________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-651. Mon 14 Oct 1991. Lines: 248 Subject: 2.651 Machine Readable Dictionaries Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1991 16:26 EDT From: BELMORE@vax2.concordia.ca Subject: Re: 2.611 Responses 2) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 11:20:23 -0700 From: edwards@cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Jane Edwards) Subject: Re: Machine Readable Dictionaries -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1991 16:26 EDT From: BELMORE@vax2.concordia.ca Subject: Re: 2.611 Responses Concerning dictionaries with large citation files: Have a look at the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (John Sinclair, ed). This is based on the Birmingham corpus of over 40 million words (and growing). Merriam may once have had a larger citation file but no more. Oxford Univ. Press hired away some of the key people who produced the COBUILD dictionary and is rapidly developing its own corpus for lexicography etc. For more details, see Sinclair, J. M. (ed). Looking Up, An account of the COBUILD project in lexical computing. London and Glagow: Collins ELT. They've since published derivative dictionaries and a grammar. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 11:20:23 -0700 From: edwards@cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Jane Edwards) Subject: Re: Machine Readable Dictionaries Russon Wooldridge's list may be of interest. Apologies to Humanist subscribers, who saw it last Spring. -Jane Edwards ------------ Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 1137. Thursday, 7 Mar 1991. >Date: Wed, 6 Mar 91 09:36 EST >From: "NANCY M. IDE (914) 437 5988" >Subject: LIst of electronic dictionaries >Russon Wooldridge has been collecting a list of electronic dictionaries, >which appeared on HUMANIST a few weeks ago. Since then, he has received >a number of additional titles and has updated the list; I append the >revised list below. >Nancy Ide -------- "E-DICTS": LIST OF MACHINE-READABLE DICTIONARIES COMPILED FROM INFORMATION RECEIVED FROM VARIOUS SOURCES Compiler: Russon Wooldridge Version: 5 March 1991 Contact abbreviations for further information: (The compiler welcomes information on such specifications as source edition, e-medium, encoding, availability.) 1. Sources of dictionaries: AP = Alain Pierrot, Hachette, tel. 33-1-46.34.82.90 (24 Bd. St. Michel, 75288 Paris cedex 06) CD = "CD-ROMs in Print 1990" CF = Catherine Fowler, NY, tel. 1-212-373-8830/8292 (Trade Division, Prentice Hall, 15 Columbus Circle, 15th Floor, New York NY 10023) CH = Chadwyck-Healey, VA, tel. 1-800-752-0515 --or-- Cambridge, tel. 44-223-311479 CL = Charles Levine, NY, tel. 1-212-572-2224 (Reference Division, Random House Inc., 201 East 50th St., New York, NY 10022) Co = Collins Publishers, Glasgow, tel. 44-41-772-3200 (Glasgow G4 ONB) --or-- London, tel. 44-71-493-7070 (8 Grafton Street, London WIX 3LA) DS = Della Summers, Essex, tel. 44-279-4-26721, fax 44-279-4-31059, telex 81259 Longmn G (Dictionaries and Reference Division, Longman Group UK Ltd., Longman House, Burnt Mill, Harlow, Essex CM20 2JE) ES = Exceller Software Corp., tel. 1-800-426-0444 KD = K.P. Donnelly MB = Microsoft Bookshelf ML = Mark Liberman (ACL/DCI), UPenn , tel. 1-215-898-0141/0083/6046 (Dept of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305) MU = Dictionary Research Centre, Macquarie University, New South Wales 2009 MW = Merriam Webster, tel. 1-413-734-3134 OA = Oxford Text Archive, (Lou Burnard, Oxford U. Computing Service, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN) OUP = Oxford Electronic Publishing, Oxford University Press, NY (200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016) --or-- Oxford, tel. 44-865-56767 (Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP) RA = Robert Arn, Educational Software Products, Toronto (2 St Clair Ave. W., Suite 1701, Toronto, Ontario M4V 1L5) RO = "rand.org"; Michael Urban RW = Russon Wooldridge (Trinity College, Toronto M5S 1H8) 2. Source of information: BK = Bob Kraft, UPenn NI = Nancy Ide, Vassar ALPHABETICAL LIST American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language [MB] [CD] Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker, Greek-English (early Christian Greek) [BK] CED Prolog Factbase [OA: U-1192-E] COBUILD Dictionary (English) [Co] Collins Concise English-Italian [Co] Collins English Dictionary (original ed.) [Co] [OA: A-1255-E] Collins English Dictionary (ACL Data Collection Initiative) [ML "available soon"] Collins GEM English-French [Co] Comunicacion Y Calculo, S.A., Diccionario de Medicina Marin (Spanish) [CD] Davidson, Hebrew-English (biblical Hebrew) [BK] Estienne [Stephanus], Linguae Latinae Thesaurus, 1531 (Latin headwords and French glosses) [RW] Estienne [Stephanus], Dictionarium latinogallicum, 1552 (Latin-French items) [RW] Garzanti, Italian [NI] Gage Canadian Dictionary (Canadian English) [RA] Harrap's Multilingual CD-ROM Dictionary Database (English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese & Japanese) [CD] Irish Gaelic-English Dictionary [KD] Jiyu-Kokumin-Sha, Fundamental Dictionary of Contemporary Words & Usage [CD] Jones, English Pronouncing Dictionary [OA: U*-571-D] Liddell-Scott, Intermediate Size Greek-English (classical Greek) [BK] Lo Scaffale Elettronico: Italian-English and Italian-French dictionaries [CD] Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English [DS] MacBain, Etymological Dictionary of the [Scottish] Gaelic Language [OA] Macquarie Dictionary (Australian English) [MU] Macquarie Thesaurus (Australian English) [MU] McGraw-Hill CD-ROM Science and Technical Reference Set: Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology [CD] McGraw-Hill CD-ROM Science and Technical Reference Set: Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms [CD] Merriam-Webster 9th New Collegiate Dictionary (English) [MW] [CD] MRC Psycholinguistic database (expanded SOED entries) [OA: U*-1054-E] New Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (English) [CD] [MS] Newby, Greek-English (New Testament Greek) [BK] Nicola Zanichelli Editore, Lo Scaffale Elettronico: Italian dictionary, thesaurus and style manual [CD] Nicot, Thresor de la langue francoyse, 1606 (French) [RW] Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (original ed.) (English) [OA: A*-154-E] Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (untagged version) (English) [OA: A-667-E] Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (parsed and tagged version) (English) [OA: X*-683-E] Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (expanded "Computer Usable" version) (English) [OA: U*-710-E] Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English [OA: A-288-E] Oxford Dictionary of Music [OA: U-592-E] Oxford Dictionary of Quotations [OA: U-398-D] Oxford English Dictionary (1st Edition) on CD-ROM (English) [OUP] [CD] Paperno & Leed, Russian-English Dictionary (with grammatical info) in OS/2 [ES] Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto [RO] Random House Dictionary (English) [CL] Robert Electronique: on CD-ROM (French) [CH] Roget's Thesaurus (English) [DS] [CD] Shorter Oxford Dictionary (headwords only) (English) [OA: U*-157-D] Smith, Coptic-English (Sahidic) [BK] Stoer et al., Grand dictionaire francois-latin, 1593-1628 (additions) (French) [RW] Thorndike-Lorge Magazine Count (entries from "The teacher's word book of 30,000 words") (English) [OA: U-400-B] Van Dale, Dutch [NI] Van Dale, Dutch-English [NI] Van Dale Lexitron / Lexitron Plus (Dutch) [CD] Vox, Spanish [NI] Walters Lexikon: Multilingual Technical Dictionary (Swedish + English, Russian, Norwegian, Finnish, Spanish, Danish, French and German) [CD] Walters Lexikon: Termdok (databanks from France, Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden) [CD] Webster's New World Dictionary, 3rd College Ed. (English) [CF] Wiley, International Dictionary of Medicine and Biology [CD] Zyzomys (French) [AP] __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-651. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-652. Mon 14 Oct 1991. Lines: 200 Subject: 2.652 Queries Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 20:02:42 EDT From: tellierc@ere.umontreal.ca (Tellier Christine) Subject: query 2) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 12:41:09 CDT From: Richard Goerwitz Subject: Re: 2.645 Queries 3) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 10:50:37 -0400 From: gb661@csc.albany.edu (BROADWELL GEORGE AARON) Subject: potawatomi 4) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1991 10:13 IST From: Ron Kuzar Subject: Overt/covert Messages 5) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 91 17:07 From: EDMONDSONWH@vax1.computer-centre.birmingham.ac.uk Subject: postposition -s -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 20:02:42 EDT From: tellierc@ere.umontreal.ca (Tellier Christine) Subject: query Does anyone have an e-mail address for Robert Kluender at UC San Diego? I'm also looking for a (street) address for Jean Dubois (Universite de Paris-Nanterre), and Catherine Fuchs (CNRS, somewhere in France). - Christine Tellier. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 12:41:09 CDT From: Richard Goerwitz Subject: Re: 2.645 Queries Ellen Kaisse says (re sound change): Alexis Manaster Ramer writes that every phonological framework allows, indeed encourages, us to write rules of the form X-->Y without conditioning environment. Allow me to come to the phonologists' defense (if defense is what is called for.) Most phonologists would now agree, I think, that assimilations should be represented as spreading rules, dissimilations as delinking rules, and that feature-changing rules not caused by spreading and delinking are both marked and (therefore) more difficult to write, since one has to insert a feature from out of nowhere rather than simply letting the the geometric representation be minimally altered by the addition or removal of lines of association. This statement raises a question that's been on my mind for some time. Why is it that nondistinctive features condition many dis/assimilations? For instance, in Arabic, rounding often pervades vowels adjacent to the "emphatic" consonants. Likewise, in Tiberian Hebrew /r/, emphatic /q/, and sometimes emphatic /t/ sometimes condition a similar shift (this may be, incidentally, the reason for the o in Greek renditions of "Nazoreth," Jesus' birthplace). If in fact assimilation and dissimilation represent linking/delinking of association lines in a quasi-geometric feature array, then how is it that nonsystematic features seem to enter in at times (and yet at times do not enter in)? For instance in Tiberian Hebrew, CVC (< *CVCC) "geminate" nouns ending in /q/ or /r/ often show a labialized /c/ (turn the c around to get the low-mid back rounded vowel) where it's not expected (e.g. scq for saq, hammcq for hammaq, pcr and scr for par and sar, etc.). The change is sporadic, and not present in verbs. How is it that we can explain such vascillations using a geometrical set of arrays and association lines, especially when phonetic investigation reveals that such assimilations typically do not pervade an entire segment? What do we do then? Remember that the assimilation is not an idiosyncratic property of the segment in question, so how do the rules look which determine how far into the preceding segment a given assimilatory "linking" should go? I guess what I'm driving at is that some phonological rules seem best accounted for as part of a continuum - i.e. in kind of Stampean terms. Other shifts seem to be better accounted for via the kinds of quasi- geometric constructs you speak of. I must confess to being one of those dreaded, linguist-hating :-) philologists, and to being ignorant of much. May I be pardoned this ignorance, and pose my (perhaps naive) questions? -Richard __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 10:50:37 -0400 From: gb661@csc.albany.edu (BROADWELL GEORGE AARON) Subject: potawatomi An archeologist colleague of mine is looking for lexical information on Potawatomi. Specifically, he would like the words 'black', 'wolf', and 'prarie'. I've come up empty handed on bibliographic searches for Potawatomi lexical information. Can anyone out there in linguist land tell me what these words are or give a suggestion on how to find them? ****************************************************************************** Aaron Broadwell, Dept. of Linguistics, University at Albany -- SUNY, Albany, NY 12222 gb661@leah.albany.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it." -- Pascal ****************************************************************************** __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1991 10:13 IST From: Ron Kuzar Subject: Overt/covert Messages Dear Colleages, A few days ago I posted a request for bibliography and haven't received any responses. I believe that describing my little project may trigger some more interest. One of the extreme right wing writers in Israel is using a very sophisticated method of double-messaging: The opinions voiced (the overt message) have a liberal appearance, but the language used (the couvert message) is extremely racist and inhuman. For example, in a book about the Jewish Underground of the early 80's in which he was active he tells about the attempted assasination of West-Bank mayors by putting bombs under their cars, an action which was not completely successful and resulted in their loss of their legs. The report is seemingly factual, quoting also people (from the right) who opposed the action or condemned it. But the attempted assasination is referred to as 'ktiat raglayim' or 'kitsuts raglayim'. 'raglayim' means 'legs'. 'ktia' is a term used for 'amputation' or for minor violations of the social code, like 'interruption' of conversation. 'kitsuts' is used for 'chopping' vegetables, 'cutting' the budget etc. To observe and describe this discrepancy is easy, and it is no problem to write a newspaper article about it. Things like this have been done before, both by linguists and by lay people (what is a linguist anyway). What has not been done yet is to say these things within the academic system, which is holding a positivistic facade of scientific neutralism. Now, I am mainly a syntactician, not a semanticist. I am doing this work more as political involvement than as regular linguistic work. What I am looking for is some theoretical framework(s) for the description of such phenomena. Any remarks or references will be appreciated. Thanks Ron Kuzar __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 91 17:07 From: EDMONDSONWH@vax1.computer-centre.birmingham.ac.uk Subject: postposition -s Elise's response to the comment from Lachlan Mackenzie - which I also did not see, only goes into the origin of the 's marker for possessive. Is it controvertible that this is a postposition? Does anyone not have the following type of construction in their dialect? The house on the corner's garage burnt down. This sort of thing is surely eveidence of the current status of 's as an enclitic postposition. On another matter - whilst I am on the line, so to speak - Has anyone apart from me noticed the increasingly widespread phenomenon in English (British in my case)? He bought a bottle of wine to the party = He brought a bottle of wine... In both written and spoken English people seem unable to produce two distinct forms, although they apparently mean two different things. Or do they? I am beginning to wonder if in fact the semantics is changing to something which (con)fuses the two. Anyone got any ideas? Looking through my example is clear to me - but not perhaps to those who have not heard it. People have stopped saying 'brought'. William. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-652. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-653. Mon 14 Oct 1991. Lines: 70 Subject: 2.653 Queries Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 13:22 CDT From: e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu (Anthony Aristar) Subject: Indo-European 2) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 10:10:50 CDT From: Michael Earl Darnell Subject: query 3) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 1:31:36 WST From: guddt@uniwa.uwa.oz.au (David Bennett) Subject: Wanted: C source code to a natural language parser -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 13:22 CDT From: e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu (Anthony Aristar) Subject: Indo-European I'm due to teach an introductory course on Indo-European linguistics next semester, and I've been able to find very little that's recent enough and yet suitable for a course at this level. If anyone has any suggestions on this I'd be grateful to hear them. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 10:10:50 CDT From: Michael Earl Darnell Subject: query Could anyone out there point out any very recent, or forthcoming, work in the area of diachronic syntax, or typological work done within a language family? I'm starting some comparative work on Salish languages (amerindian languages in the northwest u.s. and British Columbia) and anything that hasn't made someone's bibliography somewhere would be helpful. Thanks in advance. Mike Darnell __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 1:31:36 WST From: guddt@uniwa.uwa.oz.au (David Bennett) Subject: Wanted: C source code to a natural language parser I have been looking (unsucessfully) for the past few weeks for some C source code to a Natural language parser in C. I am wanting to add some sort of cleverish (in fact in simplish is better then nothing) natural lanuage processing to a MUD I am currently writing. I am not relishing having to write the entire thing so if anyone out there actually has source code to something along these line I would be aprecative. Thank you (in advance (grin)) David. [DDT] Pink fish forever. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-653. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-654. Mon 14 Oct 1991. Lines: 198 Subject: 2.654 Responses: Themself, I Says, Possessive Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 91 23:55:20 EDT From: MAILBOOK Subject: Re: 2.627 Themselves 2) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1991 19:47 CST From: Henry Churchyard Subject: Re: 2.613 Queries 3) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 15:42:01 EDT From: jack rea Subject: yours 4) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 20:06:02 EDT From: Ron Smyth Subject: Re: 2.635 Queries 5) Date: 13 Oct 91 22:49:00 EST From: "STEVE SEEGMILLER" Subject: RE: 2.635 Queries -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 91 23:55:20 EDT From: MAILBOOK Subject: Re: 2.627 Themselves In reply to my complaint about linguists ignoring the phenomenon of singular 'they' when writing aobut bound anaphora Ellen Prince writes, >it's not that anyone gets into trouble,(if they were to include singular >THEY [MN]) it's that you've got a different phenomenon with 'they' ... >with 'they' you've got discourse anaphora I guess in my annoyance, I let myself fall into some sloppy ways of expressing myself. However I think it is sloppy of those who do this sort of work to completely ignore a closely related phenomenon-- it is the ignoring of singular THEY that I am commenting on. In any case I think that what Ellen is saying is not really complete. It is not that with THEY that you HAVE a discourse anaphora, it's that with THEY you CAN have discourse anaphora. THEY may also pick up a distributive sense, and it can even pick up a singular sense as wit- nessed by this whole THEMSELF business. As for the distributive meanings, how about this sentence that I owe to Bob Fiengo: Max saw everyone before Jim saw them/him. There are three possible readings: 1) a group reading where first Max saw some group of people and then Jim saw them 2) a reading where Max saw a person and then sent that perosn to Jim 3) a case load reading where Max finished his case load of completely different people than Jim's first. In all cases I think THEY is OK, but HE works only with the second, distributive reading. However, and this may weaken my case, I admit, a few speakers claim not to get that second distributive one with THEY. In any case I think my point still stands. A lot is going on here that has beenignored in favor of a normative rule, one which is rarely followed at least when anaphorizing EVERY Micahel Newman Hunter College __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1991 19:47 CST From: Henry Churchyard Subject: Re: 2.613 Queries On Oct 05, Susan Fischer (SDFNCR@ritvax.isc.rit.edu) asks about the third person indefinite reflexive: >The following sentence appeared in today's New York Times (Section I, p. 27): >[...] > (3) (quoting the Georgia Attorney General) "I'm not going to hire >someone who holds >>themself<< out to the public by their own admission as >being engaged in homosexual marriage," Mr. Bowers said. > >[...] (3) seems to be the most felicitous way to express the intended idea in >this case, since the "correct" >>himself<< is inappropriate given the genders >of the participants, and even >>themselves<< is a little funny since the >pronoun is semantically singular. [...] > > Has anyone else encountered constructions like (3)? At the LSA linguistic institute this summer, I collected the following example from a handwritten notice outside the University of California at Santa Cruz copy center: "The sample for resume' stock is missing, because sadly enough, someone brought it upon *themself* to steal it. We, at the Copy Center are sorry for any inconvenience they may have caused you." (Emphasis added.) In my dialect (roughly U.S. Southwestern/Californian white suburban), there are also compounds of plural pronoun + _self_ which have an unequivocally plural, rather than generic, sense: _ourself_, _yourself_ (in a plural sense), and _themself_. What is interesting is that these can acquire a semantic contrast with the original forms in _-selves_; insofar as there is a contrast, the _self_ compounds have a more collective, non-individuated meaning. Thus sentence (1a) most naturally means that some group, including the speaker accomplished some task together. Sentence (1b) can also have this meaning, especially in a formal or prescriptive context, but the meaning that each member of some group, individually and separately accomplished some task is at least equally prominent. Similarly, sentence (2a), in its plural non-generic reading, means that some group of people wants to be with each other to the exclusion of others, while (2b) suggests that each member of a group of people wants to be entirely alone by him/herself. And for me sentence (3a) implies that a group of people, standing together, saw the reflection of the group, perhaps in a far-off mirror, but that each person was not necessarily able to make out him/herself in the reflection individually. Sentence (3b) would tend more to be used for the two other readings: the first reading, that all the members of a group looked into a mirror together, and each saw not only his/her own reflection but those of other members; and the second reading, that on separate occasions in the past each member of a group looked into the mirror and saw his/her own reflection, but not necessarily those of the other members of the group. 1a) We did it by ourself. 1b) We did it by ourselves. 2a) They want to be by themself. 2b) They want to be by themselves. 3a) They saw themself in the mirror. 3b) They saw themselves in the mirror. What is also interesting is that (4a) is totally bad, despite the semantically favoring context, whereas if the intensive is merely postposed then (5a) is really rather better than (5b): 4a) *They themself spoke French together. 4b) They themselves spoke French together. 5a) They spoke French together themself. 5b) They spoke French together themselves. Does anyone else have these intuitions (I am stricly an amateur in semantics, and it probably shows)? -- --Henry Churchyard lify436@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 15:42:01 EDT From: jack rea Subject: yours One of the oddest possesives I have heard was done spontaneously in a conversation by a linguist (obviously and untrustworthy type, and was "My wife and my's reaction was the same as yours." This stopped conversation, but all agreed, "Well, how else would you say it?" __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 20:06:02 EDT From: Ron Smyth Subject: Re: 2.635 Queries I used to be a nat speaker of an "I says" dialect. This was in my childhood in Thunder Bay, Ontario. I can still do it on demand, as in: "So this guy comes up to me, eh, and I says to him, I says, 'Whattaya want, eh?'" Is this a narrative present? I'm not sure what kind of test would count. I can mix it with past: The guy wanted money, eh, so I says to him... However, I'd be more likely to put 'want' in the present as well. If you can think of a way to distinguish the historic present from a st, I can try to give some rusty intuitions. But perhaps this is just the point: is the historic present a morphological past or a morphological present? Another consideration is whether "I says" can be used for the present in some or all of these dialects. Not for mine; I can't imagine saying "I says let's go and get some ice cream" meaning "My opinion is that we should go and get some ice cream". However, it's fine if I mean, "So I said let's go and get....". Who has studied this seriously? Ron Smyth smyth@lake.scar.utoronto.ca __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: 13 Oct 91 22:49:00 EST From: "STEVE SEEGMILLER" Subject: RE: 2.635 Queries In reply to Niko Besnier's query about "I says...": I am marginally a speaker of such a dialect -- I don't use it actively, but it seems entirely natural to me. My intuition is that you are correct in thinking that "I says" is the narrative (or historical) present. For me, the -s ending can occur with any singular subject (including *you* in the singular) but no plural subject. I have no information on the regional or social distribution of this feature. I'm not even sure if I acquired it in my native Utah or in one of the five other states I've lived in. Steve Seegmiller __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-654. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-655. Mon 14 Oct 1991. Lines: 129 Subject: 2.655 X and I; Polite pronouns Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1991 10:40 EST From: Fan mail from some flounder? Subject: Re: 2.648 X and I 2) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1991 16:07:05 +0100 From: Dominique Estival Subject: 2.648 X and I 3) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 10:42:16 -0900 From: "ACAD3A::FFLDK" Subject: X and I 4) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 9:12 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.639 PC, Pronouns, Plurals and Turkic 5) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 11:37:02 GMT From: me@suzuka.u-strasbg.fr (Michel Eytan LILoL) Subject: Re: 2.615 Polite/Plural Pronouns -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1991 10:40 EST From: Fan mail from some flounder? Subject: Re: 2.648 X and I ASL has a construction that uses juxtaposition and a kind of agreement instead of a preposition, but it may be a related phenomenon: HUSBAND WE-TWO [exclusive] = My husband and I Susan Fischer __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1991 16:07:05 +0100 From: Dominique Estival Subject: 2.648 X and I Knud Lambrecht remarks that spoken French has a variant of the construction Kelly Wahl was inquiring about. Indeed, not only: 1. Avec Michel on est alle' au cine'ma. 2. On est alle' au cine'ma avec Michel. but also: 3. Nous avec Michel on est alle' au cine'ma. 4. Avec Michel nous sommes alle's au cine'ma. 5. Nous sommes alle's au cine'ma avec Michel. 6. Nous avec Michel nous sommes alle's au cine'ma. are very common, and can mean that "I and Michel went to the movies". I say "can", because all of the above can also mean that other people went along. This dialect of French is not restricted to Switzerland, I am French and was using the equivalent in English until corrected by native speakers. Dominique Estival ISSCO, Universite de Geneve CH-1227 Geneve estival@divsun.unige.ch __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 10:42:16 -0900 From: "ACAD3A::FFLDK" Subject: X and I Knud Lambrecht notes in the "we with X" discussion that in French one can say things like, "On est alle' au cine'ma avec Michel." to mean 'Michel and I went to the movies.' where On = Nous. I'm pretty sure one can also say these same sentences using Nous directly, so Nous sommes arrive's avec Jean. means 'Jean and I arrived.' Check this with a Native speaker, which I am not, but I'm quite sure I've heard this and seen it noted in grammars of French. Lawrence Kaplan University of Alaska Fairbanks __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 9:12 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.639 PC, Pronouns, Plurals and Turkic As an English Quaker I have to reply to Bruce Nevin's remarks about the 'plain speech' of certain American Friends. Such usage is not at all current among British Friends, although we do not use titles among ourselves and some Friends address others by their given name and their family name. The 'plain speech', ie use of 'thou-thee' and no titles might have been 'plain' 300 years ago, but is no longer. The few birthright Friends I know (ie those born into the Society - the ones I know can go back many generations) are no different in their usage of pronouns etc from the rest of us. There's a really interesting book on the 'testimony to plain speaking' published in the USA, unfortunately I can't remember the details. Richard Ogden __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 11:37:02 GMT From: me@suzuka.u-strasbg.fr (Michel Eytan LILoL) Subject: Re: 2.615 Polite/Plural Pronouns let me come back somewhat to the original tu/vous debate in French, since I would like to air some intuitive feelings. When I was young, we used to adress other (young?) males by their LAST name; and of course 'ladies' by Madame X (or Mademoiselle X), unless you were intimate with them. Nowadays, when you have only slight intimacy with people, and even if you do not use tu with them, you often called them by their FIRST name, be they male or female -- or else you are a damn snob. Now to me, as a speaker of French this feels very much like the American (NOT British) way of expressing the tu/vous distinction without going too far (ie as far as tu). Michel __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-655. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-656. Mon 14 Oct 1991. Lines: 95 Subject: 2.656 Closing of Minnesota Linguistics: Amended Version Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 18:30 CDT From: ASHELDON@vx.acs.umn.edu Subject: closing Linguistics at MN -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 18:30 CDT From: ASHELDON@vx.acs.umn.edu Subject: closing Linguistics at MN 10/11/91 TO: Colleagues FROM: The Department of Linguistics, U of Minnesota RE: Closing the Department of Linguistics at Minnesota Dear Colleagues, The Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Julia Davis, has recommended that the Department of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota be abolished because of the financial crisis that the University is currently in. The linguistics *curriculum* is to be totally eliminated. Thus, the undergraduate linguistics major would be eliminated, the graduate program would become nonexistant, and there would be no curriculum to train students in other programs (e.g. cognitive science, communication disorders, natural language processing in computer science, language teaching and education, etc.). There would be no long range plan to rebuild the Department. No new students will be admitted. Current students will have to seek financial support elsewhere at the University, complete their degrees without the Department or linguistics courses in place, finish their degree elsewhere, or abandon it altogether. If the current Department faculty remain at Minnesota, they would have to move individually to other departments and fit in with the teaching needs of those departments, even if it means "retooling". Linguistics as a discipline, will be eliminated from the curriculum. Whereas some courses in linguistics might be occasionally taught in other departments, there would be no future administrative support for teaching a coherent linguistics curriculum or for reconstituting linguistics outside of the current Departmental arrangement. At a meeting with a number of faculty this morning, Dean Davis projected that the immediate "savings" to the University would come from our loss of the supply budget, T.A. salaries, the secretary, and the Chair's augmentation. The largest part of the "savings" are expected to come from faculty attrition over the long run. The effectiveness of this plan therefore depends on the salaries of the present faculty eventually being "freed up". This proposal will be reviewed and voted upon by CLA committees beginning October 17th and ending on October 22nd. It will be voted on by the Budget Committee on the 17th, by the Curriculum, INstruction and Advising Committee on the 18th, and by the Assembly on the 22nd. The Linguistics Department has been in existence at Minnesota for twenty-five years. We would like to enlist your support in making a strong case to the effect that it is not in the University's best interest to abolish either the Linguistics Department nor the linguistics curriculum and the undergraduate or graduate degrees at the University. You are also invited to send written testimony about the standing and reputation of the Department of Linguistics. Such testimony from colleagues who are outside of the University of Minnesota will be weighed heavily in the committees that will be considering the proposal to close the Department. It will also provide the deans with a current barometer of the Department's standing. Please send two copies of your message. One can go to Dean Julia Davis, College of Liberal Arts. The email address is BARDOUCH@UMNACVX (bitnet), or BARDOUCH@VX.ACS.UMN.EDU (internet). Please send a carbon copy of your letter to the Linguistics Department email address so that we can transmit it to the committees which will be voting on this matter: UMLING@UMNACUX (bitnet), or UMLING@UX.ACS.UMN.EDU. This is a matter of utmost urgency. The support of colleagues in linguistics and related disciplines will be crucial to the outcome of this proposal. We appreciate your support. Linguistics Department faculty: Andrew Cohen, Bruce Downing, Jeanette Gundel, Kathleen Houlihan, Larry Hutchinson, Michael Kac, Rocky Miranda, Jerry Sanders, Amy Sheldon, Joe Stemberger, Nancy Stenson, Elaine Tarone. Our 24 hour fax no. is: 612-625-2312. Suggestions of alternative measures for cutting costs would be welcome. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-656. