4. ELABORATION BARS
This set of elaboration bars, in the section on the right, provide specific information on some aspect of the record being looked at. They arose after a particular record had once been scrutinised and various points about it had come to mind. It seemed useful then to have a copy of the information that had been found out, rather than having to start from scratch each subsequent time the record, or one similar to it, was looked at. First there was just the one bar, but later others were added to reflect different aspects of the various different records, as outlined below.
The main layout in the Bayala databases is OVERVIEW: see 2. The Big Picture. The eight ‘elaboration’ bars, which draw on information in the Elaboration related database, appear at the top of the OVERVIEW layout in Fig 2.1.
Fig. 4.1 The ‘elaboration' bars
KEYWORD (blue) and THEMEWORD (yellow)
The first two bars are similar in function, with the first, as its name suggests, being based on a key 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 or more bars. Subsequently, the keyword bar came to be preferred for verbs and the themeword bar for nouns.
Fig. 4.2 Partial display of a Keyword elaboration
Clicking on the keyword elaboration bar reveals the complete entry. Here are gathered various examples elaborating on the word in question.
Example of the usefulness of the Elaboration bars
Dawes recorded the following:
“Pyélla” bayi-la “Crooked” crooked Dawes (b) [b:16:20] [BB] [NSW]
Could Dawes have been wrong?
Fig. 4.3 Extract from the ‘crooked / bent / knot' themeword example
Clicking on the themeword elaboration bar shows that there is slight support only in the databases for Dawes’ claim that Pyélla (bayi-la) means ‘crooked’. His entry is in the middle of Fig. 4.3 above below the second double-line, all except one of the other entries for ‘crooked’ being quite different.
Sometimes there are surprising insights. In the entry just above the second double-line 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 concept elaboration bar is often used to present ideas generally, such as the operation of suffixes, the privative and proprietive (lacking/having) contrasts, plurals, numerals and much else.
Fig. 4.4 Concept elaboration bar: the various case endings for the Sydney language, Biyal Biyal
Clicking on the concept elaboration bar showing ‘CASES BB’ brings up the summary illustrated above. There is a similar concept elaboration bar option showing ‘TENSES & DFXs: BB’.
Fig. 4.5 The ‘TENSES & DFXs: BB’ concept elaboration bar
THE OTHER ELABORATION BARS
The other elaboration bars operate in a similar way. They are much less used, but each contains elaborating detail when the entry is clicked.
As stated above, the elaboration bars idea came about when research was done on an entry on some occasion. Then the entry, or a similar one, was encountered, and it was recalled that research had been done on it, but what was it? And it had to be done again. To avoid that problem, research done was put into an elaboration bar and named under one of the eight elaboration bar tags, enabling it to easily be subsequently referred to at any time.
Fig. 4.6 The full set of Elaboration bar tags
