________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-551. Fri 03 Jul 1992. Lines: 161 Subject: 3.551 Phonology Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 3 Jul 92 04:54:09 HST From: David Stampe Subject: 3.546 Dissimilation Summary 2) Date: Thu, 2 Jul 92 11:19:30 CDT From: Eric Schiller Subject: Re: 3.546 Innateness, Dissimilation Summary -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 3 Jul 92 04:54:09 HST From: David Stampe Subject: 3.546 Dissimilation Summary Thanks to Jose Ignacio Hualde for the summary of responses to Jennifer Cole and Chuck Kisseberth's earlier request for examples of dissimilations. It would be nice if the full detail of the responses could be put on the LINGUIST server. But I have some questions about Hualde's conclusions. He says we have not received any examples of true long-distance dissimilations of the type that /milit-alis/-> [militaris] would exemplify were this a regular synchronic rule; that is, between segments which are not in adjacent syllables. Changes in non-adjacent syllables as in militaris, lunaris, etc., may be sporadic, but they are obviously reflections of the same process that applies in adjacent syllables as in polaris, similaris, vulgaris. The former are surely long-distance dissimilations, regular or not! Hurch is quoted as saying that "productivity gradually decreases the more distant the [dissimilator] is from the [dissimilatee]". Good. But if adjacency favors dissimilation, why doesn't ll dissimilate in mellis (not *melris)? Because of the Geminate Integrity Principle? (But that's not an answer, it's just a fancy name for the question.) The point of examples like "kisse[s] > kisse[z]" and Grassmann's or Dahl's Law is that the dissimilator and the dissimilatee are close together but MAY NOT BE adjacent. So how can we accept the conclusion that "these cases can be reformulated as respecting adjacency with some relaxation of this notion to include, e.g., syllable-adjacency"? If the sounds are actually adjacent, the dissimilations don't apply! Another puzzle: Dissimilations, like other fortitions, apply in narrower prosodic domains only if they apply in wider domains. For example, if a dissimilation like uw > iw applies at syllable peaks (as in Old French) it also applies at the peak of feet (that is when accented); but not the reverse -- early English uw > ow applied in accented but not in unaccented position. This is the opposite of assimilations, which, like all lenitions, apply in wider prosodic domains only if they apply in narrower ones. For example, if iw mutually assimilates to y(y) at the head of a foot (i.e. iff it's accented), it will do so also at the head of a syllable (i.e. regardless of whether it's accented). [Here I'm using head in the dependency sense: the sonority peak of a prosodic domain.] These apparent paradoxes were resolved in Donegan's 1978 thesis, On the Natural Phonology of Vowels. She pointed out that if fortitions precede lenitions, and if sounds are more likely to assimilate the more similar they are (cf. Zwicky, Hutcheson, Hankamer & Aissen), then clearly dissimilations can block assimilations. If dissimilation blocks assimilation, then it's more likely in sounds that are more adjacent, since more adjacent sounds are more likely to assimilate. On the other hand, since dissimilation per se is limited to wider domains, such as phrases or feet, then it's more likely in sounds that are separated by major prosodic boundaries, like the rise and fall (nucleus and offglide) of a foot. Thus in early modern English accented ey as in _white_ (< iy < i:) dissimilated to ay /hwayt/, and thereby escaped the fate of unaccented ey in profundity (< profundite), which assimilated to iy (> i). Actually some early dialects optionally dissimilated unaccented ey as well, so that lady was sometimes rhymed with eye. In nonadjacent dissimilation, there is this difference: the sound that is threatened by assimilation is BETWEEN the similar sounds. As e.g. O. Jesperson noted, a sound may assimilate to like flanking sounds and yet not assimilate to the same sounds if they only precede or follow: prob[schwa]bly -> prob[b]bly, but not cred[schwa]ble -/-> *cred[b]ble, and not ib[schwa]dem -/-> *ib[b]dem. In the example I cited of the English -(e)s affixes becoming -(e)z, the unaccented vowel in words like kisses was in danger of assimilating to the flanking voiceless sounds, thus becoming completely inaudible (kissss), and this result was blocked by dissimilating voicelessness in the final s. The same dissimilation occurred in missu[z] (Mrs.) beside mistress, and in a common pronunciation of Missi[z]sippi, which otherwise often loses the s-flanked vowel in quick speech: Miss'sippi. The dissimilation in Bantu of voiceless consonants separated by a (short?) vowel, called Dahl's Law, may have had the same function of blocking the devoicing of the vowel. And Grassmann's Law, ChVCh > CVCh, blocked aspiration of the vowel in Greek and Sanskrit. And in many languages there are constraints against CVC roots where the C's are too similar. The motivation for dissimilation here is clear from many languages that lose (i.e. completely assimilate) vowels between consonants that are too similar. If "distant" dissimilations of consonants protect the sounds they flank from complete assimilation, we wouldn't expect dissimilation either (1) if the flanked sounds are so many or so different from the flanking consonants as to resist assimilation, or (2) if there are no flanked sounds. Therefore, (1) we would expect l...l dissimilation to be most needed where a single vowel would be flanked by l's (polaris) or maybe even a sequence of vowels (familiaris) or a sequence of vowels and consonants similar to the flanking l's, e.g. dentals (lunaris, plantaris), because the entire sequence might be assimilated. With velars or labials (localis, globalis) this is less likely, or with long sequences of flanked sounds (fluvialis). (2) we would NEVER expect dissimilation in mellis (*melris), where there is no flanked sound to protect from assimilation. (The only other reason for dissimilating two sounds is to keep them from assimilating to each other, but ll can't get any more similar!) I doubt whether the forms, domains, or roles of dissimilations can be specified except in terms of their phonetic functions. On function and form, see Donegan's thesis (OSUWPL 23, 1978, or the Garland reprint, and the insightful works of Grammont and Fouch\'e she cites). On their domains, cf the paper by Donegan & Stampe in A. Bell & J. Bybee Hooper, eds, Syllables and Segments, Amsterdam 1978. On their role in derivations, see the latter, and also our paper in D. Dinnsen, ed., Current Approaches to Phonological Theory, Bloomington 1979. On their special role in phonological perception, see Donegan's paper in a forthcoming Longman's volume on linguistic change edited by C. Jones. David Stampe , Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of Hawaii/Manoa, Honolulu HI 96822 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 2 Jul 92 11:19:30 CDT Subject: Re: 3.546 Innateness, Dissimilation Summary Re: Natural Phonology Perhaps John Coleman should review the literature (e.g., the Natural Phonology Parasession at CLS 1974) and discuss particular analyses with which he disagrees and which point to the failing of the theory. As someone who is still shopping for a decent theory of phonology, I would like to see a bit more in the way of specifics. Eric Schiller -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-551. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-552. Mon 06 Jul 1992. Lines: 103 Subject: 3.552 Job, Conference Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1992 19:21:46 +0100 From: aurnague@irit.fr Subject: Toulouse 2) Date: Fri, 3 Jul 92 16:18:48 PDT From: marthasw@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Martha Swearingen) Subject: Pidgin & Creole Conference -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1992 19:21:46 +0100 From: aurnague@irit.fr Subject: Toulouse APPEL A CANDIDATURE POUR ALLOCATIONS DE RECHERCHE EN LINGUISTIQUE ET LINGUISTIQUE INFORMATIQUE. LIEU DE TRAVAIL : EQUIPE DE RECHERCHE EN SYNTAXE ET SEMANTIQUE (URA 1033 DU CNRS) UNIVERSITE LE MIRAIL TOULOUSE. SUJET DE RECHERCHE : 1- Etude de l'expression du temps, de l'espace et du mouvement dans la langue. Ces etudes peuvent se distribuer du lexique au discours. Elles peuvent aller de la linguistique descriptive a l'elaboration de modeles formels et computationnels ( en collaboration avec des informaticiens de l'Insitut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse). 2- Terminologie et dictionnaires electroniques pour l'ingenierie linguistique. CONDITIONS DE CANDIDATURE : - Etre titulaire d'un DEA de linguistique obtenu en 1992 (derogations possibles) - Etre de nationalite francaise ou avoir fait toutes ses etudes superieures en France - Avoir moins de 27 ans (possibilites de derogation). ALLOCATION : Montant mensuel brut : 7 400 frs Duree : 2 ans, renouvelable 1 an (max) SI VOUS ETES INTERESSE(E) : ENVOYER VOTRE CV DETAILLE A : MADAME BORILLO Andree PROFESSEUR DE LINGUISTIQUE ERSS - UNIVERSITE DE TOULOUSE LE MIRAIL 5, ALLEES ANTONIO MACHADO 31058 TOULOUSE CEDEX Tel : 61 50 46 76 fax : 61 50 46 77 e-mail : Borilloa irit.fr -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Fri, 3 Jul 92 16:18:48 PDT From: marthasw@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Martha Swearingen) Subject: Pidgin & Creole Conference *************************************************************** * * * CALL FOR PAPERS!!! PIDGIN & CREOLE LANGUAGES * * * * SPCL will hold a conference on pidgin and creole languages * * in conjunction with the next LSA meeting. * * * * Conference dates: 7-11 January 1993 * * Place: The Biltmore Hotel * * Los Angeles, California * * * * Deadline for submission of abstracts = JULY 31, 1992 * * * * For abstract forms and/or information write to: * * Prof. Armin Schwegler * * Spanish & Portuguese * * UC Irvine * * Irvine, CA 92717 / U.S.A. * * * * E-mail: aschwegl@uci.edu (Internet) * *************************************************************** -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-552. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-553. Mon 06 Jul 1992. Lines: 121 Subject: 3.553 Queries: Accents, Kay CSL, Taboo Words, Afar Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 92 3:05:20 EST From: raskin@j.cc.purdue.edu (Victor Raskin) Subject: No accent allowed! 2) Date: Mon, 06 Jul 92 10:23:44 EDT From: Ellen Broselow Subject: kay csl 3) Date: Mon, 06 Jul 92 16:46:07 EST From: mark Subject: list of English taboo words 4) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 92 13:34:29 -0700 From: hammond@convx1.ccit.arizona.edu (Mike Hammond) Subject: Afar -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 92 3:05:20 EST From: raskin@j.cc.purdue.edu (Victor Raskin) Subject: No accent allowed! Has anybody else seen a weird piece in a newspaper (I read it Sunday morning in the local Gannett paper and promptly misplaced it) about a measure taken by the Greek mayor of a small Massachusetts town with a very ethnically mixed population to prevent people with foreign accents to be employed as grade school teachers? Besides killing my own chances of ever teaching grade school over there, is this measure also nonsensical linguistically? Am I right in assuming that children do not typically get "infected" by foreign accents? The exploits of my bilingual daughter were already mentioned on this list or around it, but her experience with English (one of her two native languages) pertains to my query. For the first 3 or 4 years of her life, her English exposure was primarily to my wife's and my (different) foreign accents and our housekeeper/nanny who spoke rather a radical Upper Peninsula Michigan dialect, complete with "warsh" for "wash," etc. Sarah never acquired any of that. To refocus the query, is it possible for a 5- or 6-year-old to be influenced by the foreign accent of his or her grade school teacher? -- Victor Raskin raskin@j.cc.purdue.edu Professor of English and Linguistics (317) 494-3782 Chair, Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics 494-3780 fax Coordinator, Natural Language Processing Laboratory Purdue University W. Lafayette, IN 47907 U.S.A. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 06 Jul 92 10:23:44 EDT From: Ellen Broselow Subject: kay csl I would like to hear from other users of the Kay CSL system, to determine whether anyone else has run into the same bugs that I've hit. Please reply dir ectly to me (broselow at sbccvm.bitnet or ccvm.sunysb.edu). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Mon, 06 Jul 92 16:46:07 EST From: mark Subject: list of English taboo words Does anyone have a reasonably large list of English taboo words, preferably in machine-readable form? I am interested in the classic "four-letter words" and their thematic relatives, as well as any other words that "shouldn't be used in polite company", such as ethnic or religious slurs. Slang per se is NOT of interest. Mark A. Mandel Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 92 13:34:29 -0700 From: hammond@convx1.ccit.arizona.edu (Mike Hammond) Subject: Afar I have a student (Lee Fulmer) working on morphology in Afar. She is trying to get ahold of the following dissertation. Hayward, Richard J. (1976) "Categories of the Predicator in Afar, with Especial Reference to the Grammar of Radical Extensions", SOAS, University of London. Is there somebody out there who has this and would allow us/her to copy it? Does anybody out there know if Hayward is reachable via email? Thanks much, Mike Hammond -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-553. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-554. Tue 07 Jul 1992. Lines: 122 Subject: 3.554 Queries: Portugal, SSC, Sexist Language Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 07 Jul 92 12:20:24 BST From: WHEATLJS@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk Subject: Re: PORTUGAL 2) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 09:54:40 -0400 From: hitzeman@cs.rochester.edu Subject: A question about the SSC 3) Date: 07 Jul 1992 07:07:13 -0600 (MDT) From: REBWHLR@CC.USU.EDU Subject: sexist langauge & the word *dog* -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 07 Jul 92 12:20:24 BST From: WHEATLJS@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk Subject: Re: PORTUGAL Excuse me but ... does anyone out there have experience of working in higher education in Portugal - if so please get in touch. I need to talk to you!! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 09:54:40 -0400 From: hitzeman@cs.rochester.edu Subject: A question about the SSC I'm stumped by the presence of a dash in the definition of the SSC, and I haven't met a linguist who can tell me what it means. I'm sure there's someone out there who can answer this question-- When Chomsky gives the Specified Subject Condition (p. 90, Essays on Form and Interpretation) it looks like this: No rule can involve X, Y in the structure ...X...[ . . . Z . . .-WYV. . .]... alpha where Z is the specified subject of WYV in alpha. What is that dash for? It's not mentioned. Newmeyer, in his book on the history of modern linguistics, copies the constraint exactly, but also doesn't mention the dash. If it's simply there to seperate the constituents, why isn't there a dash between the W, Y and V? Thanks, Janet Hitzeman hitzeman@cs.rochester.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: 07 Jul 1992 07:07:13 -0600 (MDT) From: REBWHLR@CC.USU.EDU Subject: sexist langauge & the word *dog* I'm trying to collect some data speaking to the claim of a Chevrolet dealer that a billboard they've erected is not sexist but speaks of both men and women. In Salt Lake City is a billboard depicting a corvette. The slogan reads, ''If your date's a dog, get a vet.'' Now, aside from the associations of animals and veterinarians, I can't think of an instance where 'dog' with the meaning 'unattractive person' is used of a man, and if so, then the meaning here is more properly rendered, 'unattractive woman.' I recently heard two 'jokes' demeaning women in which 'dog' is used in this fashion. 1) Q. What's the difference between a dog and a fox? A. A sixpack (of beer). 2) Q. What's a dog with wings called? A. Linda McCartney. If it turns out that indeed 'dog', as unattractive person, is exclusively used as an insult to women, I want to present this car-dealership with a huge list of examples to defeat his claim of gender-equity and show his billboard to be woman-demeaning message I think it is. So, anybody who knows a joke, saying, etc, in which 'dog' refers to an unattractive human, please send it to me. Thanks, Rebecca S. Wheeler Logan, Utah REBWHLR@cc.usu.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-554. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-555. Tue 07 Jul 1992. Lines: 67 Subject: 3.555 Comparatives, Phonology Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 2 Jul 92 11:19:30 CDT From: Eric Schiller Subject: Comparatives 2) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 92 9:33 GMT From: JL1@VAXB.YORK.AC.UK Subject: phonology -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 2 Jul 92 11:19:30 CDT From: Eric Schiller Subject: Comparatives Jacques Guy writes: Finally, I found a meaning such that that sentence was grammatically correct, to me at least: "I think this [steak] is rarer than Allan does [cook them]". I think that this is not ellipsis, but rather an anaphoric use of does. "John does his veggie burgers rare." Where the 'does' is getting its interpretation from the context. Or perhaps 'does' is just a kind of underpecified lexical item here, a plausible idea in that it is usually just a tense marker. Eric Schiller -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 92 9:33 GMT From: JL1@VAXB.YORK.AC.UK Subject: phonology John Coleman seems to be out on his own in what he requires of phonological theories and proponents thereof. He is not. I agree wholeheartedly both with his observations concerning Natural Phonology and on his invitation to practitioners to demonstrate what they're claiming. Too much low grade observation and pre-theoretical formalisation has passed and still passes for 'phonology'. To some extent this can be seen in the way most 'theories' do indeed pick over the same old material. That's not to say that it's an illegitimate exercise (unless of course the picking over simply reworks some previous analysis without actually getting out there and listening/measuring to what happens!) rather that there is a concensus agenda which few practitioners are willing to challenge. I can find no evidence that Natural Phonologists have or are dealing with material which other frameworks have not essayed or find unaccountable. John Local -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-555. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-556. Tue 07 Jul 1992. Lines: 49 Subject: 3.556 FYI: List-list Available, SCI.LANG Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 10:11 MET From: "Norval Smith (UVAALF::NSMITH)" Subject: RE: 3.550 Classical Lists 2) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 14:28:56 +1000 From: bert peeters Subject: American teachers with accents -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 10:11 MET From: "Norval Smith (UVAALF::NSMITH)" Subject: RE: 3.550 Classical Lists I would remind subscribersm that a listing of Listserv and other Discussion Groups concerned with individual languages (and other linguistic topics) is available by sending the message list list* to the LINGUISTS Nameserver at linguists@alf.let.uva.nl Norval Smith -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 14:28:56 +1000 From: bert peeters Subject: American teachers with accents To Victor Raskin and whoever else is interested: By all means, if you don't read sci.lang (the newsgroup) yet, do tap in: there is a discussion starting up on the very matter right now. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-556. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-557. Wed 08 Jul 1992. Lines: 109 Subject: 3.557 Queries: Case in Genitive, Barthel, Philosophy of Mind Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 92 12:12 CDT From: e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu (Anthony Aristar) Subject: Case-Marking in the Genitive 2) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 10:02:06 EST From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Subject: Book: Thomas Barthel 3) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1992 0:03:20 -0400 (EDT) From: GIVEN@sbchm1.chem.sunysb.edu Subject: Philosophy of Mind -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 92 12:12 CDT From: e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu (Anthony Aristar) Subject: Case-Marking in the Genitive I'm interested in languages with case-agreement in the genitive, i.e. languages where any case which the head might take must be copied on the dependent. These are pretty common in Australia, e.g. Uradhi (g/ is gamma): wutpu-:namu-mun g/antu-mun old-man-GEN-ABL canoe-ABL "From the old man's canoe" They're also found in the Caucasus, in the languages of the Ethiopian Highlands, and in some Siberian languages. All these only have suffixal genitival agreement. I have three questions: 1. Does anyone know of any languages outside these areas which have similar genitival agreement? 2. Does anyone know of any languages which have prefixing genitival agreement? 3. Does anyone know of any languages where all case-marking for the entire genitival phrase appears affixed solely on the dependent? (I have two examples already: Kanuri and Sumerian) My Thanks! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 10:02:06 EST From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy) Subject: Book: Thomas Barthel Would anyone have a copy of Thomas Barthel's "Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselnschrift" they would be willing to part with for a not unreasonable price? My only proviso is that the line reproductions of the tablets and the list of glyphs in appendix must be as close as can be to mint condition. In fact, that is all what I am interested in, and if you'd not mind parting with them whilst keeping the rest of the book, it's fine with me. The reason: my nth-generation photocopies are getting tatty, and the first-generation copy faded. j.guy@trl.oz.au (Telecom Research Laboratories, PO Box 249 Clayton 3168 Australia) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1992 0:03:20 -0400 (EDT) From: GIVEN@sbchm1.chem.sunysb.edu Subject: Philosophy of Mind Dear Linguist, Do any Group participants perchance know of Discussion Groups in the philosphy of mind, philosophy of language, and other kindred philosophical subjects? Or, to apply the META operator still once again, is there a general resource or "phone book" for Discussion Groups? JA Given SUNY -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-557. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-558. Sat 11 Jul 1992. Lines: 200 Subject: 3.558 Conferences, Job Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 13 June 1992, Berlin From: Christa Hauenschild, Univ.Hildesheim/TU Berlin Subject: MT and Translation Theory Workshop 2) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 18:05:37 PDT From: marthasw@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Martha Swearingen) Subject: Pidgins & Creoles 3) Date: 7 Jul 92 15:07:37 EST From: EJLESBB@engfac.indstate.edu Subject: new organization on World Englishes 4) Date: Fri, 10 Jul 92 13:54:14 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: International Congress of Asian and North African Studies 5) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 10:47 PDT From: barrett@cse.ogi.edu (Phil Barrett) Subject: Position announcement -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 13 June 1992, Berlin From: Christa Hauenschild, Univ.Hildesheim/TU Berlin Subject: MT and Translation Theory Workshop WORKSHOP ON MACHINE TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATION THEORY Dear colleagues, We (that is Ulrike Schwall as a representative of the European Association for Machine Translation and I as a person who is especially interested in combining machine translation with translation theory) are planning a small workshop in the temporal neighbourhood of Coling 92 at Nantes. It will take place on July 22nd at 2 pm. at a place to be announced as soon as we know the approximate number of participants. Christian Boitet told me that we could have a room at the IUD. The program will be the following: * 2-3 papers (about 30 minutes each) by experts in the fields of translation theory and/or MT; * very short (max. 5 minutes) presentations by the participants of what they are doing in the field(s) and in which respect they are interested in the combination of MT with translation theory; * discussion of perspectives and future activities. As Uli has just moved to Munich and I haven't yet got e-mail in my new position at the University of Hildesheim, we ask you to use the e-mail account, fax or mailing address of the secretary of the KIT group of the TU Berlin (with which I am still cooperating) in order to signal your interest and for further information. Cordula Lippke Technical University of Berlin KIT-FAST Sekr. 5-12 Franklinstr. 