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-657. Mon 14 Oct 1991. Lines: 192 Subject: 2.657 Whorf Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1991 17:28:43 EDT From: SEGUIN@VAXS.SSCL.UWO.CA Subject: RE: 2.632 Whorf 2) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 09:58:00 PAC From: STEVEROY@IDUI1.bitnet Subject: NONE 3) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1991 13:58:45 -0400 (EDT) From: J_LIMBER@UNHH.UNH.EDU Subject: RE: 2.632 Whorf 4) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 17:58:12 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@mts.cc.wayne.edu Subject: 2.636 Whorf -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1991 17:28:43 EDT From: SEGUIN@VAXS.SSCL.UWO.CA Subject: RE: 2.632 Whorf The posting by Laughlin mentioning the Berlin & Kay work done in the sixties as "disconfirming" the Whorfian position might be disconfirmed itself by a more recent study (Kay was a co-author I think) in which there was an effect on perception attributable to the colour term system of a language. Instead of finding that speakers of a language such as Tarahumara which doesn't cut the green-blue line as English does lack the ability to perceive the distinction (they can do all of the sorting tasks very well), the test discovers that it is the speakers of English whose perception is skewed. Specifically, the judge- ments that English speakers make about "how different" pairs of chips are that are actually spaced evenly along the wave-length continuum are systematically skewed to "push apart" pairs where a colour term boundary intervenes. As many of the contributors have noted this is not the sort of effect that most interested Whorf, but as Laughlin noted it is the field from which many had thought that definitive disconfirmation had come. So we have met the natives whose language filters the world -- and they are us. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 09:58:00 PAC From: STEVEROY@IDUI1.bitnet Subject: NONE THE DISCUSSION ON WHORF AND LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY SHOWS AGAIN HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO DEMONSTRATE CAUSALITY EMPIRICALLY. HISTORICALLY, THE DIFFICULTY OF DOING SO FOR THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS SUGGESTS THAT THERE IS NO STRONG CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP. HOWEVER, THE LARGELY NEGATIVE RESULTS ALSO MAY MEAN THAT THE QUESTIONS WERE NOT QUITE RIGHT. SO FAR AS I KNOW (NOT VERY FAR) THE EARLY ATTEMPTS TO TEST THE HYPOTHESIS (AS IT EVOLVED) FOCUSED ON LINGUISTIC INFLUENCE ON THE PERCEPTION AND CATE- GORIZATION OF ONE'S PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT (COLORS, SHAPES, BASIC TYPES, ETC.). SINCE CATEGORIZATION OF CONCRETE OBJECTS IS CONSTRAINED (AT LEAST IN PART, PERHAPS LARGE PART) BY SENSORY RECEPTORS AND LOW-LEVEL COGNITIVE PROCESSING, PERHAPS IT NEVER WAS REALLY REASONABLE TO EXPECT LINGUISTIC CATEGORIES TO AFFECT SUCH COGNITIVE CATEGORIES MUCH. HOWEVER, ONCE WE GO BEYOND CONCRETE CATEGORIES TO ABSTRACT CATEGORIES, THERE IS MUCH MORE OPPORTUNITY FOR LANGUAGE TO INFLUENCE THINKING. LAKOFF AND JOHNSON, AND LAKOFF IN MUCH MORE DETAIL IN _WOMEN, FIRE, AND DANGEROUS THINGS_, HAVE SUGGESTED HOW CATEGORIZATIONS OF SOCIAL, AFFECTIVE AND CULTURAL ABSTRACTIONS MAY DEVELOP AS METAPHORICAL EXTEN- SIONS OF CONCRETE CATEGORIZATIONS TO ABSTRACT ONES. OF COURSE, SUCH CULTURAL ABSTRACTIONS ARE PASSED ALONG LINGUISTICALLY ANYWAY, AND SO TO TALK ABOUT CAUSALITY MAY BE CIRCULAR, BUT THE HYPOTHESIS SHOULD STILL RAISE INTERESTING QUESTIONS ABOUT CORRELATIONS IF NOT OUTRIGHT CAUSALITY __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1991 13:58:45 -0400 (EDT) From: J_LIMBER@UNHH.UNH.EDU Subject: RE: 2.632 Whorf I have been struck by the somewhat narrow focus of the discussion about Whorf and linguistic relativity. Perhaps my personal recollections will broaden the discussion! As an undergraduate in the late 50s and early 60s it was commonplace, I'm sure, to read not only about linguistic relativity but some of Whorf's own writings. I first encountered Whorf in an intro social psychology class--the several papers in the Newcombe reader which was widely used. We also used the Saporta reader in an undergraduate psycholinguistics class. The Saporta volume also contains excerpts from Whorf and some papers by Lenneberg, Greenberg, Vygotsky, Roger Brown and an interesting experimental paper. Vygotsky, as one might surmise from a "socialist" theorist, was influenced by various German writers including von HUmboldt--whose veiws are developed in Brown (1967) and in some papers by Aarsleff (1982). Similarly the interest in relativity within psychology and linguistics at the same time is not surprising given the parallel behaviorist climate in the USA--(the apocryphal "languages can very in infinitely many ways...) Finally, it is obvious that Kuhn's work follows along the same tradition. As I try to persuade my students, there is not much more in Kuhn than what follows from the propositions that "a scientific theory is a language" and "linguistic relativity is true." What is most irksome to me even today in discussions of relativity is the continued emphasis on the morpheme (the fabled numbers of "words" for camel, snow, etc.) without recognition that the functional linguistic referential structure is the phrase or clause.. While there may be interesting cultural aspects to specific lexical entries--and perhaps some important implications for memory and information processing, it remains the case that the unique and fundamental aspect of human languages is in the realm of syntactically generated "names" for concepts for which no specific morpheme is available. It is not a coincidence that the earliest relative clauses observed in 2-3 year olds are on empty noun heads like "one, thing, kind, way, place"- -e.g. "I want one like Lev has." John Limber, Psychology, University of New Hampshire Brown, R. L. (1967). Wilhelm Von Humboldt's Conception of Linguistic Relativity . The Hague: Mouton. Rheingold, H. (1988). They Have A Word For It. . Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc. Saporta, S. (1960) (Ed) Psycholinguistics : A book or readings. HOlt Rinehart Newcombe etc. ?? (1958??) (Eds) Readings in Social Psychology Vygotsky Language and Thought Kuhn, T. (1960?) Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd Ed) Aarsleff, H. (1982). From Locke to Saussure . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 17:58:12 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@mts.cc.wayne.edu Subject: 2.636 Whorf I am very grateful to those who have written in to note that the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was NOT what Whorf (or a fortiori Sapir) maintained. And also to those who have written in reminding us of the results, such the Berlin and Kay ones, that seem in fact to support the Un-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. However, it should be noted that these results do NOT show a causal relation going from language to cognition. Indeed, the often-noted fact that color terminologies seem to become more and more complex as the speakers' material culture becomes more and more complex would argue for precisely the opposite causality: People find they need to distinguish more colors because of material, nonlinguistic reasons, and then devise the necessary linguistic means to formalize the distinctions. I would also like to address briefly the question of a connection with Humboldt. As I noted in my first message on the subject of Whorf, Whorf (like most of his contemporaries) PRESUPPOSED the existence of a connection between language and cognition, a connection which Humboldt was one of the first (if not the first) to make. The issue is very simple,really. Before Humboldt and others like him, the standard way of describing languages was in terms of how they would be glossed in some Western metalanguage like Latin or Spanish. This is why people were perfectly happy to describe ergative constructions (in e.g. Greenlandic) or "active" ones (e.g., in Huron and Guarani, see Mithun's recent Language article) without noticing anything odd. They would just say that the subject and the verb had different forms in transitive as opposed to intransitive constructions. People like Humboldt came up with the revolutionary idea of describing languages in their own terms, which meant that the superficial patterns of each language had to be taken at face value. Hence, Humboldt's argument that Malayo-polynesian verbs are really nouns, for example. Or later arguments by various people that ergatives are really passives (or other things). But that then made it imperative to explain why exotic peoples say things that we would not, e.g., why do they use "nouns" instead of verbs or "passives" instead of actives. And the explaination, of course, was that they THINK differently from us as well. Whorf, like almost all his contemporaries, was steeped in this way of thinking, but certainly did not originate it. As I noted before, his point to show just HOW EXOTIC languages could get, and this he tried to do by discussing the Hopi treatment of time, events, and quantities. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-657. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-658. Mon 14 Oct 1991. Lines: 152 Subject: 2.658 Sound Change and Double Modals Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 13:34:26 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@mts.cc.wayne.edu Subject: 2.642 Sound Change and Collectives 2) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 13:42:59 EST From: bert peeters Subject: 2.642 Sound Change 3) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1991 16:58 EDT From: LINVAN@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: Re: 2.631 Double Modals; Specific/Referential 4) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 91 13:56:58 -0500 From: edding@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Dave Eddington) Subject: Double Modals 5) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 9:27:38 CDT From: gliesche@lonestar.utsa.edu (Jules D. Gliesche) Subject: Double Modals -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 13:34:26 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@mts.cc.wayne.edu Subject: 2.642 Sound Change and Collectives Ellen Kaisse rises to the defense of the phonologists from me by pointing out that recent theories treat feature-changing rules as marked compared to spreading and delinking rules. And what am I if not a phonologist? Chopped liver? But seriously I think I may have conflated some issues. The first one is whether, formally, one can really enforce the use of context in rules. I still have doubts whether this can be done in any framework I know of, but I would be happy to be shown otherwise. The other point is much simpler, really. I don't see how any existing approach can capture the fact that sound changes often (maybe always) seem to start in a certain environment and then spread to other environments (or that they tend to start out as "optional" rules (whatever that means) and then become more and more obligatory). And, of course, I am not even sure (as I tried to indicate in my earlier posting) that we should insist on this as a universal of sound change. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 13:42:59 EST From: bert peeters Subject: 2.642 Sound Change > Date: Tue, 08 Oct 91 21:03:08 -0400 > From: Ellen Prince > Subject: Re: 2.621 Sound Change > > >From: bert peeters > > >When the labels "conditioned" > >and "unconditioned" were coined, historical linguists did not know > >better (witness the other label for "unconditioned", viz. "spontaneous"). > >Nowadays, we do know that there are no changes without causes. So why > >do we stick to the old terminology? > > historical linguists did not know better? what is the evidence that they ever > thought that unconditioned (or conditioned) sound change did not have (or had) > causes? and why is 'spontaneous' another label for 'unconditioned'? i thought > it was opposed to 'gradual', a distinction that is, to my understanding, > orthogonal to conditioned/unconditioned. My assessment of what historical linguists in those days knew and/or didn't know rests on what I read in several writings by Martinet. See especially *Evolution des langues et reconstruction* (1975, Paris, P.U.F.), pp. 54 and 235 (revised reprints of papers originally published in 1965 and in 1959 respectively). --------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Bert Peeters Tel: +61 02 202344 Department of Modern Languages 002 202344 University of Tasmania at Hobart Fax: 002 207813 GPO Box 252C Bert.Peeters@modlang.utas.edu.au Hobart TAS 7001 Australia __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1991 16:58 EDT From: LINVAN@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: Re: 2.631 Double Modals; Specific/Referential With respect to double modals: I grew up in Texas and 'might could' is the 'best' double modal combination for me, followed by 'might should'. I don't get other combinations very easily. Others have more liberal dialects; I once heard a man in Houston say to his wife "Don't get so far ahead, I may not could make it." Robert Van Valin __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 91 13:56:58 -0500 From: edding@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Dave Eddington) Subject: Double Modals The discussion on double modals makes it appear as if they are limited to the southern US. They are in fact heard commonly in Utah, and often considered the 'shibboleth' of the working class or of people from small towns. David Eddington __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 9:27:38 CDT From: gliesche@lonestar.utsa.edu (Jules D. Gliesche) Subject: Double Modals Re: Bill Renynolds' Poll of Southerners Bill, I grew up between southwest Florida and northwest North Carolina - also lived in Tenessee for a couple of years, and I've heard "might could" used often both in declarative and interrogative sentences. For instance: Do you recon you might could fix my fence today? (i.e. might you possibly be able to?) Interestingly enough, the folks for who this is natural seem to only use it when they're being either polite (i.e. don't want to be pushy so they add the extra aspect of possibily to the request) or unsure (i.e. It might could rain this afternoon.) Hope this is of some use. Jules D. Gliesche gliesche@lonestar.utsa.edu __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-658. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-659. Mon 14 Oct 1991. Lines: 216 Subject: 2.659 Sign Language and Anymore Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1991 19:37 EST From: Karen Christie Subject: Re: 2.623 On Becoming Bilingual 2) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 12:15 PST From: Subject: ASL Literature 3) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 10:13:16 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: any more anymore? -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1991 19:37 EST From: Karen Christie Subject: Re: 2.623 On Becoming Bilingual I would like to respond to the query regarding teaching deaf children in Spain. I am bilingual in ASL and English, also I am a Deaf teacher of English here at NTID. The 'tendencies' that are mentioned carry with it tremendous assumptions. I would like to present another viewpoint for you to consider in the goal of having deaf children learn more than one language. -When priority is given to verbal communication, deaf children are deprived the right to a fully accessible first language. I argue for teaching the child first the language of the deaf community in that area that deaf people 'retreat' to after leaving school. Although it is likely that the children do learn this banned language in the bathrooms and hallways of the school, they are not given formal instruction in the language. Jim Cummins and Marcel Danesi have written an enlightening chapter in their book on Heritage Languages (1990). In this chapter, they argue for using ASL a the language of instruction and teaching about the culture of Deaf people to encourage academic success. This is not to say that the spoken language should not be taught. Although the focus should probably remain on teaching the written language of the majority culture, it is precisely in learning the spoken language for communication where it 'depends on the capabilities of the child.' Learning language for deaf children has not been so much a problem as being exposed to a fully accessible first language. As for case studies, I have a few students here from Spanish-speaking homes who can speak Spanish, English, and sign ASL. At the school for the deaf where I used to teach, students were taught to read and write in a second language (spanish) with about the same success as the public high school spanish courses (except, of course, they also learned to speak spanish). Thus, if you are interested in teaching a second language (whether it be written or spoken), it seems the best way to do that is to ensure that the students have competnecy in their first language (e.g a signed language). You might consider how the deaf adults communicate with Spanish and Basque speakers. What are their needs socially and economically related to these two groups? If a deaf child came from a Basque family, it seems unfairly oppressive to decide to teach them Spanish only. Thanks for the opportunity to respond. Here are some other references: Cummins, J. 1980. The cross-lingual dimension s of language proficiency: Implications for bilingual education and the optimal age issue. TESOL Quarterly 14 (2) 175-187. Lane, H. (to be published) The mask of benevolence: Biopower and the Deaf Community. Newport, EL (1984). Constranins on learning: Studies in the acquisition of American Sign Language. Papers and reports in Child Language and Development, 23, 1-22. Model Progams at: Indiana School for the Deaf, California School for the Deaf, Fremont, and The Learning Center in Framingham, MA. I'd be happy to provide other references. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 12:15 PST From: Subject: ASL Literature RE: ASL Literature It is a popular belief that ASL does not have any literature. However, this claim is based on the misconception that in order for a language to have a literature, that language must posses a formal writing system. In fact, many non-written languages in the world have a rich oral literature. Several researchers in the field of sign language studies are investigating the "oral" literature of ASL (e.g. Sam Supalla, U of Arizona; Clayton Valli, Gallaudet U.; and Ben Bahan who, believe it or not, is at BU!) In fact, the nature and characteristics of ASL literature will be discussed in a session at the upcoming conference titled "Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research" to be held in San Diego, August 5 - 8, 1992. Sam Supalla who is an expert on ASL narrative and storytelling will chair the session which will discuss (among other things) what it means to have an "oral" literature, how ASL literacy compares with English literacy, and the structure of ASL narratives, poetry, and song. Watch for a postings here on the net which will provide conference details and list the other session topics. Karen Emmorey Conference Chair __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 10:13:16 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: any more anymore? Scott Delancey writes: >I'm also puzzled by the puzzlement that >some people express about the meaning of positive anymore--isn't it >exactly the same as the meaning anymore in negative contexts, minus >the negation? Do you want some more? I want some more. Don't you want some more? ?I don't want some more. [I don't want "some more". ] Don't you want any more? I don't want any more. Do you want any more? *I want any more. Isn't the meaning of "any" in the starred sentence exactly the same as in the corresponding negative contexts, minus the negation? If one's dialect has a discontinuous morpheme including negation, not ... any, then the question makes no sense. Similarly, for those whose dialect has a discontinuous morpheme including negation, not ... anymore (where the not may be lost if the effect of negation is carried by some other form), the question makes no sense. (The connection between any and any more > anymore (American spelling) is fairly direct, I should think. I don't want it anymore. I don't want it on any more occasions. More on this below.) The situation is more complex than positive vs. negative anymore. Examples from Webster's 9th New Collegiate (W9NCD): Regular in negative contexts: No one can be natural anymore --Mae Sarton in yes/no interrogative contexts (also negative): Do you read much anymore? in conditional contexts: If you do that anymore, I'll leave and in "certain positive constructions": The Washingtonian is too sophisticated to believe any more in solutions --Russell Baker. For all of these, a verbose alternative like "for any more time" or "on any more occasions" works fine. No one can be natural in any more [social] situations. Do you read much on any more occasions [of leisure]? If you do that any more times, I'll leave. The Washingtonian is too sophisticated to believe in solutions any more occasions. W9NCD gives sense 2 "at the present time: NOW" with example "hardly a day passes without rain anymore," and adds the usage comment: In some regions the use of anymore in sense 2 is quite common in positive constructions While most common in Midland settlement areas of the U.S., this usage is also found in other areas. It has been noted at least since the 19th century in England and may be of British dialectal origin <`Quite absurd,' he said. `Suffering bores me, any more.' --D.H. Lawrence> For these examples, I can with a struggle get a verbose alternative to work: ?*Hardly a day passes without rain on any more occasions. ?Listening is a rare art in any more situations. ??In a way he almost felt sorry for him, on any more occasions of seeing/hearing him. ?Suffering bores me, in any more experiences of it. I would say that the reduction from some such verbose form to "anymore" has been conventionalized in some dialects, but not in mine. Maybe some positive anymore native speakers can come up with verbose paraphrases of this sort that seem natural to them, and provide the rest of us a clue or two. From your question, I guess that you are a native speaker, Scott? Bruce Nevin bn@bbn.com __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-659. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-660. Mon 14 Oct 1991. Lines: 155 Subject: 2.660 Responses Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1991 15:29 EST From: Fan mail from some flounder? Subject: Re: 2.646 LINGUISTS Nameserver 2) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1991 9:43:36 +0800 (SST) From: A_DENCH@FENNEL.CC.UWA.OZ.AU Subject: RE: 2.642 Sound Change and Collectives 3) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1991 19:25-0400 From: Allan C. Wechsler Subject: 2.635 Filled pauses 4) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 22:59:45 EDT From: "Wayles Browne (Cornell Univ.)" Subject: Re: Filled Pauses 5) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1991 11:22:45 +1000 From: sussex@lingua.cltr.uq.oz.au (Prof. Roly Sussex) Subject: Re: 2.654 Responses: "I says" dialects 6) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 08:22:53 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: data is -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1991 15:29 EST From: Fan mail from some flounder? Subject: Re: 2.646 LINGUISTS Nameserver This isn't about the linguist nameserver, just trying to reply to something else. A while back, someone asked for Shibatani's whereabouts. He is at University of Kobe, probably in the English dept. I don't know if he has na e-mail address. Susan Fischer __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1991 9:43:36 +0800 (SST) From: A_DENCH@FENNEL.CC.UWA.OZ.AU Subject: RE: 2.642 Sound Change and Collectives Michael Barlow replies to Michael Kac's request for information on collectives on verbs mentions the use of reciprocal morphology. The use of reciprocals with a collective interpretation is fairly common, certainly in Australian languages. Although I am pretty sure the semantics involved here are not quite what Kac was looking for, an additional reference is: Lichtenberk, F. "Multiple uses of reciprocal constructions", Australian Journal of Linguistics 5 (1985) 19-41. and if this IS what is being sought, the polysemous functions of a verbal collective suffix in a group of Australian languages is described in: Dench, A. "Kinship and collective activity in the Ngayarda languages of Australia" Language in Society 16 (1987) 321-340. I should say that Lichtenberk's paper is not in the least bit restricted to Australian languages. Alan Dench Department of Anthropology University of Western Australia Nedlands WA 6009 A_DENCH@fennel.cc.uwa.oz.au __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1991 19:25-0400 From: Allan C. Wechsler Subject: 2.635 Filled pauses Date: Tue, 8 Oct 91 00:59:11 PDT From: ees@speech.sri.com (Liz Shriberg) Subject: filled pauses Does anyone know of any cross-linguistic work on hesitation phenomena? In particular I am interested in filled pauses (like "um" and "uh" in English; "euh" in French.) Any type of information (phonetic/phonological form, prosodic characteristics, function, distribution, etc.) would be extremely helpful. Information on languages other than English, French or German would be especially appreciated. Anecdotal information on a language you have worked on would also be great, as would suggestions for people to contact. My mother is a native Hebrew-speaker, one of the first full generation of such, b. 1922. She uses [a:] and [e:], mostly the latter. Gosh, I can /hear/ her in my imagination -- the memory of the pausal [e:] is very evocative of my memory of her voice! (I'm a pretty good mimic, but I've /never/ been able to imitate her accent.) __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 22:59:45 EDT From: "Wayles Browne (Cornell Univ.)" Subject: Re: Filled Pauses Serbo-Croatian agrees with what Scott Delancey says about Japanese and Mandarin: it uses a demonstrative _ovaj_ 'this (masculine singular nominative)' as a pause filler. Unlike Japanese and Mandarin, this is not a distal demonstrative; it's the closest of three: ovaj 'this (near me); just about to be mentioned' taj 'this/that (near you); already mentioned' onaj 'that (further from both of us); mentioned on a previous occasion'. The language has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter; I don't know why it doesn't use the neuter _ovo_ here. __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1991 11:22:45 +1000 From: sussex@lingua.cltr.uq.oz.au (Prof. Roly Sussex) Subject: Re: 2.654 Responses: "I says" dialects Ron Smyth asks about "I says" dialects. Australian teenagers have a similar (and endemic) usage with "go": "and then he comes in, and he goes, he goes, umm ... and then I go,...". There isn't anything quite like "I says to him, I says", and this use of "go" is unknown (to me, anyhow) in the past: I haven't heard "he went" meaning "he said". The main function is discourse-oriented, and is a means of marking discourse participants, including switch reference (at a not too formal level) when new participants enter the conversation. __________________________________________________________________________ 6) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 08:22:53 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: data is A convenient way to rationalize the use of "data" as a singular in English to those who don't know the history just pointed out (or are unimpressed by it) might be to claim that it is a collective noun like "sand". The real issue of course is not semantic but social. Of such tiny shibboleths are mighty social barriers made. Bruce Nevin bn@bbn.com __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-660. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-661. Tue 15 Oct 1991. Lines: 130 Subject: 2.661 Word Processing Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 17:43:32 CDT From: txsil!dale@utafll.uta.edu (Dale Savage) Subject: Re: 2.637 Word Processing 2) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 15:28:34 -1000 From: Phil Bralich Subject: Word processing 3) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1991 09:54 EDT From: "Michel (mgrimaud@lucy.wellesley.edu\") GRIMAUD" Subject: DOS 5.0's "Brazilian" keyboard for accented characters 4) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 10:45:43 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: list for MS Word queries -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 17:43:32 CDT From: txsil!dale@utafll.uta.edu (Dale Savage) Subject: Re: 2.637 Word Processing Perhaps others beside R. LaPolla missed the original posting. Yes, the Microsoft word development team for the Mac is soliciting input. Interested parties can write them at: Microsoft Word for the Macintosh Development Team Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052P6399 I've already put in a plug for autonumbering of examples. I suggest that others who need to use Word for one reason or another and are interested in various features should drop the development team a line. I need the cross platform compatability of Word, but am sorely tempted by Eric Schiller's description of NISUS. Perhaps I'll send a copy of his postings to the Word gurus. Dale Savage __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 15:28:34 -1000 From: Phil Bralich Subject: Word processing I have always found that Word Perfect to be a very useful and versatile word processor. I was very happy when Word Perfect 5.1 came out with all the new character sets, but I was baffled to discover that they did not include an IPA character set. I can find most of the characters I need since I do not do really need a detailed phonetic alphabet for most of what I do, but still, it seems odd. That the people at WP are unaware of this need. Also missing from all those alphabets is a schwa. Does anyone know why the IPA (and the schwa too) have been omitted? I would hate to give up all the familiar features that WP has to offer in order to get the characters I need. Does anyone know if it is possible to get IPA for word perfect? Thanks Phil Bralich bralich@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.edu __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1991 09:54 EDT From: "Michel (mgrimaud@lucy.wellesley.edu\") GRIMAUD" Subject: DOS 5.0's "Brazilian" keyboard for accented characters I have been experimenting with the badly documented so-called BRAZILIAN KEYBOARD available in 5.0. It enables one to handle the accented characters for FRENCH (and many other languages) WITHOUT MEMORIZATION and IN ALL DOS APPLICATIONS including WordPerfect. Put the "keyb" command in your autoexec.bat Type Control-Alt F1 to go back to your default keyboard Type Control-Alt F2 to go back to your Brazilian keyboard This works in WP 5.1 and in applications (for example the wonderful PAPYRUS bibliography and note-taking program) APOSTROPHE + VOWEL = acute vowel APOSTROPHE C or c = c cedilla QUOTE (shift apostrophe) + vowel = dieresis vowel GRAVE (under tilde, usually top left of keyboard) + vowel = grave vowel CIRCUMFLEX (shift 6) + vowel = circumflex vowel TILDE (top left of keyboard) + n or N = Spanish N If you want to use an apostrophe or a quotation mark with a consonant, it will work fine, but for an apostrophe as in "l'amie" you need to type the apostrophe twice (or type apostrophe + space, for example)... Or, if you are only using an accent occasionally, switch back to your default keyboard by typing CTRL-ALT F1. The beauty of this is that it is DOS _and_ that it does not interfere with any CTRL or ALT keyboard definitions you may have created with WP 5.1... and liberates your CTRL and ALT A-Z keys for other purposes. And this does not take up memory the way PROKEY or other programs would. Michel Grimaud __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 10:45:43 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: list for MS Word queries There is a moderated email list for MS Word issues, and MicroSoft has representatives tuned in to it. You should post your recommendations there: word_pc@hvrford.bitnet __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-661. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-662. Tue 15 Oct 1991. Lines: 107 Subject: 2.662 Responses Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 21:38:30 -0700 From: slobin@cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Dan I. Slobin) Subject: Re: 2.660 Responses 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 9:23 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: Tiberian Hebrew and autosegmental phonology 3) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 09:51:21 EST From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Subject: X and I 4) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 9:15 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.660 Responses -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 21:38:30 -0700 From: slobin@cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Dan I. Slobin) Subject: Re: 2.660 Responses I have the following e-mail address for Matt Shibatani: d54565@jpnkudpc.bitnet -Dan Slobin (slobin@cogsci.berkeley.edu) __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 9:23 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: Tiberian Hebrew and autosegmental phonology Richard Goerwitz asks how it is that final -r and -q in the nominal system of Tiberian Hebrew often have vowels which are partly rounded before them, and asks how do you describe this in autosegmentla phonology. I too would be interested in an answer to this. It seems to me that you need to say that the phonology of nominals need not be the same as that of other classes of items in the language. Also - what are features there for? to give you phonetic details or phonological contrasts? --- why use the same features for phonetics and phonology when the tasks of the two levels are so different? I don't think I need to look further than my own English to find similar things to those Richard G is describing. All my [r] (voiced alveolar approximants) are velarised and often rounded, and the vowels after them are also retracted; but after my [l], the vowels have quite different qualities. so: [ri-:d] but [li:d]. Wish I could use the full IPA! How can autosegmental phonolgy explain this sort of thing? Richard Ogden __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 09:51:21 EST From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Subject: X and I Bichelamar: mituvala wetem Rogor we dual exc. with Rogor meaning: Rogor and me ("wetem" is inclusive "with") Sakao (Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu) has a 2nd person inclusive and exclusive, of sorts. If the subject is the second person plural pronoun, the verb can be either 2nd or 3rd person. With the verb in the 2nd person the meaning is "you, to whom I am talking, but not they". With the verb in the 3rd person "you, and they too (to whom I am not talking or who are absent)". __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 9:15 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.660 Responses About 'I says' and 'I goes': both of these are very common where I come from, Northern England. They're not unique to North America and Australia repectively! 