In my research, I rely on predictions made by theoretical work, which in turn must be informed by natural language data collected through detailed and methodologically well-grounded fieldwork. Since 2010, I have been conducting fieldwork on Wolof with native speakers in Chicago, Paris, and Senegal. Wolof is a well described language, yet it is relatively understudied by formal linguists. My fieldwork is therefore not documentary in nature, but methodologically structured to elicit particular structures. However, I believe it is crucial for the target utterances to be embedded in a natural language context, and elicited from a larger number of speakers. To that end, I am committed to developing visual materials and questionnaires designed to elicit target sentences in a natural discourse context. Below you can find samples of storyboards I developed for investigating the interaction of morphosyntactic and information-structural properties of utterances.
Storyboards
Demba's Voyage
This storyboard for the elicitation of a past- or future-tense narrative is an adaptation of the storyboard "Hawaii Trip" by Rose Underhill & Seth Cable. http://www.totemfieldstoryboards.org
Twin Troubles
The goal of this storyboard was to get specificational copular sentences in a natural context.
Moussa And His Friends - Version 1
This storyboard was used to get specificationalpseudocleft constructions. It has two versions, to get different orders of the two major constituents in a pseudocleft (wh-phrase & NP).
Moussa And His Friends - Version 2
The second version of the storyboard above, to reverse the order of the wh-phrase and the NP in specificational pseudoclefts.
Contact Information
martina [dot] martinovic [at] mcgill [dot] ca
Department of Linguistics
McGill University
1085 Ave Dr Penfield, #318
Montreal, QC H3A 1A7
Canada