Mean Pre-Verb Length

[Stephanie Miles]

I'm completing a master's thesis at the University of Maryland (under Nan Ratner) for which I'm studying children, ages 2:6 and up, and their mothers. Among other analyses, I'm looking at syntactic complexity.  I'm including Mean Pre-Verb Length (mean # of morphemes before the main verb in each clause) as one measure, but have been unable to find many conventions for the calculation of this measure.  A few studies, such as Snow (1972) and Fey, Leonard, & Wilcox (1981) offer some basic guidelines (e.g., exclude imperatives and accessories, include prepositions when they precede the main verb in a secondary clause), but I have come up with several additional questions during my analyses for which I haven't found answers.  I've posed some of these below-- any help that anyone can offer would be very much appreciated!

(1) how are morphemes in inverted structures (questions) counted-- e.g., "Is the baby hungry?" Do I count 0 or 2 (for "the baby") morphemes? 

(2) how does one deal with verb omissions, such as, "she all better" (where the verb "is" is assumed) or "I holding" (does that count as 1?) 

AND subject omissions, such as: 
"remember" for "do you remember" and 
"want to get down" for "do you want to get down?" 

(3) how about utterances that start with "and"? 
(i'm assuming that "and" is just a connector and that I would start the count at the subject that follows it) 

(4)Are "yes" and "no" counted as accessories in a sentence such as ("Yes, I'm going")? It seems that yes and no are redundant in this case, so I'm not certain.

(5) How are utterances such as "you do" (in response to the question, "do I look pretty") or "it does" (in response to "does it go in here?") treated?  Can you treat those as clauses and count accordingly because the main verb is understood?  

That's it for now. Thanks in advance for giving this some thought!

Stephanie Miles