Searching for Double Object Ditransitives

[Liam Considine]

Thanks for the generous contributions!

I've made a test file with two simple lines:
give^me^it
pass^me^that

I can see how finding a set of ~60 or so candidates would cover a
great deal of the occurrences. Will, thanks for the tips about how to
make this process exhaustive and accurate.

I found it especially cool that the test file can contain %mor line
configurations. It is nice that they can be combinations of syntactic
categories and lexical items. This is a much better approach than
making one search with lots of parentheses and "+" or statements to
cover variations. One only needs to make a list of the searches.

Thanks again for the advice! I'm sure i'll be back around with some
more questions.
-Liam




On Dec 21 2011, 11:34 pm, William Snyder <william.sny... at uconn.edu>
wrote:
> Dear Liam,
>
> Some years ago, Karin Stromswold and I did a fairly fine grained analysis
> of double-object datives in the longitudinal corpora that were available in
> CHILDES at that time.
>
> [Snyder, William and Karin Stromswold. 1997. The structure and acquisition
> of English dative constructions. Linguistic Inquiry 28(2): 281-317.]
>
> The type of approach we used is still an option for you.
>
> In current terms, you would use the CLAN program 'freq' (with the +u
> switch) to get a list of all words used at least once by the child in a
> given corpus. (It would also be possible to combine corpora and run 'freq'
> on all the transcripts at once, to obtain a single list of words used at
> least once by at least one of the children you are studying.)
>
> The next step would be to hand-code that list to identify all words that
> can either function as a double-object verb in adult English, or that have
> a meaning that might tempt a child to use the double-object structure (in
> error).
>
> The third step would be to enter the words in a text file, and use the CLAN
> program 'combo' to locate all child utterances that contain at least one of
> the words. Preferably you'd use the -w2 switch to get two lines of context
> for each match, so that you could easily identify and discard direct
> imitations of other speakers.
>
> The fourth step would be to hand-code the matching utterances to identify
> the ones that are relevant to your project.
>
> ~~~
>
> If you want to be sure to catch all the child's early uses of the
> double-object dative, including the errors that may have occurred, this
> strategy would (I think) be a reasonable way to go.
>
> On the other hand, if you need speed more than a high level of accuracy,
> using the automatic parses in some way (preferably in the way that Brian
> recommended) could be a better choice for you.
>
> ~~~
>
> With best wishes,
>
> William
>
> William Snyder
> University of Connecticut
>
> In (Snyder & Stromswold 1997)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Brian MacWhinney <m... at cmu.edu> wrote:
> > Dear Liam,
> >      The best way to do this would be to create a test file.  That file
> > would include
> > as much variation in the configuration of double object sentences as you
> > can think of.
> > You would start by collecting about 60 such sentences by hand and eye from
> > various corpora.  Then perhaps you would imagine some other possible
> > combinations.
> > Then you would see if your search strings correctly located each
> > occurrence.
> >      If you can first do the work of composing a test file, we could go
> > from there.
> >      Regarding your %mor line attempt, I can easily think of many cases it
> > would miss, such
> > as sentences with two nouns as objects.  In theory the %gra line should be
> > more definitive,
> > but the level of accuracy of tagging of objects there is at about 90%, so
> > the GRASP tagger
> > is itself going to miss some things.
> >    Generally, this is probably going to take repeated work and testing.
>
> > -- Brian MacWhinney
>
> > On Dec 21, 2011, at 1:58 PM, Liam Considine wrote:
>
> > > Hey Chibolts Community,
>
> > > I am working on extracting double object ditransitive occurrences from
> > > the CHILDES corpus.
>
> > > "John give me the cookie"
>
> > > I've tried a handful of different searches on the %mor and %gra line.
> > > I would really like some other people who are familiar with CLAN
> > > syntax to check out my searches. I have already made a search for the
> > > prepositional dative so I am trying for this search to exclude those
> > > instances.
>
> > > Here is my %mor line attempt:
> > > combo +t*CHI +t%mor +sv*^(pro*)^(det*+qn*+pro*)^(n*+pro*) +k +r2 +u
> > > *.cha
>
> > > My first %gra line form:
> > > combo +t*CHI +t%gra +s"1|0|ROOT^2|1|OBJ^((3|4|DET^ 4|1|OBJ2)+3|1|
> > > OBJ2)" +k +r2 +u *.cha
>
> > > My best effort %gra line:
> > > combo +t*CHI +t%gra +s"(1|2|SUBJ^2|0|ROOT^3|2|OBJ^((4|2|OBJ2)+(4|
> > > 5DET^5|2|OBJ2)))+(1|0|ROOT^2|1|OBJ^((3|4|DET^ 4|1|OBJ2)+3|1|OBJ2))" +k
> > > +r2 +u *.cha
>
> > > I've selected the same data files from CHILDES as Anat Ninio does in
> > > the book "Syntactic Development Its input and output." This seems to
> > > be about 75% of all the files available.
>
> > > With my bigger %gra search i'm getting about 1075 hits. Is this
> > > consistent with the frequency of occurrence others have seen? Does my
> > > syntax have any glaring errors?
>
> > > Thanks for all the time and energy,
> > > Liam Considine
>
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