28-29 D-W-1000 Berlin 10 e-mail: lippke@cs.tu-berlin.de or: lippke@db0tui11.bitnet fax: +49-30-314-24929 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 18:05:37 PDT From: marthasw@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Martha Swearingen) Subject: Pidgins & Creoles *************************************************************** * * * CALL FOR PAPERS!!! PIDGIN & CREOLE LANGUAGES * * * * SPCL will hold a conference on pidgin and creole languages * * in conjunction with the next LSA meeting. * * * * Conference dates: 7-11 January 1993 * * Place: The Biltmore Hotel * * Los Angeles, California * * * * Deadline for submission of abstracts = JULY 31, 1992 * * * * For abstract forms and/or information write to: * * Prof. Armin Schwegler * * Spanish & Portuguese * * UC Irvine * * Irvine, CA 92717 / U.S.A. * * * * E-mail: aschwegl@orion.oac.uci.edu (Internet) * ************************************************************ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: 7 Jul 92 15:07:37 EST From: EJLESBB@engfac.indstate.edu Subject: new organization on World Englishes The International Association for World Englishes (IAWE) has just been formed in order to establish international links among those who are involved with any aspect of World Englishes in research and/or teaching. The Association will focus on global issues relating to three major aspects of World Englishes: language, literature and methodology. IAWE replaces the International Committee on World Englishes. The charter annual membership fee is $10.00. Requests for further information and membership applications may be addressed to: Professor Cecil L. Nelson Department of English Root Hall A-261 Indiana State University Terre Haute, IN 47809 USA phone: 812-237-3167 e-mail: EJNELS@ENGFAC.INDSTATE.EDU -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Fri, 10 Jul 92 13:54:14 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: International Congress of Asian and North African Studies I am organizing a panel on Panini for the Congress, to take place in Hong-Kong in Aug. Anybody who is interested shoulf send me their name, title, affiliation,address, title of paper, and one or two line abstract IMMEDIATELY (if not sooner). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 10:47 PDT From: barrett@cse.ogi.edu (Phil Barrett) Subject: Position announcement POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology ****************************************************************** PLEASE NOTE: OGI is not able to accept employment applications or inquiries via electronic mail at this time. All electronic communications will be ignored. ****************************************************************** Research Computer Programmer The Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology has an immediate opening in its Center for Spoken Language Understanding for a full-time research computer programmer. Candidates should have a B.S. or above in computer science or related field; 2 or more years programming experience using C, UNIX and X windows; knowledge of speech processing or pattern recognition; and the demonstrated ability to work effectively in a loosely structured team environment and complete assigned tasks with minimal supervision. Post-doctoral candidates will be considered, but please note that the position emphasizes activities that support the research infrastructure. We offer a competitive salary and full benefits package. To apply send a letter expressing interest, current resume and 3 listed references by July 27, 1992 to: Director of Personnel, Oregon Graduate Institute, 19600 NW von Neumann Dr., Beaverton, OR 97006. Affirmative Action - Equal Opportunity Employer General Position Description: The research computer programmer will provide a broad range of support to the speech recognition research group of the Center for Spoken Language Understanding. The programmer will participate in and contribute to all research activities of the group. Principal Responsibilities: * developing and optimizing speech recognition systems under the guidance of Center faculty * adapting existing speech recognition system components to new tasks * maintaining the integrity of all application and data files used by the speech recognition research group * modifying a variety of existing C, X window and Perl programs to meet changing research needs * writing programs for speech database collection and manipulation * building graphical interfaces to software tools * porting existing speech recognition systems and software tools to new platforms * coordinating installation of systems and tools at remote sites and providing limited user support * writing and maintaining documentation and users manuals -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-558. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-559. Sat 11 Jul 1992. Lines: 272 Subject: 3.559 Queries: Culture, CD-Rom, Epenthesis Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 10:10:33 +1000 From: bert peeters Subject: Physics: culture dependent or independent? 2) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 10:35:39 mes From: blaesi@lili1.uni-bielefeld.de Subject: 3.543 Please Respond: Linguistics CD-Rom, Mispased Idioms 3) Date: Wed, 08 Jul 92 14:53:36 BST From: Martin Wynne Subject: Chomsky citations 4) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 08:52:32 EDT From: maxwell@jaars.sil.org Subject: Epenthesis rules 5) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1992 13:31:00 -0400 From: Brian (B.F.) Doherty Subject: Query: Standard Codes for Languages and Dialects 6) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 21:28:44 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Query: Stieber's Law 7) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 23:12:20 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Query: Status of Chomsky's Minimalist Paper 8) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 23:12:34 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Double Negation in Black English 9) Date: Fri, 10 Jul 92 13:51:53 EST From: wynne janis Subject: query: narrative -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 10:10:33 +1000 From: bert peeters Subject: Physics: culture dependent or independent? I'm currently into a bit of a slinging match with a physicist who reckons physics is culture independent. Physicists do not, according to his view, create their concepts, but discover them by observation of the facts. He seems to be convinced that if physics had been persued by the Navahos or by some Highland Papuans first (his and my examples in private discussion) it would be exactly the same kind of physics than the one developed in the West that we know now. Has anyone some views on this? I'm trying to tell him he is wrong. Or am I? To help me prove my case (if there is a case to be proven), could anyone come up with languages where there is no concept for the (physical) concept of "force"? My discussant's view is that if in a language there is no such concept it will be created, because the physical forces of Western physics are just there, in the world, for us to be observed. My view is that without such a concept, there is no guarantee that you must develop a kind of physics which is "Western" in outlook. I need help!! Thanks. Please send general comments (first question) to the list, and examples of languages to me. I'll summarize. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 10:35:39 mes From: blaesi@lili1.uni-bielefeld.de Subject: 3.543 Please Respond: Linguistics CD-Rom, Mispased Idioms Since there is notably little work on encyclopedias (as the text type of for example the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Brockhaus and the Larousse, NOT so much as an idea), I am looking for those bits and pieces. I am especially interested in structural and user-oriented aspects of the matter (what are prototypical questions asked by a prototypical encyclopedia user ? are these questions supported by the text structure of encyclopedias and encyclopedia entries ?). I am also interested in comparisons with respect to encyclopedia concepts and encyclopedia projects and in approaches to bring the encyclopedia idea up to the state of the art in information technology (especially hypertext, ...). Are there research activities going on in this field ? Do you know of any more up-to-date bibliographies or papers ? Please tell me ! Christoph Blaesi Fakultaet fuer Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft Universitaet Bielefeld Postfach 100 131 D-4800 Bielefeld 1 Germany -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Wed, 08 Jul 92 14:53:36 BST From: Martin Wynne Subject: Chomsky citations Forgive me if I missed this, but in the earlier discussion of Chomsky's elevated position in the citations index, did anyone work out how many of the citations were for his LINGUISTIC works and how many were for his POLITICAL works. I ask this out of general interest, and also because a colleague of mine is interested to know the extent of his stature in academic political studies. Comments on the latter could be directed directly to me. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 08:52:32 EDT From: maxwell@jaars.sil.org Subject: Epenthesis rules Do epenthesis rules ever plausibly epenthesize more than one segment at a given position? My suspicion is that they only insert a "C" or a "V", but conceivably there are cases where they epenthesize a CC or a VV. (Not an affricate or vowel with off-glide, but two separate segments.) Conceivably there are even epenthesis rules that insert a CV. Any examples? By "plausibly" I mean, would a reasonable linguist ever propose such an analysis (as opposed, perhaps, to a deletion analysis)--even though constraint X in theory Y might rule out such an analysis. Please send responses to me; I can summarize to the net and/or send copies of replies to individuals if there is interest. Mike Maxwell Phone: (704) 843-6369 JAARS Internet:maxwell@jaars.sil.org Box 248 Waxhaw, NC 28173 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1992 13:31:00 -0400 From: Brian (B.F.) Doherty Subject: Query: Standard Codes for Languages and Dialects What numerical and alphabetic codes have been established for representing languages and dialects in computer databases and computerized information exchange? Is there an international standard for representing the language (and dialect) of a spoken utterance (as opposed to the written form). The best that I have found is the three-character alphabetic code used by the Cornell-SIL Language Archive as published in Ethnologue by Wycliffe Bible Translators, Inc. However, it does not have the status of an international standard and does not have a corresponding numerical form that is published. Ideally the standard numerical form would use 13 bits to represent the 5445 languages described. This would leave 3 bits out of two bytes to reference up to 8 dialects. The International Organization for Standardization does publish two relevant standards but neither attempts to represent spoken languages directly. The standard ISO 639: 1988 is a "Code for the representation of the names of languages." It uses two alphabetic characters to represent only 136 languages and does not distinguish the various spoken forms of Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.). The standard ISO 3166: 1988 is a "Code for the representation of the names of countries." It presents three different codes to represent the countries of the world. They can be of some use in identifying dialects associated with different countries. Is this all there is? Is there any interest in establishing an ISO international standard? -Brian Doherty P.S. What is the UDC number (=20 for English, =951 for Chinese) that is listed in the Annex to ISO 639: 1988(E/F)? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 21:28:44 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Query: Stieber's Law If I may, I would like to repeat a query I posted some time ago to which I received no responses: Does anybody know who first proposed that analogical change cannot introduce new phonemic contrasts into a language? The earliest reference I have found is a paper by Z. Stieber, written in Polish in the 1930's, but I think this must go back further. ----------------------- I did receive ONE response (from Harry Bochner) regarding possible counterexamples to this, namely, it has been assumed that glottalized /y/ in Navaho is always of analogical origin. There are numerous other claimed examples of this in the literature, but most of them appear to be quite spurious (e.g., Ukrainian and Belorussian /dzh/ (voiced alveolopalatal affricate) mentioned by Jakobson, and certain umlauted vowels in Swiss German mentioned by Moulton and Kiparsky). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 23:12:20 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Query: Status of Chomsky's Minimalist Paper Does anybody know the publication status of Chomsky's minimalist paper? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 23:12:34 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Double Negation in Black English I am wondering if anyone has done research on double negation in Black English in recent years. I am interested in particular in an old claim of Labov's that double negation in BE spreads across clause boundaries as in : Ain't no cat can't get in no coop As it happens, I believe that Labov was wrong and that this example illustrates a different phenomenon, namely, reinterpretation of such structures as consisting of a single clause (with 'ain't' becoming a negative marker. And I am looking for any relevant research. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9) Date: Fri, 10 Jul 92 13:51:53 EST From: wynne janis Subject: query: narrative Does anyone know of linguistic analyses of how shifts between narrator and character roles are expressed? For example, one way is to switch to direct quote. But I'm looking for cases without dialogue where the writer wants to express the thoughts, feelings, or perceptions of a character, i.e., the writer wants to present the perspective of the character. While I'm interested in how the character's perspective is represented, I'm even more interested in how the writer uses linguistic devices to show that the text is moving from the narrator's perspective to the character's perspective. Thanks in advance. Wynne Janis Janis@purccvm -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-559. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-560. Sat 11 Jul 1992. Lines: 271 Subject: 3.560 Phonology Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 15:07:45 CDT From: "Richard L. Goerwitz" Subject: Re: 3.555 Comparatives, Phonology 2) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1992 15:36:01 -0500 From: jihualde@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Subject: dissimilation update 3) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 19:35:00 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: 3.551 Phonology 4) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 20:53:20 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Phonology (Normal, Natural, Broad, Etc.) -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 15:07:45 CDT From: "Richard L. Goerwitz" Subject: Re: 3.555 Comparatives, Phonology John Local writes: > I agree [with John Coleman] wholeheartedly both with his > observations concerning Natural Phonology and on his invitation to > practitioners to demonstrate what they're claiming. Too much low > grade observation and pre-theoretical formalisation has passed and > still passes for 'phonology'. To some extent this can be seen in > the way most 'theories' do indeed pick over the same old material. > That's not to say that it's an illegitimate exercise (unless of > course the picking over simply reworks some previous analysis > without actually getting out there and listening/measuring to what > happens!) rather that there is a concensus agenda which few > practitioners are willing to challenge. I can find no evidence > that Natural Phonologists have or are dealing with material which > other frameworks have not essayed or find unaccountable. On the face of things, it seems you are missing the point. Natural Phonology was not necessarily meant to account for facts about language that had never been accounted for. The SPE formalism had no elegant mechanism for dealing with rules with obvious motivations in the physical (and to some extent cognitive) mechanisms through with speech is created. The SPE formalism, though, is powerful, and can be extended to cover a lot of data. The question is one of natural- ness and elegance as much as anything else. Ironically, those very aspects of Natural Phonology that were perceived as strengths by some were perceived as insuperable weaknesses by others. As I recall, one of the big objections raised almost immediately was that not all phonological rules are "natural." If phonology is not "natural," then natural phonology loses its predictive value, and becomes little more than yet another formalism. For example, if you tell someone to pronounce "a big apple" as a spoonerism ("an ig bapple" or whatever), the a/an choice is made after the metathesis. This happens both in contrived examples, and in actual speech. Now a/an is certainly not a reflection of some basic phonological process. Children do not spontaneously add nasals between vowels separated by a word boundary. Nor do languages in general show this sort of process of nasal addition. So what's up? A morphophonological alternation that applies very near to the surface? Is this an oxymoron? Are other analyses possible? Are a/an really as consistent as the literature critical of Stampe implies? These are the sorts of objections that we have to talk about if we are to confirm/refute Natural Phonology. I really don't see how inviting Natural Phonologists to submit essays proving their case is going to work. Let's talk about specific issues, and see what interested parties have to say. Most phonologists seem to earn their living creating new recondite terms and formalisms. In most cases where I've seen theorists dip into actual data in languages I study, the results have been less than impressive. It is easy to be grateful for works like Patricia Donegan's dissertation. -Richard -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1992 15:36:01 -0500 From: jihualde@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Subject: dissimilation update Last week I posted a summary of the messages on dissimilation that we (= J. Cole, C. Kisseberth & J.Hualde) had received. I indicated that from those responses it appeared that true long distance dissimilations (i.e. between segments in nonadjacent syllables) which behave as regular synchronic rules were rather uncommon, if attested at all. Since then, we have received a couple of messages reporting what appear to be some very interesting cases of long distance dissimilation. David Odden points out that: > First, there are a fair number of tonal cases of Meeussen's Rule >between nonadjacent syllables (many Lacustrine languages, and, outside of >Bantu, a version exists in Arusa). There is also a labial dissimilation rule >in Tashlhiyt Berber where /m/ >dissimilates to [n] when followed by a labial in the word -- any number of >syllables can intervene. Finally -- and this is a recollection, which you'd >clearly want to check up on -- in Kera, there is a constraint on coocurrences >of voicing which leads to dissimilative alternations, which I recall can skip >syllables. In addition, Wayles Browne has informed us that Georgian has a liquid dissimilation rule which is reminiscent of that of Latin, but which seems to be truly productive regardless of the distance between trigger and target: >Georgian seems to be an example of productive dissimilation. There is an >adjective suffix -ur- as in phizikuri 'physical', kimiuri 'chemical', >aktiuri 'active'. If >there is an -r- even several syllables before it, the suffix appears as >-ul-: phranguli 'French', germanuli 'German', reaktiuli 'reactive'. >However if there is an -r- and later an -l-, the suffix is -ur- again: >realuri 'real', terminaluri 'terminal'. References on Georgian: grammars by >Howard Aronson and by Kita Tschenke'li. >So it is similar to Latin but better. In relation to David Stampe's comments on our earlier summary, there is a small point about the Latin case that we would like to clarify. The process was morphologically conditioned. In fact, it was restricted to words containing the suffix /-alis/. There is thus nothing remarkable about its non-application in /mellis/ and similar words; or, for that matter, about the lack of dissimilation in /li:lium/, where the sequence is morpheme-internal or in /ferr-a:rius/, which contains a different suffix. Since liquid dissimilation was furthermore restricted for the most part to words where the two liquids were in adjacent syllables, we must agree with Browne that the Georgian rule (which is also restricted to one suffix) appears to be better (but, we still haven't checked the facts). Richard Goerwitz has informed us about a case in Tiberian Hebrew where there is dissimilation between two vowels separated by certain consonants. We will be happy to send the complete file of received messages to anyone requesting it. Jose Ignacio Hualde Dept. of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese 4040 FLB, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 19:35:00 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: 3.551 Phonology In a recent posting David Stampe claims that "Dissimilations, like other fortitions, apply in narrower prosodic domains only if they apply in wider domains." and "This is the opposite of assimilations, which, like all lenitions, apply in wider prosodic domains only if they apply in narrower ones." I am not sure what a prosodic domain is exactly, but it would seem that the fact that Grassmann's Law in Sanskrit applies within (root) morphemes but not, for example, across a compound boundary would be a counterexample. Or am I misreading the claim? In the case of assimilations, I think that Polish voicing assimilation facts are a counterexample. In Polish all obstruent clusters agree in voicing, but the direction of assimilation varies. For clusters whose second element is a stop or affricate, assimilation is always regressive. Likewise, for clusters whose second element is a voiceless fricative. However, for clusters whose second element is a voiced fricative, it appears that within morphemes assimilation is progressive, whereas across boundaries it is regressive. Now, these claims are somewhat difficult to substantiate in terms of synchronic alternations within the language, but they seem to apply in situations where Polish speakers borrow foreign words as well as in made-up words, speaking foreign languages, etc. Actually, the regressive assimilations are amply documented across word boundaries and compound boundaries in native forms. However, it is difficult to find native prefixes that end in voiceless obstruents so it is convenient to see what Poles do with the Russian prefix ot. In forms where this is a live prefix, there is always regressive assimilation, e.g., ot-vyazat', ot-vratit', etc., whereas in otvetit' (which I guess is etymologically analyzable but not synchronically), there is always progressive assimilation. Something similar occurs with German forms. For example, German Ausweis and Luftwaffe come out /awzvays/ and /luvdvafa/, where somehow the German boundaries are respected, whereas Auschwitz comes out /aus^fic/ (s^ is used to represent the orthographic 'sz', phonetically an almost retroflex shibilant). Another nice morpheme-internal example I observed was in the speech of a Hebrew-speaking Polish native speaker. Hebrew is helpful because it has a lot of relevant alternations. The following occurred in spontaneous conversation: Hebrew 'titrakzi' 'you (fem. sg.) will concentrate' came out as 'titraksi'. This verb has forms such as 'mitrakezet '(fem. sg.) is concentrating, which clearly shows the /k/ and the /z/ as the underlying forms. Also, I find it common for Polish speakers of Hebrew to say to assimilate progressively in 'hitvakeax' 'he argued', where the prefix hit- is not perceived as a prefix, but to assimilate regressively in forms where the hit- is a productive reflexive/ stative/passive prefix. I should add that I do not have compelling data for the case of stem+suffix. