In this paper, a set of field work methods will be presented and discussed which I used for my postdoc project "Differential Object Marking in Language Contact Situations between Romance and Non-Romance Languages". Field work languages were Spanish, Portuguese, Aymara, Guaraní, Maltese, Sicilian, Papia Kristang and Chabacano.
The core field work method was story-telling out of different perspectives. On the one hand, I asked the interviewees to tell a story which contains an event that happened to themselves and (at least) one other story which talks about what happened to someone else or a legend or fairy tale. On the other hand, I designed a picture story of forty images, called „the three hunters" which had to be verbalized by the interviewees (in most cases with two run-throughs). The picture story was designed for the purpose of making the speakers utter a high number of transitive sentences with changing agents and patients in order to analyze the marking patterns of the direct object.
Both elicitation methods have advantages as well as disadvantages which will be discussed in the presentation. Concrete examples will also provide insight into the possibilities and limits of cross-linguistic comparison by means of a parallel corpus based on the picture story method.
