Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Relatively excited

I'm rather excited after today's session because during an elicitation task A. produced some awesome, spontaneous relative clauses. A relative clause in English would be something like:

The man who is wearing glasses.

They're generally hard enough to elicit in forced constructions, and it's not often you get some good, clear natural examples. Today we were working through some video stimulus created by the rad people at MPI, which had about 60 short videos of people 'putting' - putting hats on heads, water in cups, books on shelves, napkins in exhaust pipes, apples in socks... all a bit strange but a nice break from the usual routine.

A. used some great relative clauses to describe some of the people - including the man who is wearing glasses that I described above. Although, it probably translates better from Tam to say something like 'the glasses wearing man'.

Yup, I know, probably not much to get excited about you might think - but then it doesn't take much to make a session satisfactory!

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