You can now watch my talk about empirical methods for describing tense, aspect, and mood I recently presented at the 7th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC), University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. The slides are also available on this website. Make sure to check the list of storyboards and their references in the end, which can be downloaded from the links contained in the references, and also in the “Research outputs” tab on this website.

Very short abstract: I discuss empirical methods for studying tense, aspect, and mood in language description. By focusing on TAM categories in Nafsan (Vanuatu, Oceanic), I show that corpus work, storyboards with targeted contexts and translation-based questionnaires accompanied by elicitation offer different kinds of evidence that are all necessary for a successful description.

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