For each labeltype in the hierarchy, a set of legal labels can be defined. Legal labels can be grouped into any categories that are defined by the user (for example, vowels, fricatives, stops, etc). This declaration is primarily used in the labeller and in database queries. In the Emu labeller, a menu of possible labels is offered when the user clicks on a segment or event label. This menu is derived from the legal label definitions. When querying the database, the name of one of the categories of legal labels (for example, vowel, fricative, stop) can be used as a wildcard to match any label in that group.
The syntax of a legal label statement is:
where classname is an arbitrary name for this class of legal labels and label+ indicates one or more labels, separated by spaces. Each labeltype can have as many legal classes as is needed and any given label can appear in more than one class; this allows, for example vowels to be split into front, back, open and close with front close vowels being identified in both classes. If such a set of definitions were set up, the database could be queried for open back vowels as follows:legal labelname classname label+
Phonetic=open&Phonetic=back |
Example:
legal Phoneme vowel A E I O U V a: e: i: o: u: legal Phoneme stop p t k b d g legal Phoneme fricative f v s z S Z D T |