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 20:53:20 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Phonology (Normal, Natural, Broad, Etc.) Perhaps it may not be amiss to point out that some of me has/have working for some years now on an approach to phonology which, while originally inspired in part by NP, is distinct from it as well as from the supposedly dominant approach originally called generative phonology, but now often referred to simply as 'phonology' or 'phonological theory' (hence I refer to as 'normal'). I have referred to this approach as 'broad' or 'horizontal' phonology. Its main tenet is that phonology is not deep (that is, characterized by levels, derivations, etc.) but 'broad' (that is, characterized by interactions between different and partly independent components, all of them quite shallow). Thus, many of the phenomena which both normal phonology and natural phonology explain by assuming various kinds of representations deeper and/or more abstract than phonetic are better explained, I suggest, by, for example, the interaction of phonetic and orthographic components or the constraints on the interaction of two phonetic components, such as, fast speech and slow speech. Methodologically, my emphasis has been on two points. First, on getting the facts right. I have argued that an incredible proportion of the crucial examples in phonological theory are simple wrong, undermining a number of the most widely held assumptions in both natural phonology and in normal phonology, Second, I have devoted a lot of attention to the question of how you choose the best explanation of a phenomenon, focusing on such things as the use of control cases in phonological (and other linguistic) reasoning. The kind of thing that I delight in finding is the fact that the particular concept of the phoneme which American structuralists ended up adopting in the 1930's and which Halle demolished in the 1950's was introduced in the early 30's by Henryk Ulaszyn on the basis of Polish facts essentially identical to the Russian facts which Halle used to criticize the same concept. And that these facts, if you read Halle carefully, pose a very similar for anyone who believes in underlying representations as for anyone who believes in phonemics. Indeed, this is what first led to my attempts to develop a broad approach in which neither underlying nor phonemic representations were required and other explanations are offered for the facts which seem to support these. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-560. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-561. Sat 11 Jul 1992. Lines: 277 Subject: 3.561 Responses: Accents, Taboo Words, Indirect Discourse Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 07 Jul 92 08:14:45 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: 3.553 Queries: Accents, Kay CSL, Taboo Words, Afar 2) Date: Tue, 07 Jul 92 09:17:21 EDT From: Lesli LaRocco Subject: Re: 3.553 Queries: Accents, Kay CSL, Taboo Words, Afar 3) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 11:26:02 CST From: (Dennis Baron) Subject: accents 4) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1992 12:20:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Bill McKellin Subject: Re: 3.557 Philosophy of Mind 5) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 10:19:43 EDT From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: 3.553 Queries: Accents, Kay CSL, Taboo Words, Afar 6) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 09:52:38 PDT From: lansing@bend.UCSD.EDU (Jeff Lansing) Subject: Indirect Discourse -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 07 Jul 92 08:14:45 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: 3.553 Queries: Accents, Kay CSL, Taboo Words, Afar Any sociolinguist will tell you that children will acquire the playground accent rather than the accent of the teacher OR the accent of the parents, for that matter. When I was in graduate school at SUNY -- Stony Brook, I noticed how distraught the English professors who moved there (for what were then relatively high salaries) became when their children began chirping like native Long Islanders. The thinking behind exclusion of folks like yourself from teaching roles is of a piece with the notion that widespread viewing of, say, SESAME STREET would level out American accents even if we took no other pains to bring places like Watts into the economic mainstream. Or perhaps we're dealing with the even more familiar desire to turn the local school system into an ethnically homogeneous (and radically isolationist) "Maple Avenue". -- Rick -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 07 Jul 92 09:17:21 EDT From: Lesli LaRocco Subject: Re: 3.553 Queries: Accents, Kay CSL, Taboo Words, Afar It seems to me highly unlikely that children will pick up the foreign accent of one teacher, provided those children are surrounded by native speakers of English elsewhere. However, within a couple of months, most of the kids in the class will probably be attempting a hilarious imitation of the accent. I suppose that could be disruptive... Lesli LaRocco -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 11:26:02 CST From: (Dennis Baron) Subject: accents Victor Raskin cites a (now lost) news article about excluding persons with accents from the teaching cadres. If anyone has a cite for that news article I'd appreciate receiving it. Using accent as an excuse to exclude people from teaching is unfortunately an old American tradition. Required speech tests or speech courses served to turn away Jews in New York City, Chinese in California, Native Americans, and of course many others, including African Americans in northern urban areas. Accent quickly became labeled as speech defect or impediment (a literal foot in the mouth), and students with accents were also targets of the educational hit list. Somewhere I've got a list of pronunciation errors attributed to various ethnic groups published by the Boston schools (ca. 1910; California also published a number of these): teachers were to recognize these errors and correct them using various tongue and breathing exercises. It is ironic, and probably predictable, that a number of these pronunciation features are now considered staples of the Boston accent. While schools paid lip service to accent-modification, they tended to ignore altogether those students who did not speak English at all. Their "method" for teaching English? Forbid the use of the home language at school (and on the playground). Corporal punishment was common for violations of this policy. Students were rewarded for ratting on their peers. And of course, drop out rates were high--probably as high as they are today. Having turned America monolingual, and forcing its teachers to develop a precise, artificial manner of speech unique to the teaching profession, our policy makers now complain that America can't compete in the inter- national market because we don't speak foreign languages! Dennis Baron debaron@uiuc.edu Dept. of English office: 217-244-0568 University of Illinois messages: 217-333-2392 608 S. Wright St fax: 217-333-4321 Urbana IL 61801 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1992 12:20:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Bill McKellin Subject: Re: 3.557 Philosophy of Mind There are discussions of Philosophy of Mind in Comp.ai.philosophy. Bill McKellin mcke@unixg.ubc.ca Department of Anthropology and Sociology University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 10:19:43 EDT From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: 3.553 Queries: Accents, Kay CSL, Taboo Words, Afar > Does anyone have a reasonably large list of English taboo words, > preferably in machine-readable form? I am interested in the > classic "four-letter words" and their thematic relatives, as > well as any other words that "shouldn't be used in polite > company", such as ethnic or religious slurs. Slang per se is NOT > of interest. Contact your congresscritter and senators. Both the Senate and the House maintain lists of "unparliamentary language" -- anybody using one of the forbidden words on the floor is squelched for the rest of the day. ("Here the other guinea-pig cheered, and was suppressed.") I don't know whether the list is available in machine-readable form, but it couldn't hurt to try. Emphasize your status as "researcher on language". P.S. I have forwarded your note to lojbab@grebyn.com, the keeper of the postal mailing list, who sent you the packet in the first place. Is there any chance that Dragon Systems would be interested in co-applying with us for grant money to develop Lojban speech recognition? Just an informal query. -- cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 09:52:38 PDT From: lansing@bend.UCSD.EDU (Jeff Lansing) Subject: Indirect Discourse Should Sister Souljah be free of her indirect discourse? E. Contini-Morava provides a Washington Post transcript of an in- terview with Sister Souljah and presents evidence to show that incitement to violence was not the intent of this "influential public figure". (i) SS's rhetorical questions are separated from her statements by tense switching. [Note: Investigation of the use of the impersonal_you_ construction in interviews reveals this same pattern of tense switching. See below.] (ii) SS expli- citly distinguishes her views from those of the "people who were perpetrating the violence". N. Besnier introduces the notion of _voice_ into the discussion, claiming that SS has blurred "distinctions between the quoting voice and the quoted voice." This "blurring" (NB claims) has two effects: (i) eluding or dodging of responsibility by the speaker/writer, and (ii) placing propositions on record, where they can influence audiences. NB then seems to undercut her own position by raising the issue of different norms for the mapping of utterances to sentiments. Why so? As Allan Rumsey recently argued [Am. Anthropologist 92(2)], the distinction between the quoting voice and the quoted voice is itself just a norm for the mapping of utterances to sen- timents -- a norm for us, but not for Ngarinyin people of NW Aus- tralia. [Note: Meir Sternberg has been arguing for years that this "distinction" is not really all that distinct in our own culture, either.] So although it has been linguistic dogma for centuries that distinguishing voices allows us to distinguish responsibilities, this may be just an artifact of our cultural norms. This then brings out deep issues about the meaning of meaning. Cognitive scientists at Buffalo (Rapaport, Segal) recognized that the real phenomenon in question is not just voice but subjectivi- ty, or as literary theorists call it, focalization. E. Segal ar- gues that there are two parallel switches in subjectivity in the interview in question: one where the discourse changes from "they [black people from the underclass] don't care what you [white America] say" to "you [wA] don't care about THEIR [bpftu] lives" which is marked by repetition, pronoun switches, and stress, and the other one where the discourse changes from "white people [etc.] were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day" to "if you [impersonal_you_] are a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody", also marked with a repeti- tion (or so ES claims). ES then seems to conclude that since the crucial passage in the interview -- if black people ... why not ... white people? -- is not marked by some (or all?) of repetition, pronoun switch, and stress, then therefore the crucial passage was not free indirect discourse and "belongs to Souljah". Other readers wondered about how this kind of analysis would hold up in court. [Note: Flaubert is said to have beaten the case concerning his _Mme Bovary_ with just this sort of argument.] And I myself wonder if we don't have here a case in which the expert witnesses fundamentally disagree as to what counts as evidence for focalization, or subjectivity switching. My own contribution will be to point out that, although G. Genette told us 20 years ago that focalization is essentially a _restriction_, focalization actually has (at least) three dif- ferent functions. One, which SS herself -- in a Pacifica radio interview -- seemed to be aware of, is to avoid responsibility by restricting the validity of what is placed on record. [Note: news reports do this all the time with their "informed sources".[ This function is well-known to linguists. A second function of focalization is to "step into the shoes" of someone [of bfptu, for instance] and to present the world like it actually fells, for them. Thus SS is not only avoiding responsi- bility, she is also inviting us [wA] to empathize with them [bpftu]. A third (perhaps more subtle) function of focalization is to validate the (restricted) content of what is focalized, and to claim that the world is actually like it feels. An easy place to see this function at work is on scientific discourse, i experi- mental narratives, where focalization is a "_convention_ for gen- erating matters of fact." [_Leviathan and the Air Pump, p 55. Note: Plato had it that attaining the truth "would be achieved most purely by the man who approached each object with his intel- lect alone as far as possible, neither adducing sight in his thinking, nor dragging in any other sense to accompany his rea- soning" (_Phaedo_55e) but by the beginning of the 17th century it was becoming accepted that singular experiences -- subjective witnessings -- could provide access to matters of fact about na- ture. Robert Boyle deliberately proselytized for the new view by incorporating vicarious subjective witnessings into his experi- mental narratives.] The idea here is that the scientist is saying to the reader: "you don't have to believe me, you can see for yourself," [and that seeing is believing, of course] and the ef- fect on the reader is that something appears without appearing to have been conjured up. It is currently my belief that news reports also rely on this function of focalization, quite heavily. In other words, they are not only saying to the reader/listener: "look, we are not respon- sible for the validity of this report," but at the same time they are also saying (underhandedly, so to speak): "look, see for yourself, this is how is really is." But then if this is what news reports do, couldn't it also have been what Sister Souljah was doing? [Note: it has been suggested to me that the particular function of focalization which is in effect for any given example depends on the particular genre of the example, but I don't know how that works.] Jeff Lansing -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-561. ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-562. Mon 13 Jul 1992. Lines: 160 Subject: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 04:33 EST From: BARBARA PARTEE Subject: accents: linguistnet in the news -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 04:33 EST From: BARBARA PARTEE Subject: accents: linguistnet in the news Since Victor Raskin kindly kept me supplied with the responses he received to his July 6 query about the Westfield accents petition, I was unusually well prepared to respond when a reporter Meredith O'Brien phoned me July 8 to ask if I had an opinion as a linguist on the matter; when I told her about the linguistnet discussion of it, she was quite surprised and interested to learn of the existence of such a thing, and it turned out her ediotr was too, and the result was an article which is as much about linguistnet as about accents. The first such that I know of. I contacted Victor to get his permission to use what I'd gotten from him, but of course neither of us could contact quickly enough the many linguists whose responses I was faxing to the newspaper. I figured, and Victor agreed, that messages sent to linguistnet are more or less public, and that in any case this was a very good and positive opportunity for us to do some educating of the public, which we are always looking for opportunities for. I certainly hope everyone who was quoted in the article agrees that I did the right thing in making the linguistnet discussion available to the reporter. I think the reporter did a good job of it. Here's the text of her article: Springfield (Mass.) Union-News, Westfield Edition, Friday, July 10, 1992, p.1 LINGUISTS CRITICIZE ACCENT POSITION by Meredith O'Brien WESTFIELD - Victor Raskin, a linguistics professor at Purdue University in Indiana, was quite perplexed when he saw an article in his local newspaper about Westfield's petition to prohibit instructors with accents from teaching elementary school students. "Has anybody else seen a weird piece in the newspaper about a measure taken by the Greek mayor of a small Massachusetts town with a very ethnically mixed population to prevent people with foreign accents to be employed as grade school teachers," Raskin asked subscribers to a linguistics computer network this week. "Besides killing my own chances of ever teaching grade school over there, is this measure nonsensical linguistically?" he queried. Responses to Raskin's question have been coming into the world-wide computer network called "linguistnet" all week, some from as far away as the Netherlands and Australia. And those who did respond had nothing good to say about the petition. Raskin is one of several linguists who have assailed the petition, which has also been chastized by education officials -- including the state secretary of education -- as unfounded and racist. The School Committee's curriculum subcommittee Wednesday night unanimously rejected the petition because the committee's attorney told them it was legally unenforceable. The full committee will vote on the issue at its next meeting which has not yet been scheduled. The petition's organizer, Laura Lee Whitten, had no comment on the subcommittee's decision. Meanwhile, the eight linguists who called into "linguistnet" on their computers concluded that parents should not be worried about their elementary school children acquiring an accent from their teachers because the chances of that happening are next to impossible. Network subscriber, Barbara Partee, chairwoman of the Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts, concurs with the conclusions of her colleagues. "What research exists on this matter makes it very clear that it would be nearly impossible to be influenced by the accent of a grade school teacher", she said Wednesday. "Young children, almost universally, pick up their accents from their peers." She said if people looked at immigrant families where the children were born in this country, they would find that the children have not adopted their parents' accent. Many others agreed. "I used to live in Boston, where you can cut the local accent with a knife, and played the organ for a church in Arlington, Mass., where the pastor and his wife were from the Midwest," Craig Thiersch, a linguistics professor from Tilburg University in the Netherlands said. "But all their children had strong 'towny' accents." "My own rather limited experience is that children aren't influenced by the foreign accents of their parents, much less their teachers," echoed University of Georgia professor Michael A. Covington. "Kids get their accents from their peers," agreed Susan Ervin-Tripp from the University of California at Berkeley. While the linguists roundly criticized the petition, some said they could understand why some parents signed it. Noting the problems some college students have in understanding some of their foreign professors, they acknowledged that a teacher's English should be understandable. But the existence of an accent is not a reason to rule out the hiring of an instructor, they said. "My own opinion is that it is legitimate to require that teachers be understandable to their students, but that is presumably a normal job qualification that does not require a petition," Partee said. She said at UMass, foreign instructors and professors are screened to assure their English can be understood. "But no one has ever been disqualified because of an accent." [End of newpaper article.] In the same paper, there was a nice column by William Raspberry. Much of it repeats things we've been over on the net; I extract here a bit from the ending: "As one who was taught French by a German-accented professor who used to amuse us with her talk of "consonants and wowels," I understand why some parents might be wary of having their youngsters taught reading by teachers whose pronunciations are too far from standard. But what in this nation of a thousand accents IS too far from standard? And who determines it? How much of the whole business is simple prejudice against Hispanic teachers? How does one draw the line between a legitimate interest in occupational qualification and an illegitimate interest in ethnicity or national origin? Where is the universal principle? Kant might not want to hear this, but the principle is the problem. A good principal would handle the thing without working up a sweat. She'd listen, make some experience-based judgment as to whether a teacher's accent might prove an impediment to beginning readers and make the appropriate assignment. She might not even be able to tell you, in close cases, what tipped the judgment one way or another, but would that really be so awful? Only if you try to make it a Kantian universal. Make it a principle, and you're stuck willy-nilly with language panels, ethnic spokespersons, teachers' union reps and, of course, lawyers. Before it's over, people will stop speaking to each other across racial or ethnic lines, and everybody will be working to get everybody else fired or defeated for re-election. The problem, of course, will remain unresolved. As they say in Massachusetts (or would if they thought of it), some things can be addressed in terms of the philosopher's "universal law." Some Kant. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-562. Linguist List: Vol-3-563. