3.1 Native Speakers
Linguistic fieldwork took place in Santo Domingo de Guzmán in August of 2013 with the collaboration of 4 Native Speaker Consultants (NCS), three females and one male. All of them were born in Santo Domingo de Guzmán, learned Pipil from their parents, and are bilingual in Spanish and Pipil. The youngest speaker, a woman, was 55 years old, while the oldest speaker, a man, was 83. With the exception of the oldest consultant, the informants were not fully proficient in writing and reading. The youngest consultant has worked as a Pipil teacher in the local school as part of the language revitalization program promoted by Universidad Don Bosco (Lemus 2008).
3.2 Stimuli
Data were gathered by means of individual elicitation sessions conducted for the most part in Pipil and using a variety of printed stimuli and real-life objects. Among the stimuli for documenting topological relations, I used the “BowPed” Topological Relation Picture Series (Bowerman & Pederson 1992). BowPed has been tested in different fieldwork sites all over the world and thus allowed for controlled comparison with other languages and with the theoretical claims made by Levinson and Wilkins (2006), as their space semantics typology draws heavily from the results obtained by using this collection of images in different languages.
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This picture series depicts several objects in a variety of spatial arrangements. In every image, one of the objects is highlighted in yellow. The objective is to elicit an utterance
describing the location of the highlighted object in terms of its relation with the non-highlighted objects in the image. The stimuli in the BowPed image series are numbered (see Appendix 3) and arranged in a random order (that is, contiguous stimuli for the most part depict very different spatial configurations). Each stimulus was printed onto an individual piece of paper, size A4.
The procedure for all elicitation sessions was as follows: first, native speakers were shown a given stimulus for 10 seconds. Then, stimulus still at hand, they were asked to identify the objects in each picture by answering the question asked in Pipil:
(7) tay ti-k-ita ka nikan
what 2SG.A-3SG.O-see at here ‘What do you see here?’
Once the objects in each picture were identified, consultants had to identify the position of the highlighted object in each image by answering the question:
(8) kan nemi ne X
where LOC the X ‘Where is the X?’
Where X stands for the name of the highlighted object in the image. All the responses by the native speaker were recorded and elicitation followed the original numerical order in the BowPed series. Not all BowPed images were used in this study, however, as some of the items portrayed were alien to the material culture of the consultants and a source of undesired
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After eliciting utterances describing all items in BowPed, native speakers were given a 10-minute break followed by the next set of stimuli. In order to document frames of reference in SD Pipil, I used the images in the Ball and Chair picture series from the MesoSpace Field Manual by Jürgen Bohnemeyer (2008) (See Appendix 4 for a list of used images). As in the BowPed image series, stimuli in the Ball and Chair picture series were randomized and numbered, and they were presented to the native speakers in their original order, each one
printed in an individual piece of paper. The methodology used for this component of my research was very similar to that illustrated in (8): speakers were shown each stimulus for 10 seconds and asked to identify the position of the ball in terms of its relation with the chair by answering the question:
(9) kan nemi ne pelotaj
were LOC the ball ‘Where is the ball?’
Again, all the responses by the native speaker were recorded. Another 10-minute break followed this second series of questions. In order to disambiguate the semantics of some
relational nouns and define them with more precision, I used a combination of stimuli consisting of images from other sources, images created by me, and groups of real-life objects such as stones and griddles (see a list of these stimuli in Appendix 5). They were printed in individual pieces of paper. In this third round of questions, I showed each stimulus to speakers for 10 seconds and asked:
(10) ni-weli n-ina ka ne X nemi Y
1SG-can 1SG-say that the X LOC Y ‘Can I say that the X is Y?’
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Where X was the name of an object and Y was a locative predicate including one relational noun. The purpose of this methodology was to assess the situations in which speakers accepted the use of one relational noun with locative meaning and rejected the use of others. Elicitation sessions were recorded with a digital audio recorder.
In total, I used around 100 different visual stimuli and recorded around 395 utterances from the Pipil native speakers.
3.3 Pipil and Nahua Written Sources
Most of the examples used in this work were obtained first-hand during my fieldwork in the summer of 2013. However, it is important to list some of the most important Pipil written sources that are relevant to this study.
-The Pipil Language of El Salvador by Lyle Campbell, published in 1985, presents the results of his fieldwork in El Salvador during the 1970s. It includes a grammar sketch, an extensive Pipil-English-Spanish vocabulary, and some texts.
-Ne Tajtaketza Pal Ijtzalku (Schultze-Jena & King 2012) is a revised edition by Alan King of the most important work in the Pipil corpus: the texts on a wide array of topics that the German linguist Leonhard Schultze-Jena collected from Ynés Masin and other anonymous Pipil speakers in the Salvadoran municipality of Izalco in 1930. This text is only in Pipil.
Additionally, different sources on other modern and extinct Nahua languages are used for comparison purposes. Whenever a given example was taken from any source other than my fieldwork, it will be duly indicated.
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