quotations

[Mark Brenchley]

Hi Professor MacWhinney,

Looks like the quote instructions are for PCs. For Macs, should it just be *
shift+*" for both quotes?

Regards,
Mark

On 17 July 2012 21:56, Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu> wrote:

> Dear ChiBolts and Info-CHILDES,
>
>     We have recently changed the way that CHAT defines quotations.  The
> earlier system used two methods.  One method placed the mark +" at the
> beginning of the line to show that the following material was a quote, as in
>
> *MOT:   +" and the caterpillar ate four whole tomatoes.
>
> This part of the system is not changing.  The quotation mark used in this
> form is the standard straight double quote.
>
> The second method used scoping to mark shorter quotations within an
> utterance.  It had this form:
>
> "MOT:   you should say <please pass the salt> ["], when you want to have
> some.
>
> We have now changed this second form to look like normal written text with
> curly begin and end quotes, as in this example:
>
> *MOT:   you should say “please pass the salt", when you want to have some.
>
> The beginning curly double quote is entered using F2+"  and the closing
> curly is entered using F2+shift+".
>
> We have changed all of the corpora in CHILDES to this new format, and
> CHECK and Chatter also expect this new format.  The CHAT manual has been
> revised in accord with the new system.
>
> The reasons for this change are:
>
> 1.  This form matches what people are used to reading.
> 2.  The MOR program can treat the beginning and end quotes as special
> "words" that are then written to the %mor line, thereby helping in
> grammatical tagging and parsing.  This is part of a system that has also
> introduced special characters to mark preposed and postposed phrases.  All
> of this is discussed in the CHAT manual in sections 7.4 and 7.9.
> 3.  The earlier system led to complex overlapping angle bracket markings.
> 4.  The new system matches up better with other current text-processing
> systems.
>
> In reality, we would have gone for a system like this 28 years ago when
> creating CHAT, if we had not been confined to the use of the 128 characters
> of ASCII.  Once we shifted to Unicode, it became possible to implement this
> new system using special Unicode characters.
>
> If you have data that are not yet in this format, we have a PERL script
> that can do an automatic conversion.  If your data are already passing
> CHECK and Chatter, then we just run the converter in a few seconds.
>  Alternatively, we can run the conversion when you contributed your data to
> CHILDES.
>
> Best regards,
>
> -- Brian MacWhinney
>
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>


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a close-knit book of the world writ in lappet line and spark.

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