'I goes' is often used before the speaker mimics another person, either vocally or by gestures or both. Richard Ogden __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-662. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-663. Tue 15 Oct 1991. Lines: 172 Subject: 2.663 Is Language Finite? Polite Forms Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 11 Oct 91 23:25:17 EST Subject: Finiteness/Harrisian From: JASKE@bat.bates.edu 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1991 10:35:10 GMT From: ADA612@csc1.anu.edu.au (AVERY D ANDREWS) Subject: Is language finite? 3) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 17:28:13 -0400 From: Ellen Prince Subject: Re: 2.655 Polite Pronouns 4) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 22:18:37 -0400 From: auger@linc.cis.upenn.edu Subject: Re: 2.655 X and I; Polite Pronouns -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 11 Oct 91 23:25:17 EST Subject: Finiteness/Harrisian From: JASKE@bat.bates.edu After reading in a recent posting the following (unrelated) items: (i) Alexis' excellent response to those who worry about the finiteness of language and (ii) a reference to (Roy) Harris, I was reminded of the following quote I recently read, which, without being a Harrisian (or a Harrisite, for that matter), i was able to appreciate. Jon Aske "Consequently to maintain, as generativists have done, that the principle [sic] aim of a descriptive grammar is to specify all and only the grammatical sentences of the language becomes quite vacuous. It is to treat a language as if it were, on the formal plane, a closed logistic system of the type devised for purposes well-formedness' of a proved'. But the fact is quite simply that the languages used in everyday life are not enormously blown-up logistic systems. On the contrary, logistic systems are drastically cut-down versions of everyday languages. And an essential purpose of the cutting-down is to provide the logician with a limited, self-contained decontextualised system within which the procedueres of mathematical proof can be manipulated. grammaticality' as some psychophysical counterpart to well-formedness in a mathematical system is to foist a grotesquely inappropriate analogy upon linguistic behaviour as a whole. Furthermore, it is not even an analogy which provides a viable solution to the problem it was supposed to deal with." (Harris, Roy. 1981. The language myth. London: Duckworth, p. 76) __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1991 10:35:10 GMT From: ADA612@csc1.anu.edu.au (AVERY D ANDREWS) Subject: Is language finite? I don't really like disagreeing with Alexis Manaster-Ramer, but I do. The important issue, I think is not cardinality of NLs per se, but what the aim of generative grammar is supposed to be. I would go with Chomsky in saying the aim of figuring out how an actual device works and is organized. Given this, I find finite but not finitely bounded sentence length to be the `obviously' appropriate idealization, since the limits on actual sentence length are (a) not well defined (b) clearly not due to the structure of the gadgetry responsible for the facts of grammar. I see (a) and (b) as empirical issues, though the step from them to what the appropriate idealization is is not an empirical issue (and probably not a very important one either). Infinite sentence lengths are on the other hand not attainable by any kind of gadgetry whatsoever, and therefore, I would claim, are irrelevant to investigations into the function and structure of mechanisms. The infinite size of languages was perhaps a more important issue thirty years ago than it was today, since nowadays it is widely accepted that grammars have to capture generalizations, while in those days the idea that a grammar might be a huge, stupid and unorganized list of sentence patterns was more of a serious contender. Avery Andrews (ada612@csc.anu.edu.au) __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 17:28:13 -0400 From: Ellen Prince Subject: Re: 2.655 Polite Pronouns >Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 11:37:02 GMT >From: me@suzuka.u-strasbg.fr (Michel Eytan LILoL) >Subject: Re: 2.615 Polite/Plural Pronouns > >let me come back somewhat to the original tu/vous debate in French, since I > would like to air some intuitive feelings. > >When I was young, we used to adress other (young?) males by their LAST name; a nd > of course 'ladies' by Madame X (or Mademoiselle X), unless you were intimate > with them. Nowadays, when you have only slight intimacy with people, and even > if you do not use tu with them, you often called them by their FIRST name, be > they male or female -- or else you are a damn snob. Now to me, as a speaker o f > French this feels very much like the American (NOT British) way of expressing > the tu/vous distinction without going too far (ie as far as tu). michel eytan has brought up a topic that has mystified me for several years--what young (and some not-so-young) americans mean by last-naming. i am particularly amazed that college students and up seem to be UNCOMFORTABLE being last-named by their instructors. i've been told that they've never in their life been last-named and it seems 'weird' to them. obviously, there's been a huge change in behavior in a fairly short time--when i was a kid, we were first-named thru the 6th grade. from the 7th grade on, it was last names only. some teachers used 'mr.' or 'miss' with the last names, some used just the last names, and many (especially male teachers) used just last names for male pupils and 'miss' + last name for females. and these were not stuffy prep schools--these were large public schools in brooklyn. it did not seem weird. it seemed appropriate in view of our newly-arrived-at adulthood. it goes without saying that no instructor ever first-named any student when i was in college, at least not publicly. today, when i have a little lapse and last-name an undergraduate, they either don't respond or else giggle or do something to indicate that i have behaved in a very strange way. for anyone with intuitions about this, why does last-naming feel so 'weird'? also, does anyone know if this is perhaps a class thing? are working-class urban kids still being last-named in by their teachers? were upper middle class kids always first-named? (time is not the only variable in my experience, i realize.) thanks. __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 22:18:37 -0400 From: auger@linc.cis.upenn.edu Subject: Re: 2.655 X and I; Polite Pronouns I would just like to confirm that the use of sentences like "On est alles au cinema avec Michel" meaning "Michel and I went to the movies" is also found in Quebec French. Like Dominique Estival, I used to transfer this construction into English, until it was pointed out to me that it is ungrammatical in that language. About tu/vous in French: Pierrette Thibault and Helene Blondeau gave a paper at the NWAVE meeting last weekend where they argue that, contrary to the widespread feeling that "vous" is losing grounds and that "tu" is replacing it, the proportions of use of "tu/vous" as terms of address have basically remained stable in Montreal French between 1971 and 1984. The widespread impression of the omnipresence of "tu" is to be attributed to the high frequency of "tu" as a generic pronoun (examples of the type: "quand tu es pauvre, tu peux pas faire tout ce que tu veux", meaning "when one is poor, one cannot do everything one wants") and to the very frequent use of the discourse marker "tu sais" (you know). --Julie Auger __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-663. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-664. Tue 15 Oct 1991. Lines: 252 Subject: 2.664 Spanish Machine Translation Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 91 10:13 GMT From: "J.HUTCHINS" Subject: MT and Spanish 2) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 91 10:33:29 +0100 From: destombe@ruulc6.let.ruu.nl Subject: Spanish Machine Translation 3) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 10:53:06 HOE From: Enrique Torrejon Subject: Spanish MT 4) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 15:00:00 GMT From: me@suzuka.u-strasbg.fr (Michel Eytan LILoL) Subject: Re: 2.630 Machine Readable Dictionaries & Spanish MT -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 91 10:13 GMT From: "J.HUTCHINS" Subject: MT and Spanish Machine Translation systems involving Spanish as either source or target language have been numerous. Many current operational systems include the language; the most prominent are: Systran (operating at many installations in North America and in Europe, the Xerox Corporation has been using it for Spanish for over 10 years), and the SPANAM and ENGSPAN systems at the Pan American Health Organization in Washington (since late 1970s). Nearly all the cheaper (mainly micro based systems) offer Spanish, e.g. the Weidner Corporation (systems now appearing in revised versions from DP/Translator), the TransActive systems from ALPNET, Linguistic Products (PC-Translator) and Globalink. As for experimental projects, the most significant current ones involving Spanish are: the Siemens' development of a Spanish component for their METAL system, the research at Carnegie-Mellon University, research at Philips (Rosetta system), research at a number of IBM centres (on the LMT system), and research at New Mexico State University (the ULTRA project). There have been numerous small-scale projects which have come and gone. In fact, Spanish has been among the most popular of all languages for MT research. As an initial introduction to the substantial MT literature, the following may help: General works: Lehrberger, J. & Bourbeau, L.: Machine translation: linguistic characteristics of MT systems and general methodology of evaluation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1988. Nagao, M.: Machine translation: how far can it go? Oxford U.P., 1989. (A Japanese perspective.) Hutchins, W.J. & Somers, H.L.: An introduction to machine translation. London: Academic Press, 1991. Surveys: Slocum, J. 'A survey of machine translation: its history, current status, and future prospects.' Computational Linguistics 11(1), 1985, 1-17. Hutchins, W.J.: Machine translation: past, present, future. Chichester (UK): Ellis Horwood. New York: Halstead Press, 1986. Hutchins, W.J. 'Recent developments in machine translation: a review of the last five years.' In: Maxwell,D. et al.(eds) New directions in machine translation. (Dordrecht: Foris, 1988), 7-62. Collections: King, M., ed. Machine translation today: the state of the art. Edinburgh U.P. , 1987. Nirenburg, S., ed. Machine translation: theoretical and methodological issues. Cambridge U.P., 1987. Slocum, J., ed. Machine translation systems. Cambridge U.P., 1988. (Also contains Slocum's survey mentioned above.) Aslib (1979, to date) Translating and the computer. [various editors]. London: Aslib. (Series of conferences.) Vasconcellos, M., ed. Technology as translation strategy. Binghamton, N.Y.: State University of New York., 1988. The main research journal is: Machine Translation. Editor: Sergei Nirenburg. Published by Kluwer (Dordrecht) [Previously entitled: Computers and Translation] I shall be pleased to supply further details to anyone interested. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 91 10:33:29 +0100 From: destombe@ruulc6.let.ruu.nl Subject: Spanish Machine Translation "l. valentine" writes: > Is anyone aware of any machine translation projects > either ongoing or completed involving Spanish? > Can anyone point me to some current literature > on the subject of machine translation in general, > or more specifically, projects involving > French or Spanish? Many groups relevant for you have unpublished materials, for which you best write to those people directly. Here are some projects and addresses: Spanish: Rosetta project: Dutch/English/Spanish in all directions. Based on Montague UG and containing GB-inspired syntactic analyses. Standard ref "Isomorphic Grammars ..." (1884) in M. King (ed) Machine Translation today (Edinburgh Univ. Press 1987) Good example of the linguistics in this project is J. Odijk (1989) "The organization of the Rosetta grammars" proceedings European ACL Manchester. Their address is Philips Research Lab, PO box 80000, 5600 JA Eindhoven. MiMo-2. Much simpler. Same languages, linguistics HPSG-inspired (eclectic version of it :-) Standard ref: van Noord et al "The MiMo2 system" in proceedings of 3d conference on theoretical and methodological issues in MT, LRC Austin, 1990. You can contact me for more info. Perhaps theoretically less interesting but working and actually used (at the PanAmerican Health Oraganisation): SPANAM and ENGSPAN. Reference: M. Vasconcellos (1983) "Management of the MT environment" in proceedings ASLIB conference on translating and the computer, London. Address: 525 23rd Street N.W. Washington DC 20037. French: The best known of all MT systems may well be TAUM-Meteo. This and various other systems and prototypes involving French were made by the former TAUM group at Montreal nowadays called CWARC. Contact Pierre Isabelle (isabelle@ccrit.doc.ca). A unification-based MT system is developed at ISSCO, Geneve, Switzerland. Languages are French, German, and Italian. Contact these friendly Swiss via, e.g., Dominique Estival (estival@divsun.unige.ch) or Pierrette Bouillon (pb@divsun.unige.ch). Unsurprisingly, the latter is working on a system to translate avalanche bulletins. In Grenoble, Christian Boitet is the head of a project, I am sorry but I cannot find the address right now. Systran has several language pairs involving French, their address is SYSTRAN, PO Box 907, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA. Both: The Metal system (Siemens) involves French and Spanish but I am not sure in which language combinations. The people to contact here are Gregor Thurmair at Siemens, Muenchen, Germany, (sorry I do not have a more detailed address at hand right now), or W. Scott Bennett, Siemens Nixdorf info systems, LRC, PO Box 7247, Austin, Texas, USA, 78713-7247. Eurotra is a decentralized EC-based project involving 9 European languages including Spanish and French. In Barcelona there is a center working on Spanish. Contact Ms. Nuria Bel for info, the email address I have is nuria_bel@eurokom.ie. The French center is in Paris. Contact Laurence Danlos, I hypothesize that her email address is laurence_danlos@eurokom.ie. I am sure the above is incomplete, but I hope it will do for a start. General literature on MT: look at proceedings of the conferences mentioned above, as well as Coling, ACL. There is a journal called "MT". Louis des Tombe __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 10:53:06 HOE From: Enrique Torrejon Subject: Spanish MT Machine Translation Involving Spanish, Subject: psycling textbooks follow-up -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 91 22:04:14 EST From: Ralf Thiede Subject: psycling textbooks follow-up You may remember my earlier query about textbooks in psycholinguistics which weren't outdated, intimidating, or overly dependent on anecdotal accounts of experiments at the expense of linguistic theory. I had pro- mised to post the responses. Dan Slobin suggested Aitchison, Jean. The Articulate Mammal. London: Unwin, 3d ed 1989. Vicki Fromkin suggested Garnham, Alan. Psycholinguistics: Central Topics. New York: Methu- en 1985. Carroll, David W. Psychology of Language. Monterey: Brooks/Cole, 1986. and selected chapters from Carolson, Greg N., and Michael K. Tanenhaus (eds.). Linguistic Struc- ture in Language Processing. Kluwer 1989. Altman, Gerry T. M. (ed.). Vol. 4 of Language and Cognitive Processes (on Parsing and Interpretation). 1989. I found The Articulate Mammal to be a very attractive book for the level of the course, so I will probably adopt it. However, while browsing the shelves at Chapel Hill, I discovered a book I should really want to recom- mend and that I would clearly like to teach with (although I'll probably not dare to hit undergraduate students with it because of its terse soph- istication): McNeill, David. Psycholinguistics: A New Approach. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. I thank Dan Slobin and Vicki Fromkin for taking the time to respond and for their helpful and kind advice! Ralf Thiede UNCC Dept. of English __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-666. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-667. Tue 15 Oct 1991. Lines: 47 Subject: 2.667 'He goes' Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 10:26:54 -0400 Subject: Re: 2.662 Responses ('he goes...') From: Ellen Prince 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 15:35:12 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: 2.660 Responses -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 10:26:54 -0400 Subject: Re: 2.662 Responses ('he goes...') From: Ellen Prince there was an interesting paper on the use of 's/he goes...' at the nwave conference in montreal a few years ago. i don't remember the author(s) but i'm sure david sankoff, the conference organizer, could (99@cc.umontreal.ca). __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 15:35:12 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: 2.660 Responses To the (recent?) "I go" (the latter presumably having something to do with "the cow goes moo," etc.), add "I'm like," "she's like," etc., another staple of young people's storytelling styles. It seems to provide material of the sort a cartoonist would put in a thought balloon, as for example in sequences such as "So he goes, 'you interested in a movie Friday?', and I'm like, 'does this guy ever brush his teeth?'.... -- Rick Russom __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-667. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-668. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 179 Subject: 2.668 Queries Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 14 Oct 91 19:27:00 EST From: "Julia Aymerich (STU)" Subject: query 2) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 17:15 MET From: RICHARD@celex.kun.nl Subject: Query intrusive r-insertion 3) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 17:53:32 +0100 From: Adam Kilgarriff Subject: Query: `Come' and `bring'. 4) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 8:30:02 PDT From: Larry Gillick Subject: Re: filled pauses 5) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 08:33:16 PDT From: andrewg@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Andrew Garrett) Subject: Re: 2.661 Word Processing 6) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1991 09:42 CDT From: Peter Subject: Essays on Language 7) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 12:11:08 MDT From: Jeff Turley Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' 8) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 15:51:03 -0400 From: "Paik,Woojin" Subject: FIDDITCH Don Hindle's deterministic parser -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 14 Oct 91 19:27:00 EST From: "Julia Aymerich (STU)" Subject: query Does anybody know about bibliography on Spanish clitics in Machine Translation systems or NLP systems? I am also interested in the treatment of clitics in LFG. Any (ANY) suggestions will be highly appreciated. Julia. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 91 17:15 MET From: RICHARD@celex.kun.nl Subject: Query intrusive r-insertion In J.C. Wells' "Accents of English"(1982), volume 1, p. 226, he gives the rule for r-insertion in RP English (both linking /r/ and intrusive /r/) as: 0 -> r / [-high V]__ #0 V (i.e. a zero can become an /r/ in the environment of a non-high vowel and a word or morpheme boundary followed by a vowel, this if my set of character codes turns out different from yours on your screens). This rule made me wonder about the position of the /u:/, as in 'groom'. To my humble non-native ears, r-insertion after /u:/ appears to be possible, even though it is a close vowel, as in 'you and me' /ju:r@nmi:/ and 'hue and cry' /hju:r@nkraI/. Am I right in assuming this? If so, can we perhaps posit a rule preceding r-insertion that diphthongizes the /u:/ to /U@/, so that Wells' rule still holds (since it does include centring diphthongs)? Does anyone know how common intrusive r-insertion is in RP? Is it the predominant phenomenon in environments defined by the rule or not? Richard Piepenbrock __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 17:53:32 +0100 From: Adam Kilgarriff Subject: Query: `Come' and `bring'. I once heard a reference to some research which compared the phrasal constructions and idioms involving `come' and `bring', and concluded that the patterns were very similar for the two verbs. Does this produce any flicker of recognition? If so, could you give me any further clues which might help me locate the work. Thank you, Adam Kilgarriff University of Sussex, England __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 8:30:02 PDT From: Larry Gillick Subject: Re: filled pauses I seem to recall that Jim (James D.) McCawley fills pauses with [ai], homophonous with "I", leading the unsuspecting listener to expect an agreeing VP to follow. If this is a feature of his native dialect, how do its speakers avoid similar confusion? Jim? Mark A. Mandel (even if the header says Larry Gillick) Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-7670 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160 USA __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 08:33:16 PDT From: andrewg@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Andrew Garrett) Subject: Re: 2.661 Word Processing Apropos all this, does anyone know of phonetic and/or other linguistic fonts which are scalable (e.g. Type 1) and available for Adobe Type Manager for Windows (or indeed otherwise suitable for use in Windows; I use Word)? Andrew Garrett __________________________________________________________________________ 6) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1991 09:42 CDT From: Peter Subject: Essays on Language In an effort to get more undergraduates into our linguistics courses (I am in the English Department at the University of Houston), I will be teaching a course officially entitled "Non-Fiction Prose" for sophomores. I don't think I can get away with teaching linguistics as such, but I can certainly assign solid articles dealing with language (and possibly larger selections; I have already ordered Labov"s "The Study of Non-Standard English" for the course). The selections need to be defensible as essays, in case my colleagues in literature ask, and I have added the obligatory articles by Orwell, etc. for their benefit, but I am looking for good essays that are linguistically sound and readable by sophomores. Suggestions would be welcome. Thanks in advance. __________________________________________________________________________ 7) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 12:11:08 MDT From: Jeff Turley Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' Does anyone know of equivalents to the verbum dicendi "he goes", that is where a verb of motion has been thus grammaticalized? A friend from Madrid gives the peninsular Spanish "se pone" 'he puts himself', as in "se pone: no quiero!" 'he goes: I don't want to!" (This periphrasis also means 'become', as in "se puso triste" 'he got sad.') __________________________________________________________________________ 8) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 15:51:03 -0400 From: "Paik,Woojin" Subject: FIDDITCH Don Hindle's deterministic parser Can anybody share information about Don Hindle's deterministic parser called FIDDITCH? I believe this parser was used for the Penn Treebank Project. Is it possible to obtain for free of charge for the research purpose? Thanks, Woojin __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-668. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-669. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 165 Subject: 2.669 Phonology and Sound-Change Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 11:38:14 EDT From: Michel Jackson Subject: The Effects of r 2) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 10:27:41 -0700 From: Ellen Kaisse Subject: autosegmental representation and sound change -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 11:38:14 EDT From: Michel Jackson Subject: The Effects of r >I don't think I need to look further than my own English to find similar >things to those Richard G is describing. All my [r] (voiced alveolar >approximants) are velarised and often rounded, and the vowels after them >are also retracted; but after my [l], the vowels have quite different >qualities. so: [ri-:d] but [li:d]. Wish I could use the full IPA! How >can autosegmental phonolgy explain this sort of thing? > >Richard Ogden It's not clear that you need or want autosegmental phonology to 'explain' this phenomenon in American English. It is simply a phonetic _fact_ that /r/ in American English is rounded (for some speakers or some dialects, etc.) It simply follows that adjacent segments are coarticulatorily rounded. Many phonologists (perhaps not all) would regard this phenomenon as a 'low-level phonetic process' since it exhibits the typical characteristics of such a process (demonstrably gradient in time, non-distinctive, etc. - c.f. Kiparksy's claims about post-lexical processes). It is analogous, perhaps, to the minor changes in place of articulation that /l/ undergoes in clusters such as /ln/, /lth/, /ls/, etc. A rather teleological explanation for this phenomenon goes back at least to Jakobson, Fant & Halle. Rounding, like retroflexion, and (certain) pharyngeal constrictions have the general effect of lowering formant frequencies. To somewhat anachronistically paraphrase JF&H, all three are articulatory mechanisms for implementing the acoustic property (or perceptual quality) [+grave]. Or, in a more modern framework (see Stevens, Keyser, & Kawasaki), we might describe rounding in American English /r/ as a 'helping feature'. ---michel jackson (jackson@shs.ohio-state.edu __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 10:27:41 -0700 From: Ellen Kaisse Subject: autosegmental representation and sound change This is a very partial reply to some queries of Alexis Manaster-Ramer (Hi, Alexis!), Richard Goerwitz, and Richard Ogden about the relation of feature-geometric/autosegmental spreading-type representations of phonological rules to possible historical changes and to assimilations involving non-distinctive features. It's nonetheless kind of *long*, so poise your fingers over those `q' keys, colleagues! I brought up the relative markedness of rules inserting features out of the blue in the new autosegmental spreading representations because Alexis had said all phonological models indeed *encouraged* writing context-free changes. In the more mechanistic versions of an SPE-style feature-counting evaluation metric, it is indeed true that the formalism should encourage such synchronically unnatural rules: X --> [alpha F] takes less symbols than either an assimilation X --> [alpha F] /__ [alpha F] or a non-assimilatory change X --> [alpha F] / __ [beta G]. While in a spreading model X Y | \ | [alpha F] (where that backslash should be a dotted line adding an association between F and X) is a natural adjustment, and inserting F is not. But of course you can allow your theory of representation latitude enough to write all kinds of highly marked phenomena. So feature geometry/spreading won't organically rule out operations that aren't adding and delinking of association lines, and it's not clear that we want it to be that restrictive, though there are current proposals to that effect. But I think Alexis will agree that these developments in phonological representation are in part directed to the questions of natural phonological changes he's worrying about. Richard G, echoed by Richard O, wonders if autosegmental representation can deal with the spreading of non-distinctive features and the partial assimilation of one segment to a neighbor. These questions are somewhat orthogonal to the question of how you represent phonological processes. That is, you tell the feature geometry what features are represented at some stage in the derivation and it will spread them for you. You need another part of your theory to tell you what features are available. The theory of Lexical Phonology, for instance, claims that the later in the phonology he rule is located, the more non-distinctive features it should have access to. So-called 'postlexical' rules (which, as Richard G has anticipated, bear a family resemblance to Stampean `processes', though they aren`t quite the same, and also sort of resemble rules of phonetic implementation), will refer to a wide range of redundant, non-distinctive features, while `lexical` rules (which, again, overlap to some degree with Stampean `rules') refer only to distinctive features. (I don't want to overemphasize the resemblance, but readers of our listserver probably don't want to be subjected to an entire discourse on lexical phonology). As you progress in the derivation from lexical to late-lexical to postlexical rules, you expect non-distinctive features like the rounding of a rhotic to start to participate in the phonology. (Richard - your Tiberian Hebrew case sounds pretty gnarly - I don't think LP will be able to handle it in some easy, summary fashion! I'll send you a forthcoming paper of mine on some historical changes in Cypriot Greek that will illustrate what I'm talking about.) As for spreading of a feature partway into its neighbor, that's easy enough: X Y / \ | [-F] [+F] (again, the backslash should be dotted, indicating spread of +F from Y back onto X). What I just wrote will give you a contour segment X which starts out with one value of a feature and ends up with another. You can find actual uses in recent literature - e.g. Nick Clements' 1987 CLS Parasession paper on intrusive stops. Kiparsky 1985 (_Phonology Yearbook_ 2) also talks about gradient phonological rules of this and other sorts in the LP model. None of this tells us what kind of telescoped rules you can get relating a grammar at one stage to that at another. The literature of the late 60's and early 70's on absolute neutralization does speak somewhat to this issue. As for why rules generalize (often beyond their phonetic motivation and sometimes so that their telescoped, diachronic statement has no environment at all, I leave to someone else or at least to a later message! P.S. Alexis - my favorite version of `what am I -- chopped liver?' comes, I must confess, from a remark of Oliver North's lawyer. He said to the congressional committee, `What am I -- a potted palm?'. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-669. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-670. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 95 Subject: 2.670 Whorf Part 1 Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1991 13:38 EET From: MANYMAN@FINUHA.BITNET Subject: on the SW hypothesis 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 10:45 EDT From: CHARLES LAUGHLIN Subject: MORE ON SWH -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1991 13:38 EET From: MANYMAN@FINUHA.BITNET Subject: on the SW hypothesis The strong version of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is falsified if it can be shown that conceptual thinking is possible independently of language. Now, consider profoundly deaf children with very deficient linguistic capacities. It is more probable than not that they can think conceptually independently of language. Martti Nyman Dept of General Linguistics, Univ of Helsinki, Finland __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 10:45 EDT From: CHARLES LAUGHLIN Subject: MORE ON SWH The psychologist, Henry A. Murray said it best, I think: "In some ways all men are alike, in some ways some men are alike, and in some ways no men are alike." But depending upon one's taste, personal history, cultural background, or theoretical orientation, one may have a bias toward seeing one set of ways more clearly than, or to the exclusion of, the other sets of ways. Euroamerican cultures make it more difficult than most because of an inherent, prescientific world view characterized by a mind-body dualism which predisposes its scientists and philosophers toward polarizations like "determinism vs. free will," "realism vs. idealism," "structure vs function, or content," "nature vs. culture," "cultural universalism vs. relativism," and so on. It is ever thus. This dualism inevitably surfaces in discussions of the SWH and evaluations of evidence for and against the notion that culture or personal history may influence perception. As the initiator of the present discussion noted -- correctly I think -- most everyone accepts at least a soft form of the SWH. The trouble is, most do not seem to have a frame of reference for believing in panhuman universals. This is because linguistics (and especially my discipline, anthropology) has yet to become really permeable to the (now largely interdisciplinary) neurosciences. Without grounding in the neurosciences, all approaches to cultural or linguistic universals remain deductive. And as we all know, any explanandum may be derived from a variety of explanans, any behavior from a variety of structures, any effect from a variety of causes. Only through the neurosciences can we look at structures directly. All considered, the best picture of the influence of culture and language on perception from a neuroscience perspective is one of partial penetrance. THere is no such thing as a human neural system that does not develop to some extent relative to the environment. On the other hand, some systems develop less than, and sooner in life than, other systems. All in all, the closer to the sensory structures of the nervous system one looks, the less influence language and culture have upon their organization and function, and the closer to higher cortical structures one looks, the more open to linguistic and cultural influences. Keep in mind that all sensory systems are in place and functioning all the way to the cortical level BEFORE BIRTH. And most of the postpartum neural development at the sensory level of perception is completed within the first 6 months or so after birth. Generally speaking, the higher in the nervous system one looks, the longer the development takes. it seems to me that only by incorporating the neurosciences into our perspectives that we can actually operationalize Henry Murray's balanced approach to how all, some, and no humans are alike. Charles Laughlin __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-670. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-671. