Free Listing

Free-listing is a technique used to isolate and define a domain and explore salient members of a domain. Quite simply, participants are asked to list members of a domain or category specified by the researcher. Lists collated from multiple participants can be combined to uncover salient members of a category. The frequency of an item across lists produced by different participants and the order of an item within individual participants’ lists have been shown to be indicators of the salience of a category member. These metrics are often combined to give an overall numeric value indicating salience, such as Smith’s Salience or the Cognitive Salience Index. The data collected was used to create our dictionaries.

Method

Participants from the six languages heard a recording of each of the possessive classifiers in their language. After each classifier, participants had three minutes to say as many nouns that were associated with that classifier. The full methodology for the Free listing task can be found in our paper published in Semantic Fieldwork Methods: Implementing free-listing: possessive classifiers in Oceanic.

Results

The data reveals the overlap of nouns with associated classifiers – do participants list nouns only with one classifier, or across multiple classifier categories? This shows whether each language has a rigid, gender-like assignment system or a more variable, classifier-like assignment system. The data also reveals differences in the overall number of nouns that are associated with each classifier. Some classifiers allow many nouns to be associated with them, whereas other classifiers allow only associate with a few nouns. By comparing the saliency of the nouns associated with each classifier, we can compare similar classifiers across languages.

The results for the Free-listing task are still being analysed.

Data

Data can be accessed…

Skinned green coconuts