syllabic tones

[Bjoern Wiemer]

Dear INFO-Childes'ers,

I have a problem with marking things that are not included in the depfile
and which are required by a certain peculiarity of a language with
phonological tone distinctions on syllables -- namely, Lithuanian.
Lithuanian has three tones, which should be marked diacritically. Many
people (even native speakers) are not sure about the correct syllabic accent
in many cases, and therefore it sometimes may become desirable to mark
digressions from the norm (or from what some scholars claim to be the
"correct" intonation).
        The only sign from the non-extended ASCII code that remained free
for marking something additionally to the set already defined by the CHILDES
handbooks appeared to be the back slash (\). I, thus, began to put it
immediately before the syllable pronounced with incorrect accent. But when I
began to apply CHECK on the particular files it wants them to be removed
since \ isn't defined in the depfile. Even after adding the back slash to
the depfile (which, I know, shouldn't be done for some non-technical
reasons...), CHECK continued to announce that \ isn't a part of the depfile
(?!).
        My question thus is: why does CHECK behave this way, declaring that
something isn't listed in the depfile, though it IS? And can anybody give me
an advice how to mark the feature I described above in .cha-files without
violating the principles of the CLAN format?
        With best regards and wishes,
Bjoern Wiemer.


#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#

Bjoern Wiemer
Universitaet Konstanz
Philosophische Fakultaet / FG Sprachwissenschaft - Slavistik
Postfach 55 60 - D 179
D- 78457 Konstanz

e-mail: Bjoern.Wiemer at uni-konstanz.de
tel.: 07531 / 88- 2582
fax:  07531 / 88- 4007
		- 2741

*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*