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 195 Subject: 3.563 Summary: Accents in Classroom Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 12 Jul 92 18:14:24 EST From: raskin@j.cc.purdue.edu (Victor Raskin) Subject: Accents in Classroom -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 12 Jul 92 18:14:24 EST From: raskin@j.cc.purdue.edu (Victor Raskin) Subject: Accents in Classroom I received a number of helpful and informative responses from a few colleagues and I am grateful to all of them. Below please find a digest of the responses. First of all, Barbara Partee provided the background information on the case itself, which was playing out practically in her own backyard. On July 7, 1992, Barbara Partee (partee@cs.umass.edu) wrote to me: "I'm keeping an eye on the Westfield accent uproar because it's not far from here and there's something about it in the paper almost every day, including editorials. I'll be glad to help keep you updated on news, and I would appreciate receiving any references you find out about to research that shows that the parents have nothing to worry about. (An article in a local paper today, about reactions, said in the last paragraph "Linguists said that, as long as the teacher is comprehensible, parents concerned about having a good "model" in the classroom to help their children become Americanized quickly in their speech have little to worry about." But no names or references.) What happened was that early last week a petition signed by 403 residents of Westfield, Mass. was given to the school board in response to a decision to reassign two bilingual education teachers to positions as normal classroom teachers. The petition urges that no teacher be assigned to first or second grades "who is not thoroughly proficient in the English language in terms of grammar, syntax, and - most important - the accepted and standardized use of pronunciation." The mayor of the city, a Greek immigrant with an accent, and a proponent of English-only laws, and chair of the city's school committee, has been vocally in favor of the petition. It has been denounced by the state's secretary of education, Piedad Robertson, a native of Cuba and a former kindergarten teacher herself, who immediately came out with the statement that the proposal "would appear to be discrimination, plain and simple. ... This petition, instead of fostering the acceptance of cultural diversity, would appear to encourage bigotry, racism, and discrimination." The mayor in a phone interview June 30 dismissed her attack as "bovine scatology." The state's attorney general has offered th opinion that the plan would almost certainly violate the state's anti-discrimination laws. An article today (both articles I'm quoting from are in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, of Northampton, though there was also a mention in Sunday's NYTimes) says the mayor, George Varelas, says he has been getting calls from all over the country, mostly agreeing with his point of view. The two parents who started the drive are expressing great surprise; the wife, "who is of Spanish and Portuguese descent, has become so distraught over accusations of bigotry ... that she has taken to avoiding people." The city has about 36000 population and a broad ethnic mix. But like most of what one reads about the English only movement, there's a great deal of debate about whether it's racist or xenophobic, etc., and very little about the fundamental question that you raised, namely does it in fact have any effect on the acquisition of English by the children in the classes?" Throughout last week, I was forwarding the responses to Barbara and she was updating the story as things evolved. On July the 8th, she was contacted by a reporter of the Westfield paper, and she asked me for (and, of course, received) permission to use the materials I had in her interview with the paper. On July the 9th, Barbara wrote: "By the way, I heard second hand that the school committee or a subcommittee thereof just voted this morning 3-0 not to adopt the petitioners' request. I'll know more by this evening's news. I expect the newspaper article that our stuff went to will appear tomorrow morning. I'll let you know. This is happening quicker, and coming out more emphatically on the right side, than I had expected." The article appeared on Friday, July the 10th, and Barbara is likely to post it here on Monday. As you will see, the reporter was absolutely fascinated by the fact of the ongoing worldwide discussion of the issue on a computer net. The same issue of the same paper ran a syndicated column by William Raspberry on the subject. I have not yet found a paper available here that runs Bill Raspberry. That was the chronicle, and now for the substance of the responses. A couple of people suggested that the petitioners' concern was about the teachers being comprehensible to the grade school students. This is, of course, a most legitimate concern, and many states, school corporations, and universities have taken measures to protect their students from incompetent English speakers. Apparently, however, this was not the petitioners' concern, and the core of the issue was their belief that the students would acquire the foreign accent of a teacher. All the responses on this subject shared the conviction that it could not happen. Michael Covington (mcovingt@uga.cc.uga.edu): "My own rather limited experience is that children aren't even influenced by the foreign accents of their _parents_, much less teachers." Cliff Miller (miller@defun.cs.utah.edu): "Of course it is possible [for a grade school student to be influenced by the teacher's foreign accent], but it is highly unlikely that it will be complete or long-lasting. And perhaps the more important question is: does it matter? I grew up in several different places and my English has undergone a number of shifts -- I even had a Japanese accent for a while. My English is quite native now and I don't think that the different stages it went through did it any harm...." Craig Thiersch (thiersch@kub.nl): "I'm afraid I don't have any citations from linguistics literature, and our phonologist isn't here today, but you're right: it's more or less common knowledge that children virtually always acquire the accent of their peers, not that of parents, teachers, or other adults. I can think of countless examples from my own experience: for instance, I used to live in Boston, where you can cut the local accent with a knife, and played organ for a church in Arlington, Mass., where the pastor and his wife were from the Mid-West. But all their children had strong "towny" Arlington accents." Amy Sheldon (asheldon@vx.acs.umn.edu): "I was interested in learning that your daughter never acquired the pronunciations of the 3 adults at home, when they differed from, I assume, the local dialect. I can add that our 9 & 12 year olds do not have any of their father's Quebec French pronunciations or translations in their speech and on occasions when they have had his speech forms/usage, they seem to get rid of it when they learn the local dialect. That is, his speech does not persist in theirs. They also recently asked me if I thought that Daddy had a foreign accent. They said they didn't think so. I must admit, that I have to stop and think a second before I realize that he does indeed have an accent, and that on reflection, our kids will admit to it too. But there is a sense in which we don't think on a minute to minute basis of him as speaking differently from us, though certain pronunciations or translations on occasion may strike us noticeably. I'd imagine that students in a class with a nonnative teacher muight have the same perceptions, esp. if the teacher is fluent in English, although having an accent. This is a good "applied linguistics" example." The only references that the discussion has yielded so far were contributed by Catherine Doughty and Susan Ervin-Tripp. Catherine Doughty (Catherine.Doughty@linguistics.su.edu.au): "The ability "to be affected by phonology" seems to be the earliest of thing to go in terms of maturational constraints on language acquisition -- see the work of Johnson & Newport 1989 in Cognitive Psychology 21. J & N set the age of the beginning of the decline at 5 or 6. Another interesting case that is analogous in some ways but not others is the case of Simon a profoundly deaf child of profoundly deaf parents. Simon's parents were late acquirers of ASL (learned at ages 16 & 15) and so provided non-native and very different versions of ASL to their child. They are his only source of input, as Simon goes to a "normal" school where no one knows any ASL. Simon's ASL is comparable to the ASL of children who learn ASL from native signers -- e.g., nativelike. (Singleton 1989 dissertation). Susan Ervin-Tripp (ervin-tr@cogsci.berkeley.edu): "It would be nearly impossible for a child to be influenced by the accent of a grade school teacher unless it was the prestige accent of the community, and the child knew it. As Labov showed convincingly, kids get their accents from their peers. On the other hand, I ran into some reported cases of children who preserved the accents of their immigrant parents, but these were unusual cases of socially isolated children. For example, in the clinical literature I found a case of an 8 year old who immigrated at 3, and still had "his father's accent". As he was psychoanalyzed (!) he lost his accent, spoke like his peers, and became able to mimic the accent at will. Buxbaum, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 18, 279-289 (1949)." -- Victor Raskin raskin@j.cc.purdue.edu Professor of English and Linguistics (317) 494-3782 Chair, Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics 494-3780 fax Coordinator, Natural Language Processing Laboratory Purdue University W. Lafayette, IN 47907 U.S.A. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-563. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-564. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 89 Subject: 3.564 Queries: Spirantization; Cohesion Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1992 13:29 EDT From: FMART@GUVAX.bitnet Subject: Spirantization of voiced stops across languages" 2) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 10:32:34 PDT From: Davide Galletti Subject: Query COHESION & INFORMATIVITY -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1992 13:29 EDT From: FMART@GUVAX.bitnet Subject: Spirantization of voiced stops across languages" I am working on the topic of the stop/continuant allophones of the voiced obstruent in Spanish. Does anyone know (or have any references) about any language(s) that exhibit a pattern similar to that of Spanish, other than, of course, languages in the Iberian Peninsula, such as Basque and Catalan? (studied in Mascaro 1984 "Continuant Spreading in Basque, Catalan, and Spanish",in *Language Sound Structure*, Aronoff & Oeherle, eds., MIT Press). The basic facts of Spanish are: voiced obstruents /B, D, G, J'/ (capitals indicate underlying unspecification for continuancy; J' stands for a voiced dorsopalatal obstruent realized as either an affricate or a fricative) surface as stops: 1) after pause; and 2) after a homorganic consonant /n/, and /l/. (only /lD/ and /lJ'/ are homorganic in Spanish, so in /lB/ and /lG/ the obstruents surface as fricatives). Elsewhere they surface as continuants ("elsewhere" coincides in most cases with "after a continuant"). It might be helpful to note that there is no compelling reason to believe that voiced obstruents in Spanish are specified for the feature [continuant] in underlying representations. Finally, is anyone aware of a language with an asymmetric pattern of alternation such as that exhibited by Spanish after laterals? I would greatly appreciate any help regarding this matter. Please send your responses to "FMART@GUVAX". I'll post a summary or send a printout to those interested. Fernando Martinez-Gil Spanish Dept. Georgetown University -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 10:32:34 PDT From: Davide Galletti Subject: Query COHESION & INFORMATIVITY Hello, I'm writing on behalf of a friend of mine who hasn't got access to the list. She is writing a dissertation on two standards of textuality: cohesion and informativity. The problem she is dealing with is the relation between these two principles: are they inversely proportional or not? Has anybody got any references to this problem? Considering that there doesn't exist a universal definition accepted by the majority of linguists, could you suggest anyone? Any help would be extremely appreciated. Reply to my e-mail address and if there is enough response, I will summarize for the list. Many thanks. Ciao, Davide e Laura. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-564. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-565. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 100 Subject: 3.565 Queries: Compounds, Tags, Melchuk Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 16:06:41 +0200 From: lingdisp@et.kuleuven.ac.be Subject: Compounds and PDP 2) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 15:14 CDT From: TB0NRN1@NIU.bitnet Subject: query: Uninflected tags 3) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 10:56:28 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Query: Melcuk (Melchuk) -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 16:06:41 +0200 From: lingdisp@et.kuleuven.ac.be Subject: Compounds and PDP Re: Query: Compounding and PDP **************************************************************** Dear reader of Linguist, Last year, we put a query on Linguist, asking for work done about the interpretation of nominal compounds. Thanks to the many replies we got, we managed to obtain the excellent dissertation of Mary Ellen Ryder (Ordered Chaos: An Investigation of the Interpretation of English Noun-Noun Compounds). Now, one year further, we are thinking of implementing a PDP model like the one Ryder introduces in her work. However, it seems to us that little work has yet been done on this. Since as far as we know, Ryder does not have e-mail, we wanted to ask some general questions about this matter: - Do you know whether M.E. Ryder or anyone else for that sake has made some kind of implementation of a compound interpretation model? In her thesis, Ryder mentions some small implementation of which she doesn't mention the results. - If not, do you know of any other people that are working with PDP techniques, particularly with a view to implementing morphology? Many thanks in advance, Lieve De Wachter and Jan Provoost Centre of Computational Linguistics Leuven Maria-Theresiastraat 21 B-3000 Leuven BELGIUM Tel. ++ 32 16 28 50 85 Fax. ++ 32 16 28 50 25 E-mail: lieve@et.kuleuven.ac.be jan@et.kuleuven.ac.be -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 15:14 CDT From: TB0NRN1@NIU.bitnet Subject: query: Uninflected tags Does anybody know of recent work on uninflected tags like HUH? and RIGHT? in the examples below? They're going to replace DOS, right? Then he's got to look for a job, huh? Contact me directly and I'll summarize responses. Thanks. Neal R Norrick, tb0nrn1@niu.bitnet -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 10:56:28 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Query: Melcuk (Melchuk) Does anybody know a WORKING email (or other) address for Igor Melcuk (Melchuk)? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-565. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-566. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 179 Subject: 3.566 Accents in the Classroom Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 11 Jul 92 15:06:08 EDT From: junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu (Peter D. Junger) Subject: Accents 2) Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1992 10:34:55 PDT From: Geoffrey Nunberg Subject: accents 3) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 07:40 PDT From: Vicki Fromkin Subject: Re: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news 4) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 17:04:34 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 11 Jul 92 15:06:08 EDT From: junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu (Peter D. Junger) Subject: Accents On Friday, July 10, 1992 the United Press distributed the following proprietary story, which relates to the ongoing discussion of teachers and accents. (There are a large number of related stories that appeared in major newspapers over the last few months. One can find them if one has access to the NEXIS library within the LEXIS electronic full-text data base. If you don't have access to Lexis and want to find an article on the subject in a particular newspaper around a certain date, I may be able to find it for you. -------------------------------CUT HERE--------------------------------- Foreign accents won't keep teachers out of elementary school classrooms in Westfield, school officials have ruled, rejecting a ban proposed by a group of parents. The petition was presented by parents concerned that heavily accented teachers should not instruct youngsters in the formative first and second grades. The School Committee's curriculum subcommittee Thursday rejected the petition after being advised it would be discriminatory and constitutionally unenforceable. Mayor George Varelas, a leading supporter of the petition and one who speaks with a heavy Greek accent, said he will go along with the committee's decision but still believed such a ban was a good idea. ''When they presented me the petition, they asked me very vital question. They said, 'George, you got couple degrees, you have a master's degree in education, criminal justice, do you presume yourself able to teach first and second?' And I said 'Hell no, not me, or anybody like me,' and the reason I think is obvious in your ears, to your ears,'' the mayor said. The petition stated that its supporters ''strenuously object to the employment of any person for the purpose of educating children on the primary level who is not thoroughly proficient in the English language in terms of grammar, syntax, and most important, the accepted and standard use of pronunciation.'' The petition began circulating several weeks ago after a bilingual teacher whose first language is Spanish was assigned to teach a class conducted in English. State Education Secretary Piedad Ferrer Robertson earlier had condemned the petition drive, saying it appeared to be ''discrimination, plain and simple.'' ''Teachers should be judged on their effectiveness and their ability to engender excitement about learning, not on whether they have an accent,'' she said. Peter D. Junger Case Western Reserve University Law School, Cleveland, OH Internet: JUNGER@SAMSARA.LAW.CWRU.Edu -- Bitnet: JUNGER@CWRU -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1992 10:34:55 PDT From: Geoffrey Nunberg Subject: accents Linguists interested in accent discrimination may want to look at a 1991 article in the Yale Law Journal (100: 1329-1407) by Mari Matsuda called "Voices of America: Accent, Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction." Matsuda is a professor of law at UCLA and Hawaii who is associated with the critical legal theory movement. She reviews several cases involving discrimination against people with either foreign or nonstandard accents, and discusses the legal basis for remedying such discrimination under existing civil rights provisions. One case that Matsuda discusses, for example, is Kahakua v. Hallgren, which was heard in the Ninth Circuit Court in 1987. James Kahakua is a native-born Hawaiian with an acrolectal creole accent. He has a B. S. degree and worked for several years as chief meterological officer at a an army installation in Hawaii. In 1985 he applied for a job advertised by the Honolulu office of the National Weather Service, which involved among other things recording weather announcements for broadcast to local boaters. The Weather Service didn't dispute his general qualifications, but said that his accent was unacceptable; they gave the job instead to an Ohio-born applicant who had no degree and a minimal meteorological background. Kahakua sued the Weather Service under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. The case was heard by M. D. Crocker, a visiting judge from Fresno, California. Crocker ruled that the Weather Service was justified in insisting on a standard English accent as a job qualification. He said that "standard English pronunciation should be used by radio broadcasters," and added that "there is no race or physiological reason why Kahakua could not have used standard English pronunciations." Matsuda also reports that "the judge discounted the testimony of the linguist who stated that Hawaiian Creole pronunciation is not incorrect, rather it is one of the many varieties of pronunciation of standard English. The linguist, the judge stated, was not an expert in speech." (I haven't looked at the decision and can't say how the judge justified this conclusion.) Matsuda observes that the courts have been willing to entertain the proposition that refusal to hire a person on the grounds of accent may constitute a violation of Title VII. The problem is that defendants in such cases invariably argue that the plaintiff's accent makes him or her difficult to understand, and so impedes the performance of job duties in positions requiring communication. In every case brought to date, the courts have accepted this argument, on the basis of the judge's subjective evaluation of the plaintiff's speech. The difficulty is in finding objective tests for "comprehensibility," all the more because it is well known that unconscious racial or class bias may affect someone's perception of the degree to which an accent is comprehensible. Then too, criteria of comprehensibility should vary according to the nature of the communication required in the job -- whether it involves public contact, for example. Which raises the question: could linguistic procedures provide a more objective measure of comprehensibility that could be invoked by plaintiffs in cases like these? -Geoff Nunberg -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 07:40 PDT From: Vicki Fromkin Subject: Re: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news A most welcome article. Thanks Barbara. And thanks once again to Anthony Aristar and Helen Dry for keeping the LINGUIST net going. I still don't see how they manage it and they really deserve a place in the linguistic Hall of Fame for their great contribution of welding the field together and keeping us all in touch and learning from each other. Vicki Fromkin -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 17:04:34 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news Am I the only one who believes that kids can quite easily pick up the pronunciations of individual lexical items, especially learned words, from adults rather than from peers? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-566. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-567. