T-units

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Ngoni, Marilyn, Phyllis, and Info-CHILDES,

  The discussion of how to count t-units seems to assume that people are
counting these units by hand and eye.  However, it is possible to count them
automatically, using the CLAN MLU program, if you wish.  You can separate
units with the unit markers such as [c] or [t], as is often done for the
Frog Stories.  And you can use the -s switch to exclude certain words such
as "yes" and "no".  However, if the goal is to exclude all single-word
utterances, that could be done by preprocessing with MAXWD.  Finally, if you
want to handle direct quotation as a separate t-unit, you can transcribe in
this way:

*CHI:   I said +"/.
*CHI:   +" I'm going.

Of course, it was not clear in the earlier messages whether Ngoni wanted to
use a program to do this, but that is a possibility.

--Brian MacWhinney