quotations

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear ChiBolts and Info-CHILDES,

    We have recently changed the way that CHAT defines quotations.  The earlier system used two methods.  One method placed the mark +" at the beginning of the line to show that the following material was a quote, as in 

*MOT:	+" and the caterpillar ate four whole tomatoes.

This part of the system is not changing.  The quotation mark used in this form is the standard straight double quote.

The second method used scoping to mark shorter quotations within an utterance.  It had this form:

"MOT:	you should say <please pass the salt> ["], when you want to have some.

We have now changed this second form to look like normal written text with curly begin and end quotes, as in this example:

*MOT:	you should say “please pass the salt", when you want to have some.

The beginning curly double quote is entered using F2+"  and the closing curly is entered using F2+shift+". 

We have changed all of the corpora in CHILDES to this new format, and CHECK and Chatter also expect this new format.  The CHAT manual has been revised in accord with the new system.  

The reasons for this change are:

1.  This form matches what people are used to reading.
2.  The MOR program can treat the beginning and end quotes as special "words" that are then written to the %mor line, thereby helping in grammatical tagging and parsing.  This is part of a system that has also introduced special characters to mark preposed and postposed phrases.  All of this is discussed in the CHAT manual in sections 7.4 and 7.9.
3.  The earlier system led to complex overlapping angle bracket markings.
4.  The new system matches up better with other current text-processing systems.

In reality, we would have gone for a system like this 28 years ago when creating CHAT, if we had not been confined to the use of the 128 characters of ASCII.  Once we shifted to Unicode, it became possible to implement this new system using special Unicode characters.  

If you have data that are not yet in this format, we have a PERL script that can do an automatic conversion.  If your data are already passing CHECK and Chatter, then we just run the converter in a few seconds.  Alternatively, we can run the conversion when you contributed your data to CHILDES.  

Best regards,

-- Brian MacWhinney

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