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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 90
Elicitation
Elicitation is asking speakers about their language. Despite the fact that this
method of collecting data is virtually inescapable, and despite the fact that some
linguists believe that speakers will have good intuitions about their own language,
direct elicitation has to be treated with great caution. Problems may
include things such as speakers not liking to contradict the linguist in any way
because that would not be considered polite, speakers saying that something is
impossible in their language when what they mean is that they cannot immediately
think of a situation in which they might say it (linguists are far more
used to thinking about sentences out of context than most speakers are), speakers
becoming confused because they are asked about too many similar structures
at once, speakers being sidetracked by matters which are irrelevant for the
linguist (e.g. Kim wouldn’t do that, but I’d believe it of Lee; I couldn’t say that,
but it would be in order for a prince/woman/rude person to say it; we all know
that happened last year, so you can’t use the present tense to describe it), and
speakers not being able to put their intuitions about some usage into words. In
some cases, speakers seem to be just plain wrong. Quirk & Svartvik (1966: 49)
point out that in an experiment they carried out A keeps changed very when and
Not if I have anything to do with it got very similar results for acceptability. For
all these reasons, elicitation is best if carefully planned so that the informant or
consultant is not inadvertently led to give a particular set of responses or
exhausted in any particular session, and so that the elicitation uses behaviour
which is as natural as possible. The other side of this particular coin is that
some speakers, even if they cannot express what is going on in linguistic terms,
may have very good intuitions about what is important in their language.
For all these reasons, a number of techniques have been designed in an
attempt to make data elicitation as accurate as possible, and indirect methods
of elicitation are often to be preferred over direct ones. There are, of course,
traps. If you ask a speaker of English ‘Do you say diaper or nappy’, they may
give you the answer they think you are looking for (for example, you may be
more likely to get diaper if you speak with an American accent), but if you show
them a picture of a baby wearing the relevant garment and ask what the baby
is wearing, they may give you an answer depending on whether they perceive
the garment as being made of cloth or some artificial fabric. In principle, there
is a distinction to be made between the situation of the linguist trying to elicit
details of a language from a single speaker of that language, and the linguist
trying to elicit details of a language from large numbers of speakers (where statistical
techniques may be used to determine degrees of acceptability, for
instance). In practice, both require similar care. For some discussion of these
matters see Quirk & Svartvik (1966), Greenbaum & Quirk (1970), and
Newman & Ratliff (2001).