Guidelines

See the Background for details on the construction and special properties of the questionnaire.

The following was provided as background information to all collaborators as part of the questionnaire:

This questionnaire investigates the relative order of object (O) and verb (V) as well as a set of features that are known or suspected to correlate with this. In principle, we do not wish to impose strict rules as to the precise details of the data collection, but here are some guidelines that should be followed if possible:

• Much of the data we collect is heavily influenced by the context of the utterance, so please make sure that the informants judge/produce the data relative to the context prompt indicated.
• You could have the informant translate the English sentence into his/her language as a response to the context prompt. You would then present the informant with the alternative ordering possibilities indicated in the questionnaire and have him/her judge the alternative orders in the context of the prompt. These alternatives could be pre-constructed by yourself, or be arranged on the fly based on the informant’s translation. Please make sure that, unless indicated otherwise, the sentences are not produced/judged involving any sort of contrastive reading.
• If the context prompt or the English target sentences we provide do not work for the language you are investigating, replace them by other material with the same information structure possibilities. Please do not replace our items by sentences with a different grammatical form (e.g., please do not use a sentence with an oblique O instead of a direct O).
• Please provide examples for ALL the orders that are possible in the given context. Include negative data, i.e., data on what is not possible in the language!
• Please complement the examples with a word-by-word gloss (if possible, using the Leipzig Glossing Rules, https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php) and a translation.
• Judgments should be classified as acceptable, unacceptable (indicated by an asterisk *), unacceptable in this context (indicated by a hash #), and unclear (the informant is not sure about the answer, indicated by a question mark ?).
• If the language shows an alternation between O-V and V-O order (as in West African S-Aux-O-V / S-V-O languages) or shows a difference between main and embedded clauses, apply the tests relative to the position of the lexical V when an Aux is present/in embedded clauses. If in doubt, feel free to contact us anytime!
• If the data is already clear from the literature or your own previous work, there is no need to collect the data once more. Please just insert the relevant information into the questionnaire, indicating the source of the information.