Up North

Work in Progress continued

So, last time I wrote I kind of eschewed the task of describing the trials and tribulations of my first interview, and now I can barely remember them. The good thing is, all I need to do to remember is go back to the -now annotated - video of that first meeting, all my successes and failures are documented faithfully.
As we learnt in school, when judging somebody's performance on anything, highlight the positive aspects first, as hard to find as they may be, and then plunge into your criticism tirade.
What I considered positive about that first interview was that it provided me with the necessary self-confidence to continue my work. I realised that I was not going to fail completely, that my camera was set up well, that it wouldn't just stop recording right through the middle of the interview, and I was able to communicate my questions through pictures, hand-written and typed out English sentences and fingerspelling. I was lucky to have an amateur linguist as my first consultant (I learnt much later to call them consultants, I used 'participant' and 'subject' before, but now I think I'm gonna stick with consultant, sounds most professional and least insulting). Not only was he very much aware of the differences between English and ASL grammar, teaching them to students every day, but he realised early on that we were talking about compounds, so I was able to slip in metalinguistic questions of the sort 'Do you consider this one word or two? Is this a compound'?
I also decided to not randomise my questions but go through verbs first, proceeding to nominal compounds after and finishing off with adjectical ones. The rationale behind this procedure was that once the consultant knew what I wanted from him, he'd supply some of the information himself. For example, I would show him a picture of a calf (BABY COW) next to its mother and ask for the sign for calf. Next, I would ask if any sign could intervene between BABY and COW and the last question would be if he could form the plural of that sign by repeating the sign for COW accompanied by a body shift from left to right. When I then showed the next picture of a baby deer, the consultant would already know what type of questions I was going to ask and sometimes provided replies without my even asking the question. Proceeding in this fashion has the further advantage of enabling the consultant to use analogies for his judgements, e.g. if he cannot form the plural of BABY COW by reduplicating the head, he might also not be able to form the plural of BABY DEER in this way. Or he might be, and then the contrast would become obvious right away.
My first consultant also helped me eradicate several mistakes in my questions based on vague assumptions I had previously about what was possible in the language and what was unusual, or influenced by English. In my search for signs I might use to split up compound candidates (to see if they could be split up, rather), I came across the intensifier 'really' and thought myself real smart for having found such a convenient adverb to put between adjectival and verbal signs. I'd ask my consultant how to say that the dog was 'really wet' or how the man 'really' smuggled cigarettes (ok, no 'intense' meaning there) and I'd meet with outright rejection. That the dog was 'really wet' would be expressed not by an extra sign for 'really' (and I had chosen the wrong one for that anyway, I had chosen one that is used to affirm the truth of an expression or express surprise at a certain proposition), it would be expressed by using the 'intense' inflection on the sign for 'wet', i.e. a short hold at the beginning of the sign followed by a rapid and forceful execution of it. So I had to come up with different signs to put between the compound sign that translates as 'wet', namely WATER SOFT.
So much for the positive aspects of that meeting. Now to the downsides, and of course there were and are downsides. Namely that things didn't work out the way I wanted them to work out. Namely that I couldn't show formal headedness on compound heads as I set out to do. I'm not sure about verbal compounds yet, things are looking a bit brighter on that side, but for nominal and adjectival ones, I fear I can't. I know, that's a result, too, and I'll be able to write enough about it to fill the required amount of pages, but it's not the revolutionary thesis we all dream we'll write. Should I go into detail? I'll skip the theoretical aspects for now, if you want them, post a comment.
The second annoying downside of elicitation work for me during that first interview was being considered ill-prepared and ill-informed by the consultant. Of course he didn't say it in so many words, but asked me if I had looked up the answers to my questions in books. My ASL was not sufficient (nor is it now) to explain that of course I had done my reading on compound formation in ASL, that I know how you're supposed to set up things in space before you expound on the relations between them (ok, I suppose I really had neglected that aspect in my preparation!), that I knew plural formation was generally possible on nouns through reduplication but there was no literature on how this is done in compounds - in short, he must have thought me pretty ignorant and unprofessional. And yet, when I got out of the Deaf Culure Centre that afternoon, I had my first set of data, and it was pretty good data and I knew I'd be able to converse in ASL for my next interviews - and that was a darn good feeling.

I forgot to mention the last downside of this first interview: I ended it after 'only' 90 minutes, maybe two hours, we took one or two short breaks in between, so I don't remember exactly, but after I had gone over all my test items I decided to call it a day and meet up with my consultant at the end of the week for the remainder of the semantic questions and to review stuff that had been recorded so far. Only that there never was to be a second interview. The following week was very busy for my consultant, who had just started a new job, and the next weekend was just as bad, since it was the long Labour-Day weekend and he had gone away for a trip. So I never got my second interview. We settled for me asking him questions via email, which I'm planning on doing once I have reviewed all the other consultants' data.

So much for my first interview.

posted by Conni @ 7:46 AM