Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

1 Ans van Kemenade, Tanja Milicev & R. Harald Baayen
from YCOE. To help manage the data, the query results from CorpusSearch were
imported into a simple Microsoft Access database. This was accomplished with
a specially-written script in the computer language perl, which transformed the
CorpusSearch output into several tables in ‘comma-separated value’ (CSV) format.
These tables were then imported into Access (using its interactive ‘Import’
command).
The Access database includes one table for the subclauses found by the queries
in YCOE, a second table for the complete sentence containing the clause in context,
and a third table for the manually-entered subject properties. A fourth table was
added later listing the source documents and the chronological period they belong
to. These tables are related to each other with appropriate keys and relationships,
and are edited from a form that arranges the information conveniently. 2
3.1 Parameters and values
The discourse-relevant properties of each subject were entered in numerical values.
We here discuss only those properties primarily relevant for the quantitative analysis
in this article.
The first relevant parameter is NP type, the numerical values are as in (26):
(26) Numerical values for NP type
1 personal pronoun
2 weak demonstrative (the se paradigm)
3 strong demonstrative (this, that, these, those)
4 definite NP
5 indefinite NP
6 reflexive pronoun
7 Man
8 proper name
The second relevant parameter is NP position, the values are in (27):
(27) Numerical values for NP position
1 left periphery (e.g., wh-words in questions)
2 high (preceding þa/þonne)
3 mid (immediately following þa/þonne)
4 low (preceding the non-finite verb)
5 low (following the non-finite verb)
2. The database and the import script were built by Alexis Dimitriadis. They made it possible
to analyze a large number of sentences with a considerably increased level of efficiency and
accuracy.