CHILDES Portuguese Batoréo Corpus

Hanna Batoréo Linguistics Universidade Aberta hanna.batoreo@uab.pt website

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Project Description

The two stories used for elicitation are the “horse” story and the “cat” story. For each story 60 narratives were elicited — 30 from adults and 30 from children. The children were ages 5, 7, and 10 with 10 children in each age group. The total number of elicited narratives is 120. The @ID headers in each file indicates the participant's age and gender and the code HC means that they did the horse story first, whereas CH means that they did the cat story first. The dissertation focuses on the linguistic knowledge of space. The language studied is the European variety of Portuguese. The study of space raises basic epistemological questions in a number of different fields (e.g., Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Social Sciences, the Arts). The characterization of the interface between linguistic expression and spatial cognition involved a strong experimental component, with a psycholinguistic methodology, namely with respect to production and acquisition. A moderate Whorfian assumption underlies the investigation undertaken, namely that languages differ from one another with respect to their semantic structures and that the latter are reflected on the ways speakers conceive the world. Given the general aims mentioned above, research was carried out along the following lines:

1. Demonstration of the relevance of cognition to the study of language, in particular to the interface between linguistic expression and spatial cognition;
2. Definition of the scientific scope of cognitive linguistics relative to other linguistic currents in cognitive science, given the assumption of localist theory, establishment of space primitives (both cognitive and linguistic) within Leonard Talmy’s theoretical framework.
3. Analysis of the interactions among the grammatical, lexical, and contextual mechanisms of the linguistic expression of space in European Portuguese, taking into consideration spatial, temporal, and aspectual references.
4. Proposal of a parametrization of the space typology in European Portuguese and establishment of linguistic constraints on cognitive primitives of space.
5. Establishment of the spatial parameters of the production of elicited narrative discourse by European Portuguese native speakers (both children and adults), adopting the psycholinguistic methodology developed in the 90s in particular by Melissa Bowerman, as well as by Maya Hickmann and Henriette Hendriks.

• Picture 1: A bird is sitting in a nest which is on a limb of a tree.
• Picture 2: A bird flies away and a cat comes up to the tree.
• Picture 3: The cat sits watching the empty nest.
• Picture 4: The cat climbs the tree as a dog watches.
• Picture 5: The dog pulls the cat’s tail, as the bird flies back.
• Picture 6: The dog chases the cat away, as the bird hovers at the nest.

• Picture 1: A horse is running in the field near a fence.
• Picture 2: The horse looks across the fence at a cow.
• Picture 3: The horse jumps the fence. Cow in the background and a bird on the fence.
• Picture 4: The horse stumbles on the fence and falls. The cow and bird watch.
• Picture 5: The cow bandages up the horse’s leg. The bird brings a first aid kit.

Acknowledgements

This dissertation was supported by two funds of Junta Nacional de Investigacao Cientifica e Tecnologica: FMRH/BD/241/92 and PRAXIS XXI/BD/5260/95.