new transcription norms

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Camilla, Joanna, and Anna,


>
> We also tried to use CHSTRING for replacing ()
> with (xxx).

I think I was suggesting use of xxx, not use of (xxx).
You will find that xxx works fine and doesn't require you to make a guess at
what the learner said.  However, if you are saying that you had a word that
might have been "coniglio", but the child only said "coni" and you don't
want to infer that the child meant "coniglio" then you can just transcribe
as &coni. This form of transcript says that "coni" was a phonological
fragment and that you don't really know what the child wanted to say.  On
the other hand, if you really think the child was saying coniglio, then you
can transcribe as coni(glio).  In any case, I would avoid coni(xxx).

>
> We will take your advice and replace "-:" with ":".
> Then should we or should we not leave a space
> before the colon at the end of a word?
>

No space.  Just place the colon at the end of the word.  Or, if want to be
more precise, you can place it inside the word after the vowel or whatever
segment was lengthened.

> Our problems with the placement of some of
> our bullets origin in the fact that one transcriber,
> who used to work with us, decided to place all
> the bullets at the beginning of the transcribed
> material, i.e. after *XYZ:
>
> There was actually no particular reason for this,
> as far as I understand, she probably just
> thought that one could place them
> either before or after the transcribed material,
> creating in either way a space between two
> bullets, where the sound was represented.

I'm really sorry about the hassle that this has created.  This type of
change is extremely easy to do with tools such as BBEdit, which allows you
to make changes using Regular Expressions.  If you send me a copy of your
data, I can make the fix.  You can send me files as an attachment, but make
sure that it is a single attachment created by first combining all of the
files using Zip.

--Brian