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 312 Subject: 2.671 Whorf Part 2 Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 08:28:26 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 08:28:26 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis I want to outline the views of Sapir and of Whorf on linguistic and cultural relativism as I understand them and survey some of what has been done with these ideas, both as deriving explicitly from their writings and as arising from less clearly articulated cultural and intellectual antecedents that it is difficult for any of us not in some measure to share as we grapple with universals and idiosyncrasies of language and culture. These ideas arose for Sapir in the context of his work on language typology on the one hand and psychology on the other. In the background lay social Darwinism, or at least the pervasive evolutionist perspective of 19th- century anthropology, and in this respect Sapir's interest here was a continuation of Boas' restitution of "primitive" languages as on an equal footing with the languages of familiar literate cultures, and an all- important entre'e into "the network of cultural patterns of a civilization," which "In a sense . . . is indexed in the language which expresses that civilization." (1929:162) In his conception of the relation of language, personality, culture, and "the world," Sapir distinguished between social reality "Language is a guide to `social reality.' . . . it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. . . the world of social activity as ordinarily understood"<1> ____________________ 1. Hoijer, in the 1953 conference proceedings, adduces passages of a similar sort in the writings of Boas. ____________________ and objective reality, as had Durckheim and others, and affirmed of the former that "No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different sodcieties live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached." It was in this sense that he made his famous assertion "The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group." (Preceeding quotations all loc. cit.) The core of the matter for Sapir, however, was an identification of language, specifically grammatical categories, with thought: I quite frankly commit myself to the idea that thought is impossible without language, that thought is language. (In a letter of 8 April 1921 keeping Lowie abreast of progress on the manuscript of Language; quoted in Darnell 1990:99.) In other places, Sapir severely divorces language from culture, but in this he appears to mean material culture, the "inventory" of cultural artefacts. The correlation of these things with associated vocabulary he regarded as trivial.<2> ____________________ 2. Darnell (1990:434 n) says Sapir's strongest relativity statement was a brief note titled "Conceptual Categories of Prinitive Languages," an abstract of a paper read to the National Academy of Sciences in 1931. This was published only after his death. Her bibliography lists it as appearing in Science 74:578. I have not seen it and cannot comment. ____________________ Whorf may have been a Theosophist. His philosophical interests attracted him to Sapir and to linguistics, and his fascination with the "hidden metaphysics" of languages remained always the central thing for him, for which the tools of linguistics were subordinate means. From the point of view of an emerging profession, then, he was quite literally eccentric, in that specific sense. His ideas began to crystallize with preparation to teach a course at Yale during Sapir's leave in 1937-38. His intention was to "excite [students'] interest in the linguistic approach as a way of developing understanding of the ideology of other peoples" (letter to Spier). He would focus on "a psychological direction, and the problems of meaning, thought and idea in so-called primitive cultures," aiming to "reveal psychic factors or constants" and the "organization of raw experience into a consistent and readily communicable universe of ideas through the medium of linguistic patterns" (to Carroll; both quoted in Darnell 1990:381). Whorf developed his ideas about linguistic relativity during Sapir's illness and elaborated it after his death, so Sapir never had a chance to comment. Whorf died in 1941 at the age of forty-four, leaving less sympathetic colleages to pursue the implications of his work. (Darnell 1990:375) Sapir had confined the constitutive role of language to social reality. Whorf went farther, and developed the claim that It is the grammatical background of our mother tongue, which includes not only our way of constructing propositions but the way we dissect nature and break up the flux of experience into objects and entities to construct propositions about. (1956:239) The identification of language and thought takes an adversive twist: [T]hinking . . . follows a network of tracks laid down in the given language, an organization which may concentrate systematically upon certain phases of reality, certain aspects of intelligence, and may systematically discard others featured by other languages. The individual is utterly unaware of this organization and is constrained complete within its unbreakable bonds. (256) Since if a rule has absolutely no exceptions, it is not recognized as a rule or as anything else; it is then part of the background of experience of which we tend to remain unconscious. In the background always is Theosophy, as in The Voice of the Silence: The mind is the great slayer of the real. (Quoted on p. 253) His views were recast in terms more acceptable to prevalent conceptions of operational test and verification, as by Eric Lenneberg in 1953, summarized by Roger Brown (Reference: In Memorial Tribute to Eric Lenneberg, Cognition 4:125-153): I. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the two languages. II. The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the world-view he will acquire as he learns the language. (p. 128) Behind this was the assumption (presumably "part of the unconscious background" of every student in the Boas-Sapir tradition, and indeed of virtually everyone as has been argued on the LINGUIST list) that III. Languages, and hence cognitive systems, can vary without constraint. Proposition II has generally been presumed to be untestable because of the identification of language and any means of communicating one's world-view. Attempts to verify or falsify the hypothesis have concerned themselves either with I or III (with indirect evidence for II sought from III). It would be interesting to see a resumption of attention to III e.g. employing techniques developed for study of non-human communication. A conference organized by Robert Redfield in 1953 drew together a relatively small number of linguists and anthropologists with the aim of defining problems related to the hypothesis, reviewing work undertaken and plans for future work relating to it, and attempting to establish a minimal framework of institutional support for these research interests. Their proposals concerned mostly methods for getting at I. Their conclusions were cautious, as noted above, in keeping with the temper of the times. Kay and Kempton (AA 86:66), perhaps somewhat parochially but truthfully as regards empirical research, claim that most of this research has been in the domain of color. They give citations of work bearing on III beginning about the time of the Redfield conference (Ray 1952, Conklin 1955, Lenneberg and Roberts 1956, Gleason 1961, Bohannan 1963), and probably the best known study, their own (Berlin and Kay 1969). They remark that "studies before 1969 tended to support III; those since 1969 have tended to discredit III" (loc.cit.) They accept the finding of Kay and McDaniel (1978) explaining universal constraints in color classification in terms of the neurophysiology of human color vision, and discrediting III with respect to color. They affirm of course that research into II and III is an open matter for domains other than color perception, in particular domains (they mention religion) where characteristics of peripheral neural mechanisms like those of color perception have no bearing. A parallel tradition of research into aspect I of the hypothesis has been carried out primarily by psychologists, and Kay and Kempton (1984) is a continuation of this. They cite Brown and Lennebert 1954, Burnham and Clark 1955, Lenneberg 1961, Lantz and Stefflre 1964, and Stefflre, Castillo, and Morely 1966. This line of research seeks a correlation between a linguistic variable (codability and communication accuracy) and a nonlinguistic cognitive variable (memorability) within a single language, and is thus a weak form of I. After initial claims of success in finding a positive correlation between the memorability of a color and its value on a linguistic variable, Rosch showed that both memorability and the combined variable of of codability and accuracy of communication is determined universally by focality or perceptual salience. The assumption that the linguistic variables of codability and communication accuracy differ across languages (III again) was falsified by this research, and therefore any correlation between memorability and a linguistic variable was not relevant to the hypothesis. Lucy and Shweder determined that the problem of focality or salience was an artefact of how the color chips were presented, and devised an array by repeatedly re-randomizing chips from the initial array so that there is no relation between focality and findability. By this means they have reinstated the earlier correlation in favor of I with respect to color categories. There remain problems of interpretation and relevance to the broader aims of the enterprise, as unfortunately often happens in narrowly empirical work. Research of a broader sort has gone on in many fields. In social and cultural anthropology it is difficult to find anything that is absolutely irrelevant to the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, though the latter can be made irrelevant to some forms of anthropological work essentially by legislating a rather narrowly realist, anti-constructivist perspective for science. Among clearly relevant issues I name questions of symbolism, including especially money and symbols of political and/or religious stature, magic and cargo cults, studies of kinship systems and their role in the construction of interpersonal and social relations, and work in social categories. To this must be added work of more obviously linguistic nature, such as projection of prehistoric cultures from reconstructed protolanguages, Studies of the bases of prejudice, of stereotyping, and of national character in a more genuine sense (as pioneered by Gregory Bateson) . . . the list is seemingly endless. The fields of ethnolinguistics and sociolinguistics, themselves extremely broad and diversified (and themselves polarized rather as the right and left hemispheres of the brain of the archetypal anthropological linguist), have obvious bearing on the hypothesis. Hymes has urged a reinterpetation of the hypothesis, investigating patterns of language use rather than of language structure per se. The perhaps contentiously named field of cognitive linguistics has a strong constructivist bent. Work in psycholinguistics in general often has clear bearing, though the direction of interest (and funding) to linguistic universals has tended to obscure investigation of linguistic idiosyncrasies that might correlate with cognitive differences. >From Bateson's work on communication and learning and in particular the discovery of the double bind in relation to these have developed lines of clinical research that have developed practical techniques of reframing and use of metaphor, and an understanding of human systems in cybernetic terms, as therapy (particularly the field of family therapy). Lastly, I must mention the resurgence of feminism in all its many forms, especially as a scholarly concern in anthropology. I will describe in a little more detail a new test of aspect I of the hypothesis devised by Kay and Kempton (1984) so as not to be so restricted in interpretive scope as the previous communicability/codability studies had been. Speakers of Tarahumara (a Uto-Aztecan language of northern Mexico) lack the basic lexical distinction between green and blue (as do various other languages, including Achumawi). Aspect I of the hypothesis predicts that speakers of English will polarize their perceptions near the border of green and blue, but speakers of Tarahumara will not.<3> In the first experiment, English- speaker's judgements reflected the division of green against blue in 29 trials out of 30; Tarahumara speakers responded even-handedly with 13 out of 24, extremely close to a 50-50 split, vindicating the hypothesis. ____________________ 3. This phenomenon of polarization, by the way, is the reason speakers of English can disagree so strongly about the assignment of marginal colors to either green or blue. A slight difference in idiosyncratic placement of the boundary makes a large difference in categorization. This would provide the basis of an interesting study relating to I. ____________________ These experiments involve discriminating among three chips. In the first experiment, the subject had an opportunity to assign a color name to the intermediate chip, and this may have prejudiced the later step of the experiment, when the alternate comparison was made. The second experiment made the comparisons with the three chips adjacent in a box with a sliding cover that covered the chip on one end. In the setup stage, the subject agrees that the middle chip is greener with respect to one chip, and then that it is bluer than the other. It thus has both names associated with it when the subject is invited to alternate views as often as desired, and judge which difference is greater. In this experiment the polarization effect disappears. This accords with an interpretation by categorization (experiment 1) versus an interpretation by discrimination (experiment 2). An exact parallel could be made with the fact that people can discriminate differences between sounds with indeterminate fineness (phonetics), but discriminate relevant differences that make a difference4 in small numbers of categories (phonemes, contrasts, distinctions) and displaying characteristic polarization effects at the boundaries. A culturally/linguistically determined contrast can be repeated, a difference requiring perceptual discrimination can only be imitated. Kay and Kempton interpret these findings as disconfirming what they call radical linguistic determinism, in which "human beings . . . are very much at the mercy of the particular language" (Sapir, quoted previously). Because the polarization associated with naming can be made to disappear simply by not naming, we are not hopelessly at the mercy of our language. To this I would add that it is difficult to do many sorts of things cooperatively with other human beings or with social consequence and recognition without employing the categories inherent in language. The exceptions, it seems to me, are in the realms of art, of religion, of play and creativity. These are the domain of the _pleroma_ in Bateson's terms, the realm of cybernetic explanation, as opposed to the _creatura_, the realm of forces and impacts dealt with in the conventional categories of one's shared language and culture. c 1991 Bruce Nevin bn@bbn.com __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-671. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-672. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 133 Subject: 2.672 (S)he goes Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1991 09:15 EST From: Fan mail from some flounder? Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' 2) Date: 16 Oct 91 10:27:00 EST From: "ALICE FREED" Subject: RE: 2.667 'He goes' 3) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 12:36:45 EDT From: rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU (William J. Rapaport) Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' 4) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 17:58:24 CDT From: Barbara Johnstone Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' 5) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 19:43:13 -0700 From: tshannon@garnet.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1991 09:15 EST From: Fan mail from some flounder? Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' I've done a little data collection and analysis of "I'm like," and "He's like." I think it's different from "go" in that "go" is really a verb of quotation, whereas "like" involves at best paraphrase, and in the case of "I'm like" can simply reveal the person's thoughts rather than words (these observations are of people 18-30 -- "like" may have evolved further in the younger generation). So you get sentences like (1) (1) I'm like "Give me a break." where the person may have said nothing at all. This isn't exactly my area, so if there's published stuff on this, I'd like to know about it. Susan Fischer __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: 16 Oct 91 10:27:00 EST From: "ALICE FREED" Subject: RE: 2.667 'He goes' There was a paper given as LSA last January by Kathleen Ferrara and Barbara Bell (Texas A&M Univ) on the use of _ be + like_ as a dialogue introducer. It seems more widespread than just a "story" introducer. In taped conversations which I am analyzing between pairs of female students and pairs of male students, it is the "normal" way of introducing past dialogue. My otherwise articulate nine year old son has it well established in his speech. His middle-aged parents use neither this nor even the older form _go_ to introduce dialogue. __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 12:36:45 EDT From: rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU (William J. Rapaport) Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' I, too, have noticed that teenagers seem to use the VP "to be like" to mean "to say". When I've pointed it out to them, they vehemently deny that they ever do it! William J. Rapaport Associate Professor of Computer Science Center for Cognitive Science Dept. of Computer Science||internet: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu SUNY Buffalo ||bitnet: rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet Buffalo, NY 14260 ||uucp: {rutgers,uunet}!cs.buffalo.edu!rapaport (716) 636-3193, 3180 ||fax: (716) 636-3464 __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 17:58:24 CDT From: Barbara Johnstone Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' I understand that a paper on "be like" as a quotative by Suzanne Romaine is to appear shortly in American Speech. Kathleen Ferrara and Barbara Bell (Dept. of English, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843) presented a paper on this topic at the 1990 LSA. __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 19:43:13 -0700 From: tshannon@garnet.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' Sorry to add mere fuel to the fire of young people's storytelling gambits, but I have to mention one more usage for "say" or whatever. A couple of years ago in a course on German (!) linguistiics an undergraduate (sophomore, I believe) asked why some people used "all" to mean "say". When I looked at him puzzled, he pointed out that his younger siblings (!) and their friends used this (to him, absurdly strange) formula, as in: "He says to me, 'Let's go to see that film.' and I say: 'Naw, I don't have the time.' and my girlfriend's _all_ "Oh, don' you really want to see it? It's super cool!" [or whatever the appropriate term of approbation would have been] I had assumed it was only used to express, as in the above example, someone's effusively expressed opinion, urging, etc., but he assured me that his siblings' crowd simply used it all the time to express what the speaker said, without any necessary urgent or emotive tone. Other students (from the same vicinity, which, I believe was somewhere south of the Bay Area [shades of "Valley talk"??!]) confirmed the usage. It also appeared to be strictly (?) limited to narration of direct discourse ("quotative"). I've never heard it used myself, but then again, I probably don't hang around with the right crowd! Has anyone else heard of this wide a usage for "I'm/You're/He's all..."? tom shannon tshannon@garnet.berkeley.edu __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-672. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-673. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 346 Subject: 2.673 Conferences Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 13:29 EST From: GL250012@Venus.YorkU.CA Subject: 19th International Systemic Congress 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 22:59 +0100 From: 13SCANLING@jane.ruc.dk -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 13:29 EST From: GL250012@Venus.YorkU.CA Subject: 19th International Systemic Congress 19th INTERNATIONAL SYSTEMIC CONGRESS CALL FOR PAPERS 13 - 18 July 1992 Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia Daytime sessions will be devoted to plenary and section papers, with the Wednesday set aside for workshops or sightseeing. Evening sessions will be devoted to panels, and to presentations about the semiotics of theatre and music which will include and element of performance. A brochure with accommodation and registration information will be available by the middle of November 1991. Please send your abstracts to: Rhondda Fahey, School of English and Linguistics Macquarie University, NSW 2109 Australia Fax no: (062 intl.) (02 natl.)805 8240 E-mail: isc92@srsuna.shlrc.mq.oz.au by February 1st, 1992 - Abstracts should be camera ready and include a heading with: the title of the paper, and name(s) of the author(s), together with the name of the institution(s) to which the author(s) are attached. - Abstracts should not exceed one A4 page. This includes references. Please use wide margins - minimally 3 cm left and right, and minimally 4 cm at top and bottom. All papers will be given a 40 minute time slot. Please indicate if you need less time or more. With your abstract please send us also a separate sheet with the following information: - your name, the title of your paper, and the address to which we should send out reply. - The title and the brief description of any workshop you would like to offer. - An indication of the type of workshop(s) you would like to participate in. (We will use this information to try to determine what workshops are likely to attract sufficient participants to be viable). - Any equipment (projectors, audio or video replay facilities, etc. you will need for your paper and/or workshop. - Whether or not you require early acceptance for funding purposes. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 22:59 +0100 From: 13SCANLING@jane.ruc.dk The Thirteenth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics University of Roskilde Denmark January 9-11, 1992 2nd circular =========================================================== IMPORTANT INFORMATION All correspondence (registrations, abstracts, suggestions) should be directed to: The 13th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics Att. Lars Heltoft University of Roskilde 0324, P.O. Box 260 DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark. Please do not contact the conference by phone, but use ordinary mail, e-mail or fax: E-mail address: 13scanling@jane.ruc.dk Fax +45 46754410 The conference fee is DKK 250 and includes coffee, all materials, abstracts, and a copy of the final proceedings. There will be a conference banquet on Friday January 10. Price 250 DKK (optional). The conference fee and optional banquet fee must be paid along with the final registration, either by enclosed cheque payable to: The 13th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics Lars Heltoft, University of Roskilde, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark or (preferably) by postal giro transfer (from Nov 1) to: Postal account no. 6 16 69 11 The 13th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics Lars Heltoft University of Roskilde 0324 DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark NB! Change of deadlines. Compared to the dates stated in the first circular, there are the following changes: The deadline for final registration has been extended to December 1, 1991, and the deadline for submission of abstracts of papers is now November 22, 1991. Abstracts received after this date will not be included in the conference booklet of abstracts. ============================================================ CONFERENCE PROGRAMME The programme will comprise one plenary lecture, a number of thematic sections, and two workshops. Registration and social gathering Wednesday 8, 19.30. Details to follow in 3rd circular. Registration Thursday 9, from 9.00. Thursday 9, 10.00. Opening Ceremony, followed by Plenary lecture by Peter Eisenberg, Freie Universit Berlin: Syntaktische Relationen und thematische Rollen. Ein strukturell-funktionaler Ansatz. Peter Eisenberg's lecture will be given in German, discussion in English. >From Thursday afternoon section papers will be given in three parallel sections. Time will be allowed for shifts between the sections. Judging from the preliminary registrations there will be large sections on syntax, semantics, pragmatics and dis- course analysis, including spoken language. There will be sections on sign language and phonology as well. Workshops will be held within neurolinguistics and anthropological linguistics/intercultural communication. Participants interested in these workshops will receive specific infor- mation. The empirical languages investigated comprise - apart from the modern Nordic languages -: Chinese, Easter Island, English, French, German, Green- landic, Mongolian, Old Norse, Sumerian, Vietnamese. There will be a short closing ceremony on Saturday 11, at 12.15. ============================================================ CALL FOR FURTHER PAPERS Additional papers may still be submitted. Papers may be given on any linguistic topic in any of the official conference languages, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, English, German. The time allotted to each paper is 30 minutes (20 minutes for presentation, 10 for discussion). Speakers should be realistic about the length of their papers, competent chairpersons will enforce these time limits. Abstracts (not exceeding 1 page) must be submitted in camera ready form. Margins should conform to those of the present sheet (1" all dimensions). Abstracts received later than November 22 will not be included in the conference booklet of abstracts. Blackboards and overhead projectors will be available. TV-monitors and tape recorders can be provided upon request when submitting the abstract. The booklet of abstracts along with the 3rd circular will be mailed on Dec 5. ============================================================ ACCOMMODATION Participants must book their own hotel rooms, and are advised to do so well in advance. Hotels etc. in the Roskilde area: Hotel Prindsen. Old, but remodelled, in the centre of Roskilde, next to the cathedral. Single room DKK 495, double DKK 595. Tel. +45 42 35 80 10, fax +45 42 35 81 10. Scandic Hotel Roskilde. Modern hotel, built 1989. Single room DKK 795, double DKK 795 (same). Tel.+45 46 32 46 32. SR hotel. Roskilde. Single room Mon-Thur DKK 495, Fri-Sun DKK 445. Double room Mon-Thur DKK 595, Fri-Sun DKK 545. Tel. +45 42 35 66 88, fax +45 42 35 85 86 Scandic Hotel H|je Taastrup. Modern hotel at H|je Taastrup. 10+15 minutes (train and walk) from the university. Single room Mon-Thur DKK 895, Fri-Sun DKK 695. Double room Mon-Thur DKK 895 (same), Fri-Sun DKK 695 (same). Tel. +45 42 99 77 66, fax +45 99 72 66. Svogerslev Kro. 8 km west of Roskilde. Old inn from 1727. Nice restaurant. Bus connections do exist, and buses from Svogerslev at 8.19 or 8.57 (change at Roskilde) will reach the university in time for the morning lectures. The committee will try to organize transport by private car. Single DKK 410, Double DKK 510. Tel. +45 46 38 30 05. Osted Kro. Old inn 10 km southwest of Roskilde. Bus connec- tions do exist, and bus from Osted at 8.05 (change at Roskilde) will reach the university in time for the morning lectures. The committee will try to organize transport by private car. Single DKK 390, Double DKK 490. Tel. +45 42 39 70 41. There are, of course, numerous hotels in central Copenhagen and in the Greater Copenhagen area. One deserves special mention for very reasonable prices and quality: Ibsens hotel. Next to N|rreport Station. Bathroom in the hall. Single DKK 320, double DKK 420. Tel. +45 33 13 19 13. Check distance from rail stations (Copenhagen Central, N|rreport or \sterport) before booking rooms outside the Roskilde area. See the section on transportation for train schedules. Primitive accommodation free of charge can be provided at the university itself (approx. 30 persons, presumably in folding cots). Sleeping bags (or the like) and towels must be brought along. Showers accessible. Cots will be set up in student group rooms, 2-4 beds per room. The university canteen opens at 9 o'clock in the morning. Tea kitchens are available. ============================================================ TRAFFIC INFORMATION The University of Roskilde is situated at the eastern outskirts of Roskilde, 5 km from the centre of town. There are very good train connections from Copenhagen to the nearby Trekroner Station. >From Trekroner there is a path leading to the university. Morning train timetable Mon through Fri: Sat and Sun: \sterport: 32 02 55 N|rreport: 35 05 58 Copenhagen Central: 41 11 03 Arr. Trekroner: 06 36 26 >From Roskilde: 25 55 12 Arr. Trekroner: 28 58 15 The motorway 21/23 runs close to the university. Exit no. 9, Hedehusene V. Further traffic information will appear in the 3rd circular. Registration Form I would like to register for the 13th Scandinavian Conferen- ce of Linguistics. Name: Address: Academic affiliation: I submit an abstract for a paper titled: I wish to participate in the workshop on: Neuro- linguistics: Anthropological Linguistics: Payments (please check): The conference fee (DKK 250) ____ The conference banquet (DKK 250) _____ Total amount DKK ______ enclosed in cheque: _____ paid by postal giro : _____ (Acc. 6 16 69 11). Primitive accommodation at the university Wed 8 - Fri 10. I am fully aware of the low standards of the free accommoda- tion offered at the university, but I wish to stay there anyway: ____. Please indicate the length of your stay. From _______ to _______ . Bus transportation between the University of Roskilde and hotels in Roskilde. (Prindsen, SR, Scandic Roskilde). I wish to be picked up by bus from hotel (additional charge):_________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-673. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-674. