How often does a child acquiring English as a native language use the various forms of reflexive pronouns such as myself, himself, and themselves? Assuming Adam is a representative child, use CLAN program FREQ to count up each occurrence of each form by issuing the following command:
freq +s'himself' +t*ADA adam1.cha
The command would work; in particular, it would search for each occurrence of "himself" (+s'himself') only among Adam's utterances (+t*ADA). However, to answer the original question, you must
To solve the problem in (1), use the wildcard (*) to search all of Adam's files at once:
freq +s'himself' +t*ADA adam*.cha
To solve the problem in (2), direct each search to place the results into a file on the a: drive. Read the files and print them with Notepad or Word. Type the following command to place the search results into a file called "rflxv.txt" on the a: drive:
freq +s 'himself' +t*ADA adam*.cha >a:\rflxv.txt
To solve the problem in (3), type the various forms of the reflexive in a file using Notepad:
myself
yourself
herself
himself
itself
(etc.)
Save this file on the a: drive and name the file. Name this file "rflxv.lst" (for "reflexives list"). Then, alter the command to search for all occurrences of all the reflexive forms in Adam's data:
freq +s@a:\rflxv.lst +t*ADA adam*.cha >a:\rflxv.txt
The command has two final problems. First, young children acquiring English often use not only adult-like reflexive forms like "himself" and "themselves" but also forms like "hisself" and "themself." If researchers were to search only the adult-like reflexive forms, then they might miss significant portions of the child's production!
To solve this problem, use wildcards in the file created with Notepad, "rflxv.lst." Type the following forms into the file:
*self
*selfs
*selves
The wildcard symbol used with the word "self" locates any occurrence of "self" combined with any other form.
Second, issuing the revised CLAN command produces a large list of reflexive forms in the various Adam files. But to produce a short list of the results of all of his files at once (i.e., pool the results), add one last switch , the "+u" switch, to the command:
freq +s@a:\rflxv.lst +t*ADA +u adam*.cha >a:\rflxv.txt
Therefore, to answer the original question, create a file in Notepad that contains the following text:
*self
*selfs
*selves
Then, save this file on the a: drive as "rflxv.lst" and issue the following CLAN command:
freq +s@a:\rflxv.lst +t*ADA +u adam*.cha >a:\rflxv.txt
The search makes the following output file (called "rflxv.txt") on the a: drive:
FREQ.EXE +s @a:\rflxv.lst +t*ADA +u adam*.cha > a:\rflxv.txt
FREQ.EXE (date) is conducting analyses on:
only speaker main tiers matching: *ADA
******************************************************
1 dierselves
1 demselves
2 herself
4 himself
2 hisself
16 itself
87 myself
26 self
1 selfs
2 selves
12 yourselves
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11 Total number of different word types used
154 Total number of words (tokens)
0.071 Type/Token ratio