reponses to my transcription query

[Sharon Unsworth]

Dear all,

Thanks to the following people for their suggestions regarding my query
regarding transcribing interruptions without effecting (MLU) (original
message below):
Marita Boehning, Emma Marsden, Diane Pesco, Javier Aguado Orea and Judi
Fenson.

It seems that the only way to count two utterances from one speaker -- with
an intervening utterance from another speaker -- as one utterance for MLU
purposes is to use the +/. (interruption) symbol at the end of the first
utterance and start the second utterance with +, as in:

Subject:	there's a dog and a boy and the boy is +/.
[The subject doesn't know the word in her L2 English so the experimenter
tells her.]
Experimenter: ++ crying.
Subject:	+, crying.

Note, however, that this works with +/. but not with +//.
(self-interruption) or +... (trailing off), which is unfortunate in my
case, because the second language learner usually trails off (rather than
being interrupted) because s/he doesn't know the word, so using the latter
symbol would be truer to what actually happens.

Sharon Unsworth


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Original query:

Dear all,

In my transcription of an L2 picture description task I would like to do
the following, but I'm not sure whether this is possible with CLAN/CHAT:

Subject:	there's a dog and a boy and the boy is +...
[The subject doesn't know the word in his L2 English so the experimenter
tells her.]
Experimenter: crying.
Subject:	crying.

What I want to do is transcribe this in such a way as to show that the
subject's second utterance follows on from her first so that the two
utterances will be counted as one utterance for the purposes of MLU.  I
started using the overlap signs, [<] and [>], but this isn't an overlap
(they're not talking at the same time);  I could use the other-completion
sign ++ for the experimenter's utterance but that doesn't really solve the
problem.

Is there a way of doing this that I can't find in the manual!?

Thanks in advance,
Sharon Unsworth

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Sharon Unsworth
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics UiL-OTS
Trans 10 				
3512 JK Utrecht	
The Netherlands
tel.  +31 (0) 30 253 8099