Using an Online Tool for the Documentation of Edo Language

Language documentation is important as a tool for preservation of endangered languages and making data available to speakers and researchers of a language. A data base such as TypeCraft is important for typology studies both for well documented languages as well as little documented languages and is a valid tool for comparison of languages. This requires that linguistic elements must be coded in a manner that allows comparability across widely varying language data. In this paper, I discuss how I have used the coding system in TypeCraft for the documentation of data from È dó language, a language belonging to the Edoid group of the Benue-Congo subfamily of the Volta-Congo language family and spoken in Mid-Western Nigeria, West Africa. The study shows how syntactic, semantic and morphological properties of multi-verb constructions in È dó (Benue-Congo) can be represented in a relational database.