new transcription norms?

[Brian MacWhinney]

On 9/22/03 8:34 AM, "Ann MacGibbon" <macgibbon at comcast.net> wrote:

> Dear Prof. MacWhinney,
>
> I am running CHECK on a corpus of children's narratives in CHAT format.  I
> would greatly appreciate it if you could answer two questions for me when you
> have time.
>
> 1.    I recently discovered that the CHECK program no longer accepts the
> symbol -? to indicate a rising tone at the end of an utterance that is not a
> question.  Is there another way to indicate this?  I assume that the hypen is
> no longer acceptable for use in utterance terminators.  I saw your recent
> messages about changes in the CHECK program, but several symbols using the
> hyphen still appear in the CHAT manual and the depfile as utterance
> terminators.
>

These symbols are still allowed, but they are no longer allowed to be used
as utterance terminators.  So you now need to add a terminator (period,
question mark, exclamation, or one of the +... type terminators) after
these.

> 2.    Is it still possible to use the hyphen symbol (e.g., -') to indicate
> changes of  tone within utterances?
>

Yes, that one is OK.  The new electronic version of the manual on the web
has the correct set of possibilities.

I should explain that I removed the option of using -? As a terminator
because people were really confusing its use as a terminator and its use as
a prosodic marker.  Now, it can ONLY be used as a prosodic marker.


--Brian