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Pablo Irizarri van Suchtelen
3.2. Material
The data under study here were obtained as part of a larger procedure aiming
at eliciting a wide range of linguistic phenomena. The procedure was designed
within the Traces of Contact project for explorative study of several heritage
languages in the Netherlands. For this analysis, descriptions of video
scenes were selected which contained a semantic role that can be encoded as
a dative in Spanish, but not in Dutch:
– typical dative scenes, with a Recipient and a Theme,
– scenes in which something happens to a person’s (Possessor’s) body part,
– scenes in which something is taken away or stolen from a person (Human
Source),
– scenes in which a person’s (Interestee’s) interest is affected by some event
that happens to an object, without that person being responsible for the
event,
– scenes in which a person (Experiencer) forgets or leaves something, has an
idea or feels pain.
The stimuli which elicited these descriptions were video’s (animations or
live recordings), played on a laptop in front of the informant. All participants
viewed the same set of stimuli, but not all participants had the same number of
responses, either because they did not describe an event (this happened particularly
if it was part of a story with many events going on) or because their description
was not considered adequate enough for inclusion.
The only criterion for including an utterance for analysis was that it contained
an adequate description of the Event + Theme involved (a physical object
or an abstractum, such as ‘an idea’ or ‘pain’). The exact phrasing or choice of
predicate was variable: it did not matter if the same video scene was described
as “Man showing a box to a woman” or “This guy offers her some cereals”.
However, if the same video were described as, say, “The guy flirts with a
woman”. it was not an adequate description for analysis. The Recipient, Possessor,
Human Source, Interestee or Experiencer could either appear as an indirect
object, in some other encoding, or even not be mentioned.
In short then, the analysis focused on the formal encoding of constellations
of Events and semantic roles: was the encoding such that the Recipient, Possessor,
Interestee or Experiencer was an indirect object, or something else?
3.3. Results
A total of 698 scene descriptions was analyzed. Those described in section
2.1 were indeed the major encoding strategies. If a dative construction, like
examples [2] in section 2.1, was not used, the alternatives were as expected and