Linguistics 300, F12, Undergraduate tutorial

Linguistics 300, F12, Assignment 3

Assignment

As discussed in Coded corpora, CorpusSearch coding queries encode the results of many ordinary CorpusSearch queries as a single string of characters. For this assignment, you will download a file containing all of the coding strings from the coded versions of the Penn Parsed Corpus of Historical English and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. The meaning of the various symbols is described in the coding conventions. In order to analyze the coding strings, you will be using a Linux/Unix command called grep (an acronym based on 'global regular expression print'), and not surprisingly, you will need to learn a bit about regular expressions in order to use it. The tutorial on grep provides a summary of the regular expressions that you will use.

Once you're somewhat familiar with the coding conventions and grep, start working on the exercises below.

As you'll soon see, the grep searches that you need for the above exercises are quite repetitive. In order to save time and to avoid making typos in your command-line input, it is very convenient to run the searches in batches rather than on a one-by-one basis. The tutorial on shell scripts provides you with two sample scripts. Once you understand how these scripts work, you will be able to edit them to complete the exercises.

A very important concept in dealing with large corpora is the concept of the sanity check. It isn't humanly possible to check every single last piece of data for errors in a large corpus, but it is possible to identify types of data that are logically impossible and then to search for them (hoping that we don't find them). For example, no clause in the corpus should be both a negative declarative and a question at the same time. Can you think of some more sanity checks like this? Search for the relevant coding strings, and report any "insane" instances.
Track the rise of do support with ordinary verbs in negative declarative sentences by convenient time periods (say, 20-year time periods). "Ordinary" verbs are ones that are coded as "v" or "V" in the coding strings; see the coding conventions for details.
Ellegård 1953:199 distinguishes a know class of verbs (see the coding conventions for details). Document how these verbs behave differently than ordinary verbs.
Repeat the two above exercises for questions. If you wish, you can take into account different subtypes of questions.

Troubleshooting

The preferences on your text editor should be set as "primitively" as possible.
- For instance, in TextEdit, under "New Document", set the "Format" option to "Plain text" (not to "Rich text").
- Under "Open and Save", deselect all button options.
- Under "Plain Text File Encoding", select UTF-8 or UTF-16.
The names of your shell scripts should contain no extensions (no .txt, .rtf, etc.).
The commands in the assignment assume that you are using the tcsh shell. The default shell on most systems seems to be a slightly different shell, the bash shell. You can find out which shell you are running by typing
```
    echo $SHELL
    
```
If typing the simple filenames to run the shell scripts gives an error message, chances are that the bash shell doesn't know how or where to find your command. Help it out by prefacing the command you are trying to run with . (which explicitly tells the shell to look in the current directory) or with bash.
```
    batchGrep
    
```
try one of the following two options:
```
    ./batchGrep

    bash batchGrep
    
```
There is no space in the first option, but there is a space after bash in the second option.