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 186 Subject: 3.567 Comparatives Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 11:23:07 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: Comparatives -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 11:23:07 EDT From: "Bruce E. Nevin" Subject: Comparatives >From: Allan C. Wechsler > From: jcj@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (Jason Johnston) > >I agree that these sentences are all acceptable. But if this is true, >what derivation explains (1)? I haven't studied enough syntax to know >how to say this technically, but there is something here that needs >to be explained. > > (1) I think this is rarer than Allan does. > > (2) I think this is rarer than Allan thinks it is. > (3) I think this is rarer than I used to believe [it is]. > (4) I think this is rarer than people generally admit [it is]. > >(5) Moroccans think cheese is more acceptable than Algerians do. >(6) Moroccans think cheese is more acceptable than Algerians are. >(7) Moroccans think Libyans work harder than Algerians do. (Ambiguous.) >(8) I think Mary believes John to be more intelligent than I do. You are right that this is not the most usual form of comparative, viz: (9) Marble is harder than chalk. For ordinary comparatives such as (9), there is available a set of other sentences such as the following: (9) Marble is harder than chalk. (9a) Marble is hard more than chalk. (9b) Marble is hard more than chalk is. (9c) Marble is hard more than chalk is hard. (9d) Marble is hard to a degree more than the degree to which chalk is hard. (9e) Marble is hard to a degree which is more than the degree to which chalk is hard. (9f) Marble is hard to a degree; said degree is more than a degree; to said degree chalk is hard. These sentences differ from one another by a series of small differences. These differences are amenable to the interpretation that a word or words in one such sentence are reduced to zero in the next sentence in the series. (Between 9a and 9, "more" is reduced to "-er".) Sentences (9d-9f) are awkward and one is unlikely to hear or read them in actual usage precisely because less awkward and more conventional alternatives like (9a-c) are available. However, they are undoubtedly English, and they have the merit of being more explicit than their fellows. Now look at sentence (1): (1) I think this is rarer than Allan does. (1a) I think this is rare more than Allen does. (1b) I think this is rare more than Allen thinks this is rare. (1c) I think this is rare to a degree more than the degree to which Allen thinks this is rare. (1d) I think this is rare to a degree which is more than the degree to which Allen thinks this is rare. (1e) I think this is rare to a degree; said degree is more than a degree; to said degree Allen thinks this is rare. This makes the differences between (9) and (1) explicit. A different kind of thing is being compared. In (9) etc, we see a first-order assertion "marble is hard" (an operator word entering on a zero-order word or noun) being said to be to a degree, which is then compared to the degree asserted of the same first-order operator "hard" entering on a different noun, "chalk". The following dependency tree expresses this more clearly by showing the operator-argument dependencies graphically: degree --- hard --- marble / more \ degree --- hard --- chalk (The tree is turned on its side to make it easier to draw in ASCII, and it omits the operator indicator "is" and argument indicator "than".) Compare this with the sentence set of (1). Here, we have a second-order assertion, the operator word "think" asserted of the pair "I, hard", and it is this "think" that is said to be to a degree, which is then compared to the degree asserted of a repetition of "think" on a different argument pair (only the first member of the pair differs, "I" vs. "Alan"). Again, the dependency tree is clearer than the verbal explanation: I / degree --- think / \ / rare --- this / more \ \ Alan \ / degree --- think \ rare --- this The argument under "more than" need not be "degree." For example, the appropriate word is surely "amount" or "number" in e.g. "This hen lays more eggs than that one." Indeed, in (1) one might also say "hard in an amount," "to an amount," etc. Also consider: (10a) A 6' tall woman is taller than a 6' tall man. (10b) A 6' tall woman is tall in a sense which is more than the sense in which a 6' tall man is tall. (10b) A 6' tall woman is tall in a sense; said sense is more than a sense; in said sense a 6' tall man is tall. Absent the word sharing under more, the more conventional forms of the comparative are not available. However, the unreduced sentences can be quite sayable: (11a) ??I think this is rarer than John is willing to pay for it. (11b) I think this is rare more than John is willing to pay for it. (11c) I think this is rare to a degree which is more than the degree to which John is willing to pay for it. Usually, such sentences without word repetition are uninterpretable: (12a) * I think orchids are rarer than Dewey understood the importance of feedback. (12b) * I think orchids are rare more than Dewey understood . . . feedback. (12c) ? I think orchids are rare to a degree which is more than the degree to which Dewey understood . . . feedback. The differences between (11) and (12) show that there are two sorts of factors affecting acceptability. The reduced forms (12a,b) are starred because word repetition is a formal requirement for the reduction of redundant words to zero. The fully explicit (and awkward, unconventional) form (12c) is only queried and not starred because the problem here is not grammatical but pragmatic: how does one compare the degree or amount of perceptions so disparate as the rareness of orchids (or my thinking that orchids are rare--the sentence is ambiguous) and Dewey's understanding of the importance of feedback? This analysis is based on work of Zellig Harris, e.g. _A Grammar of English on Mathematical Principles_. This is not transformational grammar (TG). It might be called operator grammar (Stephen Johnson's term), assertion-reduction grammar, or entry-and-reduction grammar. Reductions take place (usually optionally) when an operator word enters on its arguments. For example, the reductions yielding (1) might be graphically represented as follows (though I do not suggest that such a graphical metalanguage is essential): degree --- hard --- marble 0 --- hard --- marble / / more than ==> er than \ \ degree --- hard --- chalk 0 --- 0 --- chalk The dependency structure of operators and arguments represents the information in sentences. Additional work of sublanguage analysis results in a representation of information in discourse. (Harris, _Language and Information_, _A Theory of Language and Information: a mathematical approach_, Harris et al. _The Form of Information in Science_, Ryckman, _Grammar and Information: an investigation in linguistic metatheory_.) Bruce Nevin bn@bbn.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-567. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-568. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 195 Subject: 3.568 Conference: Turkish Linguistics Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 13:52:32 +0300 From: ko@TRBILUN.bitnet (Kemal Oflazer) Subject: Provisonal Programme of 6th Int. Conf on Turkish Linguistics -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 13:52:32 +0300 From: ko@TRBILUN.bitnet (Kemal Oflazer) Subject: Provisonal Programme of 6th Int. Conf on Turkish Linguistics The following may be of interest to the readers of this list. Kemal Oflazer ------------------------- Provisonal Programme of 6th Int. Conf. on Turkish Linguistics 12-14 August 1992 Anatolia University Eskisehir, Turkiye "The Ways of Extension of Meaning through Borrowed Words in Modern Turkish" Mehmet Demirezen "The Pragmatic of tane" Christopher Schroeder "Cases of Synonomic Constructions in Turkish" Gul Acar "The Pragmatics of contradiction in Turkish" Gurkan Dogan "The Situation in Turkish" Erkan Tin - Varol Akman "Gunumuz Turkcesinde Hitap Bicimleri" Yadigar Egit "Turkce'deki Beddua Sozcukleri Uzerine Bir Calisma" Ulker Vanci Osam "Linguistic Criteria for Robust Morphological Parser/Generator for Turkish" Michael Norris "Case Theory in Turkish in Nominal Phrases" Serpil (Aydin) Tin "Turkish Subordination [-CP+Tense+Case]" Sarah D. Kennelly "Turk Dili Icin Yeni Kok Sozcukler Kaynagi" Polat Kaya "A Root Driven Parser of Spelling Checking in Turkish" Aysin Solak - Kemal Oflazer "On the Grammatical Status of Turkish Clitics" Armin Bassarak "A Descriptive Framework for Specification of Structural Relationships in Modern Turkish" H. Braam - M. van Damme "The Place of AYN and HEMZE in Structure of Words in Turkish" Majid-Al-Kuran and Faruk Turker "The Parameter Aspect in Turkish" Eser Erguvanli Taylan "Exceptions to the Turkish Vowel Harmony or [-VH] Revisited" Karl Zimmer "The Syntax of non-Verbal-Final Sentences in Turkish" Jacklin Kornfilt "A Blue Print for a Red House" Creyan van Schaaik "Reciprocal Constructions and Plurality in Turkish" Guliz Kuruoglu "A New Study of the Origin of the Old Turkic Script" Nui-Ru-ji "Turkish Affixal Behaviour: A Synchronic Re-interpretation" Omer Demircan "Some Geographical Distribution Patterns of Bolu Dialect" Tooru Hayasi "The Usage of Suffix -dik+Poss. in Turkish Fatma Erkman Akerson - Seyda Ozdil "Turkish Prosodic Minimality" Sharon Inkelas - Orhan Orgun "12-60 Aylik (1-5 Yas) Turk Cocuklarinda Dil Yapisinin Incelenmesi ve Buna Dayali Olarak Olcek Gelistirilmesi" Necate Baykoc Donmez "The Language of Newspaper Reporting - Ideological Transformation of Discourse: How Newspapers Get Their Messages Across" Muhsin Karakas "A Study of Phonological Acquisition by Turkish Children and Its Implicators for Phonological Disorders" Seyhun Topbas "The Development of the Topic in Turkish Expository Written Discourse" Lutfiye Oktar - Semiramis Yagcioglu "Bilingual Discourse in The Netherlands: Patterns in Turkish-Dutch Code-Switching" Ad Bachus "The Language Used by Modern Turkish Political Leaders" Azmi Ozkardes "Early Bilingual Development of Turkish Children in The Netherlands" Hanneke van der Heijden "Preliminaries to the Study of Stylistic Scales in Turkish Discourse" Ahmet Kocaman "Developing Referential Cohesion in Turkish Elicited Narratives" Aylin Kuntay "Comphrehending Newspaper Headlines" Deniz Zeyrek "Lexical Gaps and Compensatory Strategies in the First Language of Turkish Children in The Netherlands" Anneli Schaufeli "NP Anaphora in Turkish" Sukriye Nuri "Development Changes in the Use of Complement Constructions in Narrative Discourse" Ayhan Aksu Koc "Title to be announced" Husainov Kobey "Tittle to be announced" Kandirali Konkobayoglu "Anaphora in Turkish: A Preliminary Implementation" Erkan Tin - Varol Akman - Nihan Unver "Development of Complex Turkish Syntax in Mono and Bilingual Children" Jeroen Aarsen "Title to be announced" Zulal Balpinar "Acquisition of Nouns in Turkish" Yasemin Hoscan - Ahmet Konrot "Title to be announced" Karboz Diykanov "Title to be announced" Kirggizbek Ibragimov "Prosody in Turkish Speakers with Parkinson's Disease" Ahmet Konrot - ^ukru Torun "Title to be announced" Gul Durmusoglu "Title to be announced" Kurpesko Nadecda Nikolayevna "Title to be announced" Kaydarov Abdu - Ali Tuganbayevic -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-568. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-569. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 120 Subject: 3.569 Phonology: Assimilation, Dissimilation, Natural Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 12 Jul 1992 20:13:27 CDT From: Subject: Polish voicing assimilation 2) Date: Sat, 11 Jul 92 12:31:24 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Dissimilation 3) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 09:40:46 EDT From: jsc@mbeya.research.att.com (John S. Coleman) Subject: Natural Phonology -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 12 Jul 1992 20:13:27 CDT From: Subject: Polish voicing assimilation Re Polish voicing assimilation: Alexis Manaster Ramer writes (3.511): "However, for [obstruent] clusters whose second element is a voiced fricative, it appears that within morphemes assimilation is progressive (...)". In support he cites Hebrew _titrakzi_ 'you will concentrate' which a Polish person pronounced _titraksi_. Relevant data, as he notes, are hard to come by, but _gz/lo_ is a dialectal word meaning 'shirt' (/l is "barred l", pron. w). S/lawski (S/low. Etym. j,ez. polsk.) says the etymology is obscure, but Vasmer (Russ. Etym. W"orterbuch, at chexol) derives it from *kuzlo. The lax u dropped and the resulting -kz- assimilated to -gz- regressively, as is the rule for obstruent clusters. It is sonorant consonants that assimilate progressively. After a voiceless obstruent within a morpheme they are devoiced , e.g., in _teatru_ 'theater (gen.)' but not in _bobra_ 'beaver' (gen.). This helps explain why the Polish cognates of Russian _knjaz'ja_ 'princes' and _kniga_ 'book' are _ksi,e.za_ and _ksi,ega_. The _n_ was devoiced and lenited to palatal s and its nasality spread to the following vowel (the nasal e, which I have spelled ,e). The labial fricative _w_ was a sonorant in Common Slavic and still patterns like one in Polish. Thus in _krewny_ 'relative' _w_ is [v] while in _krwi_ 'blood (gen.)' it devoices to [f]. The alternations with _r_ are more complicated. That _r_ is less voiced in _teatru_ than in _bobra_ is no big deal; an r is an r. But when _r_ palatalizes to _rz_ it becomes an obstruent and falls together with _.z_ ("dotted z", the voiced hushing continuant) when voiced and with _sz_ when devoiced. Thus while the locative of 'beaver' is _bobrze_ (all voiced), the locative of 'theater' is _teatrze_ with _rz_ pronounced "sz" as the result of progressive assimilation. On the phonetic surface Alexis is right: _rz_ is a voiced continuant obstruent that undergoes progressive devoicing. But so is _z_ and it doesn't. I think a better description is possible if _rz_ and _w_ are classified as sonorants for purposes of the voicing rules. The Polish Hebrew speaker may have said _titraksi_ because (s)he knew _titragzi_ would be wrong and unified the voicing of the cluster the other way. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Sat, 11 Jul 92 12:31:24 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Dissimilation It may be only me, but I think it would be desirable to distinguish different classes of productive rules, in part., what Bloomfield as far back as the 1920's (presumably echoing the more complex typology of alternations offered by Baudouin a generation or two earlier) called 'automatic' from those which involve only a single affix or morphological class. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 09:40:46 EDT From: jsc@mbeya.research.att.com (John S. Coleman) Subject: Natural Phonology It seems that Eric Schiller, like Richard Goerwitz, missed the beginning of this discussion. I did not criticize any aspect of Natural Phonology in the way his comment seems to suppose, so a review of the literature is not called for. The objection I raised was this: a proponent of Natural Phonology (can't remember who it was now) recently claimed that Natural Phonology was the ONLY theory to address phonetic data. I think this claim is ignorant and false. To refute it it is not necessary to examine the Natural Phonology literature. It suffices to find an example of just one other phonological theory which also attends to phonetic data. Firthian prosodic phonology is one such case: I could cite others. But in my original comment I made the stronger claim that Natural Phonology addresses the same pool of phonetic "data" as other phonological theories. Even if Natural Phonology placed some new "data" into this pool, proponents of other theories of phonology have also taken them up in the meantime. So whatever the value of Natural Phonology may be as a contribution to the field, it is not distinguished by the data which it addresses. Could I respectfully suggest that LINGUIST contributors read postings carefully before jumping in aflame. --- John Coleman -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-569. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-570. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 82 Subject: 3.570 Jobs: Comparative, Communication Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 12 Jul 92 23:02:12 MEZ From: Martin Haase Subject: job: comparative linguistics 2) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1992 21:28:15 -0700 (PDT) From: VCSPC005@VAX.CSUN.EDU (AHARRIS - Alan Harris) Subject: Job: Communication (Japan) -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 12 Jul 92 23:02:12 MEZ From: Martin Haase Subject: job: comparative linguistics The university of Osnabrueck (Germany) offers a job in comparative (germanic) linguistics (with an emphasis on language typology). As proficiency in German is required, I have copied the official anouncement in German: "U N I V E R S I T A E T O S N A B R U E C K Im Fachbereich Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft ist die Stelle eines/r Wissenschaftlichen Mitarbeiters/in (BAT IIa/Z) im Gebiet Sprachwissenschaft zum naechstmoeglichen Zeitpunkt zu besetzen. Aufgabengebiet: Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft innerhalb der Allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft Mitarbeit in Forschung und Lehre. Der sprachliche Gegenstandsbereich ist vorrangig durch die germanische Sprachfamilie bestimmt, in theoretisch-methodischer Hinsicht steht die Auseinandersetzung mit sprachtypologischen Fragen im Vordergrund. Erwuenscht sind Kenntnisse in einer nicht-indogermanischen Sprache. Einstellungsvoraussetzungen: Sprachwissenschaftlicher MA-Abschluss oder vergleichbares Examen. Schwerbehinderte werden bei gleicher Qualifikation bevorzugt. Bewerbungen mit den ueblichen Unterlagen sind bis zum 20.8.1992 zu richten an den Dekan des Fachbereichs Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft der Universitaet Osnabrueck, Neuer Graben 40, 4500 Osnabrueck." -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1992 21:28:15 -0700 (PDT) From: VCSPC005@VAX.CSUN.EDU (AHARRIS - Alan Harris) Subject: Job: Communication (Japan) PLEASE POST AND ANNOUNCE: COMMUNICATION JOBS AVAILABLE AT AOMORI UNIVERSITY, COMMUNICATION DEPT., AOMORI CITY, HONSHU, NO. JAPAN, BEGINNING APRIL, 1993 Prof. Reiko Wida is in charge of putting together a brand new Communication Studies department at Aomori University, Honshu, Northern Japan by April 1993. She is looking for qualified candidates at MA or post MA/Ph. D. in Communication or allied fields. Candidates must be very fluent or bilingual in Japanese and English. Applications are immediate. She is looking to hire by the end of July or early August, this year. Contact Prof. Wida directly: 16602 Sell Circle, #61 Huntington Beach, CA 92649 You may call her COLLECT at 714-840-7146 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-570. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-571. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 88 Subject: 3.571 Queries: ASL, Stress Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 13:18:12 CDT From: lynne@lees.cogsci.uiuc.edu (M. Lynne Murphy) Subject: smithsonian article 2) Date: Sat, 11 Jul 92 12:40:16 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Stress in words ending in -ery -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 13:18:12 CDT From: lynne@lees.cogsci.uiuc.edu (M. Lynne Murphy) Subject: smithsonian article back to the subject of the portrayal of linguistics in the mass media, the july issue of Smithsonian magazine includes a long and arguably well-done piece on American Sign Language that includes discussion of the politics of redefining "language" to include non-oral languages, the contributions of sign language studies (esp. at the Salk Institute) to our understanding of language and the brain, and sociolinguistic and stylistic aspects of ASL. The article refers to a lot of the people at the forefront of ASL studies (Bellugi, Stokoe, Liddell, Lane, etc.) and even manages the requisite Chomsky reference. I'm planning on using this article in my Intro to Linguistics course next semester (which is largely composed of Speech and Hearing Science students). If anyone has any caveats to offer about the article, I'd be interested to hear them. M. Lynne Murphyu U of Illinois/Urbana lynne@boas.cogsci.uiuc.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Sat, 11 Jul 92 12:40:16 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Stress in words ending in -ery Most of the response to my posting about 'stationery' and 'dysentery' has been skeptical or else involved questions about different varieties of the language. So let me clarify. Leaving ALL other varieties aside, in white educated Northern-states US English of the sort spoken from Manhattan to Seattle to San Diego, words ending in -ory and -ary have a clear secondary (or tertiary, if you like, I am not sure what the difference is) stress on the -o- or the -a-, e.g. 'territory', 'stationary'. However, it is my belief that at least some speakers WHO SAY THESE WORDS THIS WAY have a different pronunciation at least optionally available for words in -ery. Namely, one where the -e- is pronounced as some kind of syllabic and NOT elided (as it might be in other varieties) but does not have any stress. In other words, you get the same stress pattern as in the case of 'hospitable' (when initially stressed), 'admiralty', etc. Clearly, there are speakers who DO have a secondary stress there (I do myself in 'stationery', which is homophonous with 'stationary'), but it seems that there are also pronunciations like the ones I described above. And Webster's Third agrees with me. Now, what I was wondering if there are any LINGUISTs our there who have heard or themselves use these pronunciations? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-571. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-572. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 100 Subject: 3.572 Dog Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 14:58:23 CST From: (Dennis Baron) Subject: dog 2) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1992 23:24:21 -0400 (EDT) From: GIVEN@sbchm1.chem.sunysb.edu Subject: Hot Dogs and Hot Dates -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 92 14:58:23 CST From: (Dennis Baron) Subject: dog Two questions arise about the nature of _dog_: 1) is it sex-neutral? 2) is the billboard in question sexist? Undoubtedly the answer to the second question is yes, it will be perceived to be sexist by a significant number of people of both sexes, which makes it sexist no matter what. The question of the actual reference of _dog_ is an interesting one. Its masculine references are often negative, though never in the same way that the feminine ones are. Perusing the OED and the slang dictionaries shows the sexual connotations of male human dog, as in sly dog, lucky dog, are positive ones, or if they are negative the sense differs from that of the feminine. But the billboard owner will rely, no doubt, on the kind of definition provided by the _Random House Webster's College Dictionary_, sv _dog_, sense 8: "an unattractive person" , which no doubt derives from the dictionary's policy of sex-neutral definitions. Of course slang is so slippery and pliable that dog may be developing a sex-neutral sense of `unattractive or otherwise disappointing date' after all. But the slang dictionaries do not support such a reading now. Dennis Baron debaron@uiuc.edu Dept. of English office: 217-244-0568 University of Illinois messages: 217-333-2392 608 S. Wright St fax: 217-333-4321 Urbana IL 61801 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1992 23:24:21 -0400 (EDT) From: GIVEN@sbchm1.chem.sunysb.edu Subject: Hot Dogs and Hot Dates Rebecca Wheeler asks whether the term "dog", as applied to a date can refer to a man, i.e., whether the date can be male. My copy of Wentworth and Flexner lists as its articles 11 and 12, respectively; 11. A disreputable or untrustworthy man, especially in sexual or social matters; a cad. 12. An ugly, unrefined, or sexually disreputable girl or woman; a boring girl or young woman who does not have the compensation of beauty. So the usage described in the query is not sex-specific, per se. The usage is not specific enough to allow an unambiguous choice between these. The matter becomes much more complex, of course, if you want to discuss distribution and relative frequency of usage. Wentworth and Flexner tends to emphasize male slang. So it would tend to underemphasize the female use of such terms. (There is still, I believe, a relative lack of information on the history of use of sexual language by women, despite recent studies.) Can one make an argument that men are far more likely than women to use such a term? Slang etymologies are notoriously difficult to obtain. The entire group of usages (op cit) is consistent with the idea that the above usages 11 and 12 are derivative from the more general: 6. Something inferior; something disliked or lacking in appeal....... Under this reading the term is very general; its referent need not be human or even animate. J.A. Given SUNY -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-572. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-573. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 68 Subject: 3.573 Culture-Dependency Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 20:13 +8 From: CTTOMLAI@CPHKVX.bitnet Subject: physics and culture 2) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 22:18:38 BST From: WAB2@phx.cam.ac.uk Subject: culture-dependency -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 20:13 +8 From: CTTOMLAI@CPHKVX.bitnet Subject: physics and culture >From: bert peeters >I'm currently into a bit of a slinging match with a physicist who reckons >physics is culture independent. Physicists do not, according to his view, >create their concepts, but discover them by observation of the facts. He >seems to be convinced that if physics had been persued by the Navahos or >by some Highland Papuans first (his and my examples in private discussion) >it would be exactly the same kind of physics than the one developed in >the West that we know now. Has anyone some views on this? I'm trying to >tell him he is wrong. Or am I? I only want to make the following two points clear (please reckon them as my belief): (1) Physics (as it is) is independent of culture; (2) The history of Physics, and it's accidental present state of development, is of course dependent on culture like anything that has a history. To me, the Whorfian kind of relativity is invalid as far as Physics in concerned. Just an honest expression of view, Tom Lai. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 92 22:18:38 BST From: WAB2@phx.cam.ac.uk Subject: culture-dependency Bert Peeters has chosen the field for his disputation from a very narrow and jargon-ridden area. The existence of wider culture-specific world views are well enough described (e.g. Whorf). And culture-specificity is not restricted to different idioms. He should ask his physicist colleague where to find phlogiston these days. Bill Bennett. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-573. