Alor-Pantar languages: Origins and theoretical impact

Conditions on pronominal marking video stimuli

This set of 42 video stimuli were designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., ‘He is ill’, whereas more actor-like ones are not, e.g., ‘He runs’. Animacy plays a role in the choice of prefix for undergoers in Abui, but is not as important and pervasive as in Teiwa.

Citation and use

The video stimuli are freely available for individuals to use for non-commercial purposes, providing they are cited using the citation method given below.

Complete set of stimuli and manuals

The complete set of 42 video stimuli consists of two series of clips (a core set and a peripheral set), a video elicitation manual and a list of elicitation stimuli. It can be cited as:

Fedden, Sebastian, Dunstan Brown & Greville G. Corbett. 2010. Conditions on pronominal marking: A set of 42 video stimuli for field elicitation. University of Surrey. http://dx.doi.org/10.15126/SMG.25/1

Download the Complete set of stimuli and manuals pdf

Video elicitation manual

This short  manual provides some background on the study and instructions on how to run the experiment. It can be cited as:

Fedden, Sebastian, Dunstan Brown & Greville G. Corbett. 2010. Conditions on pronominal marking: Video elicitation manual. University of Surrey. http://dx.doi.org/10.15126/SMG.25/1.M01

Download the Video elicitation manual [PDF]

List of elicitation stimuli

This list of elicitation materials provides details of the content of each video clip. It can be cited as:

Fedden, Sebastian, Dunstan Brown & Greville G. Corbett. 2010. Conditions on pronominal marking: List of elicitation stimuli. University of Surrey. http://dx.doi.org/10.15126/SMG.25/1.M02

 Download the List of elicitation stimuli [PDF]

Video clips

All 42 video clips, comprising 21 clips from the core set and 21 clips from the peripheral set are available individually below. If a specific clip is cited rather than multiple clips, it can be references individually using the clip title and a unique doi, based on the citation format below.

Fedden, Sebastian, Dunstan Brown & Greville G. Corbett. 2010. Conditions on pronominal marking: Video C01 - pull person. University of Surrey. http://dx.doi.org/10.15126/SMG.25/1.C01

Core set of video clips

Peripheral set of video clips