Autotypologizing databases and their use in fieldwork

Abstract

This paper presents two database methods for crosslinguistic data collection and comparison: autotypologizing and exemplar-based sampling.Autotypologizing dispenses with a priori defined comparative grids and instead lets structural types emerge inductively through a type list that is constantly updated in response to languages entered in a database.Examplar-based sampling allows identification of a single representative of cross-linguistically heterogeneous structural domains such as case.These two methods are helpful tools in fieldwork.Autotypologizing generates inventories of known types.These inventories update researchers' expectance range for newly encountered types (like published typological surveys, but more dynamically).Examplar-based sampling is useful for writing typological profiles at very early stages of description.

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