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-574. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 98 Subject: 3.574 FYI: Chomsky's Minimalist Paper, New World English Assoc. Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 11 Jul 92 12:44:57 EDT From: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics Subject: Chomsky Minimalist Paper 2) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1992 13:54:07 CDT From: "Fred Davidson, DEIL, UIUC" Subject: New Association: IAWE -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 11 Jul 92 12:44:57 EDT From: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics Subject: Chomsky Minimalist Paper In Response to Alexis Manaster Ramer's Query: Chomsky's Minimalist Paper is published by the MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, as the first in the _MIT Occasional Papers In Linguistics Series_ (MITOPL). It is available at a cost of $5.00 plus $1.00 Postage and Handling ($1.50 in Canada and Overseas). Payment can be made by a US dollar money order or by a cheque drawn on a US bank. Payment must be made in advance of shipping. The address to send orders to is: MITWPL 20D-219 Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge MA 02139 ** Sorry, we cannot accept orders by email ** For a list of our publications, send email to MITWPL@athena.mit.edu. The list is also available from the LINGUIST Listserv. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1992 13:54:07 CDT From: "Fred Davidson, DEIL, UIUC" Subject: New Association: IAWE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR WORLD ENGLISHES FORMED IN HAWAII At a recent meeting to discuss linguistic, literary and pedagogical aspects of World Englishes held in Honolulu, Hawaii, a new international scholarly association was launched. The organization is named International Association for World Englishes (IAWE). The Steering Committee for the Association was formed during the conference on "Culture and Literature: Issues of Interpretation and Comprehension" organized by the East-West Center, Honolulu (May ll-15, 1992). The conference included international scholars representing both Western and non-Western countries. The members of the Steering Committee are James E. Alatis (Georgetown), Kimberly Brown (Portland), Wimal Dissanayake (East-West Center, Honolulu), Braj B. Kachru (Illinois), Peter Lowenberg (San Jose State), Cecil L. Nelson (Indiana State), Anne Pakir (NUS, Singapore), Larry E. Smith (East-West Center, Honolulu), S. N. Sridhar (SUNY Stony Brook) and Tamara Valentine (South Carolina, Spartanburg). The main objective of the Association, said Larry Smith, organizer of the Honolulu conference, is to "establish international links among those who are involved with any aspect of World Englishes in research and/or teaching. The Association will focus on global issues relating to three major aspects of World Englishes: language, literature and methodology." IAWE replaces the International Committee on World Englishes formed in 1987 at Georgetown. The charter annual membership fee is $10.00. Requests for further information and membership applications may be addressed to: Professor Cecil L. Nelson Department of English Root Hall A-261 Indiana State University Terre Haute, IN 47809 USA; phone: (812) 237-3164, -3167 Checks should be made payable to: International Association for World Englishes -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-574. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-575. Tue 14 Jul 1992. Lines: 278 Subject: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1992 12:33 CST From: LIFY460@orange.cc.utexas.edu Subject: Re: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1992 12:33 CST From: LIFY460@orange.cc.utexas.edu Subject: Re: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news Barbara Partee indirectly raised an important question in her posting about sending a LINGUISTnet discussion to a newspaper, namely this: what are the laws and conventions governing free speech and/vs. copyright on electronic bulletin boards? It's time that we look more directly at questions like this, because they are going to become increasingly complicated as we increase our use of electronic communications media. The fact is that "laws and conventions" have not kept pace with new communications technology: there are no precedents for the new juxtapositions of media and kinds of messages being transmitted. I'll mention a few of the issues as I understand them to get people thinking and talking about them. If you want to read more about this, you might want to look at I. Pool (1983) _Technologies of Freedom_. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, from which I gleaned some of following information. It's almost a decade old, but it brought to my attention things I didn't know, and I suspect you don't know either. The First Amendment, for instance, applies variously to the three major communications media (broadcast media, common carrier (e.g., telephone lines and U.S. mail), and print) because of differences in scarcity and "indivisibility" of resources. Telephone and mail have been considered "indivisible" because noone can have access to everyone unless everyone is included in the network; therefore these media have enjoyed special protection and government support to assure equal access to everyone (indeed, in many countries, the "P.T.T", including also telegrams, are all government owned and operated). Part of the definition of a common carrier is that it allows one-on-one communication. The privacy of messages communicated by common carrier is protected by strict laws: it is a federal offense to tap a telephone line and to interfere with the U.S. mail. Broadcast frequencies have been apportioned and licensed because only a limited number can be distinguished in a small geographic area, e.g., you can't have several radio stations broadcasting at the same frequency in the same town. Since the messages communicated by broadcasting are ephemeral, it is difficult to cite them and especially to quote them verbatim. (They are rarely of a "scholarly" nature anyway, and so direct citation isn't often an issue for _us_.) And since they reach so many people, who have a choice of only those frequencies to tune in to, free speech is _limited_ in broadcast media; entities which get broadcast licenses have to agree not to pervert the common good. The medium of print, not being subject to either scarcity or indivisibility of resources (anyone can scrape up enough money to publish a newsletter), is the most unrestricted in the matter of free speech. It is also the most durable, and thus quotable, citable, and copyrightable. Thus you can publish virtually anything you want in print, and the laws and conventions regarding quoting, citing, and piracy are quite clear. Now, however, the lines of demarcation between these modes of communication are becoming blurred, and so it is not legally clear whether the protections or freedoms originally accorded to one or another medium now extend to similar "kinds" of communications send out over other media. (For example, some telephone conversations are sent not over wires but over the ether, e.g., via cellular phones and portable phones; there is now a law prohibiting eavesdropping on cellular phone conversations, but it does _not_ yet extend to portable phones (according to the Today Show, July 9).) Furthermore, the points noted here concern the laws of the United States; they do not address international issues at all. Electronic bulletin boards span all three media: they _broadcast_ "print" via _common carrier_. Here are some of the inconsistencies I've noticed, which need to be addressed in order to assure to the scholarly community both maximum free speech and appropriate copyright protection. Since e-mail is sent via common carrier, it is against US law for anyone but the sender and the receiver to look at it without permission. If your department chair or administrative assistant or local "superuser" is in the habit of peeking at your e-mail, that is a federal offense--or is it? Bulletin boards are also sent by common carrier, i.e., over wires. But they are also sent to thousands of recipients, so the one-on-one nature of phone conversations and regular mail isn't there. The sender knows that it's not a private communication and that thousands of strangers will see it, and so can leave out anything that he or she may not want "overheard". That is, the sender has to protect herself from having private things overheard by censoring her own message, as she would if she were talking with several people on speaker or extension phones. But what about the recipients of bulletin boards? Do laws protecting people from obscenity or libel protect them here, given that the medium in question is not broadcasting but common carrier? If I call up my friend and tell him that Barbara Partee is an XYZ and does ABC, that's gossip. But if I "call up" the readership on the LINGUIST net and say the same thing, then what? I'll probably be censured by the linguistics community, but Barbara Partee can't sue me--or can she? Messages posted on bulletin boards are virtual print. But it's not clear that they enjoy the same freedom of speech and copyright protection as real print. It's a well-honored courtesy to acknowledge the source of an unpublished idea as "private communication." But p.c. implies that someone told you something personally, knowing enough about you and what you'd do with the information to risk telling you. It may be stretching things to call an idea gleaned from a bulletin board "p.c." Furthermore, it's not clear that the originator of idea X wants to be quoted on it. A bulletin board is not a refereed journal, nor even a conference presenting working papers, where a person _expects_ to be held accountable for what he or she presents. A bulletin board is a place where informal exchange of ideas takes place. If people have to fear future vilification for their irresponsible publication of stupid, half-baked ideas, they will be very hesitant to write anything to the LINGUIST net. (In fact, this did happen in the early months of LINGUIST. Some people submitted informed but not perfectly formulated remarks or queries to the list, and others, seeing something to critize, hit the reply button and snotted off to the entire subscribership about it. It was then they who came off looking snotty, but it was unpleasant and embarrassing for all.) On they other hand, noone wants other people picking up their nifty ideas and turning them into books of their own with no acknowledgement. But it is often difficult to remember who wrote such-and-such a comment (sometimes the comments come with no names, but only cryptic e-mail addresses, attached). Searching for a key word in the entire text for a given time period (if you can remember the approximate date) may work if you keep copies of all the LINGUIST postings or summon them all from the archives. But it's more difficult than searching the printed articles you've read, because the LINGUIST net presents such a broad range of linguistic topics, and your printed articles are likely to be much more limited in number and scope (and you may have other clues to help you remember where it came from, e.g, it was about half-way through that green book, on the bottom of the left-hand page). This are some of the problems alluded to by Barbara Partee's posting, and we have not yet developed conventions for dealing with them. Let's start with a list of issues: 1. Should we cite LINGUIST postings? 2. If so, how do we cite them? 3. If so, should we assume the same kind of intellectual accountability for the idea as we assume for print publication? Or should we all learn to recognize that any bulletin board citation carries with it this caution: warning: this idea may be weak (but if it turns out to be strong, _X_ gets credit for it)? 4. Corollary to 3: Do we need to get prior permission from authors of LINGUIST postings before we cite their ideas? 5. If LINGUIST postings are citable, can we list them on our c.v. as publications? (Whew! think of what that would do to the length of "some people's" c.v.'s!) If so, should they be given a status apart from the others, since they were unrefereed, not submitted to approval by the scholarly community? 6. Should LINGUIST postings be considered copywrited, or should citing them simply be a courtesy? 7. Should bulletin board postings be governed by anti-libel and anti-obscenity laws? or should the community of subscribers or the moderators handle this informally? 8. How are answers to these questions, and others that will arise, affected by the fact that LINGUIST is international? Here are a few of *my* suggestions relative to these issues: a. Assume that whatever you read on LINGUIST is the intellectual property of the person who sent it. That means you must cite it if you use it publicly in any way. b. Sign your postings; don't expect people to tease your identity from your e-mail return address. c. If you as the originator of a posting do NOT want to be quoted or cited, make that very clear in the posting. It seems to me that if you will not take responsibility for the posting, then you also make no claim to it; thus if other people appropriate it and call it their own, with no reference to you, you have right to complain about it. d. Perhaps the moderators or the subscribership could compile a list of key words to use in the message headings, to make searching for postings easier. This is done on an ad hoc basis now, but the headings are perhaps not as helpful as they could be. d. You may list your LINGUIST postings on your c.v., but they should be given a separate, non-refereed, status. I would like to invite other subscribers of LINGUIST to read Pool's book, find other things to read, including up-to-date information about how the First Amendment and privacy/copyright laws are being interpreted, raise other questions, make other suggestions, and share them with the rest of the community. For the record, I claim this posting as my intellectual property (acknowledging my debt to I. Pool's book). If you refer to it, please acknowledge me and cite this posting, this bulletin board, and today's date, July 13, 1992. (And I, once again, acknowledge and thank Helen and Anthony, and their sponsoring institutions, for initiating and maintaining this wonderful resource.) Christine Kamprath Note: There are many issues raised by the "convergence of modes" (Pool's term) that are not directly relevant to bulletin boards but are relevant to differential application of the laws to the various communication modes, and thus to our understanding of the extensions of free speech and copyright/privacy laws, e.g., books can be put on-line and sent by common carrier, television programs are often sent by common carrier (cable) and are easily video-taped, phone messages are broadcast as well as sent by wire, etc. These may all be important areas for us to inform ourselves about, possibly via this bulletin board. _____________________ [Moderators' note: The problem of citing postings from LINGUIST is a complex one. We know of a number of linguistic articles and papers which have either mentioned LINGUIST discussions, or indeed have actually utilized them as data for discourse analysis. None of these, to our knowledge, contained quotes from postings, however. Our main goal as moderators is to facilitate the exchange of information, and to that end we have always maintained a liberal policy with regard to LINGUIST postings. We have always felt, for example, that other lists--and individuals--should be allowed to forward our mailings freely, and have never attempted to place any restrictions on this. We have also always felt that LINGUIST should constitute a relatively unrestrained medium, one in which subscribers feel free to post half-formed ideas, in the hope that, through the following discussion, those ideas can be refined. However, to some degree these policies of ours are in conflict. The more LINGUIST postings are disseminated, the more we will all feel pressured to submit only carefully constructed messages. To prevent any loss of spontaneity, we've attempted to place what we feel is a reasonable limit on the dissemination of postings. This limit is summarized in the introductory message which all new subscribers receive, as follows: "The list is moderated and submissions are subject to editorial discretion. But moderating is as light-handed as we can make it, since we wish to encourage free and open interchange. You are at liberty to pass on and disseminate any LINGUIST message provided it is clearly attributed to LINGUIST. But you may only publish LINGUIST postings with the permission of both the list moderators and the original author of the message." This policy--like all LINGUIST policies--is open for discussion and/or revision by subscribers. We certainly don't think that the newspaper article which prompted this discussion was in any way out of line. But what do you think of this policy as a general quideline, particularly applicable to quotation in academic contexts? Anthony & Helen A footnote: we think Christine's suggestion of signing postings is a good one. Many people don't--more from modesty, we suspect, than anything else--probably assuming that putting their name in the heading once is enough. But it's helpful to the reader to have the full name at the end as well. Why don't we all try to establish this etiquette? OOPS. . . . Helen DRY & Anthony ARISTAR. . . .] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-575. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-576. Wed 15 Jul 1992. Lines: 146 Subject: 3.576 Accents in the Classroom Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 11:39 EDT From: "Barbara.Abbott" Subject: 3.566 Accents in the Classroom 2) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 13:03:59 EDT From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: 3.563 Summary: Accents in Classroom 3) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 10:35:25 MET DST From: David Powers Subject: Re: 3.566 Accents in the Classroom -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 11:39 EDT From: "Barbara.Abbott" Subject: 3.566 Accents in the Classroom I believe Marianna di Paolo did some work in Utah a few years ago in response to complaints about TA's with foreign accents, and found that the problem was actually not comprehensibility but prejudice. I don't know how she determined that, but it would be good if someone in that area came up with a good way to do it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 13:03:59 EDT From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: 3.563 Summary: Accents in Classroom Victor Raskin quotes: > On the other hand, I ran into some reported cases of children who > preserved the accents of their immigrant parents, but these were > unusual cases of socially isolated children. For example, in the > clinical literature I found a case of an 8 year old who immigrated at > 3, and still had "his father's accent". As he was psychoanalyzed (!) > he lost his accent, spoke like his peers, and became able to mimic the > accent at will. Buxbaum, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 18, 279-289 > (1949)." This seems to perhaps point to the related phenomenon of the person "with no native language". I know of no formal studies of this kind of person, but I can mention several examples. Henry Kissinger speaks (as everybody knows) with a thick German accent, but he himself claims to speak German with an American accent as well. This was also true of my mother (Marianne Cowan), who immigrated from Germany to the U.S. at age 12, and spoke American indistinguishably from a native except for minor differences in phonology -- most noticeable on the telephone or from a tape recording. Her German, although both native and fluent, showed mildly American phonology! On a more local level, my wife is also an "immigrant" -- from North Carolina to New York City. NYC natives tag her as a Southerner, whereas her relatives insist that she talks just like a Yankee. -- cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 10:35:25 MET DST From: David Powers Subject: Re: 3.566 Accents in the Classroom > From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu > Subject: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news > > Am I the only one who believes that kids can quite easily > pick up the pronunciations of individual lexical items, > especially learned words, from adults rather than from > peers? I believe this to be true - pronunciation of individual lexical items will be learnt from adults as much as peers, particularly words which may not be so frequently used by children at play. However, mispronunciation of isolated words is quite different from the systematic mispronunciation which we call accent. But to give anecdotal evidence from my own experience, in relation to Alexis' suggestion. As an avid reader from the age of two, I encountered many words for the first time in books, and invented my own pronunciation for some of them. Two case in point are 'misled' (which I took as being a past tense of a verb rhyming with 'thistle') and 'contents' (which I pronounced like the adjective conTENT). In the latter case my father succeeded, with very great difficulty, in training me out of the pronunciation. The former error I still make - my awareness of the problem means that I sometimes realize I have made the error and correct. Note that as the past tense of the correct synonym of my 'misle', 'mislead', I do use the correct pronunciation of 'misled'. However, in the case of 'contents', I would always talk about a 'table of conTENTS', etc. Such mispronunciation/misreadings/misparsings COULD easily be picked up from a non-native speaking teacher. As a second point re the general discussion, my wife is here in Germany an English teacher in an Inlingua language school - the Inlingua charter, and method (Mother-tongue Direct Method), requires the schools to employ native speakers of the language concerned ONLY as teachers in those courses. As Australian passport holders, we are bottom rung in terms of being able to get jobs in Germany - only after any EEC citizens who would be capable of doing it. But with the Inlingua qualification, this requirement reduced to being only British and Irish citizens having precedence. But in the application of this rule, accent is but one aspect - mastery of the grammar is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker. Even trained teachers of a language with years of experience and years of living in the countries concerned don't master all points of grammar and idiom, however could they get in regard to accent. Again we see this in our own (lack of mastery) of German and French. But of course children have advantages over adults which make such stringencies less necessary. Nonetheless I tend to be somewhat sympathetic towards the petition. And as for discrimination, I can't take any of the interesting jobs I have seen in the US, because US citizenship is required. All nationalism is discrimination! David Powers -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-576. