Syntactic Profiles in Secondary School Writing Using PaQu and SPOD

SPOD is part of the PaQu website created as a CLARIN project. It allows one to generate a syntactic profile of a corpus based on the output of the automatic parser Alpino. It runs a long sequence of queries and provides quantitative information about constituents, sentence types, coordination, length of constituents, and so on. In this chapter, we employ SPOD and the rest of PaQu to analyse a part of the Schrijfmeterscorpus of secondary school essays. We use a small subsection of the SPOD output for this purpose, in particular those syntactic properties that correlate most reliably with academically oriented texts. We show that SPOD is able to distinguish, on the basis of these variables, among grades and school types.