Units in Thai?

[Jordan Zlatev]

Dear INFO-CHILDES members,

I have recently started a project at Chulalongkorn Univeristy in Bangkok
(sponsored by the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation
in Research and Higher Education) which, among other things, should
add Thai data to the CHILDES database. We have begun with "Frog
Stories" (collecting narratives from 5 age groups: 3, 5, 9, 11, and
adult), while I am still looking for families with pre-spurt children,
cooperative enough to yeild their children and homes every second week for
1 year and a half in order build a longitudinal corpus (of at least 2
children) - something that has proven to be more difficult than I
anticipated.

In transcribing the Frog story data we have enountered the "unit
probelm" - what should we regard as the basic unit of analysis, marked in
the CHAT files by using new lines?
Should we use purely phonetic critera (pauses, intonation contours) to
segment the narrative into UTTERANCES, or should we use something like
CLAUSES, or Berman and Slobin's (1994) "unified predication"? Since Thai
is a serial verb language and clause boundaries are not
grammatically marked, the latter is problematic. On the other hand, pauses
alone, give us very "uneven" units - sometimes only a word, sometimes up
to 20 or so are uttered in the same breath. We have so far adopted a
compromise - use phonetic criteria, but don't move to a new line
if the pause comes within what is clealy a phrase or clause.

I would be very grateful for any comments and suggestions on this issue,
or concerning the project in general.

Best regards,

Dr. Jordan Zlatev
Linguistics Research Unit
Building 4, Arts Faculty
Chulalongkorn University
Bangkok 10330
Thailand