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-577. Wed 15 Jul 1992. Lines: 259 Subject: 3.577 Citing LINGUISt Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 13:20:42 PDT From: Aki Namioka Subject: Re: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST 2) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 16:58:22 EDT From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST 3) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1992 07:42 EST From: MORGAN@LOYOLA.EDU Subject: Re: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 13:20:42 PDT From: Aki Namioka Subject: Re: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST In response to Christine Kamprath's message about information policy issues and electronic information, I have a rather lenghty bibliography that was compiled by Stacy B. Veeder in December of 1991 that covers the issue of electronic privacy. It is attached below. I am also aware of two non-profit organizations which have been looking at information policy issues for a few years. They are Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The CPSR Washington D.C. office has been using its presence in the capital to influence legislation that will formulate consistant electronic information policy while still preserving First amendment, privacy, and civil rights. These activities are largely fundedby EFF. If you want more information about either organization I will be more than happy to converse with you individually over e-mail. Aki Namioka aki@atc.boeing.com (206) 865-3229 ====================== Compiled 12/91 by Stacy B. Veeder BITNET: SBVEEDER@SUVM.BITNET Internet: sbveeder@suvm.acs.syr.edu Betts, Mitch, "Do Laws Protect Wireless Nets?" Computerworld (June 17, 1991), p. 47. "Big Brother in the Water Cooler," The Washington Times (September 12, 1990), p. G2. Blickenstorfer, Conrad, "Where Does All the E-Mail Go?" Computerworld (July 22, 1991), p. 25. Burke, Steven, "Electronic-Mail Privacy To Be Tested in Court in Suit Against Epson," PC Week (August 20, 1990), 7(33):124. Caldwell, Bruce, "Big Brother Is Watching," Information Week (June 18, 1990), (275):34 (three pages). Caldwell, Bruce, "E-Mail Privacy Issues Raised," Information Week (August 13, 1990), (282):14 (two pages). Caldwell, Bruce, "Whose Mail Is It Anyway? Companies are Confronting the E-Mail Privacy Issue Head-On," Information Week (August 20, 1990), (283):53 Casatelli, Christine, "Setting Ground Rules for Privacy," Computerworld (March 18, 1991), 25:47 (two pages). "Class-Action Suit Filed Against Epson America Inc. For Invasion of Privacy," Business Wire (August 9, 1990). Davis, Fred, "Beware: 'Little Brother' May Be Reading Your Mail," PC Week (October 29, 1990), 7(43):198. Eckerson, Wayne, "Privacy Suit Forces Users To Examine E-Mail Policies: Case Against Epson Raises Troubling Questions," Network World (September 17, 1990), p. 1. Electronic Privacy Act of 1986, 18 USC Chapter 119 et seq. (P.L. 99-508; 100 Stat. 1848). "Epson America Inc. and Two Employees Named in Lawsuit for Electronic Eavesdropping and Wrongful Termination," Business Wire (May 23, 1990). "Epson E-Mail: Private or Company Information," Infoworld (October 22, 1990), 12(43):66. Feldman, Loren, "Epson Dumps Jackson, Lewis," The American Lawyer (November 1990), p. 24. "Getting a Handle on the Boom in E-Mail Use," Communication News (August 1991), 28(8):9. Holding, Reynolds, "Firms Assailed for E-Mail Monitoring," San Francisco Chronicle (October 3, 1991), p. A1. H.R. Report 647, 99th Congress, 2nd Session, 62 (1986). Quoted in Hernandez, Ruel Torres, "ECPA and Online Computer Privacy," Federal Communications Law Journal, 41(1):17-41. Keppel, Bruce, "Electronic Mail Stirs Debate on the Privacy Issue," Los Angeles Times (May 23, 1990), p. D1. Kobielus, James, "On the Net Manager's Role as Guardian of Privacy," Network World (July 1, 1991), p. 25. Kolstad, Rob, "Privacy and Policy: Two Views on the Privacy of Electronic Mail and Files," UNIX Review (August 1991), 9(8):74. Kuebelbeck, Amy, "Getting the Message: E-Mail Is Fast and Efficient, But It Isn't Always Private--And That Can Mean Big Trouble for Users," Los Angeles Times (September 4, 1991), p. E1. LaPlante, Alice, "Epson E-Mail: Private or Company Information?" Infoworld (October 22, 1990), 12(43):66. LaPlante, Alice, "Is Big Brother Watching," Infoworld (October 22, 1990), 12(43):58. Maney, Kevin, "Electronic-Mail Policies Ignite Debate," USA Today (July 8, 1991), p. 3. Maney, Kevin, "Firms Grapple with Email Ethics," Gannet News Service (July 7, 1991). Marmel, Steve, "Workplace Privacy Must Be Protected," USA Today (September 17, 1990), p. 12A. McNary, Dave, "Nissan Sued for Allegedly Spying on Staff's Email," UPI (January 7, 1991) Molloy, Maureen, "NW [Network] User Panel Takes Stand on E-Mail Privacy," Network World (November 5, 1990), 7(45):2 (two pages). Nash, Jim, "E-Mail Lawsuit Cranks Open Privacy Rights Can of Worms," Computerworld (August 13, 1990), 24:7. Nash, Jim and Harrington, Maura J., "Who Can Open E-Mail?" Computerworld (January 14, 1991), 25:1 (two pages). "Nissan Motor Corp. in U.S.A. Named in Lawsuit for Electronic (E-Mail) Eavesdropping," Business Wire (January 7, 1991). Resnick, Rosalind, "The Outer Limits," National Law Journal (September 16, 1991), p. 1. Richards, Evelyn, "Privacy at the Office: Is There a Right To Snoop?" The Washington Post (September 9, 1990), p. H1. Richards, Evelyn, "Sorting Out the Legality of E-Mail Eavesdropping," Washington Post National Weekly Edition (September 17-23, 1990), p. 21. Rifkin, Glenn, "The Ethics Gap: Despite Growing Attention, Many IS Managers Say, 'It's Not My Job,'" Computerworld (October 14, 1991), p. 83. Savage, J.A., "E-Mail Bust Generates Privacy Rights Uproar," Computerworld (January 23, 1989), 23:2. Schuyler, Michael, "Rights of Computer On-Line Users," Small Computers in Libraries (December 1990), 10(11):41. Schwartz, John, "How Did They Get My Name?" Newsweek (June 3, 1991), p. 40. Slind-Flor, Victoria, "What Is E-Mail, Exactly?" National Law Journal (November 25, 1991), pp. 3, 22. Wickham, Dewayne, "Privacy Issues Await Souter," Gannett News Service (September 17, 1990). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 16:58:22 EDT From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST I read with interest the posting of LIFY460, er, Christine Kamprath. Here are a few comments: The texts posted by the authors are unambiguously copyrighted under U.S. law and the Berne Convention as soon as they have been "fixed in a tangible medium of expression". Computer media has been held to be such a medium, and since Linguist is archived, its contents are fixed. Copyright ownership is with the author and no one else. It should not be assumed that the networks are "common carriers" within the meaning of U.S. or any other law. No court has pronounced on the point, and it is not clear that universities and random corporations would like being treated as common carriers -- one of the duties of a common carrier is to carry all who come and can pay, which is emphatically >not< something that the aforesaid universities and corporations provide. Nor are the networks themselves legal entities as yet. I would strongly urge that the list maintainers contact the Library of Congress and receive an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), the magazine analogue of the ISBN. Other moderated net.digests, specifically Telecom Digest, have done so. Since issues are already numbered, that would provide a concise and internationally interpretable form of citation. Since I am not an academic, the question of listing postings as publications doesn't affect me directly. I would propose, however, that they are more nearly analogous to editorial letters or even to public speeches than to conventional publications. Is it common practice to list either of these? The privacy of electronic mail is guaranteed within the U.S. not by common-carrier case law but by a specific statute, the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act (ECPA), the same which protects cellular (but not portable-phone) calls as if they were landline calls. Disclaimer: Not A Lawyer (Or A Linguist, Either) -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1992 07:42 EST From: MORGAN@LOYOLA.EDU Subject: Re: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST A little while ago there was a similar discussion on *Humanist* about how to cite, etc. I believe the final suggestion was to cite it as a journal. A sample format (following MLA principles) was offered, with date, volume no., etc. It would be worthwhile to create an overall policy on citing electronic lists, I think; perhaps a new paragraph in style sheets, such as LSA, to include the person cited as well as electronic source and how to retrieve (or where to retrieve) the full citation for future reference and context would be extremely appropriate. Leslie Morgan (MORGAN@LOYVAX.BITNET or MORGAN@LOYOLA.EDU) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-577. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-578. Wed 15 Jul 1992. Lines: 96 Subject: 3.578 Queries: Accents, Dean Falk, Symbols Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 14 Jul 92 15:37:00 EST From: "SUSAN SOTILLO" Subject: accents 2) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 11:00:45 EST From: daysa@mace.cc.purdue.edu (,sd) Subject: queries 3) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 14:28:51 +0200 From: Arild Hestvik Subject: correlation use of symbols <--> development of language in early man? -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 14 Jul 92 15:37:00 EST From: "SUSAN SOTILLO" Subject: accents Do any of you know of research on accents and psychological testing? I am thinking of a situation in which the person administering the test has a different accent than the test taker (e.g., an Australian test administrator and a speaker of an American variety of English). Does the accent of the test administrator affect the performance of the test taker given the fact that comprehensibility may be affected? I have serious reasons for asking this question. If you know of any recent research, please share the information. I am not talking about speakers of different languages (e.g., when the examiner is a speaker of American English and the test taker a Spanish speaker). Thanks. Susana -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 11:00:45 EST From: daysa@mace.cc.purdue.edu (,sd) Subject: queries queries: Does anyone out there have the e-mail, snail-mail, or/and voice-phone numbers/addresses for Dean Falk? I hear she is still in New York; is this correct (excuse my being somewhat out of touch on things)? Sean A. Day Purdue Univ. daysa@mace.cc.purdue.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 14:28:51 +0200 From: Arild Hestvik Subject: correlation use of symbols <--> development of language in early man? I'm posting this for someone else (an amateur archaeologist). (Any inaccuracies in my recasting of his query is my fault!) "The earliest archaelogical findings of symbol use (figurines) date back 35,000 years ago, and correlates with the arrival of the Cro Magnon man. Neanderhals (who disappeared around 30,000 years ago) are believed not to have used symbols. Cro Magnon also had a developed frontal lobe, whereas Neanderthals had underdeveloped frontal lobe. I believe that the use of symbols correlate with the development of the frontal lobe, and I conjecture that language developed in man at the same time. I.e., the use of language, a symbol system, and the use of visual symbols in art, had the same neurological source." "Is there any research along these lines? Can anyone provide any pointers to literature and journal articles addressing this (or related issues)?" Please respond to this e-mail address. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-578. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-579. Wed 15 Jul 1992. Lines: 164 Subject: 3.579 Queries: Body-parts; IPA, IRIS; Alphabet-Songs Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 13:06:26 EDT From: cowan@uunet.UU.NET (John Cowan) Subject: Query: body-part metaphors 2) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 21:49 BST From: "NAME " William Marslen-Wilson "" Subject: IPA, IRIS 3) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 21:28:25 +0900 From: Takashi Matsuzawa Subject: Alphabet songs/verses? -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 13:06:26 EDT From: cowan@uunet.UU.NET (John Cowan) Subject: Query: body-part metaphors Could any of you who have them on tap send me body-part metaphors, of the type "river mouth", "head trip", "nose for news", and the like? I am interested in non-English examples, preferably non-Indo-European, and in breadth rather than depth. The language name, the word or phrase, and a gloss will suffice. As always, ignore the address above and reply to . Thanks. -- cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 21:49 BST From: "NAME " William Marslen-Wilson "" Subject: IPA, IRIS Two technical queries: 1. I've followed with interest the various postings about IPA fonts, but unless I'm mistaken there still does not exist a readily available IPA font which I can use in conjunction with Word for Windows 2.0, running under Windows 3.1, so that I can paste IPA characters into manuscripts either by using Keyfinder or the ALT + code method. If I'm wrong about this, I would be grateful for information about whether such a font exists and how I can get hold of it. 2. We have a Silicon Graphics IRIS workstation in our laboratory, and for obvious reasons (good graphics, built in audio capacity) would like to use it for speech analysis and speech editing. The UK dealership is not expert in this area. Does anyone have any experience of using the IRIS for speech work? Has any software been ported to the IRIS? I heard that WAVES was going to be, but have no confirmation on this. I guess any speech software that runs on UNIX boxes would be a candidate here. It would be especially useful to get responses from any actual users of analysis and editing software on the IRIS. Please reply to me directly -- I will summarise any useful responses for the net. William Marslen-Wilson Birkbeck College Univesity of London Malet St. London WC1E 7HX Email: UBJTA38@cu.bbk.ac.uk -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 21:28:25 +0900 From: Takashi Matsuzawa Subject: Alphabet songs/verses? Here is a diversion for you :-) I apologize if this list is not appropriate for this particular purpose. Note I don't subscribe this list. Do you know have any knowledge about "alphabet songs" in various languages?? Well, why I am asking this here is that I would like to gather the sample texts of the world-wide languages to include them in a forth- coming software package. We are currently beta-testing a variant of GNU Emacs editor called "Mule", a Multilingual Emacs. Just like GNU Emacs itself, it will be available to the world without fee, whent it is released. I do not go into the technical discussion here, but the multilingual editor currently supports most of the European languages, as well as Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Symplified, Traditional.) We, the beta- testing people are like kids with their new toy now... I thought a collection of the above kind of poems would be a fine example of the editor's ability to handle multiple languages. As for the alphabet song, in Japan we have a traditional poem called "Iroha Uta", which is a poem consist of 47 Japanese characters (using every kana character without duplication), arranging them to have some philosophical (?) meaning. It could be an interesting sample of a traditional Japanese poem. Your poem may not have such format, but for example I think we can call an ode every stanza begin with alphabets (a, b, c, ...) "alphabet song." I think what important is that it is specific to your the native language, popular and beautiful. Please include the diacritical marks or whatever that are found in your written languages. If your equipment is not designed for it, then literal expranation of them is helpful. We will reproduce them in our sample texts, as long as we can find appropriate character code and/or fonts for your toungue. (Believe me, I am a computer engineer.) Your local PC data is acceptable as long as the Internet e-mail route does not break your character codes. It could be safer to encode them into ASCII plain texts. Of course, folklore is welcomed. Since the editor is a "free-software" that is freely distributed, we would not like to be involved with copyright issues. If you are familiar with UNIX: Please uuencode them for transmission, with the description of the character code used, if it is necessary. Note I am just a beta-tester of the software. If you are interested in Mule, please drop us a line to mule-abroad@etl.go.jp (mailing list for English discussion) and mule@etl.go.jp (for Japanese discussion) To join the Mule mailing list, drop a line to mule-abroad-request@etl.go.jp or mule-request@etl.go.jp, respectively. Thank you for your kind cooperation. PS. We have already gatherd several poems, but I believe there should be much more "alphabet songs" in the world. --- Takashi Matsuzawa Japan SDO, APPO, Hewlett-Packard Company TEL: +81 3-3335-8220 ex. 800-5847, HP-Telnet: 364-5847 FAX: +81 3-3335-6454, Internet: mzw_t@yhp.hp.com / mzw_t@yhp.co.jp -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-579. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-580. Wed 15 Jul 1992. Lines: 55 Subject: 3.580 Dog the: Summary the Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 05:53:41 HST From: David Stampe Subject: Dog days (Re: 3.466 Rules) -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 05:53:41 HST From: David Stampe Subject: Dog days (Re: 3.466 Rules) In June I posted a note on the issue of whether `dog the' is an NP, citing a study by Niemann and Noone of an English dialect where `Beware of the dog' has become `Beware of dog the'. I've had fifteen or twenty inquiries about that study. (Really.) Here's a summary: 1. Several respondents questioned Niemann and Noone's claim that examples like `cat in hat the the' represented performance errors rather than grammatical competence. Noone replies that all speakers rejected such examples. Niemann says that they only rejected them because Noone left off the quotation marks. 2. Others noted that `dog the' would be a translation of `hundet' in various Scandinavian dialects, and asked whether the speakers were Scandinavian immigrants. Noone says that they were indeed. Niemann says they didn't look Scandinavian to him. 3. Most respondents asked where to get a copy of Noone and Niemann. Noone says that one day Niemann started screaming `Any utterance that refers to itself is a grammatical noun phrase is a grammatical noun phrase is a grammatical noun phrase ...', and destroyed all the copies. Niemann says dog the ate them. David Stampe , Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of Hawaii/Manoa, Honolulu HI 96822 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-580. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-581. Wed 15 Jul 1992. Lines: 84 Subject: 3.581 Center-Embedding, Electronic Resources in Linguistics Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 12:24 CDT From: e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu (Anthony Aristar) Subject: Center-embedding in NP's 2) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 12:29:05 EDT From: tat@Athena.MIT.EDU Subject: Electronic resources in Linguistics -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 12:24 CDT From: e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu (Anthony Aristar) Subject: Center-embedding in NP's In some languages there occurs a pile-up of morphemes at the margins of NP's, so that all NP-internal nouns are unmarked, and the markings which should appropriately occur on those nouns are concatenated in one position, usually the end of the NP. So, in a language like Sumerian, you'd get the following string: house wife man of of to "to the house of the man's wife" A more "normal" phrase like: *house to wife of man of would be ungrammatical. I know that there's at least one African language which also does this: it was used as a counterexample to--I believe-- Kuno's early constraints on center-embedding. Does anyone know what this language is, and--more important--does anyone know of other languages which do this kind of thing? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 12:29:05 EDT From: tat@Athena.MIT.EDU Subject: Electronic resources in Linguistics I am the Humanities Librarian at M.I.T. and also the linguistics bibliographer. Currently, I am working on a guide to electronic resources in linguistics. I would appreciate hearing from any of you who use electronic resources in your work or research; I am interested in both commercial products ( e.g., LLBA on Dialog) and non-commercial ( e.g., University library catalogues on the internet.) I would also appreciate any evaluative comments. I will be happy to share the guide on linguist when it is ready. If you are interested in looking at M.I.T. Library's catalog the telnet address is library.mit.edu or 18.84.1.12 Thank you in advance Theresa A. Tobin M.I.T. Humanities Librarian tat@athena.mit.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-581. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-582. Thu 16 Jul 1992. Lines: 184 Subject: 3.582 Citing LINGUIST Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 11:54:51 EDT From: Stavros Macrakis Subject: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST 2) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 17:22:53 MET DST From: David Powers Subject: Re: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 11:54:51 EDT From: Stavros Macrakis Subject: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST Christine Kamprath discusses citation practices for Linguist postings in Linguist 3.575. As she says, electronic bulletin boards are a new medium, which needs new rules. But many of the old principles are valid. Citations have two main purposes: acknowledging intellectual debt, and allowing the reader to track down the author's sources. The first goal is met by mentioning the author and the date, as in standard `personal communication' citations; the author's address (postal and email) could be handy, too. The second goal is somewhat more difficult in general: citations should give the information necessary to find a work, possibly many years and many miles away from the original publication. Until Linguist is permanently archived and entered into the usual reference sources for serials, some sort of `contact information' is needed, probably both of the author (who may have kept a copy) and the editors, as well as of course the author and issue number (which will presumably be used by the archive). (`Permanently archived' means able to outlive the current editors, readers, and hardware. This is largely an institutional, not a technical, problem.) So I would suggest a reference along the lines of: Christine Kamprath (Internet: LIFY460@orange.cc.utexas.edu), "Re: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news", Linguist 3.575. (Linguist is an electronic bulletin board edited by Anthony Aristar (Internet: e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu) and Helen Dry (Internet: hdry@emunix.emich.edu).) -s PS Note that there are many networks, so the `Internet' prefix is useful. PPS Note also that many automatic mail-reply programs generate subjects which are not particularly evocative. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 17:22:53 MET DST From: David Powers Subject: Re: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST I think the matter of what to do about quoting or referring to Linguist is an important red-herring! I largely agree with Christine's posting, and Anthony and Helen's response. A couple of points. 1. Linguist is not a bulletin board, but a mailing list. The difference is probably not significant to any user of linguist, but it does change the appearance of where it may lie in the legal spectrum. The physical base for these electronic analogies gives the clue - bulletin boards are/were systems which you dialed up to upload or download messages, programs or queries. This is just like pinning something up on your departmental noticeboard - anyone who wants to come and look can, providing the place is open to the public or they have a key. Some bulletin boards are open, others require a password. Mailing lists imply that they are distributed to a particular set of subscribers, although there is also the junk mail variety. News groups are something in between. They are more like distributed bulletin boards - they come to sites rather than users - it is like a circular mailed out and posted on a bulletin board. 