Designing elicitation tools for Asante Twi verbs of separation: issues of ecological validity

"Designing elicitation tools for Asante Twi verbs of separation: issues of ecological validity" Presented by Dorothy Agyepong at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024    In this talk, I report on three data collection methods I have used in documenting verbs of separation in Asante Twi, a Kwa language spoken in the Ashanti and Eastern Regions of Ghana. The methods are video-stimuli elicitation, procedural narratives and textual examples. For the video-stimuli elicitations, I tried to balance the universality with the locality by supplementing an MPI set of stimuli (Bohnemeyer et al. 2001) with comparable stimuli set (Agyepong 2015) for eliciting local cultural verbs for describing separations within the Asante Twi context. Whileboth stimuli portrayed various types of separations involving objects, the Agyepong (2015) videos depicted the separation of objects local to the Ghanaian context, for example, cassava, plantain, coco yam, palm fruit etc. For each of the set, participants were shown the videos 2-3 times and asked follow up questions in Asante Twi. All the elicitations and interviews were both video and audio recorded. For the second set of data, participants provided procedural narratives on events such the killing and cutting up of a chicken for food, the preparation of palm wine from a felled palm tree, the distillation of gin from palm wine as well as the harvesting of crops such as plantain and cocoa. The third set of data was compiled from written texts such as Asante Twi novels, an Akan book of proverbs, and Christaller’s (1933) Akan dictionary. These written sources, provided a range of contextualised uses of each of the verbs. From a methodological point of view, I address issues of ecological validity of the video stimuli; triangulation and how data generated by different methods either converge or diverge. I also attempt to answer the question “How adequate are the various methods in capturing the culture specific semantics of the verbs?”   References Agyepong, Dorothy Pokua. 2015. “Culture specific Cut and Break videos”. Unpublished video clips. Bohnemeyer, Jürgen, Melissa Bowerman and Penelope Brown. 2001. Cut and break clips. In Levinson, Stephen C., and N.J. Enfield (eds.), Field Manual 2001, Language and Cognition Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Nijmegen: MPI, 90-96. Christaller, John Gottlieb. 1933. A Dictionary of the Asante and Fante language called Twi. Basel: Basel Evangelical Missionary Society.