Problem deleting wordforms in Word Analyses

[Josh Jensen]

Because of spelling changes and a failure to use Best Practices, I decided to clear all the analyses from my Texts. I first went to Bulk Edit Wordforms, Delete tab, selected all, chose "Wordoforms (Rows)", then hit "delete'. Nothing happened. So then I tried selecting "Form" > Delete. Success. Sort of. All the forms disappeared, and all the Word Glosses merged into a single blank form. I've now started doing some new analysis, so the list is being repopulated. But what to do with the blank Wordform line that has over 1,100 occurances?

The line remains undeletable in Bulk Edit Wordforms. I also can't delete the line in the Word Analyses section, because it is "being used" in texts.

Thanks in advance.

Josh Jensen

[Beth-docs Bryson]

This isn’t an answer to “what to do with how things are now”, but more of a comment, and also a question.

It wasn’t really the wordforms themselves that you wanted to delete.  The list of wordforms shows what occurs in your texts, and those words are indeed still in your texts, so they should stay in the list. (It’s possible to delete wordforms with zero occurrences.)  Instead, you just wanted to delete the analyses.

There is a command under Tools/Utilities to “delete all parser-approved analyses”.  That would have gotten rid of anything suggested by the parser that you had not approved.

There is also a proposal (not implemented yet) to add a command for “delete all user-approved analyses”.  That would have been the second part of what you needed.  (Someone has written a FLExTools script to accomplish the same thing, but it hasn’t been published.)

I need to think harder about the state that you have gotten your project into—it surprises me that the Form column is not showing what is in the Baseline for your texts.  Do you by any chance have more than one Vernacular Writing System?  If so, it’s possible that column is set to “Best Vernacular” instead of to a specific Writing System, and that in one of your writing systems, the words are now blank, but in whatever Writing System is on your Baseline, the words are still there.  And because the column is set to “Best …”, then you are getting a mixture of WSs showing in that column.

One way to test this would be to use Configure Columns to add another column for “Form”, and then set one Form column to one WS and the other Form column to the other WS, and see where you have blanks or not.

In order to figure out what to do for your current situation, we would need to understand what is actually currently happening.  It’s a little puzzling to me.

-Beth

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[Josh Jensen]

Thanks, Beth. We only have one vern. writing system, so switching between "best" and that particular one makes no difference.

I now understand what I should have figured out on my own. Thanks. It's a not a big deal, since as I approve analyses of words in actual texts, the "number in corpus" for the blank wordform goes down. So once I work through the corpus, I assume this will go down to zero, and in the future I'll delete what I'm supposed to.

Josh