Meronymy meeting in Mexico City (summary)

Below is the email that Juergen sent after his Mexico City meeting with Alejandra Capistran and Carolyn O’Meara. Please feel free to comment and have open discussion about the issues raised here.

*I’ve created a subfolder “NovelObs materials” to the MesoSpace Dropbox folder and moved all the documents and spreadsheets pertaining to Novel Objects = Chunches in there so everybody has an easier time finding it.

* It turns out that neither Alejandra nor Carolyn had a link to the Dropbox folder. I suspect the same may be true for others, especially for members of MesoSpace I. Here is the link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8bwa80k0lfhcvf6/bMUrcGIvxn
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wuhtr8chdsjkbdv/8Z6OTWe10J

(The second link is for the new MesoSpace manual, which is currently in a pre-release state. It’s also available for download from the MesoSpace webpage: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/Materials.html)

These links will take you to a webpage from which you can view the files in the folders and possibly (I’m not sure this works without installing Dropbox) also download them. If you would like to actually “share” the Dropbox folders – meaning to have access to them so that you can copy files and folders into and out of there freely as if they were folders/directories on your computer – send Randi a quick note and she’ll send you an invitation. The invitation is itself again a link, but this one will enable the file sharing function and, in case you haven’t installed Dropbox on your computer, ask you whether you want to install the program and do install it in case you say yes (Dropbox is free in its basic manifestation and belongs to Google). Important: if you share the MesoSpace Dropbox folders, please never ever delete anything in there. The folders are not on hour hard disk – it just looks that way. You won’t just delete the files for yourself, you’ll delete them for everybody.

* I added to the new folder two files from the 2009 San Cris II workshop: the document “cuestionario_MesoSpace_meronimo.doc” and the spreadsheet “QuestionarioMeronimo.xls”. Explanations below.

* The San Cris conference will focus mostly on the type of meronymy each language has in terms of productivity, domain-specificity/generality, the properties necessary to assess to what extent a system behaves like that of Ayoquesco according to MacLaury or that of Tseltal according to Levinson, and on the formal = morphosyntactic properties of meronyms across languages. These questions can be addressed on the basis of data from the Novel Objects Part Identification task (a.k.a. Chunches I) and the picture book tasks. The analysis will be largely qualitative and based on the coding in the “legacy-format” coding sheet for Chunches I developed in 2008, which you’ll find in the Dropbox along with instructions. At the San Cris II meeting in 2009, we attempted to come up with very preliminary assessments of the relevant properties on the basis of small subsets of the data. The document “cuestionario_MesoSpace_meronimo” contains the relevant questions and the spreadsheet “QuestionarioMeronimo” has a tabulation of the results. This may give you a first idea of what we are aiming for.

* We will probably also try to talk about the hypothesis that meronymy may affect reference frame use. But my sense is that we will probably at most attempt an indirect test of this hypothesis at the conference, by looking at what the Chunches I data tell us about the meronym system of each language and trying to determine to what extent this predicts the use of reference frames by speakers of the language. A direct test would be possible through an analysis of the Novel Objects Placement task (Chunches II) data, but this will have to be left for later (although people who want to go ahead and take a stab at Chunches II for their San Cris presentations are certainly welcome to do so and will get all the support the UB team can muster).

* At the meeting this morning, we talked a little bit about how to proceed to get our Chunches I data coded in preparation of the conference. The following is what we came up with just for the MesoSpace I team – I think we can extend this to the entire project:

– Select a “Chunche of the month” (or two)
– During this month, everybody looks at the coding of the selected Chunche(s). The people who haven’t coded their data on this/these Chunche(s) yet try to do so.
– By a certain date, we all report questions and observations to “MesoSpace Central” at UB. It was suggested that those people who can locally meet (especially in and around Mexico City) form “cells” that discuss the “Chunche(s) of the month” and come up with a joint set of questions/comments.
– MesoSpace Central compiles the questions and then we do a global Skype conference call to answer the questions etc. So one conference call per Chunche(s) of the month.