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 304 Subject: 2.674 Phonological Issues Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 9:18 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.669 Phonology and Sound Change 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 12:36:31 EDT From: Michel Jackson Subject: R-Insertion 3) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 09:45:49 PDT From: scobbie@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Jim Scobbie) Subject: (Re: 2.669) Autosegmental representations 4) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 15:37:09 BST From: John Phillips Subject: Re: Query intrusive r-insertion -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 9:18 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.669 Phonology and Sound Change Thank you MIchael Jackson for your comments on [r] and vowels. But I speak British English, and although I said my voiced alveolar approximants are often rounded as well, I also said they're velarised and the vowels after them are retracted; not the same as rounded. On the other hand the other liquid in my system of liquids at the syllable onset is always 'clear' by comparison; I think phonology ought to say *something* about that, because there seems to be a liquid system with two members, one of which is clear and the other dark. OK so you might describe the retracted vowel afterwards as 'spreading', coarticulation or whatever -- but that says nothing interesting about the liquid system in my dialect of English. (Other dialects of English have it the other way round: dark [l], clear [r]). It seems to me that a feature that means /dark/ has as its phonetic interpretation both [velarised] and [rounded], and I don't see why I'd want two phonological features to do this, since the contrast is /dark/ vs /clear/ in my liquid system. You might be interested in: John Kelly & John Local: Long-domain resonance patterns in English in 'Speech input.Output: techniques and applications', IEE Conference Publication No 258, 1986 Richard Ogden __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 12:36:31 EDT From: Michel Jackson Subject: R-Insertion This posting is LONG. >In J.C. Wells' "Accents of English"(1982), volume 1, p. 226, he gives the >rule for r-insertion in RP English (both linking /r/ and intrusive /r/) >as: > 0 -> r / [-high V]__ #0 V > > ... stuff deleted ... > >To my humble non-native ears, r-insertion after /u:/ appears to be >possible, even though it is a close vowel, as in 'you and me' /ju:r@nmi:/ >and 'hue and cry' /hju:r@nkraI/. Am I right in assuming this? > > ... more stuff deleted ... > >Does anyone know how common intrusive r-insertion is in RP? Is it the >predominant phenomenon in environments defined by the rule or not? > >Richard Piepenbrock Gimson's _An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English_ (one of the standard references on the topic) describes the following situation: i) historical syllable-final /r/, called 'linking' ii) inserted intervocalic /r/, called 'intrusive' Gimson says (p. 258 of the 1989 edition) In the case of words which end with orthographic r, and /r/-link is regularly inserted between the final vowel of the stem /schwa, long accented mid central (backwards epsilon), long low back unrounded (script a), and long lower mid back rounded (open o)/ and any initial vowel of the suffix. ... This process applies to derivatioanl as well as to inflectional suffixes. Gimson's examples included things like "blur" (no /r/ in isolation) / "blurring" (with /r/) and "familiar" (no /r/ in isolation) / familiarize (with /r/). These are simple cases that appear to be correctly described by the rule you cite above. In liason contexts between words, Gimson describes a more complex situation. His discussion (p. 302 ff.) is as follows: RP retains word-final post-vocalic /r/ as a linking form when the following word begins with a vowel, i.e. in those cases where an [r] soudn existed in earlier forms of RP ... The vowel endings to which and /r/ _link_ may ... be added are /long low back unrounded (script a), long lower mid back rounded (open o)/ and those single or complex vowels containing final [schwa] (/schwa, long accented mid central (backwards epsilon) lax high front-schwa centering diphthong, upper mid front-schwa diphthong, lax high back-schwa centering diphthong/), e.g., in _far off_, _four aces_, _answer it_, _fur inside_, _near it_, _wear out_, _secure everything_. By analogy, this /r/ linking usage is extended to all /long low unrounded, long lower mid rounded, schwa/ endings, even when there is no historical (spelling) justification. Such _intrusive_ /r/s are to be heard particularly in the case of /schwa/ endings. ... Less frequently, analogous links (unjustified by the spelling) are made with final /long low unrounded, long lower mid rounded/ ... Gimson continues It shold be noted that, in synchronic terms, the same process is in operation whether the /r/ link inserted is historically justified (linking) or not (intrusive). However, he observes (p. 303) There appears however, to be some gradation in the likelihood of occurrent as follows: (1) Where a word ends in a non-high vowel, the insertion of /r/ is _obligatory_ before a _suffix_ beginning with a vowel ... (2) Before another word, the insertion of such an /r/ is _optional_. However, it occurs in the vast _majority_ of cases where a historically justified _linking_ of /r/ is possible. (3) Where the /r/ link is _intrusive_, speakers tend to use it after /schwa/ ... more readily than (4) after /long low unrounded/ or /long lower mid rounded. There is considerable resistance to (5) the insertion of intrusive /r/ before a suffix (e.g. _strawy_ ...) Thus, I would say that Gimson's account is very consistent with Wells'. Gimson adduces no examples of linking or intrusive /r/ after high vowels. It should be mentioned that this may be a result of the fact that Gimson analyzes what might be considered underlyingly high vowels before historical /r/ as phonemic diphthongs /I@, U@, e@/ in words like _near_, _secure_, and _wear_. This analysis allows him to preserve the "non-high" generalization at the expense of a more "surfacy" phonemic analysis. Which is, of course, exactly what you had suspected. So much for RP. There are, however, similar dialects in the US, & I have a few black relatives who speak such dialects in the Southern Conn. area (although their speech is also influenced by Virginian remnants and New-Yorkisms) who have wildly generalized intrusive /r/s. In unguarded moments, i've heard a cousin of mine say 'I see[r]'im about once a week' and 'I saw[r]'em yesterday'. This is of course anecdotal. But if you have had some exposure to r-drop / r-intrusion dialects on this side of the Atlantic, it might well account for your intuition that /r/s can be intruded after high vowels. __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 09:45:49 PDT From: scobbie@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Jim Scobbie) Subject: (Re: 2.669) Autosegmental representations > Ellen Kaisse says: > Richard G, echoed by Richard O, wonders if autosegmental > representation can deal with the spreading of non-distinctive features > and the partial assimilation of one segment to a neighbor. These > questions are somewhat orthogonal to the question of how you represent > phonological processes. That is, you tell the feature geometry what > features are represented at some stage in the derivation and it will > spread them for you. You need another part of your theory to tell you > what features are available. It is correct that the number and types of constraints operative at any particular 'level' of a phonological description need not hold for all such levels. But in order that we have some kind of continuity that enables us to claim that all these levels are the same kind of thing, ie phonological, we will have to define some ground rules (constraints on phonological representations) which are good for all levels. For example, in a phonological feature bundle it might be a good idea to ban any distinction between multiple copies of identical features. So [+cont] = [+cont] = [+cont] (A) [+cont] [+cont] [+cont] And we might want to ban the presence of contradictorily-valued features: So [+cont] (B) [-cont] is ill-formed. I think both these formal properties of phonological representations would be pretty well-accepted by many people as fairly basic to Autosegmental Phonology (AP). The second has *not* been universally adopted, especially in the hierarchical representations of AP, because it is useful for describing contour segments. I think proponents of this position are now on the defensive and need to prove their case. This is because affricates, a typical contour segment, can be treated as [+stop] [+fricative] which involves no oppositely valued features (Lombardi, Steriade). So, when we begin to discuss a phenomenon that starts to violate (A) or (B), we might want to question whether we are doing something akin to introducing new non-distinctive features (you could say that we are just relaxing the constraints on the *combinations* of features that occur -- because we are moving to the post-lexical level say), or whether we are changing the ground rules for what constitutes phonological form. The treatment of intrusive stops, and the partial spreading of rounding are cases (no pun intended!) in point. Ellen Kaisse points out that in current AP: > As for spreading of a feature partway into its neighbor, that's easy > enough: > X Y > / \ | > [-F] [+F] > (again, the backslash should be dotted, indicating spread of +F from > Y back onto X). What I just wrote will give you a contour segment X > which starts out with one value of a feature and ends up with > another. You can find actual uses in recent literature - e.g. Nick > Clements' 1987 CLS Parasession paper on intrusive stops. Kiparsky 1985 > (_Phonology Yearbook_ 2) also talks about gradient phonological rules of > this and other sorts in the LP model. Now this look to me like a re-definition of feature geometry rather than the introduction of non-distinctive segments using a novel feature combination. Of course, really it is both, since every alteration to the basic rules of feature geometry would allow new=non-distinctive structures. But is it a good idea to allow such latitude? You pays your money... If no underlying representations require a geometrical form X (1) / \ [+f] [-f] but fr certain purposes such a representation appears useful, then you can say that at the post-lexical level the definition of feature geometry changes and use (1). My opinion is that this produces a bad theory. My disseratation goes into this some. Alternatively you could hold the feature-geometry constant and deal with the phenomena that appear to require (1) in other ways -- by altering the timing and overlap of the exponents of the features in question. This is to claim that there are sophisticated, systematic, non-universal rules of phonetic implementation. Is this contravertial? Empirical considerations ought to help determine which is better, along with the type of theoretical considerations I've hinted at briefly above. The reply to Richard Ogden's query (how does AP deal with such and such an assimilation) is perhaps an "it shouldn't". If AP were a predictive theory rather than, well, then it might say to us that it is incapable of handling such-and-such a phenomenon, AND BE PLEASED ABOUT THE FACT. -- James M. Scobbie: Dept of Linguistics, Stanford University, CA 94305-2150 __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 15:37:09 BST From: John Phillips Subject: Re: Query intrusive r-insertion The rule for r-insertion for me is that it can occur after any vowel in theory. In practice you don't get high vowels on the ends of words in standard English. `You' is [juw], so `you and me' is [juw@mmij]; `hue' is [hjuw] so `hue and cry' is [hjuw@nkraj]. An intrusive r in the latter sounds wrong to me. The former is a bit different because `you' is often pronounced [j@]. In non-RP English English you sometimes hear things like [j@rad] for `you had'. But children are taught at school that it is wrong to put an r in where it is not spelt. English regional dialects use intrusive r more freely, including after high vowels, e.g. in Gizzer bi. A birrer wo? (Give me a bit. A bit of what?) ['gIz@bI] [@bIr@'wA] __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-674. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-675. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 110 Subject: 2.675 Pauses Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 12:14:50 EDT From: Marjorie K M Chan Subject: Filled Pauses 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 11:43:49 CDT From: GA5123@SIUCVMB.BITNET Subject: Filled pauses 3) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 18:42 BST From: Steve Harlow Subject: RE: 2.660 Responses -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 12:14:50 EDT From: Marjorie K M Chan Subject: Filled Pauses In response to Liz Shriberg's inquiry on filled pauses in languages other than English, French, or German, the Zhongshan (Yue) dialect of Chinese has [ku] (in high level tone) 'this' as a pause filler, as evidenced in my mother's speech. (She speaks the variety of Zhongshan spoken in Shiqi, the county seat of Zhongshan district, Guangdong Province.) In Mandarin Chinese, besides the demonstrative mentioned by Scott DeLancey, _name_ (which is glossed in the dictionaries as 'in that way; then') seems to be used as an empty filler sometimes. Hong Kong Cantonese speakers seem to be particularly fond of using [tsIk hai] 'equal' where English speakers use 'you know' as filler in giving them time to come up with the remainder of the sentence in conversational discourse. Marjorie Chan, Ohio State U. (marjorie_chan@osu.edu __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 11:43:49 CDT From: GA5123@SIUCVMB.BITNET Subject: Filled pauses For the record -- like the aforementioned Mandarin, Japanese, and Serbo- Croation -- Spanish also often uses a demonstrative for filling pauses. Sp. _este:_ is masc. sing. (neuter _esto_ is not used), and it is the proximal member of a three-degree system. Other Spanish favorites are [e:] and [m:] on a constant tone. I'm no Mandarin expert, but I understand that both proximal _zheige_ and distal _neige_ are used. There was a paper -- and I will search for a more specific reference if anyone's interested and if someone else doesn't fill the gap for me -- presented at a conference during the recent summer institute at Santa Cruz, the conference titled something like "Prosody and Discourse" and the paper on the prosody of English _um_ (concluding, if I remember right, that _um_ picks up intonation from its environment). By the way, at the same conference there was a paper presentation -- given before the _um_ paper made us all hyperconscious of the subject -- whose *LAST WORD* was _um_! This started a number of us discussing what might be the implications of discourse-final _um_. Contrary to the initial impression that the speaker might be rudely confusing listeners as to whether his/her speaking turn is finished (i.e. monopolizing the floor with nothing to say), two of us *independently* suggested that final _um_ might be a form of courtesy! "I've said everything I can think of on this, but I'm willing to keep the subject open if you want..." ----------------------------------- Lee Hartman ga5123@siucvmb.bitnet Department of Foreign Languages Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL 62901 U.S.A. __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 18:42 BST From: Steve Harlow Subject: RE: 2.660 Responses Date: Fri, 11 Oct 91 22:59:45 EDT From: "Wayles Browne (Cornell Univ.)" Subject: Re: Filled Pauses Wayles Browne comments: > Serbo-Croatian agrees with what Scott Delancey says about Japanese and > Mandarin: it uses a demonstrative _ovaj_ 'this (masculine singular > nominative)' as a pause filler. Unlike Japanese and Mandarin, this is > not a distal demonstrative; Before the claim about Mandarin acquires the status of an uncontravertible fact, I think it's worthwhile pointing out Scott Delancey's original observation contained an error. The pause-filler 'zhege/zheige' is in fact the proximal demonstrative. (The distal one is 'nage/neige'.) Steve Harlow University of York __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-675. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-676. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 227 Subject: 2.676 Like Goes All... Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 01:52:13 -0500 From: Stephen P Spackman Subject: Re: 2.672 (S)he goes 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 08:36:45 +0000 From: "R.Hudson" Subject: `he goes' 3) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 09:47:16 CDT From: slc6859@usl.edu (Condon Sherri L) Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' 4) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 14:40:52 PDT From: brugman@crl.ucsd.edu (Claudia Brugman) Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' 5) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:06 EST From: Erik Carvalhal Miller Subject: like, 'round and 'round she goes 6) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 21:06:06 +0000 From: "R.Hudson" Subject: `he goes' 7) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 08:28:54 -0400 From: Ellen Prince Subject: Re: 2.668 Queries -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 01:52:13 -0500 From: Stephen P Spackman Subject: Re: 2.672 (S)he goes tshannon@garnet.berkeley.edu notes that we hear not only "(s)he's like, " but "(s)he's all ". I have the impression from my sister's speech (Gaspe', anglophone community in eastern quebec) that there's a scale, something like this: says < goes < is like < is all fairly staid "doing dramatic full-body quotation voices" impression caricature But that looks so logical and literal I wonder if I'm not imagining it. (The literal reading I have for "go" is turn-taking, not motion). __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 08:36:45 +0000 From: "R.Hudson" Subject: `he goes' The changes involving GO and the other expressions like BE LIKE that have been documented here are fascinating. But even more fascinating is the earlier version of GO which now seems to be on the way out, having been subsumed by the GO which allows quoted speech. For people like me (British, age circa 50) this GO only allows one kind of complement: some kind of noise or action initiated by the speaker but which is *not* linguistic - i.e. not made up of words. E.g. `He went [wolf-whistle]' or `The train went [train-like noise]'. This is fascinating because the subcateorisation restrictions on GO have to refer explicitly to things other than language - very clear grist for the non-modular view of language. I wrote about this in Linguistic Analysis Vol 15.4, 1985, pp 233-55 - actually just four pages about this pattern. I think I later discovered that the new use of GO, in which it can be followed by reported speech, was noted (in California, of course) by Barbara Partee in 1973 (see Schourupp in American Speech 57 148-9.) I have another brief discussion in my `English Word Grammar' (1991), pp 67-9. What I don't know is whether the new use still allows non-linguistic complements. So in 20 years time British kids are going to say `My friends all `Let's Have a party!'', are they? Something to look forward to. Does this have to have a plural subject, or could you (I mean, they) say `He all `Let's have a party''? Dick Hudson Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT (071) 387 7050 ext 3152 home: (081) 340 1253 __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 09:47:16 CDT From: slc6859@usl.edu (Condon Sherri L) Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' To the methods of reporting discourse in young people's stories, we can also add a favorite from California: "I'm all". This is typically followed by an exaggerated nonverbal gesture and/or facial expression, then the reported discourse. For example, "I'm all" followed by an exaggerated expression of disgust followed by "This is so gross!" I've also heard this in the D.C. area of Maryland. Sherri Condon __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 14:40:52 PDT From: brugman@crl.ucsd.edu (Claudia Brugman) Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' what about "and he's all, `well, i dunno, whaddayou wanna do?', and i'm all, `gee, i dunno. . .' "? --claudia brugman __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:06 EST From: Erik Carvalhal Miller Subject: like, 'round and 'round she goes >Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1991 09:15 EST >From: Fan mail from some flounder? >Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' > >I've done a little data collection and analysis of "I'm like," and "He's >like." I think it's different from "go" in that "go" is really a verb of >quotation, whereas "like" involves at best paraphrase, and in the case >of "I'm like" can simply reveal the person's thoughts rather than words >(these observations are of people 18-30 -- "like" may have evolved further >in the younger generation). So you get sentences like (1) > >(1) I'm like "Give me a break." I'm twenty-one years old, and the above observations fit my intuitions exactly. I lost one of the messages in which "go" was first mentioned as a synonym for "say" (okay, I admit it--I *deleted* it), but I believe someone said that "say" was used as such only in the narrative present, that "went" cannot be synonymous with "said." Not true. My peers and I (I am from northwest Indiana) have used "went" for "said," as in: And then he went, "Oh, yeah?" And I went, "Yeah!" (Storytelling at its finest.) However, I believe this use is still restricted to narration. My apologies if I misremembered (doublespeak?) the aforementioned deleted message. Erik Carvalhal Miller Indiana University (Bloomington) __________________________________________________________________________ 6) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 21:06:06 +0000 From: "R.Hudson" Subject: `he goes' My fourteen-year old daughter (London born and bred) tells me that she often hears things like He was like `Let's have a party' and even They were all like `Let's have a party'. So it's already reached us. Who knows; maybe it started here and has now reached California? Dick Hudson Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT (071) 387 7050 ext 3152 home: (081) 340 1253 __________________________________________________________________________ 7) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 08:28:54 -0400 From: Ellen Prince Subject: Re: 2.668 Queries >Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 12:11:08 MDT >From: Jeff Turley >Subject: Re: 2.667 'He goes' > >Does anyone know of equivalents to the verbum dicendi "he goes", >that is where a verb of motion has been thus grammaticalized? >A friend from Madrid gives the peninsular Spanish "se pone" 'he >puts himself', as in "se pone: no quiero!" 'he goes: I don't want to!" >(This periphrasis also means 'become', as in "se puso triste" 'he got >sad.') in yiddish, the verb makhn 'make' is used, as in: 1. fregt er vayter: 'kale, ir hot a bruder?' asks he further: 'bride, you have a brother?' makht zi: 'neyn, keyn bruder hob ikh nit.' makes she: 'no, no brother have i not.' 2. der shnorer hot zikh arayngeleygt dem hunderter in keshene the beggar has self in-put the $100 in pocket un makht tsu roytshildn: 'der gesheft iz azoy...' and makes to Rothschild, 'the affair is such...' 'the beggar put the $100 bill in his pocket and says to rothschild, "the deal is this...' in my data (Olsvanger, Royte pomerantsn, 1947, Schocken Press), makhn is used as a verbum dicendi only with following direct discourse. also, it's always used in the present tense, even when conjoined with a past tense, as in 2. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-676. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-677. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 146 Subject: 2.677 Anymore, Last names, ASL Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1991 11:08 PDT From: Scott Delancey Subject: anymore 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 12:17:11 -0700 From: saka@cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Paul Saka) Subject: RE: 2.663 Polite Names 3) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 11:03:37 EDT From: cowan@uunet.UU.NET Subject: Re: 2.663 Is Language Finite? Polite Forms 4) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 18:41:41 EDT From: macrakis@osf.org Subject: `Literature' and oppression -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1991 11:08 PDT From: Scott Delancey Subject: anymore For Bruce Nevin, and others who've contacted me directly: How positive _anymore_ works (no, I'm not a native speaker, but I think I can mimic native proficiency by now) is that, exactly like standard anymore, it takes the rest of the sentence in its scope (that's why there's an association between the "+A" dialect and preposed _anymore_) and asserts that it was formerly not true and now is. Thus [I don't smoke] anymore = formerly NOT [I don't smoke] & presently [I don't smoke] [There's panhandlers all over] anymore = formerly NOT [There's panhandler's all over] & presently [There's panhandlers all over] The remark of mine which seems to have distressed Bruce and others was not intended to have any reference to the intricacies of negative polarity items in English, but was a response to some comments which seemed to suggest that there is something logically or cross-linguistically odd about a linguistic form with this function. There isn't; it's perfectly coherent semantically, and some other languages do have similar constructions. Scott DeLancey __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 12:17:11 -0700 From: saka@cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Paul Saka) Subject: RE: 2.663 Polite Names In response to Ellen Prince's request for intuitions about the use of first names vs last names: I attended primary and secondary school in a working- class suburb of Detroit in the 1970s. With only two exceptions, the academic teachers used first names while the phys-ed teachers used last names. This, together with the fact that drill instructors apparently use last names, has always made me cringe when I hear bare last names being used. It makes me think of regimentation, militarization, and violence. I don't know how idiosyncratic this connotation is. On the one hand, I've asked my peers about it -- even in high school I was a budding linguist -- and they denied that last-naming had any such connotations. Perhaps my being a C.O. is relevant -- one's special interests and beliefs always cause one's idiolect to vary in one way or another from "the norm". On the other hand, I can't believe that last-naming, as practiced by coaches and P.E. teachers, has anything to do with social distance: coaches frequently had deeper and more intimate relationships with their students than any of the other teachers had. I am still inclined to think that speakers who use last names expect immediate, unthinking obedience from their addressees. __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 11:03:37 EDT From: cowan@uunet.UU.NET Subject: Re: 2.663 Is Language Finite? Polite Forms Ellen Prince writes: > Michel Eytan has brought up a topic that has mystified me for several > years--what young (and some not-so-young) americans mean by last-naming. I > am particularly amazed that college students and up seem to be UNCOMFORTABLE > being last-named by their instructors. I've been told that they've never in > their life been last-named and it seems 'weird' to them. (Reference point: I am 33, white, middle-class, ex-suburbanite Northeastern U.S. native.) Last name alone is very alien to me. I associate it with 1) Britons, 2) members of the military, 3) old-fashioned people. (No offense intended.) In fact, even title+last name ("Mr. Jones") is rare in my speech. I live in a world of almost total first names, even to business superiors. (I think this is typical of computer professionals.) I basically have three address patterns: first name alone (most people I know), title alone (people whose name I do not know for whom I wish to show respect), and avoidance of direct-address forms (everyone else). -- cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 18:41:41 EDT From: macrakis@osf.org Subject: `Literature' and oppression I thank Karen Christie for her lessons in the New Logic. Let me abstract rules of inference from her statements: The argument that ASL does not have a literature sparks the memories of the argument that ASL could not be a 'true language' because it was not spoken. A reminds me of B B is false Therefore A is false Perhaps, it is about time that the term "literature" be re-defined in a broader, more unoppresive manner. Definition A has consequence B I do not like consequence B Therefore, definition A is oppressive Everyone is against oppression Therefore, definition A is invalid __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-677. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-678. Thu 17 Oct 1991. Lines: 166 Subject: 2.678 Infinite Languages Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 11:49:30 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@mts.cc.wayne.edu Subject: Infinite Languages 2) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 16:30:39 MET From: Jacob Hoeksema Subject: Re: 2.663 Is Language Finite? Polite Forms -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 11:49:30 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@mts.cc.wayne.edu Subject: Infinite Languages LINGUIST has once again made it possible for a significant issue to be dissected in a way which does not seem possible in any other forum I can think of! Avery Andrews and I seem to disagree on the status of the claim that NLs are sets of sentences without an upper bound on their lengths (but always of finite length). Yet, as he points out in his latest, the real issue he is concerned with is not cardinality but rather the goals of linguistic theory as originally defined by Chomsky. I, on the other hand, was concerned specifically with the question of cardinality (and more generally with the issue of how appropriate it is to treat mathematical idealizations as literal claims about the real world). Having said this, I would like to try and convince Avery and everyone else that we must make some distinctions that are not usually made in this area: (1) To say that the limits on actual sentence length are undefined is not the same thing as saying that there aren't any. Let me use a simple analogy to illustrate this point. The set of citizens of the United States is finite and reasonably well-defined. The set of black citizens of the U.S. is not well-defined at all, yet it is clearly a subset of the former, and hence also finite. (2) The fact that sentences as they become longer and more complex also become less acceptable can be captured in a number of ways, one of which is to divide up your theory into two components, one called competence, the other performance, and let the second only worry about this fact. However, this is NOT the only reasonable alternative. Another is to assume that the device (or gadgetry, as Avery calls it) that we have is one that does things in real time, and that competence is an idealization of it. Thus, the theory of competence is not about a specific mental organ separate from performance. It is about the one mental organ that there is (but it is idealized in certain important ways, which is perfectly reasonable, by the way. I have no quibble with idealizations.) (3) We are used to devices (automata) really which do not get tired, i.e., which can do the same thing over and over without any diminution of, let us say, acceptability (or grammaticality). This is something that is commonly assumed in mathematical theories of automata, but then ALL physical properties of automata are ignored there. It would be reasonable to say that we can develop a theory of automata that do get tired, which might offer a closer analogy to human behavior (i.e., be less idealized in this respect). (4) It is by no means obvious, as a linguistic fact, that people reject long or involved utterances merely because they are not comprehensible or whatever. I have often enough had the experience of an informant who would understand perfectly what was intended and yet opine that it was "too complicated" and offer a paraphrase. The famous Dutch (and German) V-Raising constructions are a perfect example. I have had Dutch informants who would understand an utterance like: dat Jan Marie Hans heeft helpen laten zwemmen but insist on a paraphrase. In general, it seems to me that there are plenty of arguments that the division we tend to make between competence facts and performance facts is arbitrary and that it forces us to miss generalizations. (5) One particular kind of problem that the usual idealization causes is that it forces to assume that the set of morphemes of a language is a finite list, whereas the set of sentences is infinite. Yet in many respects the set of morphemes is also what used to be called OPEN (as opposed to CLOSED). In a paper about to apper, Daniel Radzinski and I argue that linguistics really needs the notions of open (alias productive) vs. closed (alias unproductive) instead of infinite vs. finite, and we offer a precise mathematical model of what we mean (on this view, then, a language which reduplicates verb stems for some grammatical function can be shown to be non-context-free, for example, whereas on the traditional view, the set of stems being finite, the language would be finite, hence regular, hence CF). As I alluded to at one point, some people in CS have explored models in which the "language" is strictly speaking not a single set of string but a set of sets of strings (each of the latter sets being finite). It is difficult to distinguish this view from the traditional one on factual grounds, though there are some cases where there is a difference. This is essentially the approach Radzinski and I employ: the set of morphemes is finite at any given point in time, but it varies from one moment to the next (and there infinitely many possible such lexicons). Again, my point is that there are, mathematically, many more possibilities than linguists have tended to assume, and that some of them may be better than what we have assumed (and in other cases it does not matter much or at all what we assume). ? ?(7) Returning now to the question of infinite strings (which is I think an example of where it does not matter much what we assume), mathematicians and computer scientists have explored automata on infinite strings (in fact, a talk was given on this at the last MOL conference by a student of mine), which means that there is no basis for the statement that "Infinite sentence lengths are on the other hand not attainable __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 16:30:39 MET From: Jacob Hoeksema Subject: Re: 2.663 Is Language Finite? Polite Forms Avery Andrews claims (following here Chomsky) that linguistics is concerned with the structure of an actual device and that actual devices do not produce infinite output. Therefore, sentences of infinite length can be ignored and the idealization of choice for formal linguistics should be that sentences are finite sequences with no upper-bound imposed on their length (contra Langendoen, Postal). However, following the footsteps of Chomsky a little further, one may ask if this is not to confuse competence and performance. After all, while I may be able to decide that n I think (that I think) is grammatical for any n, including perhaps omega, I certainly won't be able to utter more than a small finite number of "that I think"'s. Indeed, in various contexts it even may make sense to talk about actually uttering infinite sequences. (For example, if time allows loops long enough to say "that I think", or if the speed of talking can be increased at ever shorter periods -- and why not, if we are allowed to ignore speech rates in our linguistic theorizing -- or, thirdly, if we allow one sentence to be uttered by more than one speaker -- e.g. by consecutive generations (assuming that physics does not dictate an end to our universe ;-)). I hope that these objections suffice to show that unless Andrews is willing to forego the compentence/performance distinction altogether, he cannot get away with the claim that the very nature of the game of linguistics prohibits the consideration of infinite sequences. The question is rather, whether it is worthwhile to ponder about infinity in linguistics. I for one consider it to be primarily of recreational value. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-678. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-679. Fri 18 Oct 1991. Lines: 107 Subject: 2.679 Word Processing Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 15:25:45 -0500 From: edding@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Dave Eddington) Subject: IPA on WordPerfect 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:18:35 CDT From: Eric Schiller Subject: Re: 2.668 Queries 3) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 16:30:33 GMT From: me@suzuka.u-strasbg.fr (Michel Eytan LILoL) Subject: word processing -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 15:25:45 -0500 From: edding@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Dave Eddington) Subject: IPA on WordPerfect I'm sure that many of you were disappointed to discoved that WP 5.1 with its expanded character sets did not include the IPA characters. I recently spoke to a friend who works for WP concerning this. He informed me that the best way to get WP to include the IPA in its next release is for them to be inundated with requests for the IPA characters. Evidently when Wp sits down to decide what enhancements they will include, that ask all of the different departments how many requests they have received for a given enhancement. What that means is that it is best to send a copy of your request for the IPA to each department separately. The three departments that deal with such things are Customer Support, Enhancements, and International. Please write them at: WordPerfect Corp. 1555 N. Technology Way. Orem, Utah 84057 In addition, or instead of writing, you may also make the request through Compuserve, or by calling WP's customer support line: 1-800-541-5160. I am positive that with enough support WP will see the need for the IPA and include it in the next version. David Eddington __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:18:35 CDT From: Eric Schiller Subject: Re: 2.668 Queries Re: Windows Fonts Windows has problems with zero-width characters and a truncated character set. I have been trying to develop IPA for Word for Windows, but at present I just have a port of Mac fonts which in effect await Windows 3.1 which may oor may not solve that problem. Otherwise one will have to create a zillion macros for overstiking every diacritic. If it is any consolation, I can send you the Fontographer source code to a couple of IPA fonts, or a variety of Postscript formats. To those who have already flooded me with disks for the Mac fonts - I am just finishing up the documentation and should mail stuff out next week. To those who have not yet sent me requests for the fonts, please include SASE and if possible label the disks. My desk resembles a certain city in Iraq these days and things slip around! To those who don't know what this is all about: I am giving away IPA fonts for the Mac. Freeware if you just want to use the fonts, shareware if you want updates and source code, and small fees for customizing the fonts to your needs. Large set of IPA and theoretical linguistic symbols. No kerning pairs for Quark or Pagemaker yet, but they are coming. If I can binhex the files I will post them somewhere convenient (UM should already have the Cotswold font available now from their server, I gave it to them 10/4/91.) But the easy way is to send me a request with SASE and formatted floppy (any size) to Eric Schiller, Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1010 East 59th Street, Chicago 60637. Eric Schiller __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 16:30:33 GMT From: me@suzuka.u-strasbg.fr (Michel Eytan LILoL) Subject: word processing for many weeks now, there has been an ongoing discussion about the lack of this or that fine-tuned feature in this or that word-processor -- mostly Word. May I point out that Word (or for that matter Nisus, that I have seen; and probably WordPerfect that I have not seen) is MUCH too complicated as an everyday word-processor. Moreover its possibilities are used to the extent of 10%, usually -- unless you are a business executive and you write a book. For that matter, even a book can be done with word-processors that are faster, cheaper, friendlier and simpler. To prove my point: I use WriteNow that has many of the possibilities of Word (except drawing boxes, indexes [no, not indices] and glossary). I have translated into French E. Shapiro & L. Sterling's The Art of Prolog: the original was composed using TeX, whereas I used WriteNow to produce a camera-ready version (which was reproduced 'as-is'), except for the illustrations. The final product is nearly indistinguishable from the original! __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-679. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-680. Fri 18 Oct 1991. Lines: 131 Subject: 2.680 (S)he goes Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 08:49:48 EDT From: elc9j@prime.acc.Virginia.EDU Subject: 2.660 Responses 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 09:02:52 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: 2.676 Like Goes All... 3) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 11:16:31 -0400 From: gb661@csc.albany.edu (BROADWELL GEORGE AARON) Subject: forms of the verb 'say' 4) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 14:45:02 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: 2.564 Responses: Themself, I says, Possessive -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 08:49:48 EDT From: elc9j@prime.acc.Virginia.EDU Subject: 2.660 Responses On "I says", "he goes" etc.: another form should be added to this list of narrative quotation-introducers, used especially by American teenagers. "...I was like, 'give me a break!' (or other quote)". This form can be used in either present or past ("I'm like, 'give me a break!'"). I THINK it's not synonymous with 'say', in that it need not introduce an actual quote. It can be followed by a non-verbal "quote", e.g. a shrug or facial expression, (in this respect it is similar to "he goes"), and also by a report of what the person was thinking-- they don't have to have said it out loud (in this respect it seems to be different from both 'say' and 'go'). Ellen Contini-Morava __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 09:02:52 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: 2.676 Like Goes All... Spackman's markup of "X says" (staid situation), "X goes" (doing voices), "X is like" (dramatic impression), and "X is all" (full-body caricature) seems not unreasonable in its scale of emphasis. I would only point out that the most recent coinage is always the most emphatic one, so the next "X does whatever" term to come down the pike will pre-empt the "full-body caricature" slot. We seem to have here the sort of development noted by Aronoff in his well-known "Automobile Semantics" article, which describes Detroit's practice coining a new name for the top-of-the-line model, with pre-existing names bumped downward one notch. A small additional quibble: I and one other contributor to this discussion noted that "X is like" frequently introduces thoughts or feelings not revealed in the discourse situation, so "dramatic impression" might be a bit vague. -- Rick Russom __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 11:16:31 -0400 From: gb661@csc.albany.edu (BROADWELL GEORGE AARON) Subject: forms of the verb 'say' I think all of the following are possible ways of introducing direct quotes: He was like 'That's disgusting.' She was kinda 'Well, I don't know if I should.' I'm sort of `Well, maybe I will.' They were all 'How could you eat that?' ?She was 'Leave me alone!' All of the above sound quite bad to me without the copula. From this, I would conclude that `like, kinda, all,' and `sort of' are not the verbs in these utterances, but modifiers of the following direct quote. ****************************************************************************** Aaron Broadwell, Dept. of Linguistics, University at Albany -- SUNY, Albany, NY 12222 gb661@leah.albany.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are." -- Montesquieu ****************************************************************************** __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 14:45:02 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: 2.564 Responses: Themself, I says, Possessive The "historical present" is often said to indicate special emphasis or involvement. Presumably this falls out from Hadj Ross's "me first" principle, since the present is "closer" to the narrator than the past. Past tense can then be used to put actions of subordinate interest into the narrative background. Ron Smyth seems to use "I says," etc., primarily in a storytelling mode to identify who said what. Presumably he doesn't get "I says let's go and get some ice cream" because this is not uttered as part of a story and because "say" is being used to express an opinion rather than to perform a useful storytelling function. Part of Smyth's project, then, would involve theory of oral storytelling, as done by Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Bill Labov, etc. A bibliography of such studies has recently been published (ed. John Miles Foley). It's a commonplace of oral theory that storytelling dialects are unlike the dialect that would be used by the narrator in ordinary conversation. In the study of Homer or the BEOWULF poet, you have to do with a poetic koine containing many archaisms and forms from a variety of dialects. In America, the storytelling dialect will often reflect the subculture in which a given type of story arose, even if the speaker has moved out of that subculture or was never a fully-fledged member of it. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-680. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-681. Fri 18 Oct 1991. Lines: 137 Subject: 2.681 Responses Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:35:28 EDT From: "Judith Klavans" Subject: 2.668 Queries 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 09:42:56 BST From: Henry "S." Thompson Subject: Re: 2.668 Queries 3) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 08:12:18 -0400 From: Ellen Prince Subject: Query: `Come' and `bring'. 4) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 08:08:45 -0400 From: Ellen Prince Subject: Re: 2.668 Queries 5) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 08:59:07 EDT From: jomeara@THUNDER.LAKEHEADU.CA (John O'Meara) Subject: Potawatomi -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:35:28 EDT From: "Judith Klavans" Subject: 2.668 Queries Ref: Your note of Thu, 17 Oct 1991 00:27:30 -0500 For an article on clitics in Lexical Functional Grammar, see "Configuration in Non-Configurational Languages", in the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 1982, pp. 292-306. Clitic behavior from the Australian language Ngiyambaa is used to illustrate the power of LFG functional structure in the analysis of "non-configurational languages", and as a motivation for the basic PS rule S --> alpha (Enclitic) alpha-KleeneStar. I am the author of that paper. For an article on clitics in Spanish handled by a two-level morphological analyzer, see Tzoukermann, Evelyne and Mark Liberman's paper from COLING, 1990. Judith Klavans __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 09:42:56 BST From: Henry "S." Thompson Subject: Re: 2.668 Queries Re Jim McCawley Jim is a native speaker of galus Glaswegian, where one of the filled pause markers is indeed [ai], homophonous with "aye", which is to say "yes", a not uncommon situation. There is no problem vis a vis the 1st person singular nominative pronoun, as that is pronounced [^], that is, wedge, more or less. ht __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 08:12:18 -0400 From: Ellen Prince Subject: Query: `Come' and `bring'. >Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 17:53:32 +0100 >From: Adam Kilgarriff >Subject: Query: `Come' and `bring'. > > >I once heard a reference to some research which compared the phrasal >constructions and idioms involving `come' and `bring', and concluded that the >patterns were very similar for the two verbs. Does this produce any flicker of >recognition? If so, could you give me any further clues which might help me >locate the work. i recall a paper of fillmore's, but don't have the reference. there's also some relevant stuff in: Kuno, S. 1976. Subject, theme, and the speaker's empathy--a reexamination of relativization phenomena. In Li, C., ed. Subject and topic. NY: Academic Press. Pp. 417-44. Kuno, S. and Kaburaki, E. 1977. Empathy and syntax. LI8.627-72. __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 08:08:45 -0400 From: Ellen Prince Subject: Re: 2.668 Queries >This rule made me wonder about the position of the /u:/, as in 'groom'. >To my humble non-native ears, r-insertion after /u:/ appears to be >possible, even though it is a close vowel, as in 'you and me' /ju:r@nmi:/ >and 'hue and cry' /hju:r@nkraI/. Am I right in assuming this? If so, can >we perhaps posit a rule preceding r-insertion that diphthongizes the /u:/ to >/U@/, so that Wells' rule still holds (since it does include centring >diphthongs)? > >Does anyone know how common intrusive r-insertion is in RP? Is it the >predominant phenomenon in environments defined by the rule or not? i'm not a phonologist and i'm not sure what rp is, but in my r-linking dialect of new york city english, there is no possibility of r-insertion after /u:/ in groom, hue and cry, etc. __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 08:59:07 EDT From: jomeara@THUNDER.LAKEHEADU.CA (John O'Meara) Subject: Potawatomi re request for Potawatomi lexical information, try John Nichols (Native Studies, 532 Fletcher Argue Building, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 2N2; no e-mail address that I know of). He did fieldwork on Potawatomi in the 1970s and should be able to help. John O'Meara Lakehead University Thunder Bay, Ontario __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-681. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-682. Fri 18 Oct 1991. Lines: 191 Subject: 2.682 Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 09:06:02 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: interest in II, not III 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:13:00 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: more on W-S Hypothesis 3) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 11:04:07 -0500 From: mfleck@herky.cs.uiowa.edu (Margaret Fleck) Subject: neuroscience and Sapir-Whorf -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 09:06:02 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: interest in II, not III I wrote yesterday re the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis: >It would be interesting to see a resumption of attention to >III e.g. employing techniques developed for study of non-human >communication. I meant to say "a resumption of attention to II," which is where the greatest intrinsic interest lies: II. The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the world-view he will acquire as he learns the language. (p. 128) Bruce Nevin bn@bbn.com __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:13:00 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: more on W-S Hypothesis I might as well include some additional material relating to the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis. Construe this as continuing from the end of my post yesterday. (That includes the possible response of deleting it now if your reading of the prior part so indicates to you.) In formal linguistics, Zellig Harris and his co-workers have come full circle to the work on information structures in discourse that opened the whole field of transformational grammar. Harris, Ryckman, Gottfried et al. _The Form of Information in Science_ (1990) develops a representation of the information immanent in a body of texts written over a span of years in the history of a subfield of a science (immunology). Changes in this structure correlate transparently with historically well-documented changes and developmental stages of the science during that period, although the structure was determined by clearly defined formal means and without reference to any knowledge of that historical context. In this way, they have demonstrated strongly that structures found in the sublanguage of that science (and not imposed a priori on it) correlate on the one hand with aspects of the social reality of the science and on the other with the structure of the real-world domain which is the concern of that science. The latter correlation is reflexive, however, in the sense that, as the structure changed, it (and the undestanding of the scientists writing the original research reports on which the analysis was done) over time came into closer conformity with a reality whose nature was in process of being discovered. Before that change, certain characteristics of reality could not be stated or thought; afterward, they could. But the discovery and the change in structure were simultaneous (though of course the writing down for publication was not). No better confirmation could be offered of Sapir's claim of the essential unity of language and thought by one of his students. ____________________ 5. The confirmation is equivocal, however, since the work clearly demonstrates (as Harris stated at the end of _Mathematical Structures of Language_ (Wiley, 1968)) that language is not identical with thought but instead provides a rather rigid channel for thought. This corresponds precisely to the observation above that the discovery and the language for talking about it co-evolved. By using this term I refer specifically to the common misperception regarding biological evolution that e.g. eohippus evolved into the horse in response to environmental changes, when one must instead acknowledge eohippus and its environment co-evolved into the horse and its environment. Synecdoche is fallacious in both cases. ____________________ To illustrate this point further, I should like to adduce a recent contribution to the enormous literature in the study of kinship categories, always a favorite topic in anthropological linguistics. Wierzbicka, in Semantics and the interpretation of cultures: the meaning of 'alternate generations' devices in australian languages, proposes a new set of metalanguage terms for discussing the alternate sets of pronouns used in many Australian languages. She urges that the terminology of "generation harmony" and "disharmony" that has become traditional in anthropology is arcane and psychologically arbitrary, does not capture native speakers' meaning and does not make that meaning accessible to people from other cultures, and claims that her new terminology provides a better fit. This paper illustrates a Whorfian effect in the sublanguage of a specialization within the science of anthropology. With the traditional terminology, aspects of aborigine culture are difficult to come to recognize and understand, and not possible to communicate; she claims that with the proposed new terminology it is.<6> Thus, while providing an illustration of Whorfian ____________________ 6. This is part of ongoing work on natural language semantics based, ultimately, on a proposed set of universal semantic primitives, including: I,you, this, someone, something, want, don't want, say, think of, imagine, know, become, part, place, and world (Wierzbicka, Semantic Primitives (1972), Lingua Mentalis (1980). Be it noted that Harris denies there can be a lingua mentalis or any metalanguage external to natural language. For one thing, were there such one would need to account for the grammar and semantics of that metalanguage. For another, he has demonstrated that the information structures immanent in texts account precisely for the information that the texts report, so that, like LaPlace, he has no need for this additional hypothesis. All this notwithstanding, Wierzbicka's proposal here concerns a sublanguage serving as metalanguage for a subfield of anthropology. ____________________ effects within a subfield of a science, she proposes to overcome such effects by devising a perfect metalanguage for that subfield. Since the subfield concerns an area that is by nature a matter of social convention and so in social reality rather than physical reality (to make that Durckheimian distinction again), she may be able to get away with it. I do not doubt the creativity of human cultures, however, and would build in means for the sublanguage to evolve. An abiding interest of Harris, as of his teacher Sapir, has been the question of refinements and possibly extensions of natural language that foster international scientific communication. In his analysis, language-particular characteristics due to the reduction system (extended morphophonemics) of one language or another are partitioned from operator-argument structures that `carry' information, which are remarkably uniform from one language to another. This uniformity becomes very close indeed in the grammar of a science sublanguage, where classifications and selection restrictions are much more closely constrained than in other domains. But even in nontechnical domains Harris has a great deal to say about linguistic universals,<7> and about the distinctions between what is universal in language and culture and what is idiosyncratic and therefore pertinent to the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis. ____________________ 7. See e.g. _Language and Information_ (Columbia 1989) and _A Theory of Language and Information_ (Oxford, 1990), which is a more philosophical companion volume to _A Grammar of English on Mathematical Principles_ (Wiley 1982). c 1991 Bruce Nevin bn@bbn.com __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 11:04:07 -0500 From: mfleck@herky.cs.uiowa.edu (Margaret Fleck) Subject: neuroscience and Sapir-Whorf I have some sympathy with Charles Laughlin's position that one might eventually want to use information from neuroscience to establish the truth of, and mechanisms behind, nature vs. nurture type questions. However, from my experience in computer vision, the information available from the neuroscientists is still rough and preliminary, even for the lowest levels of sensory processing. Much of what we know about human abilities is via psychophysics, not neuroscience. Even then, the information is only suggestive, not enough to be able to outline (still less construct the details of) formal or computational theories. By the time you get up to the level of shape perception and object recognition, the information on humans is fragmentary, pretheoretical, and pretty damn near useless. At higher-levels, e.g. describing spatial arrangments of objects and their behavior, even the psychophysics peters out. This is not intended to run down the neuroscientists. They are doing as well as we have any right to expect. But they are not in a position to solve my low level problems, let alone the high level ones that make up the bulk of the S-W discussion. Margaret Fleck __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-682. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-683. Fri 18 Oct 1991. Lines: 219 Subject: 2.683 The LINGUIST List Moderators: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu) -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 14:41 MDT From: e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu (Anthony Aristar) Subject: The LINGUIST List -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 14:41 MDT From: e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu (Anthony Aristar) Subject: The LINGUIST List Helen and I received the following messages over the last few weeks, and we thought we'd like to show them to you, and perhaps start a debate on the issues they raise, and what we could do about them. We comment on them at the end of this message: >From IYO1VAF@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU Tue Oct 1 13:56:57 1991 >Date: Tue, 01 Oct 91 08:29 PDT >From: Vicki Fromkin >Is there anyone besides me who is beginning to feel like >Katherine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story when she said "I'm >standing here on my own two hands and going crazy" when >confronted by the LINGUIST messages each time one >logs on? I find it fascinating that so many people are >so involved and so willing to share their thoughts and >information but if this goes on we will have to give up >teaching, research, social life, eating, drinking >in order to read LINGUIST. I know of some people who >are now resigning from the list, and others who just erase >everything. Just as I can't let a phone ring without >answering, I find I can't (or hardly ever can) >not read a message. But this is all getting to be too >much. I am of course as guilty as anyone but I think we >need to use a little self control or the LINGUIST NET >will be counter productive and we will send our poor >editors into a state of depression. VAF ------------------------------ >Date: 02 Oct 91 11:15:04 EDT >From: Ron Hofmann <71721.2655@compuserve.com> >Subject: List split >Stock splits are supposed to signify successful operations, >& I think it may be time to consider splitting LINGUIST. Anthony >& Helen have been doing a wonderful job, but their success breeds >bigness. I know I would prefer to see several lists, one devoted >entirely to conferences, an other devoted to jobs announcements, >plus a general one for everything else. What I am not interested in >I can simply not subscribe, & my mailbox is less full, & less time to >delete the unwanted subjects. >The 'logs' are getting so hefty that I fear some networks (like mine) >will refuse to carry them soon. LOG9109D was more than 5000 lines long >(1 week) >I suspect there are many others who would welcome such a >split, & it ought to make the work load on Anthony & Helen less: the >jobs list need not be moderated at all, & maybe the conference list too. >Maybe Anthony will take a straw vote? > ...Ron Hofmann ------------------------------ >Date: Mon, 7 Oct 91 21:08:45 CDT >From: nm1@Ra.MsState.Edu (Natalie Maynor) >Message-Id: <9110080208.AA26330@Ra.MsState.Edu> >I just deleted a huge bunch of LINGUIST messages unread >because I saw how long the clumps of messages were and realized that I >just didn't have time to read them tonight (and can't save them until >tomorrow because of the new mail I'll be getting tomorrow -- when I save >things, saying to myself "I'll read these tomorrow," they always get >deleted unread). Is it possible to send shorter "clumps"? Often I see >interesting-looking topics in the list of messages at the beginning of the >clump, but I can't take the time to scroll through six messages in >order to get to number seven. I'm a believer in unmoderated lists >because the flow of mail is steadier and I can delete single messages unread >on the basis of subject header. If I'm the only one with this >attitude, please ignore this note! LINGUIST is an *excellent* list -- >it's just that I find myself deleting it unread 75% of the time. > --Natalie (nm1@ra.msstate.edu) -------------------------- First of all, let us say that we empathize with all of you who are having trouble with the volume of mail on LINGUIST. Often even we don't have time to actually read all the messages, only to skim them, sort them, and send them out. And, from our personal perspective, this a great irony: we began LINGUIST with the hope of participating in stimulating intellectual discussions broader in scope than those available at home. We didn't realize we might have to choose between editing such discussions and reading them. But, on the positive side, the volume of messages is a mark of success, one that ALL subscribers should take credit for. As those of you who read several lists probably realize, your submissions to LINGUIST are of very high quality: substantive, well-informed, and uniformly collegial in tone. We have had no problem at all with flaming, posing, advertising, speechifying, or irrelevance. Virtually everything submitted furthers our primary enterprise, the academic study of language. But that has meant (1) that virtually all submissions are posted and (2) the discussion has attracted more and more subscribers. At present we have about 1500 subscribers and receive 50-70 messages a day. So we agree: something should be done. But what? Below we offer our responses to the suggestions we've received. But these are intended to open the discussion, not to close it. Let us know what you think. 1. Breaking up LINGUIST into lists divided by sub discipline (e.g. phonology, discourse, syntax, etc.): We believe that this would defeat the main purpose for which LINGUIST was set up, to initiate genuine cross talk between linguists in different fields. A comment made to Anthony when the list was first mooted was that LINGUIST would surely fail because linguists were not really interested in talking to people ouside their own narrow areas. This has decisively been proved wrong; and, from our point of view, one of the most heartening facets of the discussion has been the information-sharing across disciplinary lines. However, to say that we don't want to break up LINGUIST into sub-disciplinary lists is not to say that we want to discourage the formation of other lists focusing on linguistic sub-fields. Rather, we will do everything we can to support special-interest lists, if any of you wish to start one. And perhaps linguistics will eventually have the kind of situation that exists in the humanities: i.e., numerous special-interest lists, but one large list, HUMANIST, on which general questions are considered and cross-disciplinary discussion conducted. 2. Splitting off from LINGUIST an unmoderated sub-list devoted to conferences: This is a very good idea (Thank you, Ron). We do not, however, have the time or the computing resources at our institutions to set up another Listserv operation. Is there is anyone out there who would like to take this on? If so, we will forward conference postings to you, as well as offer whatever advice and support we have. 3. Splitting off from LINGUIST an unmoderated sub-list devoted to jobs: We have been told by other list-owners that lists specifically aimed at job-postings usually flounder, because those who subscribe to them have no jobs to offer, and those who have jobs don't subscribe to the job-lists. Unless there is some structure which compels employers to post to the job-list, the job-list gradually fades away. However, there may be some way around this problem. (Perhaps combining the job and conference lists would work?) And, certainly, if anyone wishes to set up such a list, we will offer any support we can. 4. Using moderation about submissions (VAF's suggestion): Loath as we are to curb the free flow of discussion, perhaps it is time to urge discretion, particularly about query responses. So far, we've posted all responses to queries--and, of course, many of these have sparked discussions of general interest. But if a query is highly specific, (e.g. personal contacts in Rumania), or practical (e.g. texts for a course, bibliography or software suggestions), respondants should henceforth direct their replies to the sender, not to the list as a whole. We do, however, urge the original questioner to summarize all responses with of general interest (e.g. text suggestions, bibliographies) and post the summary to the list. 5. A steadier flow of messages: This is a reasonable suggestion, and we may be better able to implement it soon. Brian Wallace, a graduate student at Eastern Michigan U., will soon be working with us 5-hours a week as an editorial assistant. And the more hands we have to help with the editing, the more likely we are to be able to maintain regularity in "publication." The number of messages, and the need to sandwich editing into the interstices between other professional demands, has meant that messages inevitably pile up from time to time and then get sent out in clumps. However, perhaps some of the current suggestions--as well as others which you may yet send us--will help with the problem underlying message "flooding," i.e., the sheer volume of mail. --------------------------------- Thank you in advance for your suggestions--as well as for the remarkable support, co-operation, and patience we have received from you all year. We certainly do not want this discussion of editorial problems to obscure the fact that we find editing LINGUIST enormously rewarding, primarily because of the caliber of LINGUIST subscribers. The Moderators Anthony and Helen __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-683. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-684. Sun 20 Oct 1991. Lines: 117 Subject: 2.684 (S)he Goes Like Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 12:05:00 EDT From: Margaret.Luebs@ub.cc.umich.edu Subject: I'm like... 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 13:07:21 -1000 From: Ricky Jacobs Subject: Re: 2.672 (S)he goes 3) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 91 15:31:15 EST From: On ne peut rien contre Erik! On ne peut que fuir!--Christine Daae dans 'Le Fantome de l'Opera' de Gaston Leroux Subject: RE: 2.676 Like Goes All... 4) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1991 10:44:48 GMT-10:00 From: Fran Karttunen Subject: all____ -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 12:05:00 EDT From: Margaret.Luebs@ub.cc.umich.edu Subject: I'm like... In regard to the current discussion -- there's an article in American Speech (1990, vol 65 no 3 pp 213-227) by Carl Blyth, Jr., Sigrid Recktenwald & Jenny Wang, "I'm like, "say what?!": a new quotative in American oral narrative" with some interesting points. The authors don't find anyone over 32 using "be like" as a quotative, and I would definitely question that -- I know a number of 40-year-olds (in California) who use it. They don't mention any occurrence of "be all" as a quotative, but I've certainly heard it -- is it very new? very rare? very casual? And what about "they were all like....."?? -- Margaret Luebs, University of Michigan __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 13:07:21 -1000 From: Ricky Jacobs Subject: Re: 2.672 (S)he goes Here in Hawai'i I hear many teenagers using something that sounds like "I'm all" and "(s)he's all to introduce a direct quotation "(s)he's all". I haven't been able to get it in second person or plural forms. __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 91 15:31:15 EST From: On ne peut rien contre Erik! On ne peut que fuir!--Christine Daae dans 'Le Fantome de l'Opera' de Gaston Leroux Subject: RE: 2.676 Like Goes All... >Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:06 EST >From: Erik Carvalhal Miller >Subject: like, 'round and 'round she goes >>I've done a little data collection and analysis of "I'm like," and "He's >>like." I think it's different from "go" in that "go" is really a verb of >>quotation, whereas "like" involves at best paraphrase, and in the case >>of "I'm like" can simply reveal the person's thoughts rather than words >>(these observations are of people 18-30 -- "like" may have evolved further >>in the younger generation). So you get sentences like (1) >> >>(1) I'm like "Give me a break." > >I'm twenty-one years old, and the above observations fit my intuitions exactly. Later, the very same day I sent out this message, I went to my part-time job at a university cafeteria. A cart I wheeled out of the dishwashing room was especially chock-full of clean plates, and I was a little frustrated as I kept putting tens and tens of plates away, so I said: It's like, these dishes are comin' out of nowhere! I immediately realized my submission to LINGUIST was incomplete; "be like" as a verb characterizing a situation can take an impersonal object as well. It was like, nobody wanted to volunteer his time. [or "their time"] It's like, I'm totally confused. It was like, he had no idea what was goin' on. It's like, I'm outahere. Erik Carvalhal Miller ECMILLER@IUBACS.INDIANA.EDU Indiana University (Bloomington) __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1991 10:44:48 GMT-10:00 From: Fran Karttunen Subject: all____ It seems to me that there might be a potential evolution of the use of copula + "all" as illustrated in these sentences: She's all wet. She's all upset. She's all shivering and sobbing. She's all "boo hoo hoo." She's all "" What I haven't (yet) heard is "like" or "all" with no vestige of the copula, but maybe it's out there. Fran Karttunen __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-684. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-685. Mon 21 Oct 1991. Lines: 156 Subject: 2.685 Queries Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 13:48:40 SST From: Joe Foley Subject: QUERY 2) Date: 18 October 91, 08:04:53 CET From: Hubert.Lehmann.+49.404-235.LEH.at.DHDIBM1.IBM.Scientific.Center.Heidelberg.Germ any@tamvm1.tamu.edu (6221) Subject: Statistics of noun-verb co-occurrences and col 3) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 91 9:16 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.627 Themselves 4) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 14:42:37 EDT From: jdbobalj@Athena.MIT.EDU Subject: Susanne Winkler, where are you ? -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 13:48:40 SST From: Joe Foley Subject: QUERY I was wondering if anyone knows what terms are used in French for: Field, Mode, Tenor, Transitivity, Mood, Modality, Grammatical Metaphor, Nominalisation, Theme, Rheme, etc., as used in Systemic Linguistics (Halliday 1985). I do know that some work was done in Canada (Laval) but I am not sure how exten sive it is. Obviously direct translation into French from English doesn't work! Any help will be very welcome. Joe Foley (ELLFOLEY@NUSVM.BITNET) __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: 18 October 91, 08:04:53 CET From: Hubert.Lehmann.