A Comprehensive Comparison of Lexemes in the ... - SIL International

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informant gives a different lexeme from the one that actually corresponds to
the lexemes the other informants gave for their respective languages. (Note
that, at times, one Tanna language uses the noun form of a lexeme while
another related language may use only the verb form or a nominalized verb.
See, for instance, the entry for ‘poison.’ Four of the languages form the word
for ‘poison’ with the agentive k- + verb akonə while N Tanna and Whitesands
form it with the nominalizing prefix n- + verb akona + nominalizing suffix -
an.)
3) Word joining
The informant joins two words when answering the linguist, while only one
word actually belongs to the lexical category the linguist is trying to elicit.
4) Incorrect answer
The informant misunderstands the linguist or does not know the answer and so
gives an incorrect answer. Therefore, the informant’s answer does not
correspond semantically or lexically to the other languages being compared.
5) Linguist’s mistake
The linguist hears, records, or reports the information incorrectly.
Each of these errors would give the analyst the impression that the
languages are more dissimilar than they really are. Furthermore, since the
resulting data is not wholly accurate, it can muddle things for the historical
linguist who is trying to infer patterns of language change. For each of the errors
listed above, Table 1.4 (next page) gives examples which I found in Tryon’s (1976)
data from Tanna (page numbers refer to Tryon 1976 except those with ‘below,’
which refer to page numbers in this document).