quotations

Brian MacWhinney macw at cmu.edu
Wed Jul 18 16:22:50 UTC 2012


Mark,

     These are not the curly quotes used by MS-Word.  Those quotes are not Unicode symbols.  These are Unicode characters that look a lot like the MS-Word characters, but are parts of Unicode.  For both Mac and PC, they require the F2 before the quote key, as stated.  Please get a new copy of CLAN and give it a try.  If there is some reason not to update to a new CLAN, then you can enter them using other methods if you know that they are Unicode 201C and 201D.  But getting a new version of CLAN is definitely the easier way to go.

Best,

-- Brian MacWhinney

On Jul 18, 2012, at 8:53 AM, Mark Brenchley wrote:

> 
> 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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