In the CHILDES lab, you’re looking for non-subject wh-questions mostly, which means you need to be able to distinguish those wh-phrases that are subjects and those that are not. For a verb like “eat” it’s pretty straightforward. The subject does the eating, the object gets eaten. When the verb is “to be” however, it becomes …
Another question I was asked concerns the interpretation of an utterance like “I want to get . get milk in it”. There are two things here: First, at least when I looked at it, I took that to be a kind of disfluency, so I didn’t really treat this as two distinct instances of “get”. …
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I’ve had a couple of questions about what to do with “What my got?” in the search for null subjects. My answer to this is: I would count this as an example of an overt subject. The fact that the pronoun is the wrong one doesn’t matter for the purpose of differentiating overt vs. missing …
It was just called to my attention that in the “check” I gave you initially in the CHILDES lab description, I suggested that I found 18 of the first verb, and 24 of the second verb (for Part 2). It’s actually 24 for each of them (I missed 6 initially when I wrote that up).
In the CHILDES lab, one of the early steps is to pick a verb that is used a lot (as reported by freq). The idea was to pick the most common verb, except have, go, want, and see. Although it’s maybe giving away something that I wanted to you answer, just to keep us on …
In response to a question I got about part 6 of the CHILDES lab (where you are to count up the wh-questions): What we’re counting here should be just the cases where the child utters a wh-question (not cases where the child is responding to a wh-question).
It was just called to my attention that the nina18.cha file has a typo in the date given at the top. Specifically, it claims that nina18.cha was from 1970, but it must be from 1971, given that the age attributed to Nina increases by 4 days (not -361 days) between nina17.cha (in 1971) and nina18.cha. …
I have now finished the formatting and tests on the CHILDES lab at this point, so you can at any point now go and take a look at it and try to do it. Click on the CHILDES lab item above to get there. The last part makes reference to “topic drop” accounts, which we …
The CHILDES search I was attempting to perform in class was a combo search with these parameters, from the Eng-USA/Brown/Eve/ directory: +s”time^away” +t*MOT +w2 -w2 eve19.cha You can go to the CHILDES transcript browser, select “combo” in the popup menu, copy and paste the command above into the text box, and press “Run.” Or, if …
This is coming a bit late, but in case you had been puzzling over this on homework #3, the third question refers to how people did with respect to sentence 5. Unfortunately, the autonumbering I used to set up the questions to be answered continued with the example French sentence (giving the glosses) at the …