Grammar in FLEX

[elaine_...@sil.org]

Hi all, I’m sending a question from a colleague concerning using the Grammar section of FLEX. I personally haven’t used this feature enough to answer her and nobody else in our branch seems to have used it either for this purpose ; I think a lot of people still use Toolbox. I’ve translated from French, so excuse me if the wording is a bit awkwardː

 

“I have a question concerning the possibility of doing the grammatical analysis in FLEX starting from zero, in a language where nothing has been done and for which we don’t even know which are the morphemes and even less what their form is. Do you know if this is possible? I have looked some, and it seems that it is presupposed that you already have an idea of the morphology and syntax. I know it isn’t possible to work with verb paradigms (which is indispensable with a language with complex verbal morphology, in my opinion, so you have to just work on paper or in Toolbox). Can you tell me what is possible for FLEX to do concerning grammatical analysis?”

 

Any answers/examples would be helpful, and I’ll pass them along. Thank youǃ

• Elaine Scherrer

SIL Chad

 

[Aaron Broadwell]

Hi all,

I'd say it's perfectly possible to do grammatical analysis, starting from zero, in FLEx.  (I've done something similar for the Timucua language, since I did not trust any of the previous analyses.)

You can just enter some text or some elicited sentences along with a translation in some language you know.  Then you use the concordance features to find patterns and posit morphemes.  If your proposed morphemic analyses don't work out, you can delete or edit the morphemes till you find good generalizations.

To give a concrete example, if you have two verbs ohotetila 'doesn't give' and ocototetila 'doesn't hear', you could posit oho  = 'give' and ocoto = 'hear'. But what about all the rest of it? Is /tetila/ one morpheme, two morphemes, three morphemes, or more?  You could try different solutions, such as creating a single morpheme -tetila.  When you create this suffix, FLEx may ask you various things (such as the inflectional/derivational status of the morpheme, or what position slot it appears in.)  If you don't know, you can leave nearly all of it empty.

If on further study, you decide that -tetila is actually two suffixes, -teti and -la, you can use FLEx to create these new affixes, delete -tetila and use the Word Analyses to change all the forms in the corpus to the new analysis.

My advice is to not be afraid of entering something into FLEx that is wrong.  It is paralyzing to think that all the morphological analysis must be correct the first time.  Use FLEx to help you figure out what works correctly for your language.

[Jeff Heath]

> I know it isn’t possible to work with verb paradigms (which is indispensable with a language with complex verbal morphology, in my opinion, so you have to just work on paper or in Toolbox).

I'm a little surprised to see this "declaration" that it isn't possible to work with verb paradigms in FLEx. Could they develop that idea a bit more? What are they trying to do? I seem to be able to work with verb paradigms, e.g. in Grammar > Category Edit > Verb > Affix Templates. Or are they trying to do something different? And I'm also a bit surprised that they say can do this analysis in Toolbox, but not in FLEx. Could they describe this analysis they want to do? I imagine it can be done in FLEx as well...

[H. Andrew Black]

It is possible to create a "text" that consists of one or more paradigms.  One can even set the "genre" of that text to be "Paradigm" (under Genres on the Info tab; "Paradigm" is under "Word list").

--Andy

On 6/21/2021 6:24 PM, Jeff Heath wrote:

> I know it isn’t possible to work with verb paradigms (which is indispensable with a language with complex verbal morphology, in my opinion, so you have to just work on paper or in Toolbox).

I'm a little surprised to see this "declaration" that it isn't possible to work with verb paradigms in FLEx. Could they develop that idea a bit more? What are they trying to do? I seem to be able to work with verb paradigms, e.g. in Grammar > Category Edit > Verb > Affix Templates. Or are they trying to do something different? And I'm also a bit surprised that they say can do this analysis in Toolbox, but not in FLEx. Could they describe this analysis they want to do? I imagine it can be done in FLEx as well...

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[Ken K]

Hi Elaine,

Good to hear from you! I'll admit, doing grammar with FLEx can sometimes be messy, especially when you don't have much to go on at first. Better to make a few mistakes in the beginning, and then refine your results later, than to allow yourselves to be paralysed. Avoid "the paralysis of analysis" as one of my bosses in the shipping industry used to say.

When you are not sure what the morphemes are, it might be a good idea to start with gathering natural texts. Then, just as Aaron Broadwell suggests, you can deduce the morphemes based on the glosses in the LWC, and by comparing wordforms based on the word form concordance.

One can indeed input paradigms into FLEx as texts. I regularly do this. In fact, there is a category called paradigm in the "genres" category of information about the text. Are there related languages to the language under investigation, which have had grammars written up? This might give some clues for eliciting paradigms.

Looking forward to hearing how your investigation goes.

Best wishes, Ken

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[Sari Gardner]

Hi,
I just want to sound a warning about reanalysing and deleting affixes:
make sure that they are not used any more before you delete them. (FLEX
should warn you about this.) You can do a concordance search on them and
reanalyse them before deleting them, and that way you don't end up with
unanalysed morphemes in your texts.
Sari

> o Elaine Scherrer

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