3rd or 4th language

[Brian MacWhinney]

Folks,

    Let me suggest yet another way of dealing with the issue of words that occur in both languages.  This method relies on coding inside MOR.  For example, in the English MOR, I have created a file called co-cant.cut.  These are Cantonese interjections that occur very frequently inside English-only sentences.  Here is an example line:

嗱 {[scat co][lan yue]} "laa4"

Note, that I could also write this as laa4 in my transcript and in the MOR lexicon and it would work the same.

If I include the feature "lan" in my output.cut file, I then get this output for this form:

co|laa4&yue

I can then search for such forms using +s"*&yue" and thereby avoid always having to type (and read)
@s:eng&yue every time these conjunctions occur.  

I think this is the best way to do this, because it gives you central control of your treatment of words appearing in both languages.  For Welsh-English transcripts, if I remember correctly, there are frequent uses of "well"  which could be handled in this same way.

Note also that I have a parallel series of English words in the Cantonese lexicon.

-- Brian MacWhinney

On Mar 23, 2012, at 4:24 AM, Kevin Donnelly wrote:

> Hi Joyce
> 
> ::::On Friday 23 March 2012 Joyce Marzan said::::
>> My thanks to both Brian and Shelley. The [- una] is a great idea as
>> well. Hadn't thought of that. It is perfect for words that could (or
>> do) belong to both languages. Thank you,
> 
> Another option is to use [- eng] and [- spa] precodes for monolingual 
> utterances, and tag individual words in mixed utterances: @s:eng, @s:spa and 
> @s:eng&spa (for undetermined or unassigned).  This helps if you want to look 
> at the word level as opposed to the utterance level (eg compare words 
> occurring before an undetermined word, or see what words follow a particular 
> Spanish word).  We are using this in the Bangor Miami (Spanish-English) and 
> Patagonia (Welsh-Spanish) corpora, which will be published shortly on 
> TalkBank.
> 
> -- 
> Pob hwyl / Best wishes
> 
> Kevin Donnelly
> kevindonnelly.org.uk
> 
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