Searching for combinations of words from a file

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Jonathan,
     You are really not looking for words, but for letter combinations  
across words. The word list function is not intended to include all  
the various regular expressions within it. In this case, you should  
just use a long single COMBO command with lots of
+s switches.  It would be something like this:

combo +s"el^hu*" +s"el^u*"  +s"el^ha*"  and so on

COMBO can do this.  However, you may find that, for this type of  
searching programs like BBEdit are more ideal, since they include the  
full power of regular expressions and CLAN only has a partial  
implementation of regular expressions.

--Brian MacWhinney

On May 15, 2009, at 9:24 AM, Jonathan wrote:

>
> I've read through the CLAN manual, and I'm still unclear how to
> reference a word list file to do a complex search. Or if there are any
> format requirements for the file.
>
> I am trying to search for certain combination of adjacent function
> words and clitics in Catalan. For example, looking for underuse of
> elision of articles with nouns, I need to find all instances of "el/la
> (h)V". So I created a word list of el^hu*, el^u*, la^hu*, la^u*, etc.
> The words are separated by carriage returns, and I saved the file as
> a .cha in the folder that lib is set to. But I either get errors or no
> matches when trying to run a search linking to that file.
>
> 1) Is the .cha file I created correct? Is it legal to use the * and ^
> operators?
> 2) What is the proper format for calling that file using the +s
> switch? I've seen +sfilename.cha, +s at filename, +s@, +s"filename.cha"
> and none of these work, neither their variants.
> 3) Should I be doing this search via the kwal or combo commands - is
> there a difference in this case?
> 4) For future reference, what is the proper syntax to refer to
> multiple files in a +s switch, eg, +s at file1^@file2^@file1 ?
>
> Sorry I'm such a neophyte, but there don't seem to be many web-based
> resources for CLAN besides this forum and the manual!
>
> >
>


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