OLAC Record
oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0016-A968-D

Metadata
Title:interview_MM-FO
A Description and Documentation of Avatime
Contributor (consultant):Fidelia
Contributor (interviewer):Mathias
Contributor (researcher):Rebecca
Coverage:Ghana
Date:2008-11-20
Description:Mathias interviews Fidelia, about how to get to places, what Vane used to be like and how she thinks things will be in the future. Also we do the time in space experiment.
The Avatime project aims to describe and document Avatime. The researchers involved in this project are Rebecca Defina and Saskia van Putten. The project included fieldwork in Ghana in 2008 and was completed in 2009. Outcomes of the project are: (1) audio and video recordings of different genres, of which 13,5 hours have been transcribed and annotated, (2) an Avatime-English wordlist, (3) grammar notes and (4) two Master's theses, one on the expression of motion in Avatime (Saskia van Putten) and one on aspect and mood in Avatime (Rebecca Defina).
Rebecca asked Mathias to find some elderly Avatime people who didn't speak English that would be happy to be interviewed. He found three such people. Rebecca and Mathias sat down and discussed the questions to be asked, the main goals of these interviews were to get directions, past and future changes stories and to run the time in space experiment with people who didn't speak English. Fidelia was the first elderly person he interviewed. The time in space experiment was designed by researchers at and affiliated with the MPI for Psycholinguistics. It aims to investigate how people map time onto space, for instance is the past behind, to the left or east of the speaker. The experiment consists of two parts. In the first part people are given sets of 4 cards showing a temporal sequence and asked to arrange them. In the second part the experimenter points to a place directly in front of them and fairly close by and tells them that this is the middle part of whatever sequence for instance midday or Wednesday in the sequence Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The experimenter then asks them to point to the preceding and following times such as sunrise and sunset.
The interview is conducted in Avatime, occasionally Rebecca and Mathias use some English
Mathias conducts the interview, Fidelia answers most questions but her daughter also often contributes. Rebecca mainly listens but also at times suggested which question should be asked next.
Fidelia is an elderly woman who lives in Vane with several of her children and grandchildren
Mathias is a Senior High School student in Vane.
Rebecca Defina is one of the researchers in this project. She did her bachelors in Linguistics and Mathematics at the University of Sydney and her research master in Linguistics at Leiden University. She started PhD studies at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in 2010. She grew up in Australia and now lives in the Netherlands.
The recording was made using a JVC Everio digital video camera. The file is saved in MPEG2 format with 3400 kbps video encoding rate and 256 kbps audio encoding rate. The aspect ratio is 4:3 and the size of the video is 352 x 576. It is recorded in PAL format.
This audio recording was taken from the video recording interview_MM-FO_cut.mpg
This is the first of a series of three such interviews, the others are interview_MM-SM and interview_MM-GE. An excerpt of this file has been transcribed interview_MM-FO_cut
Format:video/x-mpeg2
audio/x-wav
Identifier:oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0016-A968-D
Publisher:Saskia van Putten and Rebecca Defina
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Subject:Unknown
directions, past and future changes, time in space
Avatime language
Subject (ISO639):avn
Type:video
audio

OLAC Info

Archive:  The Language Archive at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
Description:  http://www.language-archives.org/archive/www.mpi.nl
GetRecord:  OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:  Pre-generated XML file

OAI Info

OaiIdentifier:  oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0016-A968-D
DateStamp:  2017-02-14
GetRecord:  OAI-PMH request for simple DC format

Search Info

Citation: Fidelia (consultant); Mathias (interviewer); Rebecca (researcher). 2008-11-20. Saskia van Putten and Rebecca Defina.
Terms: area_Africa country_GH iso639_avn

Inferred Metadata

Country: Ghana
Area: Africa


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Up-to-date as of: Wed Apr 12 8:19:55 EDT 2017