Utterance Segmentation: Modified Communication Units (MC-units)

ISSUE: The basic unit for segmenting utterances used in SALT is the communication unit (C-unit; an independent clause and its modifiers, including subordinate clauses). Thus, a sentence like, the boy went running and grabbed the frog, would be segmented as one utterance. Although the equivalent of this sentence in Spanish, el niño estaba corriendo y agarró la rana, could also be segmented as one utterance, doing so would possibly ignore the pro-drop nature of Spanish. Whereas omitting subject nouns or pronouns is typically ungrammatical in English, these can be grammatically dropped in Spanish as the null subject information is encoded in the verb (Bedore, 1999). For instance, the English phrase he jumped, can be grammatically stated in Spanish as: (a) él brincó ("he jumped") including the pronoun él ("he"); or (b) as brincó ("[he] jumped") since the pronoun that is being referred to is able to be deduced by context and morphosyntactic agreement of the verb.

SOLUTION: Modified C-units (MC-units), based on rules originally proposed by Gutiérrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994) for Terminable Units in Spanish, are an alternative rule for segmentation that is used for language transcripts contained in the Bilingual Spanish/English Reference databases. MC-units are used because they are better able to (a) account for cross-language differences such as pro-drop in Spanish, and (b) facilitate consistency when transcribing language samples in Spanish and English from the same bilingual speaker. Therefore, segmenting utterances as MC-units is recommended in SALT for bilingual (Spanish-English) samples.

MC-units follow two rules. The first rule, like with standard C-unit segmentation, states that an utterance consists of an independent clause and its modifiers, including subordinated clauses. The second rule states that independent clauses that are joined by a coordinating conjunction are segmented as two separate utterances. MC-unit segmentation is illustrated in Figure 7-3. The first row illustrates subordinated clauses in Spanish and English, which are not segmented as two separate utterances. The subordinating conjunction cuando, is used in Spanish; the subordinating conjunction when, is used in English. The second row illustrates coordinated clauses in Spanish and English, which are therefore segmented into two utterances in each language. The coordinating conjunction y, is used in Spanish; the coordinating conjunction and, is used in English.

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