Introducing: COTM (Chunche of the Month)

Dear MesoSpace People (who have run the Novel Objects a.k.a. “Chunches” task),

You are reading the inaugural post of our new Chunche of the Month series. Here is the basic idea: every month, I blog about one chunche. I describe it, tell you a little bit about what the Yucatec speakers had to say about it, and then discuss how I coded their descriptions. Then everybody goes and looks at how the speakers they worked with referred to the parts of this chunche, and if they come up with any questions or comments, they leave those in the comment thread below this post. I will be monitoring the comment thread regularly and respond as often as I can muster.

The legacy coding sheet and coding guidelines can be found on the project’s homepage. The document “MesoSpace_NovelObs_PartIdent_coding_guidelines_v2” will provide you with an overview of how to code and other guidelines to follow while coding. I wrote it in the field in 2008, then Carolyn updated it in 2009.

Now, we’ll be using the legacy coding sheet to code the chunche data, and then using that information to answer a version of the Meronymy Questionnaire we used at the San Cris II workshop in 2009. A version of this Questionnaire will be used in preparation for the Meronymy Conference in August 2013.

Now, on to the coding! The first chunche looks like (quoting from the legacy coding sheet):

“A single volume; two C-shaped planar surfaces delimited by sharp edges; a convex outside and concave inside surface; convex extreme points (“apses”); an aperture between these apses.”

First of all, none of the Yucatec speakers produced an explicit comparison of the entire object. The directors held the object in all sorts of different ways or in fact placed it on the table in front of them, and only two of them instructed the matcher on how to orient the object (‘If you place it upside down, its hole, you’re going to put it on your left’; ‘Hold it face-up’).

The convex outside surface (Blue) was described most commonly as ‘its back’ and ‘its side’, but also as ‘its edge’, ‘its protuberance’ (see below), ‘the side of its bend (_vuelta_)’, and ‘its bottom’ – the latter by a director who was holding the object with the aperture pointing up.

The C-shaped planar surface (Red) was described by all directors as ‘its side’ and/or ‘its top’ – the latter both by directors who turned this particular surface upward and by directors who did not!

The “apses” (Orange) were described most commonly as ‘its tip(s)’, but also as ‘its end’ , ‘its corner’, ‘the side of its entrance (_entrada_)’, and ‘the side of its hole’.

Only one director described the concave inside surface – as ‘inside’.

The aperture was described as ‘its hole’, ‘the prolongation/extension of its hole’, and ‘its entrance (_entrada_)’.

Other parts that were labeled were the arc (see below; as ‘its arc’ (_arco_), ‘its bend’ (_vuelta_), or, with a nominalization, ‘its bent (part)’ (see below!)), the donut hole at the center of the object (as ‘its hole’), and the extreme points of the planar surfaces (i.e., the sides of the ‘apses’), as ‘its tip(s)’.

Which of these descriptors should we treat as meronyms?  First, we exclude terms that clearly refer to places rather than parts, such as the adverbial clause ‘where its little edges end’ for the apses. I also consider ‘the extension/prolongation of its hole’ as place-denoting, because the relational noun I’m glossing here as ‘extension/prolongation’ really means ‘straight (line)’ and is most commonly used to describe directions. Furthermore, we are only interested in LEXICAL meronyms. This excludes nominalizations such ‘its bent (part)’, derived from a verb ‘to bend’, and ‘its protuberance’, derived from a verb that I think means something like ‘to blister’, ‘to form protuberances’.

Similarly, whereas apertures (‘its entrance’) are necessarily parts of things, arcs are not, so ‘its arc’ is out. I realize that this reasoning is somewhat problematic, because my intuition that Yucatec speakers do not consider arcs to be inherently parts of larger things is not based on any evidence that I could point to and might very well be “contaminated” by my native language. The test would be whether it is possible to say ‘This is an arc’, with an unpossessed nominal referring to the arc and the arc in question being a structure that is not integrated into a larger structure. My sense is that this is fine in Yucatec, but I haven’t actually tested this.

Negative spaces such as holes are of course difficult to test with the above procedure since there is no such thing as a freestanding hole. I’m treating the Yucatec word for ‘hole’ as a meronym, because it is the most common way to refer to any kind of aperture, including doorways of houses and the aperture of Chunche #1.

I’m inclined to treat the use of Spanish _vuelta_ ‘bend’ in reference to the arc as a meronym, because I find myself unable to imagine a freestanding bend. (An independent problem here is that the entire object can be described as an ‘arc’ or ‘bend’ of sorts. So one wonders how exactly people compute the reference to an ‘arc’ or ‘bend’ as a proper part of it, then. And the Yucatec participants clearly did, since they used the terms in question in possessed form. Interesting!)

This means that the only volume meronyms this object elicited were ‘bend’, ‘entrance’, and ‘hole’. All other parts were described with surface and edge/extreme-point meronyms. All the surface and edge/extreme-point meronyms are high-frequency general-purpose meronyms in Yucatec, and so is the volume term for ‘hole’.

The use of ‘back’ for the convex outside surface and that of ‘top’ for the planar surfaces independently of the object’s orientation is intuitively in line with Levinson’s (1994) algorithm, even though it is unclear what the ‘generating axis’ of the only volume of this object would be (I’ve discussed this with various people over time, including Gabriela and more recently Gilles and Samuel – we’re all scratching our heads).

So that’s it. Now please comment away!