phrasal verbs

Janet Bang janet.bang at gmail.com
Tue Apr 21 01:02:01 UTC 2020


Hi Brian,

Thank you for your response. It's comforting to know that this wasn't just
us! Since we are not concerned with MLU (morphemes), we will likely move
forward with our solution (2), which is to link all phrasal verbs and also
do our best to group phrasal verbs and their variants together (e.g.,
"clean_that_up" and "clean_up" as two of the same type). Since we are
working with types, this means that noun and verb forms will be collapsed
(e.g., "let's play dress_up" and "let's dress up the doll").

Janet



On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 12:55 PM Brian MacWhinney <macw at andrew.cmu.edu>
wrote:

> Dear Janet,
>
>     For computational analysis two most difficult aspects of English
> grammar are phrasal verbs and the distinction between auxiliaries and the
> copula.  The problem with phrasal verbs is that the particle or preposition
> is often separated from the verb.  I agree that the solution you propose of
> marking the verb and its particle together is not a bad one.  In that case,
> the object of the preposition in a sentence such as "He calmed_down the
> crowd" will be interpreted as a direct object which is also not that bad.
> Some of these combinations, such as chill_out,  don't take objects and many
> allow for omission of the "object".
>     So, if your goal is to get a nice dependency graph this could work
> well.  However, if your goal is to calculate MLU, then joining the particle
> with the verb would warp that computation.
>     By the way, the combinations you found in n+v+prep.cut are not verbs,
> but nouns, as in "he is a burnout".  This is a different pattern.
>     In general, dealing with English verb+particle constructions is not an
> easy problem to solve.  I'm working now on the similar problem in Chinese
> which has remarkably similar issues, including the verb separation pattern.
>
> -- Brian MacWhinney
>
> On Apr 20, 2020, at 2:27 PM, Janet Y Bang <jbang at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> We have a question about linkages/compounds. We have been transcribing
> samples of LENA recordings in English (caregiver-child interactions with
> 2-year-old children) and we have compiled a list now of different phrasal
> verbs in transcripts. We defined phrasal verbs as units of "verb + adverb
> or preposition" where the meaning is attributed to the unit more than the
> meaning of each individual word.
>
> Our main interests for now are to collect measures of tokens, types
> (lemma), and MLUw (not morphemes) of caregiver and child speech.
> Determining the linkages are important for our measure of types, since we
> will be collapsing across word families with the lemmas.
>
> I noticed in the English MOR the n+v+prep.cut file has some phrasal verbs
> (e.g., dress up), but I wanted to check if there was some school of thought
> on how they should be treated? There are always situational issues we've
> come across with these. For example, in the case of particle verbs,
> sometimes these are transitive, so we weren't sure on how these
> should/would be transcribed (e.g., clean up your toys vs. clean that up).
> Also, it's not always clear from the usage if it is following our
> definition of "meaning is attributed to the unit more than the meaning of
> each individual word".
>
> We were thinking of the following solutions:
> 1. Link all phrasal verbs only when the key words are combined next to
> each other (e.g., clean up)
> 2. Link all phrasal verbs. In the case of transitive particle verbs, link
> those variations as well and count these all towards their respective
> 'particle verb family' (e.g., "clean that up" would be counted towards a
> type of "clean up")
> 3. Do not link any phrasal verbs (e.g., for "clean up", this would
> separated into the type "clean" and the type "up").
>
>
>
> ate_up
> back_up
> calm_down
> catch_up
> chill_out
> clean_up
> come_back
> come_here
> come_on
> come_out
> come_over
> drank_up
> dress_up
> get_down
> get_out
> get_up
> giddy_up
> go_ahead
> go_on
> hang_on
> here_we_go
> here_you_go
> hold_on
> hold_up
> hurry_up
> lay_down
> let_go
> light_up
> lights_out
> make_up
> pick_up
> pull_up
> slow_down
> stand_up
> stay_out
> take_care
> throw_up
> wake_up
> watch_it
> watch_out
> work_out
> zoom_in
>
>
> Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
>
> Janet
>
>
> --
> Janet Y. Bang, Ph.D.
> Postdoctoral Fellow
> Department of Psychology
> Stanford University
>
> jbang at stanford.edu
>
>
>
>
>
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