This study collects linguistic data by two elicitation stimuli:the“Picture Series for Positional Verbs”(PosB,cf.Ameka,de Witte& Wilkins,1999;Bonhemeyer&Brown, 2007, http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/1999/picture-series-positional verbs-locative-descriptions/,Appendix A.1) and “Topological Relations Picture Series”(BowPed,cf.Bowerman& Pederson,1992,http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/1992/bowped/,Appendix A.2).Both series were downloaded from the website of Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics(Nijmegen,Niederlande):The website and the materials have been developed by the members of the Language and Cognition Department of Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.Since we downloaded the tools from the website,we have been keeping in touch with the Language and Cognition Department of MPI for Psycholinguistics.
According to their elicitation instrument,both the topological relations pictures and the picture series for positional verbs were designed to help researchers to:(i)“identify a language's resources for encoding static topological relations”;(ii)“delimit the pragmatics” of using of such resources;and(iii)“determine the semantics”of selecting spatial terms(Ameka,de Witte&Wilkins,1999:48).The PosB series,however,is intended to complement the earlier,with the focus on the exploration of the predicative component,rather than the adpositional component,especially in the contrastive elicitation of positional verbs in locative descriptions.Both tools have been employed in previous studies,for instance,BowPed in Levinson(2003),BowPed and PosB in Bohnemeyer&Brown(2007).
We adopted the whole set of 71 pictures from BowPed series
(cf.Appendix A.2)and randomly selected 37 pictures(cf.Appendix B.2)from PosB series to elicit stationary event expressions in both English and Chinese.So the stimuli altogether contain 108 test pictures.Besides,we also randomly selected 16 pictures from PosB as training pictures(cf.Appendix B.1) to help the subjects get acquainted with the elicitation process.