lørdag den 20. oktober 2012

Data analysis

Sometimes I find it a bit overwhelming a task to formulate grammatical analyses of the data that I'm working on; I guess I don't know where to start because there is so much interesting stuff to write about. So, I have to force myself to focus on a particular part of the grammar and ignore the rest for the time being. But how does one go about choosing that particular part of the grammar that would be interesting to zoom in on? An apriori approach might work where, without necessarily knowing a terrible lot about the language, you choose a part of speech for focus on. Of course this needs to be a part of speech that you have actually attested in the language in question; however, it might be that you later find out, that what you thought to be adjectives, were actually stative verbs with the same meaning as adjectives in most Indo-European languages - this doesn't really matter, as long as you make sure to go back and correct your anlysis once you realize that these verbs which you initially thought were a separate part of speech, actually behave in the same way as all other verbs; so maybe they take the same inflexional morphemes as other verbs, are replaceable by verbs in any given phrase and show identical prosodic features as other verbs.






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