+49.404-235.LEH.at.DHDIBM1.IBM.Scientific.Center.Heidelberg.Germ any@tamvm1.tamu.edu (6221) Subject: Statistics of noun-verb co-occurrences and collocations Is anyone aware of statistical work concerning the co-occurrence of nouns and verbs in sentences - with or without respect to given syntactic relations? I'm especially interested in statistics for languages such as German, English, French, and Spanish, but also in the methods used. Hubert Lehmann __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 91 9:16 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.627 Themselves I'd like to add to the list of things which have struck people on LINGUIST as unusual. The following three utterances were all from the same person, a woman from Britain who lived between the ages of 5 and 15 in the USA (her accent is what you might call mid-Atlantic, but I'm not sure that's particularly relevant): if you don't be very specific it's can be hard for people to see what you mean what are you wanting to achieve? it's good for you to see what each other are doing and how you're doing it The second one (are wanting) struck me as pretty normal for N. England, but the others stood out for me, especially the last one which I remember seeing in linguistics books with stars and question marks in front. I think the interesting question is not how widespread are these examples (also the 'anymore' case, and 'themself' and 'needs washed'), but rather if these are examples of 'performance' and we recognise them as odd because they don't quite square up to our ideas of 'competence' (which I think, perhaps miostakenly, is justified mostly on intuition), at what point in their development do things like the above become 'competence' rather than 'performance', and how would you know? I ask this because I've always felt that performance was used too often as nan excuse not to study the real languages that real people speak. Richard Ogden rao1@uk.ac.york.vaxb __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 14:42:37 EDT From: jdbobalj@Athena.MIT.EDU Subject: Susanne Winkler, where are you ? The MIT Working Papers in Linguistics is trying to get in touch with Susanne Winkler. We have an address for her in Wankheim, but there is no indication as to where Wankheim might be located (eg. Austria, Germany or Switzerland are the obvious guesses). Can anyone help us locate her ? Contact me (Jonathan Bobaljik) by e-mail: JDBOBALJ@ATHENA.MIT.EDU or by snail mail : MITWPL - Dep't of Linguistics & Philosophy - Room 20D-219 - MIT - Cambridge - MA - 02139 - USA Thanks, Jonathan MITWPL __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-685. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-686. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 141 Subject: 2.686 Is language finite? Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1991 20:48:46 GMT From: ADA612@csc1.anu.edu.au (AVERY D ANDREWS) 2) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 16:28:40 EDT From: Henry Kucera Subject: Re: 2.678 Infinite Languages -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1991 20:48:46 GMT From: ADA612@csc1.anu.edu.au (AVERY D ANDREWS) I agree with Jack Hoeksma that the issue of infinite language is mostly recreational, but I think it can also reveal underlying attitudes as to what linguistics is about, so ... I have thought a bit about perpetually accelerating speakers, but devices that can produce an infinite sequence of tokens in a finite time would have to be pretty wierd. Imagine a box that shows 0 on a screen for half a second, 1 for the next quarter, 0 for the next eighth, etc. What it is showing when the whole second is up? All I can think of (on the basis of my pop physics) is that it would have to be in a quantum-mechanical superposition of both states (so showing 0 or 1 randomly when looked at), but a device that could do that would be so different in its internal structure from us that I don't see how its structure or capabilities could have any bearing on the nature of human linguistic abilities (I believe that there would be other limitations of a more strictly physical nature on `accelerating speakers', but will leave that for someone with a physics background to work out, likewise the possibilities with looping time). On the other hand the `sentence' produced by an unending sequence of speakers (or one speaker on a truly excellent life-support system ...) *can't* get finished, so it *can't* get produced (not merely doesn't happen to be produced). So, being a linguist rather than a mathematician, I decline to take a professional interest in it. As for competence vs. performance, it seems to me that Chomsky (1986) _Knowledge of Language_ has already abandoned this distiinction in its original form. From the perspective of KoL, the Aspects notion of `competence' is a confused amalgam of `I-Language' (the internal, language-particular `parameter setting' constituting what the speaker has learned about their language) and a notion that one might call `idealized performance': what some of the mental modules involved in language use would be able to do if freed from various limitations that are seen as irrelevant to their essential structure and functioning. It seems to me that Chomsky also tries to deflect attention away from the idealized performance concept, but I think that it is in fact essential, since idealized performance, not I-language, is what can be compared to actual performance for empirical evaluation of theories. Grossly large sentences belong in idealized performance, I would say, since they could be produced by mechanisms we actually contain (devices realizing stacks and state loops, for example), if structurally irrelevant limitations were removed. Moving on to Alexis M-R's points (in vol-2-678, Oct 17 1991): 1. Fine, but I see the issue as not whether it is possible to regard the set of NL sentences as finite, but whether there is any motivation for doing so. Lacking a clear motivation for any particular finite bound, why impose one? 2. yes 3. yes 4. Concomitant with following Chomksy in abandoning the original comptence/performance distinction is the possibility of treating different kinds of `performance effects' differently. E.g., the mode of failure with center embeddings & cross-serial linkages is structurally much more interesting that the mode of failure with boring parataxes such as big instances of the schema John shouted, (and then somebody else shouted)* or with edge recursions like big instances of (he knows that)* he lies Emmon Bach has an article in some processing-oriented journal to the effect that *syntactic* processing of X-serial dependencies crashes when there are more than two of them: when more complex sequences are accepted and understood, the processing is actually semantics- rather than syntax- driven (like what Broca's aphasics do (and, I get the impression, Roger Schank's computer programs)). If substantiated, a hard limit of 2 on the syntactic processing of these constructions would surely be an important clue as to how the mechanisms work, and would intuitively be on the borderline between competence and performance in the Aspects framework. Some of the Ross effects, such as the ATB conditions, might also fall into this borderline category, approaching it historically from the other direction. Such borderline cases suggest that maybe the borders need revision (and, of course, Chomsky has always tried to get people to study the structure of the actual phenomena rather than quibble over labels and taxonomies). 5. I like it. 6. Infinite sentence lengths are still not attainable by devices like us, so I'll continue to urge that they be left out of linguistics. Of course, maybe, someday, somehow, the math of infinite sentences will prove relevant for linguistics, but, as things presently stand, I do not see how the ability to accomodate infinite sentence lengths is any kind of argument in favor of a linguistic theory with essentially Chomskyan aims). Avery Andrews (ada612@csc.anu.edu.au) __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 16:28:40 EDT From: Henry Kucera Subject: Re: 2.678 Infinite Languages Charles Hockett, in his small book "State of the Art," has one chapter on the finiteness of languages and the question whether natural languages are well- defined objects or not (he concludes the latter). It is a chapter where the analogy is made between football vs. baseball and natural languages and the conclusion reached that languages are like football (not like baseball where the set of possible scores is infinite but enumerable, which is not the case in football). Just curious: Has anybody read this and are there any opinions? Perhaps there are and I have missed the postings in which case I apologize. Thanks. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-686. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-687. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 121 Subject: 2.687 Goes, ASL and Whorf Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 91 15:40:10 PDT From: brugman@crl.ucsd.edu (Claudia Brugman) Subject: Re: 2.680 (S)he goes 2) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 91 10:59 U From: "Randy J. LaPolla" Subject: Re: 2.681 Responses 3) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1991 12:44 EST From: Karen Christie Subject: Re: 2.677 Anymore, Last Names, ASL 4) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 14:38 +0800 From: MATTHEWS@HKUCC.BITNET Subject: Re: 2.632 Whorf -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 91 15:40:10 PDT From: brugman@crl.ucsd.edu (Claudia Brugman) Subject: Re: 2.680 (S)he goes I don't agree that ". . .all" necessarily introduces a full body caricature. I've noticed in my own speech (northern Californian, I'm 33 y.o.) "BE all" is what I'd use as a general informal verbum dicendi, while my students would use "BE like". I don't know whether this is a merely generational thing or whether it reflects a dialect difference between north and south (California, that is). In any case, either of these can be used to introduce quotations without any caricature (even of voice), though they both do seem to increase the dramatic effect (as contrasted with "GO" or "SAY"). claudia brugman __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 91 10:59 U From: "Randy J. LaPolla" Subject: Re: 2.681 Responses re: Adam Kilgarriff's request for info about 'come' and 'bring' and Ellen Prince's responce about a paper by Fillmore, the relevant citations are Fillmore, Charles J. 1966. Deictic categories in the semantics of 'come'. Foundations of Language 2:219-227. ___. 1971. How to know whether you're coming or going. Linguistik 1971, ed. by Karl Hyldgard-Jensen, 369-379. Frankfurt: Athenum Verlag. (Reprinted in Essays on deixis, ed. by Gisa Rauh, 219-227. Tbingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.) ___. 1975b. Santa Cruz lectures on deixis 1971. Distibuted by Indiana University Linguistics Club. __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1991 12:44 EST From: Karen Christie Subject: Re: 2.677 Anymore, Last Names, ASL In response to the note about the 'new logic' (obviously meant to offend) about ASL and ASL Literature... I accept that perhaps my argument was not as articulately stated as I had hoped. My point was that there are parallels between traditional definitions of language and literature. Traditional Defnition: All languages are spoken. Therefore, ASL cannot be a language because it is not spoken. Traditional Definition: All literature exists in a written form. ASL does not have a written form, therefore, it does not have a literature. Granted these are very narrow and general defintions, however, I think there is a parallel between the two situations. Obviously, my very (unashamedly) biased implication is that linguists have researched ASL and shown it to be a language...and the same change in definition of literature will occur. I have also made the assumption that one of the reasons research related to ASL has only recently begun is because it is the language of a minority culture. Finally, if the writer of the previous note still objects to my reasoning or lack of it, I can respond with Socrates Syllogisms...However, I would prefer to have the writer respond without using the 'analysis' to hide his feelings. __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 14:38 +0800 From: MATTHEWS@HKUCC.BITNET Subject: Re: 2.632 Whorf Charles Laughlin mentions Berlin & Kay's classic work as being the best empirical tests done of the SWH and as disconfirming it. A follow-up study by Kay and Kempton is discussed in the Relativity chapter of Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things." The experiment involved chips ranging from blue to green, and found that (not) having a word for green in one's native language does affect how one rates the similarity of such items. Lakoff's wide-ranging discussion sees this as evidence of an area where relativity is found. Another attempt at an empirical test is Alfred Bloom's book "The Linguistic Shaping of Thought." He found that Chinese speakers had more difficulty comprehending a text full of counterfactual conditionals than English speakers, and attributed this to the lack of explicit coding of counterfactuals in Chinese. However, Terry Au and Lisa Garbern Liu in "Cognition" (1985?) replicated the experiment trying to avoid cultural bias, and found no significant difference. This case would appear to support the view that cultural, rather than linguistic differences are often responsible for apparent relativity effects. Stephen Matthews, U. of Hong Kong __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-687. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-688. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 230 Subject: 2.688 Conferences Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:56 EDT From: "NANCY M. IDE (914) 437 5988" Subject: Call for papers: Computational Intelligence 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:12 EDT From: "David_J.Dwyer" Subject: Conference on African Linguistics 3) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 17:27 From: EDMONDSONWH@vax1.bham.ac.uk Subject: Cognitive Science Seminar -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:56 EDT From: "NANCY M. IDE (914) 437 5988" Subject: Call for papers: Computational Intelligence Computational Approaches to Non-Literal Language COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE Special Issue CALL FOR PAPERS You are invited to submit a paper to a Special Issue of COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE Journal on Computational Approaches to Non-Literal Language, edited by Dan Fass, James Martin and Elizabeth Hinkelman. COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE has been publishing regularly four issues a year since 1984 with an international editorial board of 48 distinguished researchers covering all areas of AI. The executive editors are Nick Cercone and Gord McCalla. >From 1992 on, COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE will be published by Basil Blackwell Inc. The Special Issue is to appear in August 1992. Submission deadline is February 6th 1991. Please let Dan Fass know by e-mail or letter by November 15th if you intend to submit, giving a tentative title and brief description of the contents of your paper. 1. Focus of the Special Issue Non-literal language includes metaphor, idiom, "indirect" speech acts, implicature, hyperbole, metonymy, irony, simile, sarcasm, and other devices whose meaning cannot be obtained by direct composition of their constituent words. Papers are invited on topics including (but not limited to) the computer recognition, interpretation, acquisition, generation, and robust parsing of non-literal language. Issues of interest include: o the relationship of non-literal to literal language, o the adequacy of various forms of knowledge representation (symbolic vs connectionist vs statistical), o static vs dynamic mechanisms, o general vs idiosyncratic treatment of instances, o instances as novel vs conventional forms, o comparison and contrast of models of the various forms of non-literal language, o broader implications for AI. 2. Impetus for the Special Issue The editors of the Special Issue recently organized a workshop on non-literal language at IJCAI-91. Attendees, besides the organizers, were John Barnden, Ted Briscoe, Jerry Hobbs, Eric van der Linden, Hiroshi Motoda, Yamagami Matsumoto, David Powers, Lisa Rau, Cameron Shelley, Raoul Smith, Susan Weber, Sylvia Weber Russell, and Janet Wiles. The 169 page workshop proceedings will be available shortly as a technical report from the University of Colorado at Boulder. There will be a charge, to be determined. Please contact James Martin for further details. 3. Schedule for the Special Issue Date Stage Thurs Nov 14 1991 Notification of intention to submit. Thurs Feb 6 1992 Submission deadline. Thurs Mar 19 1992 Reviews returned. Thurs Apr 23 1992 Revised, accepted papers received. 4. Manuscript Preparation and Review Typical submissions should be 25-50 pages in manuscript form, though exceptions may be made. The manuscript should be double spaced and typed on one side of the page only. Each page of the manuscript should be numbered, beginning with the title page. The title page should include the title, authors' names, institution of origin, and its address (including postal code). Please include telephone number(s) and e-mail address. An abstract should be not more than 200 words, and on a separate page. References should not be cited in the manuscript. More detailed Instructions to Authors will be sent to those intending to submit a paper. Please note that for an author's submission to be reviewed, the author must review three other submissions to the Special Issue. 5. The Editors Dan Fass James Martin Centre for Systems Science, Computer Science Department and Simon Fraser University, Institute of Cognitive Science, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada. University of Colorado at Boulder, Tel: (604) 291-3208 Box 430, Boulder, CO 80309-0430, USA. Fax: (604) 291-4951 Tel: (303) 492-3552 E-mail: fass@cs.sfu.ca Fax: (303) 492-2844 E-mail: martin@boulder.colorado.edu Elizabeth Hinkelman Center for Information and Language Studies, University of Chicago, 1100 E. 57th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. Tel: (312) 702-8887 Fax: (312) 702-0775 E-mail: eliz@tira.uchicago.edu __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:12 EDT From: "David_J.Dwyer" Subject: Conference on African Linguistics PLEASE ANNOUNCE THIS MESSAGE TO ALL SUBSCRIBERS. Call for Papers 23rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics Michigan State University - March 26 - 29, 1992 To present a 20 minute paper at the 23rd ACAL, send six copies of a camera-ready abstract to: The 23rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics, African Studies Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, by 15 December 1992. Place the text of the abstract (using black ribbons, type or ink) entirely within box 7.25 inches (185mm) wide by 3 inches (75mm) high. On separate lines enclose the following information: 1. LAST NAME, First Name, Professional title, 2. Institutional affiliation, 3. Address including country and postal code (use 2 lines if necessary). 4. Title of the paper, 5. Languages involved and topic area of the paper. Phonology, Tone, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Lexicography, Historical/Comparative, Pidgins/Creoles, Language Planning, Literacy, Language Contact, Language Teaching, Sociolinguistics, African American Language, Literacy, Literature, Multilingualism, Computers, ... You should receive information concerning the acceptance of your paper along with additional information about the conference, lodging and other arrangements by 1/31/92.^Z^Z __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 17:27 From: EDMONDSONWH@vax1.bham.ac.uk Subject: Cognitive Science Seminar Re: the seminars below. If anyone is interested and in the country and not too far away and they would like to attend either/both of the following, then please let me or Julie know at the number(s) given, or by email. William Edmondson. *** THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM COGNITIVE SCIENCE DOUBLE SEMINARS LANGUAGE ACQUISTION 6th. November 4 pm - 8 pm Martin Atkinson (University of Essex): Principles, parameters and the non-linguistic nature of early child language. & Melissa Bowerman (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics): The origins of childrenUs spatial semantic categories: Cognitive versus linguistic determinants. REASONING AND PROBLEM SOLVING. 4th. December 4 pm - 8 pm Koen Lamberts (Leuven) & Jonathan Evans (Polytechnic South West) [Titles of the talks available later.] The first paper in each double seminar begins at 4pm with questions at 5pm and the break for supper at 5.30pm. The second paper begins at 6.30pm and the session ends at 8pm. The buffet supper (for which there will be nominal charge) will be available between the two seminars to those who book by the Monday preceding the Wednesday of the talks. To make your booking please contact Julie Heathcote on +44-21-414-4773. The seminars take place in Room G12 in the School of Computer Science. For further information contact Wlliam Edmondson on +44-21-414-4763, or by FAX on +44-21-414-4281, or by email:- edmondsonwh@uk.ac.birmingham.vax1 __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-688. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-689. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 65 Subject: 2.689 Jobs Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1991 10:31:41 CDT From: 1ECMEA@UTSA86.UTSA.EDU Subject: Job Announcement 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 08:09:20 PDT From: COMRIE@VM.USC.EDU Subject: Post-Doc at U. of Southern California -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1991 10:31:41 CDT From: 1ECMEA@UTSA86.UTSA.EDU Subject: Job Announcement University of Texas at San Antonio English, Classics, and Philosophy San Antonio, TX 78248-0643 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR--TENURE TRACK POSITION Ph.D. in Linguistics by Dec. 31, 1991. Specialty in Historical Linguistics with demonstrated competence in modern grammar, history of the English language, and descriptive linguistics. Must provide evidence of superior teaching at the college level. Must have commitment to research and expectation of scholarly achievement. Minorities and women encouraged to apply. Application deadline: Nov. 20, 1991. Send to: Alan E. Craven Division of English, Classics, and Philosophy University of Texas at San Antonio San Antonio, Texas 78249-0643 __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 08:09:20 PDT From: COMRIE@VM.USC.EDU Subject: Post-Doc at U. of Southern California UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, Los Angeles CA 90089-1693. Applications are invited for a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics, in the area of Sociolinguistics. This is a non-tenure-track one-year appointment for the academic year 1992-93. Teaching duties include one course in each of two semesters. The PhD must be in hand at the time of appointment and must not have been awarded prior to September 1985. The salary is approximately $27,500 with full faculty fringe benefits. The deadline for applications is February 1, 1992. Send applications (cv, statement of research interests, graduate transcript, and 3 letters of reference) to Chair, Department of Linguistics, 301 Grace Ford Salvatori Hall. USC is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-689. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-690. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 95 Subject: 2.690 Finiteness, like, you guys Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 14:57:21 EDT From: Gilbert Harman Subject: Infinite sentences? 2) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1991 14:44 PDT From: Scott Delancey Subject: I'm like 3) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1991 16:48 PDT From: Scott Delancey Subject: you guys -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 14:57:21 EDT From: Gilbert Harman Subject: Infinite sentences? It is sometimes said that ordinary linguistic communication involves common knowledge of certain presuppositions, for example, that the speaker is trying to say something to someone. The relevant common knowledge is sometimes explained as follows. (1) I am trying to tell you something; I know that I am trying to tell you something; you know that I am trying to tell you something; I know that you know that I am trying to tell you something; you know that you know that I am trying to tell you something; ... The three dots in (1) indicate that (1) is to be continued in the obvious way infinitely. This would seem to be an infinite sentence. Maybe there could even be a larger sentence embedding an infinite sentence of this sort: (2) Lewis says that I communicating with you only if I am trying to tell you something, I know that I am trying to tell you something, you know that I am trying to tell you something, I knw that you know that I am trying to tell you something, you know that you know that I am trying to tell you something, ..., but he can't be right about that, can he? Gil Harman __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1991 14:44 PDT From: Scott Delancey Subject: I'm like I come from the wrong time and place (b. 1949 in upstate NY) to be an "I'm like ..." speaker, but I just yesterday noticed in my own informal narrative speech a construction that looks like a likely precursor: so I walk in and everybody's looking at me like "Where have you been?" This seems pretty normal to me, though I have no intuitions about how it might sound to older speakers than I. Scott DeLancey __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1991 16:48 PDT From: Scott Delancey Subject: you guys I'm certainly a native "you guys" speaker; for me it is indubitably the grammaticalized plural form. I had the impression, though I can't recall now whether I read it somewhere or absorbed it less formally somehow, that there was a set of traceable isoglosses in the East, such that _y'all_ is Southern, _you'uns_ Midland, and in the North _youse_ was urban working class, and -you guys_ everywhere else. Scott DeLancey __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-690. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-691. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 156 Subject: 2.691 2nd Person Pronouns, Washed, Possessive Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 14:35:19 CDT From: Nancy L. Dray Subject: "you guys"/re 2nd plu pronouns 2) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 07:29:23 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: wants washed: analogy? 3) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 22:20:18 EST From: RGAGNE@ucs.indiana.edu Subject: possessive -s 4) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 0:46 BST From: Steve Harlow Subject: yours -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 14:35:19 CDT From: Nancy L. Dray Subject: "you guys"/re 2nd plu pronouns [Please pardon this message being a bit out of date. I originally sent it Wed 9 Oct, but it vanished into the ether (got killed in a crash), and I am now resubmitting it-----NLD, Fri 18 Oct] The discussion of "polite pronouns" has [had] been branching into second-person plurals, so I thought I might contribute something from my own usage: It seems that for me "you" by itself has to be singular, but I don't have a consistent second-person plural form. I can use "you all" --no contraction--when a largish number of people are involved (I'm not sure precisely what the relevant criteria are; see note below). But I'm not from a "y'all" dialect, and what seems to be my usual grammatical plural form is "you guys." The problem with this is register. (Gender isn't a problem; "you guys" is not, for me, marked for gender.) So, for example, I have found myself saying, to two senior professors with whom I normally use deferential forms of speech,"Will you guys be going to the meeting?". Indeed, I cannot say simply "Will you be going to the meeting?" to two or more people without consciously forcing myself to (i.e., without consciously speaking another dialect), and I think that in such circumstances I am still inclined to mark this in some way, e.g., by nodding my head toward each person in turn as I say "you," so that I am in effect using the singular to two separate addressees simultaneously. ("You both" or "both of you" would of course be possible, but asks a different question--i.e., the "you guys" form is not asking whether BOTH are going, but simply asking both whether they are going. I think "all" runs into similar problems in some contexts, but not as strongly as "both," so I can sometimes use "you all" as a substitute for "you guys," but not always. Thus, I can say "Are you all going to the meeting?" either to ask OF ALL whether they are going or to ask IF IT IS THE CASE THAT ALL are going--though for the latter I think I would be more likely to use "Are all of you going...?" or "Are you ALL going...?". When used for "you-plural", both "you guys" and "you all" have the primary stress on "you".) So despite the register problems I do find myself using "you guys" in formal circumstances--i.e., I start to use it and only stop myself as an afterthought--and I think that this itself lends support to the hypothesis that "you guys" is becoming a grammatical plural for me, and less and less transparent; perhaps it is just the unfortunate homophony with a markedly informal term that still causes me to notice it and try to retract it? The more clearcut grammaticalization, though, is that "you" on its own can only be singular for me. Grammaticalizing what form fills the other slot (and there does seem to be a palpable "other slot") seems to be secondary--but "you guys" may be well on its way. What do you all* think? More data? I'm sure there must be something in American Speech on this--any references? Thanks. NLD *I don't know why "you all" seems more natural here than "you guys." Perhaps "you guys" seems too individuated. In any event, I am beginning to doubt what I said before about "you guys" being WELL on its way to becoming just "you-plural." But perhaps it is on its way--or at least worth watching. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 07:29:23 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: wants washed: analogy? The following is from a local administrative message received this morning: > The Microwave that provides ethernet connectivity for Bld 20 > has been scheduled down for emergency maintenance during the hours The author is not a "wants washed" speaker, nor is this a "wants washed" region. I wonder if something like this could provide a plausible analogic path for development of the "wants washed" construction. __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 22:20:18 EST From: RGAGNE@ucs.indiana.edu Subject: possessive -s William Edmondson says that I only addressed the origin of possessive -s, not its status as a phrasal clitic. That was all I meant to do. I did not want to make any claims about the proper synchronic analysis of the form, only to point out that the old story about its descent from "his" is just plain wrong. I am sorry to see the word "only" attached to that attempt, because I think it is important to keep our facts straight, even in areas outside our own. Elise Morse-Gagne __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 0:46 BST From: Steve Harlow Subject: yours The discussion about 'yours' intiated (I think) by And Rosta, reminds me of what seems like a similar phenomenon with coordination. If you produce a coordinate possessive structure, of which the last item is a pronoun, you get by analogy with non-pronominal NPs and pronominal possessives (for example) the following (increasingly desperate) range of possibilities: John's and my car John and my car John and I's car John's and I's car John and mine car John's and mine car John and me's car John's and me's car None of these is any good for me (nor for many British English speakers I have asked about the topic). The only grammatical way for us to express this is by paraphrase - eg. 'the car belonging to John and me'. Steve Harlow University of York __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-691. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-692. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 129 Subject: 2.692 Phonology, Pauses, R-linking Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 9:36 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.674 Phonological Issues 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1991 09:37:18 +0100 From: kjetilrh@hedda.uio.no Subject: Filled pauses 3) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 00:00:30 -0500 From: macaulay@j.cc.purdue.edu (Monica Macaulay) Subject: filled pauses 4) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1991 08:44 CST From: LIFY460@orange.cc.utexas.edu Subject: Re: 2.675 Pauses 5) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 91 11:06:36 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: 2.681 R-linking -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 9:36 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.674 Phonological Issues Jim Scobbie points out that one way to deal with 'intrusive stops' is by 'altering the timing and overlap of the exponents of the features in question' and that 'this is to claim that there are sophisticated, systematic, non-univeral rules of phonetic implementation. Is this contraversial?' I don't know if it is or not; but I think it is right. Why else do different languages just sound different? French doesn't sound like English in any way, nor does German, or any other language. Why? because the 'low level' phonetics is just different. What then does it mean to say that certain phonological features are 'the same' when their interpretation in different languages is different? or when the features they stand in relation to in different languages is different? If phonetic interpretation rules are non-universal (as I believe), to what extent can phonological features said to be universal? -- and if each language has a different interpretation of 'the same' feature, what are the constraints on what might constitute an interpretation of that feature so that you recognise it as 'the same'? Richard Ogden __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1991 09:37:18 +0100 From: kjetilrh@hedda.uio.no Subject: Filled pauses Bulgarian has a well-developed system of pause fillers: _tova_ (proximal demonstrative, neuter) for definite NP's, _takova_ (demonstrative adjective/pronoun,neuter, "such") for indefinite NP's, and _takovam_ (conjugated as a verb of the a-class) for verbs. Let me also point out a definite advantage that similar pause-fillers have over _um_, _e:_ and the like: you can actually go on speaking, even if you have forgotten much of what you were going to say. -Kjetil Ra Hauge, U. of Oslo, P.O. Box 1030 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo 3, Norway -E-mail: kjetilrh@hedda.uio.no -Fax: +472-454310 -Phone: +472-456710 __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 00:00:30 -0500 From: macaulay@j.cc.purdue.edu (Monica Macaulay) Subject: filled pauses Add to our list: in Spanish (Mexican, anyway) I've heard "este" ('this') used to hold the floor... Mixtec speakers (bilingual in Mixtec & Spanish) use it while speaking Mixtec, too. Monica __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1991 08:44 CST From: LIFY460@orange.cc.utexas.edu Subject: Re: 2.675 Pauses Lee Hartman's contribution about final _um_ reminded me of something I noticed 20 years ago in Zurich, namely final _oder_ 'or'. My impression at the time was that it was an open-minded invitation for discourse participants to present an alternative viewpoint. Christine Kamprath __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 91 11:06:36 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: 2.681 R-linking My understanding is that you get r-linking primarily to avoid a hiatus between vowels. With tense "u," there's an off-glide "w" to avoid the hiatus, so it's not surprising to find that Ellen doesn't get r-linking in that environment. Linking "-r" is also sometimes present word-finally before a pause (my British grandmother said "akapulker" for "Acapulco" even at the end of a sentence). But a word-final "-r" after tense "u" amounts to a final consonant cluster [wr], which is so awkward for English speakers that epenthesis or vowel shortening would be used to correct it. -- Rick __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-692. