Passives

[Julie Ger]

Thanks so much, that's really helpful!

It looks like the command to get all of the "be" passives actually needs to 
be something more like:
combo +t%mor +s"aux|be*^*^*part|*-PASTP" *.cha
where the differences from the command you offered are "be*" instead of 
"be&PAST" (since we want all instance of "be" passives, not just the ones 
with "be" in past tense - my mistake for having the command like that in 
the first place) and adding "*-PASTP" to the end of the string to search 
for, since just "part" still isn't specific enough (again my mistake for 
not noticing that in the original command).

However, this still gets a lot of instances like "I was tired," which could 
technically be interpreted as a passive (as in "the long hike tired me" -> 
"I was tired by the long hike") but clearly this is not the intended 
meaning. Searching for only the infinitive version of "be" *almost* gets 
just true passives, but of course, that wouldn't get the instances of 
passives with a finite "be" (so that command would be "combo +t%mor 
+s"aux|be^*^*part|*-PASTP" *.cha", where "be" doesn't have "*" after it).

I don't know of any way to get only instances of passives this way, since 
passives like "I was hit" are parsed just like "I was tired." So, this is 
more or less the command that would get the original solution that was 
suggested... so at least there's that :)

On Wednesday, April 16, 2014 7:32:30 PM UTC-4, Spektor, Leonid: CMU wrote:
>
> UMD,
>
> The command that let you look for several words in sequence is called 
> COMBO. Your example command "kwal +t%mor +s"aux|be&PAST^ ^part" *.cha” 
> would be like following if:
>
> the “aux|be&PAST” should be immediately followed by “part":
> combo +t%mor +s"aux|be&PAST^part|*" *.cha
>
> there could be one word between “aux|be&PAST” and “part":
> combo +t%mor +s"aux|be&PAST^_^part|*" *.cha
>
> the “aux|be&PAST” could have zero or more words between it and following 
> “part":
> combo +t%mor +s"aux|be&PAST^*^part|*" *.cha
>
>
> Leonid.
>
>
>  
> On Apr 16, 2014, at 18:17, Julie Ger <jgera... at gmail.com <javascript:>> 
> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> I thought it might be useful to mention that it's now (mostly) possible to 
> extract "get" passives with the line "kwal +t%mor +s"aux|get&PAST" *.cha" 
> (not sure if this was possible when the post was made). It doesn't work 
> perfectly - there are a lot of false positives - but most of the hits are 
> true "get" passives. This doesn't work for "be" passives, though, since it 
> also pulls out other instances of "be" used as an auxiliary, which are a 
> lot more frequent than just "be" passives. Something that might get just 
> the "be" passives would be something like "kwal +t%mor +s"aux|be&PAST^ 
> ^part" *.cha" but this doesn't work. If someone can figure out how to make 
> something like this work, though, that would be very helpful!
>
> UMD Project on Children's Language Learning
>
> On Thursday, August 2, 2012 5:57:35 PM UTC-4, Brian MacWhinney wrote:
>>
>> Dear UMD,
>>     I think the best you can do here is to compose search strings that 
>> include all the passives along with lots of false alarms and then you have 
>> to go through the set to discard the false alarms by hand.  The problem is 
>> that the best way to do this is from the %mor line using a COMBO string, 
>> but it will match lots of structures such as "John was surprised to find 
>> out" because of the presence of the auxiliary and the lack of a distinction 
>> between the perfect and the past for the regular verbs (both -ed).  Of 
>> course, if there is a by-phrase that can help, but you can't count on that.
>>
>> --Brian MacWhinney
>>
>> On Aug 2, 2012, at 4:07 PM, "UMD Lang & Cog Lab" <umdla... at gmail.com> 
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> We are currently conducting a study that looks into how children 
>> interpret passive sentences.  We would like to investigate the passives in 
>> parent input to their children.  We found transcripts of interest to us 
>> from CHILDES; however, despite reading the manual and many tries at writing 
>> commands we have not found a way to reliably search the passive because of 
>> their variable structure.  Does anyone know the best way to go about 
>> finding passive constructions using CLAN? 
>>
>> Thank you,
>> UMD Language and Cognition Lab
>>
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