Why are missing words sometimes placed within square brackets and sometimes not?

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Cindy,

     This is a particular feature of the Manchester corpus.  The creators (Lieven, Rowland, Pine, and Theakston) paid close attention to missing elements and typically marked them using forms such as [* 0is]. I found some 900 cases of that form.  In contrast, there are only about 40 cases of the bare 0is form and they occur uniformly in initial position, because CHAT will not allow the [* 0is] form in that position.  There are many cases of these error marking forms with other markers.  For example, there are nearly 6000 cases of [* 0's] for the possessive.
    I would tend to agree with you that the 0is is more helpful than the [* 0is], certainly for the syntactic analysis, although they could tend to overstate the child's abilities.  For the possessive, a good choice might be Ann('s).   However, if we were to shift the corpus to either the bare 0is or the parenthesis form, we would have to remember that utterances with those markers should not be counted as having the "real" full syntax.
    At this point, I would only make changes to these codes if the contributors thought it made sense.  

-- Brian MacWhinney

On Jul 18, 2014, at 6:45 PM, Zhuo (Cindy) Chen <czcindy426 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear CHIBOLTS,
> 
> I'm working with Manchester corpus. I found that the missing words sometimes are placed within square brackets (regarded as error) and sometimes not. 
> 
> For example, in Anne 01b, I found the utterance as presented below, where the missing word is not bracketed, 
> *CHI:	it 0is stuck .
> %mor:	pro|it 0aux|is v|stick&PAST .
> %gra:	1|3|LINK 2|3|SUBJ 3|0|ROOT 4|3|PUNCT
> 
> In Anne 01b (the same file), I found another utterance, where the missing word is placed within square brackets. 
> *CHI:	baby [* 0is] stuck .
> %mor:	n|baby v|stick&PAST .
> %gra:	1|2|SUBJ 2|0|ROOT 3|2|PUNCT
> 
> The thing is, when the missing word is placed within square brackets, you would not tag it in the mor tier or the grasp tier. When it is not in the brackets, you tag it in the mor tier and in the grasp tier. I don't know why this is done in an inconsistent way. 
> 
> Thanks,
> Cindy
> 
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