syllable count

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Marije,
     This is the type of analysis that will eventually be best  
supported by the Phon program that Yvan Rose, Greg Hedlund, and I are  
developing (see http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/phon/)   But PHON can't  
really do this yet.  So, for the time being, hand coding in CLAN is  
the best method and the method you propose seems excellent.   
Obviously, you can get total counts by just multiplying in FREQ.   
Moreover, you can also check for sequences of monosyllables and such  
with COMBO.  So, I like your solution in the general case.  In fact,  
PHON will be implementing something like this too, I believe.   
However, if all you cared about was the total number, you could save  
yourself a bit of work by must appending a postcode such as [+ 6] and  
then running FREQ on the postcodes.
    One could imagine a special purpose version of MOR that was used  
just to yield syllable counts. You could use the "english  
translation" field for this.  You would get

%mor:  pro|I=$1 v|walk=$1 adv|home=$1 adv|tomorrow=$3

Then you would FREQ to focus on the items after the =
To make this work, you would need to have all words recognized by MOR  
and you would have to add syllable numbers to all words in the  
lexicon.  Not an easy job, but eventually we will have to do this.

--Brian MacWhinney

On Oct 5, 2006, at 6:29 AM, Michel, M.C. wrote:

> Dear everyone,
>
> I want to use CLAN to do a syllables count on my transcripts (how  
> many syllables are there).
>
> Did anyone try this before and has a good way to deal with it?
>
> My idea was just to make a dependent tier %syl: and put in the  
> numbers and then count the occurrences with FREQ e.g.
>
> *MOT:	I walk home tomorrow.
> %syl:	$1 $1 $1 $3
>
> Does anyone have a better/easier solution? As I work with second  
> language learners, it is difficult to use MOR.
>
> Thank you in advance for any helpful suggestion,
> bye bye,
> Marije
>
>
>
>
> ************************************
> drs. M.C. (Marije) Michel
> Dutch Linguistics
> Spuistraat 134
> 1012 VB Amsterdam - The Netherlands
> Room: 435
>
> Phone: +31-(0)20-525 46 58
> E-mail: M.C.Michel at uva.nl
>
>