The structure file is a list of all the markers you are using in your project and the definitions of the relations between them. Before embarking on any serious lexical enterprise, it is worthwhile to think about the markers you will use in your lexicon and the relations between them. For instance, in order to introduce examples into the lexicon, researchers very often use markers such as sfx, xv, xe, xn (sound file example, example vernacular, example English, example national language respectively). Obviously all these categories belong together. If you have more than one example per entry of course you want it to be clear which sound file goes with which translation etc. In Toolbox you could simply list them one under another, without arranging them hierarchically, as the vertical order would make it rather clear which translations go together with which sound files.

However, when transferring you data to other programs, for instance LEXUS, this information might be lost. Therefore, you need to make the relation between them explicit by ordering them in a hierarchy. This applies to all markers in your Toolbox project. Toolbox allows you to view the markers together with their hierarchy, as has been demonstrated above. It is also very easy to change this hierarchy. There for each and every marker you can specify under which other marker it should be defined, and this information is automatically saved in the .typ file. The top marker is usually the lexeme marker (lx) but the position of the rest can be defined according to your needs and the particularities of your lexicon. To come back to our example, you might for instance want to define sfx, xe, xn under xv. In that case for each xv that you might want to include you will have a different set of sfx, xe, xn, so that no confucion arises.

Let us now see what would happen if you imported such a hierarchy of markers into LEXUS. In general, basing on your .typ file, LEXUS will create a structure for your lexicon. And this structure will then be used for you data from the data file. When LEXUS encounters a structure in the .typ file such as given in Figure 2.1, it will take the top node and create a group node out of it. LEXUS always turns markers that have other markers defined under them into group nodes. Then it will put all the markers that were defined under the top node TOGETHER WITH the top node itself into that group.

Figure 2.1. Example of a marker hierarchy in Toolbox

The resulting structure in LEXUS will be the following:

Figure 2.2. The resulting structure in LEXUS

Of course the names of the particular nodes and group nodes can be changed later on in LEXUS so that xv group could be called example group and it would include in it all the necessary nodes: the sound file, transcription and the translations. Here we have already change the Spanish names of the markers from the type file (ejemplo Tsafiki, ejemplo Espaol, ejemplo Ingls) into English names (example Tsafiki, example Spanish, eample English). As a rule LEXUS will create a group node out of everything that has at least one other marker defined under it in the .typ file.