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already-identified Aymara grammatical categories and
syntactic structures, and individual lexical items show-
ing dialectal variation. Eventually the list was refined
to eliminate material not showing variation and to focus
on areas of differences. In areas having the velar
nasal phoneme, Jaqaru words containing it were added to
the list in an effort to elicit Aymara cognates.
Although the use of Spanish in the elicitation
list sometimes resulted in Aymara translations that
reflected Spanish syntactic patterns, this drawback was
minimized by deliberate inclusion of Andean Spanish
examples already paralleling Aymara structure, and
balanced by analysis of free texts recorded in Aymara.
Grammatical structures were also elicited directly in
Aymara. For example, verb tense paradigms were
elicited by changing subject and complement pronouns
once an example of a verb with person/tense suffix had
occurred. Because the purpose of the investigation was
to elicit variation, it was important to encourage use
of local forms which sources might tend to suppress if
La Paz dialect forms were used to elicit them; the use
of Spanish avoided this problem. For example, using
Spanish made it possible to elicit in each site a brief
selection of common remarks (see Appendix C). A somewhat
abbreviated version of the elicitation list is given in

Appendix A.