3ET: The “Sentence Units” Tab

The “Sentence Units” tab shows the criteria used by 3ET when searching within a sentence for the sentence units to display to the user.

Frequently, the criteria specified in the “Sentences” tab are also used to choose sentence units within a sentence and in that case the “Sentence Units” tab is not available.

The appearance and use of this tab is much like the “Sentences” tab, so much information about that tab is not repeated here.

If the exercise is loaded through the File > Load exercise menu item, the tab may look like this:

This means: Within the chosen sentences, 3ET will look for sentence units of the type word whose features meet these requirements: The case feature must be neither accusative nor nominative and the part of speech feature must be either noun or personal pronoun.

If the exercise is loaded through the File > Edit exercise or File > New exercise menu item, the tab may look like this:

This image is almost identical to the corresponding one in the “Sentences” tab. There are two important differences, however:

The type of the sentence unit is at the top of the window. This is because the sentence unit type here serves a triple purpose: Firstly, as in the “Sentences” tab, it indicates the kind of sentence unit to look for. Secondly, it is used by the feature selector in the final tab, “Features”. Thirdly, it is used when constructing MQL statements (see below). This means that the sentence unit type selector remains active even if you select “MQL feature selector”.
The “MQL feature selector” contains no specification of the sentence unit type (see below).

The friendly feature selector is used in exactly the same manner as in the “Sentences” tab. But if you want to specify an MQL statement, you will notice a difference.

If you choose to type the search criteria as an MQL statement, the program will surround the statement by [ttt ...], where ttt is the type of the sentence unit and the three dots are replaced by the statement you provide. This means that 3ET will look in the chosen sentence for sentence units that can be described as specified in the MQL statement. Here, the MQL statement must not contain the characters [ and ]; so you can only specify one sentence unit. Furthermore, you must not include the word NORETRIEVE in the statement.

Go to main page Updated: 2009-07-07 13:18:47