A lexical database tool for quantitative phonological research

A lexical database tool tailored for phonological research is described. Database fields include transcriptions, glosses and hyperlinks to speech files. Database queries are expressed using HTML forms, and these permit regular expression search on any combination of fields. Regular expressions are passed directly to a Perl CGI program, enabling the full flexibility of Perl extended regular expressions. The regular expression notation is extended to better support phonological searches, such as search for minimal pairs. Search results are presented in the form of HTML or LaTeX tables, where each cell is either a number (representing frequency) or a designated subset of the fields. Tables have up to four dimensions, with an elegant system for specifying which fragments of which fields should be used for the row/column labels. The tool offers several advantages over traditional methods of analysis: (i) it supports a quantitative method of doing phonological research; (ii) it gives universal access to the same set of informants; (iii) it enables other researchers to hear the original speech data without having to rely on published transcriptions; (iv) it makes the full power of regular expression search available, and search results are full multimedia documents; and (v) it enables the early refutation of false hypotheses, shortening the analysis-hypothesis-test loop. A life-size application to an African tone language (Dschang) is used for exemplification throughout the paper. The database contains 2200 records, each with approximately 15 fields. Running on a PC laptop with a stand-alone web server, the `Dschang HyperLexicon' has already been used extensively in phonological fieldwork and analysis in Cameroon.