Friday, April 25, 2003 1:03 pm
Here is more extensive description of the project. I am sending this
now rather than talking about it in class because you should try to
work things out this weekend, if you can at all.
The general question is: discuss the use of Root Infinitives (RI) and
Null Subjects (NS) for each relevant verb type (clause type). Where
possible, document the rate of null subjects, the interaction with
wh-phrases and the co-evolution (or not) of RI and NS. Use this to
address the following more precise questions:
1. being careful to only look at cases where the type of verb is clear
(see below for which are clear), does a clear patterns emerge for the
behaviour of RI and NS?
2. use your results in (1) above to make hypotheses about the
ambiguous cases, if possible. Do they behave more like RS or NS (or
mixed)? Also look at the aux/imperatives, how do they behave?
3. For those of you who have SLI kids: use both results in (1-2) above
to determine whether the SLI kids have a profile comparable to the
non-SLI kids, or whether they diverge in the nature of their
development.
Here are the verb types for English:
verbal
..tensed (=finite)
....sForm
....unambiguousPast
..untensed
....bareStem (with third person subjects)
.... infinitive
.... participle
.... ing
.. murky
.... bareStem (with 1/2 or null subjects)
.... ambiguousPast
.. imperative
.. aux
All verb forms under 'tensed' and 'untensed' are clear and should be
used for question 1. Those under murky, usually the most frequent
ones, are ambiguous and should be used for question 2.
Each entry in the above tree is a Dochoa keyword. For third versus
first/second person, use the keywords 'thirdPersonSubject' and
'firstSecondPersonSubject'. (Remember that the results fo these will
probably be pretty approximate. If the numbers are not too big, you
might want to check them by opening an editor on the results). A list
of Dochoa keywords will be available shortly on the Dochoa website. I
will send a separate message about that.
For French, the tree of possible verb types is simpler (compensating
for the fact that the tagging was harder!):
verbal
.. tensed
.. untensed
.... infinitive
.... participle
.... untensedAmbiguous
.. imperative
.. aux
The tensed (=finite), untensed and participle cases are the clear
cases. The untensedAmbiguous is the ambiguous case.
The project will be graded as follows:
1. Accuracy of tagging (20%)
2. Report on the difficulties while tagging and suggestions to improve
Dochoa (10%)
3. Statistics and discussion for the questions above applied to your
sessions only (20%)
4. Statistics and discussion for the questions above for all sessions
of your group, compared with the profiles of the other kids (20%)
5. Personal project, see below (10%)
The project homeworks are worth 20% (for a total of 100% ;).
As you can see, 50% is tagging and homework, and 50% attributed to the
final analysis. Within the latter, 40% goes to the RI/NS statistics
and 10% to your project. If you found a personal project of particular
interest to you, you however have the option to change the proportions
to 30% going to RI/NS and 20% to your project. If you choose that
option the figures above would be modified like this:
3. ... (15%)
4. ... (15%)
5. ... (20%)
The personal project: here you can choose any topic that caught your
attention and count it, giving appropriate statistics and discussion.
For this sub-part of the project, you are encouraged to do it in
groups. If you do it in groups, you can either have a common writeup
(graded with higher standards), or a submit each an individual
writeup.
The topic is open to you, but I would like to hear about it before you
spend too much energy on it. For those of you who have no idea for a
topic, I will provide suggestions. Here are a couple, that I can
explain in more detail in class or after class:
- look at absent preposition (eg. "I spoke him"). This has not been
looked at, I don't know whether it occurs in any relevant quantity,
but I suspect that it might be a relevant phenomenon.
- similarly, look at the rate of use of complementisers ("he said he
came" versus "he said that he came"). It is sometimes said that
initially they don't use any, even in languages that require them,
such as French or in English context that require them ("he asserted
he ate this", "the fact he ate this").
- try to code the null subjects for whether they are likely first
person, second person or third person, and see if the use of NS/RI is
different in person types. (That count was done on another French
corpus, yielding no very clear results, but the situation might be
different with English bare stems).
- in French, measure how many question words are moved ("ou il est?")
or not ("il est ou?"). If you see unmoved wh-words in English, you can
also do this with English kids.
These are "classical" suggestions. You are encouraged to come up with
your own, which will undoubtedly be more imaginative :)
Timing and methodology: As I mentioned in class, you can easily drown
in numbers, once you start counting various statistics. Don't :) I
highly recommend that you schedule yourself some quality time just
sitting down and thinking about what it is that you are trying to
count and what the preliminary numbers are telling you.
Given the timing, it would be optimal if you could sit down with this
during the weekend, extract the counts from Dochoa, and then have a
couple of quiet thinking sessions about how to interpret the numbers.
After that, give it some digestion time at the beginning of next week,
and then turn to writing it up.
Also, I will enquire with the powers that be, to see if it is
technically feasible for me to give you more time to do the projects
(if you want that, of course). I fear however that the grades need to
be turned in relatively soon.
That's it for now. Try to have fun unravelling fine-grained aspects of
the speech of your kid!