F5, batch, discontinuous morphemes

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-ChiBolts,
  Just a new on three CLAN features, one of which is largely new.  Each of
these points is in response to mail I have received about these features.

1.  The first is a feature that works with MLU and CLAN to track
discontinuous morphemes.  To do this, you need to end the first part of the
discontinuous morpheme with a hyphen and begin the second part with a
hyphen.  An example of this is the following file:

@Begin
@Participants:    FAT Father
*FAT:    I out- will -talk silly Hungarian.
*FAT:    I also out-talk so.
*FAT:    sometimes speak- I silly German all -out.
*FAT:    or German speak-out bad.
*FAT:    other times yam1-caa4 I or yam1- ha -caa4 we.
@End

FREQ will find two cases each here of out-talk, speak-out, and yam1-caa4.
MLU will find either 27 or 33 morphemes depending on your use of the +b
switch.  This new feature seems particularly useful for languages like
German, Hungarian, and Chinese that have many discontinuous verbs.

2.  I wanted to again call people's attention to the use of the F5 key for
pre-segmentation of an audio file in preparation for transcription.  We have
found that the use of the F5 method really helps in the work of getting
transcription going, if you have a digitized audio file.

3.  Finally, I wanted to note that almost all of the "shell commands"
described in section 4.1 of the CLAN manual work equally well on both Mac
and PC.  In particular, the "batch" command works on both platforms.  You
just put your commands in a file and then run

batch batchfilename

Happy CLAN-ing.

--Brian MacWhinney