coding t-units

[Marilyn Nippold]

Ngoni,

In our research on written language, we count such sentences as
"I said I'm going" as 2 t-units within one (it requires a special code
called "Quotation").  Loban (1976) discusses this on p. 109 of
his book "Language Development:  Kindergarten through Grade Twelve."
Regarding your second question, single word productions are
not counted as T-units; we don't throw them out but call them
"fragments" -- anything less than a T-unit is a fragment.

Marilyn Nippold
University of Oregon

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ngoni Chipere" <n.chipere at reading.ac.uk>
To: "infoCHILDES" <info-childes at mail.talkbank.org>;
<linguist at linguistlist.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 3:45 AM
Subject: coding t-units


> I would like to measure sentence length in a corpus of children's writing.
> The punctuation is unreliable and so I have to annotate the sentence
> boundaries myself. I've decided to use the T-unit measure and I would
> welcome some feedback on the following queries. I'm sure someone has
> grappled with these problems before and perhaps even written about them.
>
> 1) How to deal with reported speech, e.g. I said, "I'm going". Is it two
> t-units (main clause + main clause) or one t-unit (main clause +
subordinate
> clause)?
>
> 2) How to deal with single-word dialogues, e.g.
>
> "Yes!"
> "No!"
> "Yes!"
> "Okay"
>
> The problem here is not so much the direct speech is not introduced but
that
> it does not constitute a clause.
>
> Many thanks,
>
>  Ngoni
>
>
> *********************************************************
> Dr Ngoni Chipere
> Research Fellow
> School of Education, University of Reading
> Bulmershe Court, Earley, Reading, RG6 1HY, UK
> tel 0118 9875123 ext 4943
>
>
>
>