Corpora and other syntactic elicitation methods in a study of the aspectual system in Gong’an dialect

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger project on Gong'an dialect, which is based on the data collected from field and aims to identify the aspect markers in Gong'an dialect and provide a systematic and comparative account of the distributional and semantic features of the aspect. More precisely, this paper engages with the data collection methods employed in this project and some of the preliminary findings of the fieldwork. This (dis)advantages of corpora and the most recently developed syntactic elicitation techniques are taken into account in the design of the fieldwork in order to lay a solid empirical basis for subsequent analysis. By combining a variety of methods, namely, acceptability judgment, spontaneous speeches, and corpora compilation, this research promises to provide insights into both the exact nature of the aspectual system in this dialect and theoretical issues of more general interest.