scoping of a clause delimiter

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Monika,
    I am not familiar with work that calculates MLU based on clauses and I am not sure why one would want to use such a measure.  The major point of MLU is to consider the extent to which speakers compose more complex sentences and the act of breaking up sentences into clauses would actually remove the thing that it is trying to measure.  
   As you say, this system of clause marking is definitely not going to work well for center embedding.  You could get the scope of the embedded clause, but then the main clause would be broken up.  But perhaps that is interesting in itself.  
    I am curious why you are using this type of analysis.  What exactly are you interested in measuring.  It seems to me that, if you have a relatively accurate %gra line for an utterance, then that could be more useful that hand-done clause marking.

--Brian MacWhinney

> On May 8, 2019, at 7:48 AM, 'Monika Bader' via chibolts <chibolts at googlegroups.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> we are trying to decide on the best way to code for clauses. The manual suggests using a clause delimiter, and we quite like this option (especially the possibility of creating user defined codes). However, we are somewhat worried about the scoping of the symbol. We understand that for some analyses, such as MLU/MLT based on clauses, this is not a crucial issue, but we do believe that for some other analyses one would need the right scoping (if we are not mistaken). For instance, calculating words per error free clauses (or any other clause code one uses). In examples such as 
> 
> The book [that you buyed yesterday] [^c err] has disappeared [^c] 
> 
> [^c err] would scope over "the book" as well, which we wouldn't necessarily want to include. In some languages these kinds of nested/center-embedded clauses are more common than in other. The manual says that "it is not necessary to mark the scope", but is it possible? or is there any other way to deal with cases such as these?
> 
> We appreciate any suggestions!
> 
> Best,
> Monika
> 
> -- 
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "chibolts" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chibolts+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com <mailto:chibolts+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com>.
> To post to this group, send email to chibolts at googlegroups.com <mailto:chibolts at googlegroups.com>.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/chibolts/9212b6f1-ad4c-4183-b277-45711661af3c%40googlegroups.com <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/chibolts/9212b6f1-ad4c-4183-b277-45711661af3c%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "chibolts" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chibolts+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to chibolts at googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/chibolts/782BA7DD-D3B9-4722-9E96-5C0486DB11D3%40andrew.cmu.edu.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/chibolts/attachments/20190508/bb2a928d/attachment.htm>