ABSTRACT
T his chapter is directly related to one of the rst questions I asked Dan Slobin during my stay at Berkeley in summer 2001. At that time, inspired by the work on spatial language by Dan and his colleagues, I was in the process of preparing a study of motion events and static spatial relations on the border between Romance and Germanic languages. My goal was to investigate the non-standard varieties along the Swiss part of this border and to compare nonstandard and standard varieties with respect to the well-known distinction between satellite-and verb-framed languages (Talmy, 2000). Since the plan was to collect a sociologically stratied sample, including older and less literate informants, I was worried if picture stimuli would be the adequate means to elicit narratives. Dan told me that the frog story stimulus is perfectly appropriate for older informants, and showed me the transcripts of elderly informants, including his father’s retelling in Yiddish. Eventually, I carried out my research project using the frog story as one of the stimuli, and indeed, most of the informants actually cooperated and produced good data. But not all of them did. A certain number of elicitation sessions in one particular alpine area, the Muotathal, surprisingly often turned into the eldworker’s nightmare. The principal goal of this contribution is to present a detailed analysis of the problems encountered in the eld. My contribution has a rather personal avor: The research reported here would have never seen the light if Dan Slobin had not passed on the spatial language virus to me. The only downside of being contaminated with this virus was my difcult encounters with some people in the eld who were not at all amused about retelling a
children’s book to a stranger. Consequently, I feel that this Festschrift is a good place to report both pleasure and pain Dan’s charisma caused me.
