5. ELABORATION BARS

TOP OF THE ‘OVERVIEW’ LAYOUT

Fig. 5.1 The ‘Elaboration bars’

There are eight ‘elaboration’ bars. These all drawn on information in the ‘Elaboration’ auxiliary database.

KEYWORD (blue) and THEMEWORD (yellow)

The first two bars are similar, with the first, as its name suggest, being based on a word, while the second has an emphasis on a theme. But they are used almost interchangeably, for it often happens that an example may call for the use of two bars. 

Fig. 5.2 Partial display of a ‘Keyword’ elaboration

Clicking on the keyword elaboration bar reveals the complete entry, a portion only being shown in the example above.  Here are gathered various examples elaborating on the word in question.

Fig. 5.3 Extract from the ‘crooked / bent / knot Themeword example

Clicking on the second bar (yellow) shows that there is no support in the databases for Dawes’s claim that ‘bayila’ means ‘crooked’. His entry is the last, and all those above are quite different. But sometimes there are surprising insights. In the entry just above Dawes’s there is one for ‘knee’. It seems that the indigenous people might have viewed the knee not so much as a particular body part, but as something ‘crooked’.

CONCEPT (green)

The ‘ElaborationConcept’ bar is often used to present a range of noun suffixes, or case endings; or suffixes attached to verbs.

Fig. 5.4 Elaboration Concept bar: The various case endings for the Sydney language

Clicking on the Elaboration Concept bar showing ‘CASES BB’ brings up the summary illustrated above. There is a similar ‘Concept bar’ option, ‘TENSES & DFXs: BB’:

Fig. 5.5 The ‘TENSES & DFXs: BB’ Concept bar

THE OTHER ELABORATION BARS

The other bars are more of the same. They are much less used, but each contains elaborating detail when the entry is clicked. When looking at any particular entry in a database, if there is an ‘Elaboration’ tag visible it means that there is some summarised additional information immediately available that might help obtain a more comprehensive view of the item concerned.

Fig. 5.6 The full set of Elaboration bar tags