Summary
163
the mutation system is limited in scope: agreement targets are necessarily only those with a mutatable initial.58 Together, chapters 5–7 form the analytic core of this study. The survey just conducted is preparatory to the work done in chapters 6 and 7, where the variation described qualitatively in this chapter is analyzed quantitatively and a theoretical model of the system is provided.
58
The available literature does not provide any numerical data as to what percentage of the nominal lexicon of each language have mutatable initials. If available, such figures would reveal how effective initial mutations are as an agreement-marking system. However, in order to get a representative picture, it would be necessary to rank all the nouns in the lexicon according to their relative frequency, which would require very large corpora.