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-693. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 149 Subject: 2.693 Spanish MT; Prolog Course Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 10:09:48 GMT From: joseba@goya.dit.upm.es (Joseba Abaitua) Subject: Spanish MT 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 12:34:51 CET From: amsterdam linguistic software Subject: Prolog Course Available -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 10:09:48 GMT From: joseba@goya.dit.upm.es (Joseba Abaitua) Subject: Spanish MT There are at least the following MT projects in Spain that involve Spanish as source or target language: - IBM LMT Contact person: Luis de Sopen~a - Siemmens-Nixdorf METAL Contact person: Juan Alberto Alonso - Fujitsu ATLAS Contact person: Jorge Vivaldi Sabino Arana 34, 2 E-08028 Barcelona - Universidad de Barcelona EUROTRA Contact person: Nuria Bel Avda. Vallvidrera, 25-27 E-08017 Barcelona Most famous and veteran systems in USA are the SPANAN (Sp->En) and ENGSPAN (En->Sp), developed by the Panamerican Helth Organization. SYSTRAN, in Europe accesible via Minitel, also offers Spanish as either source or target language. Commercial MT or CAT systems that include Spanish are: WEIDNER, ALPS, LOGOS On another scale, and also running on PCs are: PC-Translator (Linguistic Products), Translate (Finalsoft Corp.), Toltran (Toltran Ltd.). I hope this may help you, Best wishes, Joseba Abaitua Universidad de Deusto Apartado 1 E-48080 Bilbao Spain __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 91 12:34:51 CET From: amsterdam linguistic software Subject: Prolog Course Available [The following message is made available solely for the information of LINGUIST subscribers. The LINGUIST moderators do not in any way endorse the use of the software which it advertises.] Amsterdam Linguistic Software P.O. Box 3602 1001 AK Amsterdam The Netherlands ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Can you read this text ? ======================== unhappy(X) :- linguist(X), not(know(X,prolog)). If not, you must be unhappy, for that's what the text, written in Prolog, says: "Any linguist who does not know Prolog is unhappy". In order to bring your unhappiness to an end, ALS offer PROCOURSE: a Prolog course for linguists ========= by Simon C. Dik and Peter Kahrel Prolog is a high-level programming language that is becoming more and more popular in computational linguistics. Many linguists would like (or need) to learn this language, but do not really know where to start and how to go about it. If you are among them, ProCourse, a computerized Prolog course, is exactly what you need. In a series of 144 exercises concerning problems of orthography, phonology, morphology, and syntax, ProCourse teaches you the basic principles of Prolog in such a way, that at the end of the course you are able to go on programming in Prolog yourself. You learn Prolog by "doing" it. Therefore, a few minutes after having started the course, you are doing your first practical exercises and getting your first results. The only things you need in order to use ProCourse is an IBM compatible computer and the knowledge to switch it on. ProCourse is provided with a standard Prolog interpreter, but runs on many other interpreters as well, sometimes after minor adjustments. ProCourse comes with a manual that contains all the exercises on paper, plus the answers to all the problems discussed. The manual also tells you how to set up the course files and how to start the course, and gives some references for further study. ProCourse Diskette + Manual Price HFL 200.- (or 110 US$) (Includes LPA Prolog interpreter) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Interested? This is how you can order ProCourse: * give your credit card number (Mastercard/ Eurocard) and expiry date * transfer the amount directly to giro 3159559 * transfer the amount directly to bank account 40.32.32.996. Bank details: ABN-Amro Bank, P.O. Box 19186, 1000 GD Amsterdam. Please indicate which diskette type you want (3.5 or 5.25 inch). Amsterdam Linguistic Software P.O. Box 3602 1001 AK Amsterdam The Netherlands e-mail: amling@sara.nl __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-693. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-694. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 140 Subject: 2.694 Calls for Papers Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 00:50:32 EDT From: matsuba@carr.yorku.ca Subject: Call for Graduate Student Papers 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 07:20:44 MST From: "don l. f. nilsen" Subject: Paris Humor Conference Call For Papers Deadline -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 00:50:32 EDT From: matsuba@carr.yorku.ca Subject: Call for Graduate Student Papers 00000000000000000000000000 RD: Graduate Research in the Arts 00000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000 A CALL FOR PAPERS AND READERS 00000000000000000000000000 00000000:::::::::::0000000 RD: GRADUATE RESEARCH IN THE ARTS is a refereed 000000: DDDDD:000000 journal dedicated to publishing the work of 0000: DDDDDDD:0000 graduate scholars in the Arts. It provides an 000: RRRRR D DD:000 appropriate forum for their scholarly work and a 00: R R D DDDD DD:00 collective voice for their issues and interests. 0: RRRRR D DDDDD DD:0 0: R R D DDDDD DD:0 Papers for RD are now being solicited from 00: R R D DDDD D:000 graduate students in the Arts, Fine Arts, and 000: R R D DD:000 Humanities in any of the following areas: 0000: DDDDDDD:0000 * language, literature and other 00000::: DDDD:::00000 artifacts/artefacts 0000000::::::::::::0000000 * constructions of the self, gender, 00000000000000000000000000 class and race 00000000000000000000000000 * the academy itself and its institutional 00000000000000000000000000 imperatives. 00000000000000000000000000 Multidisciplinary and collaborative work is encouraged. Address two copies of each paper to the editors with a SASE and proof of current enrollment in a graduate programme (for instance, photocopy of a student card or letter from the programme). Submissions can also be sent on disk (DOS or Macintosh format) or by e-mail. If you intend to send papers by e-mail, please contact the editors to receive guidelines for indicating foreign or special characters and italics. All submissions should conform to the _MLA Style Manual_. RD is also presently accepting applications from graduate students to act as readers of papers. Volunteers should include a CV, or a brief summary of their scholarly work and publications. DEADLINES: Submissions for RD 1 (Spring 1992) must be postmarked by 15 December 1991. Submissions for RD 2 (Fall 1992) will be accepted until 31 August 1992. SUBSCRIPTIONS: 1 Year 2 Years Student $16.00 $30.00 Individual/Institution $24.00 $44.00 Please add 7% for GST. Made checks payable to RD. Individuals who have access to e-mail can receive electronic versions of the journal free of charge by sending their name, status (student, faculty, other) and e-mail address to the editors. ADDRESS: Editors, RD York University c/o Graduate Programme in English 215 Stong College 4700 Keele Street North York, Ontario CANADA M3J 1P3 bitnet: RD@WRITER YORKU.CA EDITORS: Stephen N. Matsuba Rod Lohin EDITORIAL BOARD: Clint Burnham Cecily Devereux Mark Dineen Gayle Irwin Sherry Rowley Glenn Stillar Scott Wright =============================================================================== ******SUBSCRIPTION FORM****** RD: Graduate Research in the Art RD will be published twice per year (Spring and Fall), beginning in 1992. Subscriptions: One Year Two Year Student __$16.00 __$30.00 Individual or Institution __$24.00 __$44.00 Number of copies __1 __2 ___ Please add 7% for GST in Canada; other countries pay in US Funds. Name:__________________________________________________________________ Address:_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 07:20:44 MST From: "don l. f. nilsen" Subject: Paris Humor Conference Call For Papers Deadline The deadline for the Call for Papers for the Paris Humor conference is October 31, 1991. We will accept paper proposals only for two weeks past this deadline. =-) ;-> 8*) {^_^} Don L. F. Nilsen , (602) 965-7592 Executive Secretary International Society for Humor Studies English Department Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-0302 __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-694. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-695. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 156 Subject: 2.695 Rhetorical Questions and Textual Meaning Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 14:58:12 CST From: huttar%dallas@utafll.uta.edu Subject: essays on language 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 09:21:03 CST From: huttar%dallas@utafll.uta.edu Subject: rhetorical questions (2.635) 3) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 11:35:55 EDT From: Niko Besnier Subject: Textual meaning -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 14:58:12 CST From: huttar%dallas@utafll.uta.edu Subject: essays on language In response to the query in LINGUIST 2.668: there may be essays useful for your purposes in Paul A. Eschholz, Alfred F. Rosa, and Virginia P. Clark, eds., _Language Awareness_ (NY: St. Martin's Press). The edition I have is the 2nd ed., 1978; there may well be later ones. It includes Orwell. A rather different sort of collection is Clark, Eschholz and Rosa, _Language: Introductory Readings_, same publisher; 2nd ed. is 1977, but I think there are later eds. __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 09:21:03 CST From: huttar%dallas@utafll.uta.edu Subject: rhetorical questions (2.635) In response to Niko Besnier's query: James F. Park, "Paragraph in Djuka deliberative discourse" in Stephen H. Levinsohn, ed., _Discourse studies in Djuka and Saramaccan_ (_Languages of the Guianas_, Vol. III) (SIL: Paramaribo, 1981), pp. 1-30 has a little on rhetorical questions in Ndjuka, studied in reference to discourse function etc. Although the comments are brief, they may be of special interest to your colleague in Kenya since the genre analyzed is the article is a _kuutu_ or palaver / town meeting. Since most of SIL's work in translation has been Bible translation, a number of our members have looked at rhetorical questions (RQs) in various "target" languages as well as in biblical languages. The following may be of interest: LARSON, Mildred. 1984. _Meaning-based Translation_ Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Overview of functions of RQ's on pp. 234-238. _Notes on Translation_ #44 (June 1972) has articles on RQ's in languages of the Philippines (Manobo), India (Korku), Mexico (Otomi, Trique) and Ghana (Vagla). The article on Manobo compares RQ's in that language and in English. An article on Inga of Colombia deals with questions generally, including RQ's, again dealing with discourse function. The volume also contains 2 brief anecdotal contributions illustrating differences between pragmatic function of questions in various cultures. _Notes on Translation_ #87 (2/82) and #89 (6/82) are given entirely to RQ's in Romans (#87) and 1 Corinthians and Galatians (#89); pp. 3-33 of #97 (10/1983) handles RQ's in 19 other New Testament books. #104 (12/84), pp. 15-25 has "RQ's in Ese Ejja of Bolivia" by Joyce Prettol; #113 (6/86), pp. 25-27 has "What shall we say then? RQ's used as a linking device in Romans" by Glyn Griffiths, which includes something on RQ's in Kadiweu of Brazil. Since around 1987, _Notes on Translation_ has been appearing quarterly, with a new numbering sequence. Vol. 2, No. 1 (1988) has Richard Speece, "RQ's in Angave" (Papua New Guinea) on pp. 47-53; Vol. 3, No. 4 (1989) has Tom Phinnemore, "Questions: You might get a lot more than you asked for" on pp. 1-17, dealing with differing pragmatic functions of RQ's and other questions in various cultures. All of the above can be ordered from International Academic Bookstore, Box C, 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236. Phone (214) 709-2404, FAX (214) 709-2433. Many of the older _Notes_ are out of print in hard copy, but can be ordered in microfiche or, in most cases, photocopy. In Kenya, SIL at P.O. Box 44456, Nairobi, probably has a number of these available in their library. George Huttar (huttar@sil.org) __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 91 11:35:55 EDT From: Niko Besnier Subject: Textual meaning Someone asked recently about `covert/overt' levels of meaning in texts. (I deleted the message before I got a chance to note down the requester's name.) More than ever a timely topic in this country, with the sort of textual manipulations for political purposes that went on in the supreme-court nomination hearings that just ended! There is no single school that has focused on this sort of thing. Rather, many people with many different approaches have looked at the topic at different time. Perhaps the group that comes closest to having made a concerted contribution to this area of discourse is the group clustering around Gunter Kress and colleagues at the U of Sydney and Macquarie U, who align themselves with Halliday's systemic linguistics. They've written about representation and point of view in newspaper headlines and press reportage, e.g. the difference between `Picketing curtailed coal production' and `Coal production was disrupted by picketing miners'. I'd suggest the requester take a look at the following: G. Kress & R. Hodge. 1979. Language as Ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. D. Birch & M. O'Toole. eds. 1988. Functions of Style. London: Pinter. R. Fowler, R. Hodge, G. Kress, & T. Trew. 1979. Language and Control. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Some of the literature on political language in various societies can also be relevant. See: R. Paine. ed. 1981. Politically Speaking. Philadelphia: ISHI. D. Parkin. 1984. Political language. Annual Review of Anthropology 13:345-65. J. Wilson. 1990. Politically Speaking. Oxford: Blackwell. A lot of the questions that come up when one looks at this sort of discourse fall under the general rubric of `affect on language'. The reason why some textual meaning appears `covert' is that they take place at the level of affective meaning, which is typically indexical in nature, and thus hard to pin down because of the semiotic characteristics of indexes. The following review discusses this rubric and provides a mere 450 references on the topic: N. Besnier. 1990. Language and Affect. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:419-51. Hope this helps. Niko Besnier Department of Anthropology Yale University __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-695. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-696. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 107 Subject: 2.696 Using Names Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 09:36:43 EDT From: Michael Newman Subject: Re: 2.677 Anymore, Last Names, ASL 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 13:53:06 CDT From: GA3704@SIUCVMB.BITNET Subject: Re 2.655 Polite Pronouns 3) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 12:18:53 -0500 From: "Larry G. Hutchinson" Subject: Re: 2.677 Anymore, Last Names, ASL -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 09:36:43 EDT From: Michael Newman Subject: Re: 2.677 Anymore, Last Names, ASL In response to Paul Saka's comments about how academic teachers in his high school used first names and gym teachers last names, and about how he associated last-naming with budding militarism. My feelings exactly, although I would go as far back as Junior High. I went to school in public schools in New York, and my impression is much the same about teachers' usages. I remember a stage when some students--mostly boys--last named too, but these were usually jocks or at least jock wannabes. Last-naming still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and even when my ESL students do it to me--for completely dif- ferent reasons--I still cringe. That, of course, brings up another interesting question-- what are professors called? __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 13:53:06 CDT From: GA3704@SIUCVMB.BITNET Subject: Re 2.655 Polite Pronouns I'd like to echo Ellen Prince's puzzlement about the discomfort students express if addressed by their last names. About twenty years ago when I was a Teaching fellow at Penn, I was approached by a group of my first-year French students who asked me to call them by first name; anything else didn't seem right to them. Like Ellen, I too was pleased to be called by last name when I reached 7th grade (also large Brooklyn public school); it was a sign of not being a little kid any more. Let me add another nuance (this one definitely a function, at least for me, of pre-feminist times): I remember being thrilled when one of my teachers dropped the 'Miss' and used just my last name - it was a sign of special status for a girl, at least in my school at that time, to be addressed like a boy! Margaret Winters __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 12:18:53 -0500 From: "Larry G. Hutchinson" Subject: Re: 2.677 Anymore, Last Names, ASL The issue of a bare last name as a form af address is a very interesting and very subtle one. 1) I feel it is, with recent generations at least, originally a MALE usage, not just military, gym teachers, etc. Of course, as women have moved into the military they have adopted this usage as well. An instructive example is my own linguistics department. A few years ago a female member of the faculty voiced a mild objection to the way members of the dept. addressed each other, claiming the males used last names to each other but not to the females. We discussed, without rancor I hasten to add, whether this was really true, whether it was undesirable, what it all really meant, etc. As an experiment (of sorts) I promised to try to use her last name in as natural a way as possible for the next week, and she would try to use last names herself for the week. Here are the facts: she couldn't do it quite right (which relates to the sex-linked usage I think, and also to point 2 below), and she insisted I stop forever at the end of the week. She definitely found it offensive. A related matter: the use of bare last name to REFER may well also be sex-linked and related to its use in ADDRESS. I tried looking through minutes of depart- mental meetings to see if a pattern existed, but this was inconclusive. 2) Among males themselves, the usage is subtle and I don't understand it myself, analytically. But this much seems clear: bare last names are used to address strangers in some highly constrained environments such as the military and sports, but sometimes with demeaning intent and sometimes with inclusion- in-the-group intent, and they used with intimate friends, but not with less intimate friends. Two, perhaps interesting examples: a) in male groups such as camping trips I have seen men ostracized by first name use, the "ins" using only last names withj each other. b) I personally have many male friends, real friends of many years standing, whom I would never address by last name. The friendship is just not intimate enough. I have tried a couple of times, in the experiment mode, to the chagrin and discomfort of both addresser and addressee. __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-696. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-697. Tue 22 Oct 1991. Lines: 50 Subject: 2.697 Queries: Chinese, Dravidian Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 0:14:20 CDT From: stvan@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Laurel Smith Stvan) Subject: Chinese NP sources 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:16:44 EDT From: madhav.deshpande@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: Origin of Retroflexion in Dravidian -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 0:14:20 CDT From: stvan@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Laurel Smith Stvan) Subject: Chinese NP sources I am looking for references to works on Chinese NPs (in the hope of finding data for a DP-analysis approach to Chinese.) Does anyone know likely sources? Thanks, Laurel Smith Stvan Northwestern University __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 10:16:44 EDT From: madhav.deshpande@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: Origin of Retroflexion in Dravidian This is a question for all those experts in Nostratic theory out there. As far as we know, retroflex consonants are reconstructed as far back as Proto-Dravidian. If Dravidian is a branch of Nostratic family, what happens to retroflexion? Do we reconstruct retroflexion to Proto-Nostratic? Or, do we claim that Dravidian independently developed retroflexion? Any suggestions? From: Madhav M. Deshpande, University of Michigan __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-697. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-698. Wed 23 Oct 1991. Lines: 145 Subject: 2.698 Queries Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1991 9:52:14 +0800 (SST) From: A_DENCH@FENNEL.CC.UWA.OZ.AU Subject: Bif! Bop! Kapow! 2) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 17:43:47 EDT From: Michael Covington Subject: Pragmatics 3) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 00:08 EST From: BARBARA PARTEE Subject: Call for Errata 4) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1991 10:01:22 +0800 (SST) From: A_DENCH@FENNEL.CC.UWA.OZ.AU Subject: categorial grammars of Latin 5) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 13:37 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.690 Finitenes, like, you guys 6) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 9:04:49 CDT From: Dennis Baron Subject: you guys's gender -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1991 9:52:14 +0800 (SST) From: A_DENCH@FENNEL.CC.UWA.OZ.AU Subject: Bif! Bop! Kapow! I'm looking for a linguistic term for that class of words which regularly appear in the vivid colours when Batman or whoever indulges in a little gratuitous violence. No this is a serious request. I am editing a series of texts in the (alas somewhat moribund) Nyungar language of southwest Australia and come across a variety of such terms. Appart from general flavour they do a good job of partitioning a narrative. One such text, about the first culture hero to discover women, includes at least the following: dung! (the sound of hero's suddenly erect penis hitting his chest) dangkarl-dangkarl (the "snarling" sound his penis makes as he chases the women) derrku-derrku (the scraping noise as the women push into a cave to escape) binj-binj-binj (the ringing noise his penis makes as it bounces off the rocks at cave's entrance) Thankyou Mark Ellison for suggesting the term "ejaculative", but I'm not sure it's entirely appropriate. I'd appreciate any suggestions. Please don't send me examples of similar words in other languages, or your Freudian analysis of the text. Alan Dench Department of Anthropology University of Western Australia Nedlands WA 6009 A_DENCH@fennel.cs.uwa.oz.au __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 17:43:47 EDT From: Michael Covington Subject: Pragmatics Where and when was the first university course devoted wholly to pragmatics, and called by that name? Was it Levinson's course at Cambridge in spring 1978, or somewhere else, earlier? __________________________________________________________________________ 3) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 00:08 EST From: BARBARA PARTEE Subject: Call for Errata Mathematical Methods in Linguistics, by Barbara Partee, Alice ter Meulen, and Robert Wall is about to be reprinted. Please send any corrections to atm@ucs.indiana.edu. Your help is much appreciated! Alice ter Meulen (forwarded to linguistnet by Barbara Partee) __________________________________________________________________________ 4) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1991 10:01:22 +0800 (SST) From: A_DENCH@FENNEL.CC.UWA.OZ.AU Subject: categorial grammars of Latin I would like references to any treatments of Latin NPs within the general framework of categorial grammar. Analyses incorporating some kind of Motagovian semantics for a determiner-less NP are of special interest to me. And/or any analyses of languages in which a noun/adjective distinction cannot be maintained without some difficulty. Thanks Alan Dench Department of Anthropology University of Western Australia Nedlands WA 6009 A_DENCH@fennel.cs.uwa.oz.au __________________________________________________________________________ 5) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 13:37 BST From: Richard Ogden Subject: RE: 2.690 Finitenes, like, you guys doesn't anyone else have 'you lot' as a possible plural? Richard Ogden __________________________________________________________________________ 6) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 9:04:49 CDT From: Dennis Baron Subject: you guys's gender We were discussing _you guys_ in my seminar last week, coin- cidentally, and the question of gender marking came up. There seems to be quite a disagreement among the 13 grad students about whether -you guys_ is masculine or neuter. Several students insisted they could use it for an all female group, others said only an all male or mixed group. My sense of the form is that for many women it may function _only_ to indicate an all female group, ie, that it has replaced the out of favor _girls_. All the students were surprised at the etymology of _guy_, by the way. I'd be interested in hearing more comments about the gender marking of this form in your (you guys's [gaizez] experience). __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-698. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-699. Wed 23 Oct 1991. Lines: 79 Subject: 2.699 The Closing of Linguistics at Minnesota Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 17:03 CDT From: ASHELDON@vx.acs.umn.edu Subject: Re: Closing Lx at Minnesota -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 17:03 CDT From: ASHELDON@vx.acs.umn.edu Subject: Re: Closing Lx at Minnesota This is a brief update on the closing of the Linguistics Department at Minnesota: Thank you to everyone who has written letters of support from the outside for us. Not only has Dean Julia Davis received them, but we have also distributed them to the three CLA committees who will be voting on the dean's proposal. As of today, 10/23/91, our situation is very bad here, and it seems extremely likely that a coherent linguistics curriculum will be abolished and the faculty will be scattered to other departments. We are working hard to prevent that, but have been hampered by 1) a lack of time to solidify alternatives, such as a merger with some other unit or alternative ways to save money and still keep the linguistics currculum and degrees, 2) disinformation or lack of information about the department which is being used as a basis for the decision, 3) hard ball politics from uninformed people who speak against us in public meetings, 4) the administrative politics of playing linguistics against other departments in the scramble for limited resources, 5) being chosen the scapegoat in a game of terrorism in which the message to other faculty is "it could be you". It is very hard for anyone to move in a careful, intelligent, and deliberative way in making such an important decision in this atmosphere and events indicate that enough people in the College don't want to be careful and that they may win. Having had this proposal thrown in our laps on October 9th, the College asked for the "consultative" process to end on October 22nd. That has now been extended one week, when the Assembly will reconvene to vote (on Tuesday 10/29). The sense here is that it most likely will be a rubber stamping process. A number of us in the department are concerned that there has been a violation of due process here, that academic precedent will be set in abolishing an entire discipline at a university, and that this will have been accomplished swiftly, easily, and on the initiative of administrators. Which discipline might be next, or which linguistics department? This is stuff for the AAUP as well as the Chronicle of Higher Education, if there were time for us to pursue it, which there is precious little of. Letters are still welcomed (please send the Linguistics department a copy for our files), as well as any other initiatives and actions that could prevent the abandonment of linguistics at Minnesota. The addresses are: Dean Julia Davis College of Liberal Arts, U of MN 215 Johnston Hall Minneapolis, MN 55455 612-624-2535 BARDOUCH@UMNACVX (BITNET) BARDOUCH@VX.ACS.UMN.EDU (INTERNET) fax no. is 612-624-6549, label it for "Dean Julia Davis" Dept. of Linguistics UMLING@UMNACUX (BITNET) UMLING@UX.ACS.UMN.EDU (INTERNET) 24 hour fax no. is 612-625-2312, label it for "Dept. of Linguistics" Linguist List: Vol-2-699. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-700. Thu 24 Oct 1991. Lines: 123 Subject: 2.700 Whorf Moderators: Anthony Aristar Helen Dry -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1991 08:44 CDT From: PETER GINGISS Subject: Re: Whorf 2) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 17:16:06 EDT From: Willett Kempton Subject: Whorf and color -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1991 08:44 CDT From: PETER GINGISS Subject: Re: Whorf Thanks again, everyone, for the suggestions on essays. Suggestions included Whorf's Collected Essays, essays by Sapir and Bloomfield, G. Pullam's book, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, essays by Sir William Jones and by W. D. Whitney, Carter and Nash's "Seeing Through Language," Coupland's "Styles of Discourse," and Freeborn's "Varieties of English," and works by philosophers such as Austin, Searle, Grice, and Stalnaker. I hope I have not omitted anything, here. Maybe because of the recent discussion here, several suggestions included Whorf, and indeed reading Whorf in my own undergraduatge career got me started in linguistics. Again, I was delighted with the responses. Peter Gingiss __________________________________________________________________________ 2) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 17:16:06 EDT From: Willett Kempton Subject: Whorf and color I'm a coauthor of the Kay and Kempton study discussed in several earlier messages. (I don't follow this newsgroup regularly, but a colleague passed on the thread.) As pointed out earlier, from the tangled cluster of hypotheses referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, we tested only one question: Do the lexical categories of a language affect non-linguistic perceptions of its speakers to a non-trivial extent? (P. Kay & W. Kempton, "What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?", American Anthropologist, vol 86, No. 1, March 1984.) Considering the complexities of proir research efforts, our primary experiment was simple: Present three color chips (call them A, B, C) to speakers of two languages, such that colors A and B are slightly more different in terms of (universal) human visual discriminability, whereas B and C have a linguistic boundary separating them in one language (English) but not the other (Tarahumara, a Uto-Aztecan language). As noted earlier, the English speakers chose C as most different, whereas the Tarahumara chose A or split evenly (there were actually eight chips and four sets of relevant triads). I'll add a couple of points of interest that were either buried in that article, or have not appeared in print. First, as the speaker of a language subject to this perceptual effect, I would like to report that it is dramatic, even shocking. I administered the tests to informants in Chihuahua. I was so bewildered by their responses that I had trouble continuing the first few tests, and I had no idea whether or not they were answering randomly. In subsequent analysis it was clear that they were answering exactly as would be predicted by human visual discriminability, but quite unlike the English informants. An informal, and unreported, check of our results was more subjective: I showed some of the crucial triads to other English speakers, including some who had major committments in print to not finding Whorfian effects for color (several of the latter type of informants were available on the Berkeley campus, where Kay and I were). All reported seeing the same effects. We tried various games with each other and ourselves like "We know English calls these two green and that one blue, but just looking it them, which one LOOKS most different?" No way, the blue one was REALLY a LOT more different. Again, the Tarahumara, lacking a lexical boundary among these colors, picked "correctly" with ease and in overwhelming numbers. The article includes the Munsell chip numbers, so anyone can look them up and try this on themselves. Some of the triads which crossed hue and brightness were truly unbelievable, as it was perceptually OBVIOUS to us Engligh speakers which one was the most different, yet all the visual discriminability data were against us. (The article did not mention the hue/brightness crossovers for the sake of simplifying the argument in print.) Our second experiment, like the original visual discrimination experiments, showed only two chips at a time. We additionally made it difficult to use the lexical categories. And we got visual discrimination-based results, even from English speakers. So there are ways to overcome our linguistic blinders. (Which we knew already, or the original visual discriminability work could not have been done in the first place.) I don't feel that the differences across these tasks was adequately explored, and represent a golden opportunity for a research project or thesis. I didn't expect to find this. The experiment was a minor piggy-back on another project. I believed the literature and the distinguished scientists who told me in advance that we wouldn't find anything interesting. The experiment was going to be dropped from the field research, saved by a converstion at a wine party with a "naive" sociologist (Paul Attewell) who had read Whorf but not the later refutations. A simple experiment, clear data, and seeing the Whorfian effect with our own eyes: It was a powerful conversion experience unlike anything I've experienced in my scientific career. Perhaps this all just goes to affirm Seguin's earlier quote, as applying to us as both natives and as theorists: "We have met the natives whose language filters the world--and they are us." - Willett Kempton willett@princeton.edu __________________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-2-700.