confirguring lexicon for Phonology Assistant

[ax.h...@gmail.com]

I'm working with an agglutinative language, and I've glossed several texts. My Lexicon and dictionary full of affixes and bound roots. When using Phonology Assistant, the automatic analysis will then provide erroneous syllable structures and the like (since it's assuming that the various affixes and roots are full words).

I've been toggling various settings in both FLEx and Phonology Assistant but I haven't yet found out how to make Phonology Assistant look at only the full word forms.

Any suggestions on what settings to change or how to structure my lexicon and/or dictionary would be appreciated

--Alex

[Andreas_Joswig]

Hi Alex,

Sorry for the late response - for some reason, Google Mail put your message into my Spam folder, where I just found it.

If you use your FLEx database for parsing texts, then your lexeme forms are indeed not helpful for phonological analysis. You'll need to create a citation form for all entries that you want analyzed by Phonology Assistant. In the properties dialogue in the Phonology Assistant project setup you can then specify the citation form field as the one that feeds the data into PA. In FLEx, the citation form field should then only contain actual word forms.

Andreas

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[ax.h...@gmail.com]

Thank Andreas for the response, I found the settings you mentioned and got only the citation forms to appear in Phonology Assistant. Thank you!

However I have another question. What is the best practice for creating citation forms? I want my citation forms to cover as many inflectional combinations as possible. However it does appear that I cannot do this easily in the interlinear text view in FLEx. When glossing a text, I would like to add each word as a citation form, but I can't see a way to do this. Instead I have to enter the whole word (with affixes) as a lexeme form, then go that new entry in the lexicon, and then copy+paste the lexeme form into the citation form.

Not only is that extremely time-consuming but it also clutters up the lexicon with redundant lexeme entries. Is there a better way to do this? Is there any way I can just point Phonology Assistant at the baseline field of the text and have it pull words as citation forms from there?

Any suggestions for best practices would be most appreciated.

--Alex

[Andreas_Joswig]

Dear Alex,

It seems that PA takes it data exclusively from the FLEx lexicon and not from the wordlist, which is fed from the texts. And each lexicon entry needs to have a lexeme form, because these are needed for grammatical analysis. If you don't want to do any grammatical analysis with your database, but just want to use it as a source for PA, then you can cheat a little bit by changing the lexeme form to the citation form while you are adding it (and then let PA get its data from the lexeme-form field again). FLEx will then automatically turn the stem into an allomorph of the entry. But since you already did some grammatical analysis (as you have already entered all the affixes and bound roots) I wouldn't recommend doing that.

It is also important to understand the nature of the citation-form field. Normally you should not be able to copy-paste the word directly from the text into the citation-form field, as the word in the text rarely matches the citation-form criteria - each verb in the lexicon should always be entered in exactly the same grammatical form into the citation form, be it the infinitive (as in English), 1s.prs as in Latin, or 3.masc.pst as in Amharic. Each language comes with its own citation forms, which need to be carefully chosen. This means that for almost any word you'll need to enter the citation form field by hand in any case. Maybe for nouns there is less variation, but only in languages that only show number on the noun, but not case.

I hope that helps a little bit - short answer is, yes, you will have to enter the citation form by hand in the Lexicon area of FLEx, even if it takes time.

Best wishes,

Andreas

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[Alexander Rice]

Thank you for the information Andreas

Just an FYI for anyone else out there running into the same issue:

what I ended up doing was just creating a new FLEx project, just to serve as PA's database. I copied text from the baselines of a few texts in the main FLEx project and added them as a texts to the FLEx project intended to be PA's database. To create entries for the lexicon, I just went through the texts created new entries for each word, hit some random keys to save time, and thus populated my lexicon. Then had PA pull the lexeme forms for the database

While still time-consuming, I think it is faster and cleaner than manually entering citation forms in my main FLEx project's lexicon.

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