Instructions for Grammar Elicitation Session Bundles.

These are the instructions from our ELAR deposit for N|uu. The way that I store my data is very useful to me as a syntactician, so I thought I would share it. For elicitation, I record every sentence that I elicit individually, at the time I elicit it. One immediate benefit of this procedure is that I can use the recording to verify my transcription right away. As a consequence, my transcriptions are usually pretty accurate. Another benefit is that I can play the recording over and over, without having to bother the consultant with several repetitions of the same sentence (which can be tiring for them). 

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Every sound file of a word or sentence has a name of the following form: A_he_is_your_son.wav

The first letter is the name of the speaker, in this case Anna Kassie. The rest of the file name contains the English translation of the recorded word or sentence. And finally .wav is the file extension for sound files.

The sound files are organized according to date. Each session has a name of the following form: 2004_5_21. This means that the folder contains the sound files made on May 21, 2004.

In a small number of cases, repetitions of a word or sentence are marked with a numeral either immediately following the speaker (e.g., A1_) or at the end of the file name.

To find sentences on particular topics, download the full set of sentences onto your computer. Then search for them among the sound files using the format above. For example, to find sentences produced by Anna Kassie, search for: A_. To find sentences produced by Anna Kassie starting with a 3PL pronoun, search for: A_they. To find sentences containing 1SG pronominal possessors, search for: my. To find relative clauses headed by shoe, search for: shoe_that_.

Consultants names are abbreviated as follows:

A: Anna Kassie

An: Andries Olyn

Ge: Katrina Esau

Gr: Griet Seekoei

H: Hanna Koper

Many of the sound files in this archive are fully transcribed in Collins & Namaseb 2011. Those interested in specific topics should consult that work to find specific sentences to search for in the archive.

Collins, Chris and Levi Namaseb. 2011. A Grammatical Sketch of N|uuki with Stories. Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, Köln.