Research Questions and Purpose Thesis Overview

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1.2 Research Questions and Purpose

During a linguistic research a lot of data are collected. As data collection in itself is usually not the aim, the question arises how to analyse the data, and after analysis, how to present the results in a logical and clear way. More specifically, what can be done with the data collected during the sociolinguistic survey of the Bena language in order to give a clear picture of the dialectal situation of the Bena language? Concentrating on the data in the word lists, what methods can be used to analyse the data and what possibilities are there to present the results from these data? How do these methods to analyse data and present linguistic results compare with each other? Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to look at the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of comparing and analysing data. In order to do this I took the data collected during the sociolinguistic survey of the Bena language and applied some of the methods to these data. The data are word lists which were collected to investigate the different dialects of the Bena language and their relationships with each other. Then I compared the results and the methods.

1.3 Thesis Overview

This chapter of introduction into the topic is followed by a chapter about dialectology where a definition of dialect versus language is given with a short historical overview of dialectology and the description of some methods of analysing and comparing dialects. The third chapter gives some background information on the Bena people of Tanzania and their language. It also describes the research questions of the dialect survey of the Bena language, what type of data and how the data were collected. The fourth chapter goes into the comparison and analysis of the data in the word lists elicited during the survey and presents the findings. It also compares the results obtained by the different methods of analysing. The last chapter discusses the methods used for the analysis and contains the conclusion. 6 2 COMPARING DIALECTS

2.1 Dialects