Passives

Wed Apr 16 23:32:30 UTC 2014

UMD,

	The command that let you look for several words in sequence is called COMBO. Your example command "kwal +t%mor +s"aux|be&PAST^ ^part" *.cha" would be like following if:

the "aux|be&PAST" should be immediately followed by "part":
combo +t%mor +s"aux|be&PAST^part|*" *.cha

there could be one word between "aux|be&PAST" and "part":
combo +t%mor +s"aux|be&PAST^_^part|*" *.cha

the "aux|be&PAST" could have zero or more words between it and following "part":
combo +t%mor +s"aux|be&PAST^*^part|*" *.cha

Leonid.

On Apr 16, 2014, at 18:17, Julie Ger <jgerard417 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> I thought it might be useful to mention that it's now (mostly) possible to extract "get" passives with the line "kwal +t%mor +s"aux|get&PAST" *.cha" (not sure if this was possible when the post was made). It doesn't work perfectly - there are a lot of false positives - but most of the hits are true "get" passives. This doesn't work for "be" passives, though, since it also pulls out other instances of "be" used as an auxiliary, which are a lot more frequent than just "be" passives. Something that might get just the "be" passives would be something like "kwal +t%mor +s"aux|be&PAST^ ^part" *.cha" but this doesn't work. If someone can figure out how to make something like this work, though, that would be very helpful!
> 
> UMD Project on Children's Language Learning
> 
> On Thursday, August 2, 2012 5:57:35 PM UTC-4, Brian MacWhinney wrote:
> Dear UMD,
>     I think the best you can do here is to compose search strings that include all the passives along with lots of false alarms and then you have to go through the set to discard the false alarms by hand.  The problem is that the best way to do this is from the %mor line using a COMBO string, but it will match lots of structures such as "John was surprised to find out" because of the presence of the auxiliary and the lack of a distinction between the perfect and the past for the regular verbs (both -ed).  Of course, if there is a by-phrase that can help, but you can't count on that.
> 
> --Brian MacWhinney
> 
> On Aug 2, 2012, at 4:07 PM, "UMD Lang & Cog Lab" <umdla... at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> We are currently conducting a study that looks into how children interpret passive sentences.  We would like to investigate the passives in parent input to their children.  We found transcripts of interest to us from CHILDES; however, despite reading the manual and many tries at writing commands we have not found a way to reliably search the passive because of their variable structure.  Does anyone know the best way to go about finding passive constructions using CLAN? 
>> 
>> Thank you,
>> UMD Language and Cognition Lab
>> 
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