What is your research question?

So, what I want to investigate is given a NP(lets say type 1 ) fragment what kind of verb agreement(with the NP) do the participants produce as compared to when given another type of NP(say Type 2). The language under consideration is an SOV language. Now, i have a list of structures that can be produced given NP type 1 and also a list of structures (different ones) that can be produced when given the NP type 2...so, should I score these list of structures with some value and whatever the participants elicit, mark it accordingly?

Hi Shikha Mishra, 

here is a link to a paper that seems to describe some basics of how to analyze Cloze tests and C tests and contains a number of references that may be helpful: http://tujournals.tu.ac.th/thammasatjournal/detailart.aspx?ArticleID=55 . The paper may also help you tweak your question in order to be a little more specific (so Martin Willis in Tokyo may assist you better). 

(Also, if you are interested, Dr Kristina Kasparian (a former PhD student in my lab) and I have used C tests to investigate attrition effects in Italian immigrants: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kristina_Kasparian )

Cheers,

Karsten

 Thanks a lot Karsten ! 

The link of the paper you sent is really very informative and helpful! I think for my purposes, the acceptable word scoring method would be a good tool since there might be the case the participants may not exactly produce what is needed but something similar. In my case when given the type 1 NP, the participants can produce intransitive/transitive/ditransitive structures but when when given type 2 NP they can only produce the transitive/ditransitive structures. However, my interest lies in what kind of agreement are they producing. As in with which argument does the verb agree in the constructions they produce! So,  a little tweaking of the acceptable word scoring would work in my case i guess.

Please suggest if i am thinking in the right direction!

Once again,thank you for all the help.

Hi again,  given your research question, perhaps you might want to consider corpus analyses rather than running an experimental study.  But I don't know if your target language (Punjabi ?) allows for this alternative approach. A quick check in google suggests there are a couple of corpora in Indian languages, including Punjabi (e.g., http://lingvist.info/indian/the_emille_corpus_beta_version/ ), but I don't know what they contain and if you would find someone at IIT or elsewhere in Ropar who could help you with such a search.

No matter how you approach the question (experimentally or corpus-based), if agreement is all you care about, all you need to do is count, I guess (and calculate proportions).  You may also want to think about control conditions that could help you interpret the data (e.g., other types of NPs), but obviously all this depends on your specific hypotheses and on how exactly your target language works.

Good luck with everything !!

Karsten 

Hi,

My target language is Hindi.Although there are corpora available in Hindi most of them are not freely accessible or not annotated. Ill do a quick check to see if i can locate anything but the chances are very slim. And so, most likely I might go ahead with this sentence completion study.

And as for other NP's along with these critical conditions I have other fillers as well.

Thank you for all the insights and help! It has helped me by giving a direction to my study.

Shikha

Since your research question is about the kind of agreement produced, I think all you need to do is classify the agreement types and count the number of occurrences in each context.