Searching for syntactic contexts

[Lara]

Hi,

I'm trying to analyze the syntactic patterning of the mental state
verbs think, know, remember, and wonder in child-directed speech. In
other words, I want to see how often they occur in particular
syntactic frames (ultimately, to see whether these verbs are
differentiated by their syntactic patterns).

For example, I want to find out how often each verb is followed by
"about" (e.g. "He's thinking about the story"), how often each verb
takes an NP complement (e.g. "I know the story"), and how often each
verb takes a VP-ing complement (e.g. I remember playing...").

Occurrences of a verb plus another word (e.g. think + about) shouldn't
be too difficult to search for -- I can just use COMBO. However, COMBO
doesn't seem to allow +r for searching stems?

More importantly, though - is it possible to search for abstract
elements like NP and VP? I know the %mor tier only codes parts of
speech, but I was hoping I could make a file with a list of all
possible NP breakdowns (det|* n|*, n|*, etc.) and do a freq search for
"think" followed by any element of that list? Something like:

freq +s"think"^@nounphrases.cha

I've tried to do this and have failed; I don't know whether it's
because it can't be done (e.g. because you can't use wildcards or two
words within a list in a separate file) or because I'm doing something
wrong.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you so, so much in
advance.

Lara

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