What AZT Does

What A-Z+T will and won't do for you

Prerequisites

• a lexicon (A-Z+T can help you start this, if you don't already have one)
• a set of frames for a part of speech (each one defining a specific syntactic context),

A-Z+T will Help users to Collect data

sorting data

• A-Z+T will help users
  • sort lexical items in each context/frame,
  • verify each sort group has the same (and removing those that are not)
    • surface tone pattern
    • consonant
    • vowel
  • join groups that were separated but which are pronounced the same,
  • do the above cyclically until users are satisfied that
    • groups are each one thing, and
    • each group is different from the others.
• A-Z+T will store judgments from the above sorting in LIFT database for the user

Recording data

• A-Z+T allows easy recording, to meaningfully named sound files, linked to LIFT database

A-Z+T will Help users to Transcribe data

• A-Z+T will help users rename sorted groups (transcribe)
  • pitch transcription for surface tone sort groups
  • glyphs for consonant and vowel sort groups

A-Z+T will Help users to Analyze data

• Draft underlying tone groups, based on sorting across all frames.
• Allow users to join and rename draft underlying tone groups
• Output reports of the above to Xlingpaper (which can output to pdf, html, and others).

A-Z+T will not

• Confirm that your lift database is consistent in spelling, apart from the specific checks run by users.
• Confirm that any field is correctly marked for language.
• Confirm that senses are correctly marked for grammatical category (except through parsing second forms).
• Make frames for you, nor help you decide what makes a good tone frame
• Decide for you which draft underlying form groups should be joined
• Hypothesize underlying forms for any morpheme, nor test your hypotheses.