<div>Dear Liam,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Some years ago, Karin Stromswold and I did a fairly fine grained analysis of double-object datives in the longitudinal corpora that were available in CHILDES at that time. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>[Snyder, William and Karin Stromswold. 1997. The structure and acquisition of English dative constructions. Linguistic Inquiry 28(2): 281-317.]</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The type of approach we used is still an option for you. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>In current terms, you would use the CLAN program 'freq' (with the +u switch) to get a list of all words used at least once by the child in a given corpus. (It would also be possible to combine corpora and run 'freq' on all the transcripts at once, to obtain a single list of words used at least once by at least one of the children you are studying.)</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The next step would be to hand-code that list to identify all words that can either function as a double-object verb in adult English, or that have a meaning that might tempt a child to use the double-object structure (in error).</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The third step would be to enter the words in a text file, and use the CLAN program 'combo' to locate all child utterances that contain at least one of the words. Preferably you'd use the -w2 switch to get two lines of context for each match, so that you could easily identify and discard direct imitations of other speakers. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>The fourth step would be to hand-code the matching utterances to identify the ones that are relevant to your project.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>~~~</div>
<div> </div>
<div>If you want to be sure to catch all the child's early uses of the double-object dative, including the errors that may have occurred, this strategy would (I think) be a reasonable way to go.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>On the other hand, if you need speed more than a high level of accuracy, using the automatic parses in some way (preferably in the way that Brian recommended) could be a better choice for you.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>~~~</div>
<div> </div>
<div>With best wishes,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>William</div>
<div> </div>
<div>William Snyder</div>
<div>University of Connecticut</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div>In (Snyder & Stromswold 1997)<br><br></div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Brian MacWhinney <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:macw@cmu.edu">macw@cmu.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT:#ccc 1px solid;MARGIN:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;PADDING-LEFT:1ex" class="gmail_quote">Dear Liam,<br> The best way to do this would be to create a test file. That file would include<br>as much variation in the configuration of double object sentences as you can think of.<br>
You would start by collecting about 60 such sentences by hand and eye from<br>various corpora. Then perhaps you would imagine some other possible combinations.<br>Then you would see if your search strings correctly located each occurrence.<br>
If you can first do the work of composing a test file, we could go from there.<br> Regarding your %mor line attempt, I can easily think of many cases it would miss, such<br>as sentences with two nouns as objects. In theory the %gra line should be more definitive,<br>
but the level of accuracy of tagging of objects there is at about 90%, so the GRASP tagger<br>is itself going to miss some things.<br> Generally, this is probably going to take repeated work and testing.<br><font color="#888888"><br>
-- Brian MacWhinney<br></font>
<div>
<div></div>
<div class="h5"><br>On Dec 21, 2011, at 1:58 PM, Liam Considine wrote:<br><br>> Hey Chibolts Community,<br>><br>> I am working on extracting double object ditransitive occurrences from<br>> the CHILDES corpus.<br>
><br>> "John give me the cookie"<br>><br>> I've tried a handful of different searches on the %mor and %gra line.<br>> I would really like some other people who are familiar with CLAN<br>> syntax to check out my searches. I have already made a search for the<br>
> prepositional dative so I am trying for this search to exclude those<br>> instances.<br>><br>> Here is my %mor line attempt:<br>> combo +t*CHI +t%mor +sv*^(pro*)^(det*+qn*+pro*)^(n*+pro*) +k +r2 +u<br>> *.cha<br>
><br>> My first %gra line form:<br>> combo +t*CHI +t%gra +s"1|0|ROOT^2|1|OBJ^((3|4|DET^ 4|1|OBJ2)+3|1|<br>> OBJ2)" +k +r2 +u *.cha<br>><br>> My best effort %gra line:<br>> combo +t*CHI +t%gra +s"(1|2|SUBJ^2|0|ROOT^3|2|OBJ^((4|2|OBJ2)+(4|<br>
> 5DET^5|2|OBJ2)))+(1|0|ROOT^2|1|OBJ^((3|4|DET^ 4|1|OBJ2)+3|1|OBJ2))" +k<br>> +r2 +u *.cha<br>><br>> I've selected the same data files from CHILDES as Anat Ninio does in<br>> the book "Syntactic Development Its input and output." This seems to<br>
> be about 75% of all the files available.<br>><br>> With my bigger %gra search i'm getting about 1075 hits. Is this<br>> consistent with the frequency of occurrence others have seen? Does my<br>> syntax have any glaring errors?<br>
><br>> Thanks for all the time and energy,<br>> Liam Considine<br>><br>> --<br>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "chibolts" group.<br>> To post to this group, send email to <a href="mailto:chibolts@googlegroups.com">chibolts@googlegroups.com</a>.<br>
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