready to turn to that more complex category—verbs. S/he
should first elicit some verb forms in the simple present or present continuous, e.g. she
walks or she is walking. The third-person singular form should be chosen for elicitation,
as it is likely to cause the least confusion. First and second persons often get hopelessly
garbled in translation, so that an elicited I am hearing as often as not comes back as you
are hearing, and vice versa. The fieldworker should choose verbs denoting simple, easily
perceived events like walk, hit, run, jump, eat, sleep, stand, sing, talk, etc. S/he should
use a mixture of intransitive and transitive verbs to investigate whether these have
significant differences, but should be aware that the native language may require the
expression of an object with transitive verbs, so if a recurring partial seems to be
associated with the elicited transitive verb forms, it is quite possibly just this.
Having got some basic verb forms, the fieldworker is now ready to fill out the
paradigms. Verbs are commonly inflected for tense, aspect, mood, voice, and agreement
for subject and object. Many languages lack some of these; for example, Thai marks its
verbs only for aspect and mood (tense is not a category in Thai grammar), and even these
are indicated by independent words, not bound morphemes. Other languages have
additional verbal inflectional categories. Yimas, of New Guinea, inflects verbs for all five
of those listed above as well as others, like direction or location of the action. Languages
like Yimas have such morphologically complex verb forms, with so many inflectional
categories and distinctions, that a fieldworker could never hope to discover all of them
through early elicitation. Rather, many will crop up only when working with texts and
will be the target of later, more informed elicitation. At this early stage the fieldworker is
only concerned with getting an overview of the verbal morphology.
The fieldworker needs to get paradigms of both intransitive and transitive verbs in a
few tenses. It is suggested that s/he elicit verbs in the simple present (she walks/is
walking), past (he walked), and future tenses (she will walk). Many languages have much
more complex tense systems than this (Yimas, for example, has seven distinct tenses), but
the fieldworker is in no position at this stage to cope with the subtleties of meaning which
the different forms may encode. Rather s/he should confined her/himself to the relatively
straightforward system of present, past, and future, without assuming that all these may
be true tense distinctions (future, for example, may be a mood). S/he should elicit
paradigms for intransitive verbs (I walk, you walk, etc.) and transitive verbs (I hit you, I
hit him, I hit them… you hit me, you hit him, you hit us, etc.) in all possible combinations
of person and number for both subject and object, bearing in mind the common confusion
and switch in first and second persons. The paradigms for intransitive and transitive verbs
should be elicited in all three tenses and then in the negated forms for all three. The
fieldworker may well notice systematic differences between the inflections for
intransitive and transitive verbs; not uncommonly, for example, the agreement affix for
the subject of an intransitive verb will be quite different from that of a transitive verb, as
in so-called ergative-absolutive languages; Yimas is of this type.