Advances in the accountability of grammatical analysis and description by using regular expressions

This paper discusses the representativeness, coextensitivity and scientific accountability of corpus-based grammatical descriptions of previously unresearched languages. While a grammatical description of a previously unresearched language can hardly be representative for any kind of its varieties, it can be adequate in coextensitivity if it covers the linguistic phenomena presented in the corpus. In order to allow other researchers to retrieve the examples in their context and check the analysis, the corpus should not only contain text collections, but also the elicited data, provide metadata and be accessible to other researchers. Scientific accountability, however, can only be achieved, if the description facilitates the replicability of the analysis, which presupposes that the authors’ corpus linguistic search methods are documented, so that the readers can find other, if not all examples for the described phenomena, and scrutinize the search methods, the analysis and the description. As is illustrated in this paper, a suitable query language for this kind of scientific grammatical analysis and description are the so-called regular expressions which are implemented in the annotation tool ELAN.