2. Whatever the legal statement, the moderators of a list or board or group can disseminate the basis on which the list should operate, including in relation to citation. This would then take precedence over any defaults which might seem to be applicable to the medium, and to clarify any ambiguity. There are precedents in print for different status publications too. There are unrefereed newsletters and casual talks with one page abstracts, there are informal and formal workshops, there are departmental memos as well as technical/research reports, Finally we get to the archival forms of collected papers, monographs, conferences and journals. These are successively more deliberated, on the part of the author and the publisher/editor alike. Newsletters and talk abstracts are not archival, so I chuck them. Journals and Proceedings I tend to keep, or at least copies of the papers that I feel are important. Mailing lists correspond best to newsletters - newsletters are what is typically sent out to a physical mailing list. The electronic versions are however likely to be even less deliberated, by both author and moderator. This is not just a question of time and haste, although this plays a role. But the fact that the written word never finds its way into print before it is published. My experience is that I never pick up all errors in a paper (or program) in electronic form - although spell checkers (or compilers may help. But I don't even put this effort into my Linguist submissions - often I may reread them, but not always. I never spell check them! Thus I feel they are actually closer to the reaction I would give verbally, whether to a colleague in the next room, or a reporter on the phone. But even their the level of deliberation can vary. The three conclusions I want to draw are: 1. Permission should be obtained from the author to use extensive quotation - and in fact opportunity given to him to reformulate. The final version, if a republication of the discussion, should be an edited form accepted by the authors (and according the Linguist rules possibly also the moderators). I know of a couple of newsletters which regularly publish snippets from newsgroups - and as I have been approached for permission (as outlined above) I know that something like these guidelines are being followed. 2. To say that soandso believes/says this or that is something quite different. We must stand behind the words we write - even if we change our minds later. So I feel that brief quotations or citations, direct or indirect, as in the news story which started this new thread, are quite reasonable, particularly when attempts have been made to contact the people for more direct comment. 3. However, as I feel the group is more like a conversational discussion, and it is not usual to keep local archives, and not reasonable to search distant archives, one cannot be expected to be able to attribute every idea which comes up in the discussion, or even to know that it was in the Linguist group that it occured, just as is the case with the print newsletters and the verbal presentations one is bombarded with. In fact, neither I nor the person whose chance comment I now want to come back to, pick up and run with, neither of us may have exactly straight what form the idea originally took. In short, the problems are in no case unique to this medium. I have, for example, recently cited two people, namelessly, in an invited journal article - who, perhaps unknowingly, steered me onto a new track. Once was someone in the audience who raised an "are you aware" type comment in response to a conference presentation in 1984, the other in similar circumstances in 1991. In both cases it was support for my position from totally unexpected quarters, in different disciplines. Creativity is the synthesis of new ideas from old, from the entire sum of our experience, or at least large portions thereof. Submitted, unread and unedited but nonetheless reasonably deliberated - I've got to get off here in the next couple of minutes. That's not atypical, nor unreasonable, for this medium. And if I had to come back and knock it it to shape, it wouldn't get sent. Cheers, David Powers -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-582. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-583. Thu 16 Jul 1992. Lines: 96 Subject: 3.583 Queries: Housing in Austin; Child Language; E Prime Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1992 12:49 MST From: BRETON Subject: help with housing 2) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 11:08:41 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: Child Language 3) Date: 15 Jul 92 22:14:55 EDT From: Michael Sikillian/Annotext <76264.1323@compuserve.com> Subject: Query: E prime -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1992 12:49 MST From: BRETON Subject: help with housing Amigos lectores: ?hay alguien dispuesto a ayudar una pareja joven que necesita encontrar alojamiento en Austin, Texas? Can someone help my wife and I find housing in Austin Texas, I'm starting my doctorate there in the fall and we don't know where to move!!! Thanks: Brett Rosenberg Brosenbe@ccit.arizona.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 11:08:41 EDT From: Geoffrey Russom Subject: Re: Child Language For a presentation on the difference between AI modeling of language and efficient grammar correctors, my wife unearthed her old records of my son's child speech. Would someone be good enough to inform me about any recent work on constructions like the following in language acquisition studies: (To his mother): "Who is my daddy your?" (Answer): "Husband." Presumably this is related to sentences like "My daddy is your husband". I'm aware of theoretical literature on wh-movement, but would appreciate analogous examples of actual child speech and discussion of these in particular. Thanks, Rick -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: 15 Jul 92 22:14:55 EDT From: Michael Sikillian/Annotext <76264.1323@compuserve.com> Subject: Query: E prime Does anyone know what relationship, if any exists between e-prime and the Sapir-Whorf theories? E-prime, as I understand it, eliminates the verb "to be". Rather than say: "You are wrong", one says "It appears to me that you are wrong" "It is hot today" becomes "It seems to me to be hot today" I believe that there is a goal to change how people think by changing how they describe the world. Have there been any studies of whether this sort of "language planning" has achieved its desired result? Michael Sikillian Annotext -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-583. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-584. Thu 16 Jul 1992. Lines: 149 Subject: 3.584 Dissimilation, assimilation Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 12:09:02 CDT From: cole@lees.cogsci.uiuc.edu (Jennifer Cole) Subject: dissimilation 2) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 14:12:36 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: 3.569 Phonology: Assimilation, Dissimilation, Natural -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 12:09:02 CDT From: cole@lees.cogsci.uiuc.edu (Jennifer Cole) Subject: dissimilation We are grateful to D.Stampe for sharing his views on dissimilation with us [vol. 3.551]. In our summary of responses to our query on dissimilation [vol. 3-546], we noted that we had not yet received any productive cases of long-distance (beyond the syllable) dissimilation. The only candidate was Latin Liquid Dissimilation, which has been argued by Bernhard Hurch not to be productive as a long-distance process. Stampe contends that the Latin case should nonetheless be counted. Fortunately, the entire argument need not rest on the status of Latin. As we reported in an update to our summary [vol. 3-560], there are apparently two better examples of truly productive long-distance dissimilation, recently brought to our attention by David Odden and Wayles Brown: Meeussen's Rule and Georgian Liquid Dissimilation. However, we are puzzled by Stampe's arguments. Citing Donegan (1978) and Jesperson, Stampe suggests that dissimilation occurs between non-adjacent sounds when the intervening sound is likely to assimilate to the flanking identical sounds. When one of the flanking sounds dissimilates, it effectively blocks that assimilation. Stampe says, > If "distant" dissimilations of consonants protect the sounds they > flank from complete assimilation, we wouldn't expect dissimilation > either (1) if the flanked sounds are so many or so different from the > flanking consonants as to resist assimilation, or (2) if there are no > flanked sounds. It seems to us that under this analysis long-distance dissimilation is actually highly unlikely. How are we to reconcile Stampe's proposal with the facts of Meuussen's Rule or Georgian Liquid Dissimilation? In what sense are the flanked sounds (in caps) in Georgian [phrANG-Uli] `French' (from /phrang-ur-i/) highly similar, so as to be threatened by assimilation from the flanking r...r? Stampe comments on Hurch's position that > "productivity gradually decreases the > more distant the [dissimilator] is from the [dissimilatee]". Good. > But if adjacency favors dissimilation, why doesn't ll dissimilate in > mellis (not *melris)? Under his proposed account of dissimilation as a means of blocking assimilation, Stampe argues that > > (2) we would NEVER expect dissimilation in mellis (*melris), where > there is no flanked sound to protect from assimilation. (The only > other reason for dissimilating two sounds is to keep them from > assimilating to each other, but ll can't get any more similar!) First of all, as we pointed out in a previous message, /mellis/ is not a good example. It cannot undergo dissimilation simply because it does not contain the suffix /-alis/. But leaving this aside,and leaving geminate blockage aside (which may take place when in fact there is a single long segment instead of two adjacent identical segments) there certainly are cases where adjacent identical sounds dissimilate. A couple of examples from Basque: the final /s/ of the negative particle /es/ becomes [t] before another /s/; e.g.: /es-sara/ [etsara] 'you are not'. In Biscayan Basque stem-final /a/ becomes [e] before the singular determiner /a/: /alaba-a/ [alabea] 'the daughter'. So, dissimilation involving adjacent identical sounds is attested. We are unclear on another of Stampe's points. He states that, > Another puzzle: Dissimilations, like other fortitions, apply in > narrower prosodic domains only if they apply in wider domains. > [...] > This is the opposite of assimilations, which, like all lenitions, > apply in wider prosodic domains only if they apply in narrower ones. While this is certainly an interesting claim, it is not clear to us how it is to be interpreted. What sort of ``prosodic domains'' does Stampe refer to? From the examples it appears that a consequence of the claim is the following: dissimilations affect unaccented nuclei if they also affect accented ones, while the opposite is true for assimilations. But if so, this claim has a number of clear counterexamples; for instance Metaphony (the raising of a vowel under the influence of a final high vowel- an assimilation) in many Romance languages affects only stressed vowels. Thus, in the dialect of Lena (Spain) /p'aSaru/ [p'eSaru] (cf/ plural [p'aSaros]) (S = prepalatal voiceless fricative). We would be grateful for clarification on any of these points. Jose Ignacio Hualde (jihualde@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu) Jennifer Cole (cole@cogsci.uiuc.edu) Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 14:12:36 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: 3.569 Phonology: Assimilation, Dissimilation, Natural Dr. Gladney response (3.569) to my posting on Polish voicing assimilation (3.511) says that I was wrong to claim that ALL voiced fricatives devoice after voiceless obstruents. However, his example of dialectal /gzwo/ 'shirt', etymologically perhaps from /kuzlo/ (with short /u/) is surely irrelevant, since this form arose centuries ago, whereas my claims are about the modern language (I could also quibble about the fact that, since this belongs to some dialect which is quite foreign to me, it is also irrelevant for that reason). On the other hand, the evidence that I have (which involves Polish speakers mispronouncing foreign words) does bear on the synchronic situation. I might add yet another argument. Since Polish has a phonemic voiceless velar /x/ (actually it is usually frictionless, so 'x' is the wrong symbol, but that does not matter here) but lacks (for most speakers) a corresponding voiced sound, a good test for my hypothesis involves foreign words with clusters of /x/ + a voiced fricative. According to an experiment I did with several speakers, WITHIN the boundaries of a morpheme, such clusters will be pronounced with progressive assimilation, including orthographic (that's how forms were presented to speakers) 'Achziw', rendered with /xs/. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-584. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-585. Thu 16 Jul 1992. Lines: 127 Subject: 3.585 Call for Papers: Cognitive Linguistics Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1992 10:03 MST From: Larry Hagberg Subject: 3RD INTERNATIONAL COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1992 10:03 MST From: Larry Hagberg Subject: 3RD INTERNATIONAL COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE Call for Papers 3RD INTERNATIONAL COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE July 18-23, 1993, Leuven, Belgium AIMS AND SCOPE The conference offers a forum for research within the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics. This perspective subsumes a variety of concerns and broadly compatible theoretical approaches that share a common basis: the idea that language is an integral part of communication which reflects the interaction of cultural, psychological, communicative and functional considerations, and which can only be understood in the context of a realistic view of cognitive development and mental processing. Topics of special interest for Cognitive Linguistics include the structural characteristics of natural language categorization (such as prototypicality, metaphor, mental imagery, and cognitive models), the functional principles of linguistic organization (such as iconicity and naturalness), the conceptual interface between syntax and semantics, the experiential and pragmatic background of language-in-use, and the relationship between language and thought. CONFERENCE PROGRAM The conference will include nine keynote lectures and up to ninety 40-minute lectures in parallel sections. A workshop on psychological models of categorization is being planned. The social program will feature various receptions, a farewell concert, and a guided tour of one of Flanders' historical towns. SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS Authors are requested to submit four copies of a one-page abstract in hardcopy format to the address below. Abstracts must be received before November 1, 1992. Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by January 1, 1993. REGISTRATION FEE The regular registration fee is 3000 Belgian francs. (The current exchange rate is about 35 francs to one U.S. dollar). Members of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association pay 2000 francs. Students and residents of countries with currency restrictions can register at the reduced rate of 1500 francs. After May 15, 1993, all rates are raised by 1000 francs. All payments must be made through account number 431-0612761-79 of Dirk Geeraerts, ICLA93, Kredietbank Ladeuzeplein, Leuven. Refunds (minus 20% administration charges) will only be made if the organizing committee is notified before May 15, 1993. CONFERENCE SITE AND HOUSING FACILITIES Founded in 1429, the University of Leuven is one of the oldest in the northern part of Europe. Situated at only 25 kms from Brussels, the town of Leuven is easy to reach. The conference will take place in the classicist buildings of the 18th century Maria-Theresia College, situated in the historical center of Leuven. The participants will be housed in the immediate neighborhood of the Maria-Theresia College, either in the Pauscollege or in the Holiday Inn Hotel. The Pauscollege offers single rooms at the price of approximately 1000 francs per night per room. The Holiday Inn charges approximately 3000 francs per night per room, regardless of the number of persons occupying it (up to a maximum of four persons). Participants will receive definitive prices by January 15, 1993. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE The organizing committee consists of Dirk Geeraerts, Nicole Delbecque, Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn, Ren Dirven and Stefan Grondelaers. All correspondence should be addressed to Dirk Geeraerts, Departement Lingistiek KU Leuven, Blijde- Inkomststraat 21, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium (telephone: 32-16- 284815, FAX: 32-16-285025, e-mail: (FFAAB01 at BLEKUL11.EARN). (Also: FFAAB01 at BLEKUL11.BITNET). IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN ATTENDING THE THIRD ICLA CONFERENCE, SEND THE FOLLOWING REGISTRATION FORM TO: ------------------------------------------------------------ DIRK GEERAERTS / ICLA93 DEPARTEMENT LINGISTIEK KUL BLIJDE-INKOMSTSTRAAT 21 B-3000 LEUVEN BELGIUM Name: Affiliation: Address: ___ I intend to participate and would like to receive further information. ___ I intend to submit an abstract by November 1, 1992. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-585. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-586. Fri 17 Jul 1992. Lines: 91 Subject: 3.586 FYI: World English; NSF Database Activities Program Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 14 Jul 92 10:55:59 EST From: EJLESBB@engfac.indstate.edu Subject: World English 2) Date: Fri, 17 Jul 92 08:33:00 EDT From: mccray@nlm.nih.gov (Alexa T. McCray) Subject: NSF Database Activities Program -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 14 Jul 92 10:55:59 EST From: EJLESBB@engfac.indstate.edu Subject: World English The announcement sent out last week about the new association for World Englishes has an incorrect e-mail address. The correct address is: EJCLN@ENGFAC.INDSTATE.EDU -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Fri, 17 Jul 92 08:33:00 EDT From: mccray@nlm.nih.gov (Alexa T. McCray) Subject: NSF Database Activities Program The National Science Foundation through its Directorate for Biological, Behavioral, and Social Sciences supports a cross-disciplinary program for research in the design, development, implementation, and use of information resources. A copy of the announcement for this program, "Database Activities in Biological, Behavioral, and Social Sciences", can be obtained by writing or phoning Dr. Frank Hartel at NSF: National Science Foundation 1800 G Street, N.W. Rm 312 Washington, D.C. 20550 202 357-9880 Discussions between the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the NSF have indicated that basic research associated with NLM's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is within the scope of the research that could be supported under this NSF program activity. The UMLS project is a long-term effort to develop increasingly intelligent automated systems to help users retrieve information from biomedical databases such as bibliographic databases, clinical record systems, factual databanks and biomedical knowledge bases. The UMLS project seeks to answer research questions that involve the optimal methods for integrated access to information in multiple, generally disparate, computerized information sources. It is assumed that diversity will continue to exist, and that therefore methods and techniques need to be developed that will compensate for the dissimilar vocabularies, coding and access schemes used by different systems. The ultimate goal is to identify and implement innovative methods that will mediate between users' requests for information and the potentially multiple sources that contain information relevant to those requests. Research and development on the UMLS project was formally initiated in 1986 and has involved collaborative work with several research groups at major U.S. universities. As one result of this activity, three knowledge sources, a Metathesaurus of biomedical concepts and their interrelationships, a Semantic Network of high level semantic categories, and an Information Sources Map, have been developed and distributed to interested researchers for experimentation and evaluation. Those who are interested should contact Dr. Milton Corn for further information: Associate Director Division of Extramural Programs National Library of Medicine Bethesda, Maryland 20894 Phone: 301 496-4621 FAX: 301 402-0421 Internet: corn@lhc.nlm.gov Proposals, however, will be submitted directly to the NSF at the address given above. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-586. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-587. Fri 17 Jul 1992. Lines: 421 Subject: 3.587 Meeting on Grammar Evaluation Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 17 Jul 92 13:07:01 EDT From: black@watson.ibm.com Subject: Meeting on Grammar Evaluation -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 17 Jul 92 13:07:01 EDT From: black@watson.ibm.com Subject: Meeting on Grammar Evaluation Meeting of Interest Group on Evaluation of Broad-Coverage Grammars of English: UPenn Sept. 20-21 A meeting of the ongoing Interest Group on Evaluation of Broad-Coverage Grammars of English, hosted by Professors Mitch Marcus and Mark Liberman, will take place at the University of Pennsylvania on September 20-21. Invited to attend, in addition to the original nine group members, are researchers who (a) have developed working, broad-coverage parser/grammars of English, (b) are willing to bring to the meeting and to have distributed among its attendees their system's output parses for 50 real-world sentences to be randomly selected from large corpora by M. Marcus; (c) agree to transform their parser output by program into the canonical form necessary for input into the group's evaluation program, written in LISP, to run this program on their parses, and bring the results to the meeting. The purpose of the meeting is to continue refining the evaluation metric worked out jointly at our last University of Pennsylvania meeting, and more generally to learn from each other's successes and pratfalls in handling these sentences previously unseen by our parsers. We expect that at this meeting there will also be a preliminary discussion of proposals for the evaluation of predicate/argument analyses. Anyone who is interested specifically in this aspect of the meeting should mention that in their reply. Individuals interested in attending this meeting must contact Ezra Black (Black at Watson.IBM.Com) by July 31. All invitees will be sent detailed instructions for transforming parse output into the format necessary for input to our evaluation program, PARSEVAL. Below is an account of our approach to parser/grammar evaluation, from the Proceedings of the Workshop on Grammar Evalaution at ACL 1991: Evaluating Syntax Performance of Parser/Grammars of English Philip Harrison, Boeing Computer Services Steven Abney, Bellcore Ezra Black, IBM Dan Flickinger, Hewlett Packard Claudia Gdaniec, Logos, Inc. Ralph Grishman, NYU Donald Hindle, AT&T Robert Ingria, BBN Mitch Marcus, U. of Pennsylvania Beatrice Santorini, U. of Pennsylvania Tomek Strzalkowski, NYU We report on an ongoing collaborative effort to develop criteria, methods, measures and procedures for evaluating the syntax performance of different broad-coverage parser/grammars of English. The project was motivated by the apparent difficulty of comparing different grammars because of divergences in the way they handle various syntactic phenomena. The availability of a means for useful comparison would allow hand-bracketed corpora, such as the University of Pennsylvania Treebank, to serve as a source of data for evaluation of many grammars. The project has progressed to the point where the first version of an automated syntax evaluation program has been completed and is available for testing. The methodology continues to undergo refinement as more data is examined. The project began with a comparison of hand syntactic analyses of 50 Brown Corpus sentences by grammarians from nine organizations: Steve Abney (Bellcore), Ezra Black (IBM), Dan Flickinger (Hewlett Packard), Claudia Gdaniec (Logos), Ralph Grishman and Tomek Strzalkowski (NYU), Philip Harrison (Boeing), Donald Hindle (AT&T), Robert Ingria (BBN), and Mitch Marcus and Beatrice Santorini (U. of Pennsylvania). The purpose of the bracketing exercise was to provide a focus for the discussion of syntactic differences and a source of data to test proposals for evaluation techniques. The participating grammarians produced labelled bracketings representing what they ideally want their grammars to specify. After the exercise was completed, a small workshop was held at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss the results and examine proposals for evaluation methodologies. The results of the hand-bracketing exercise revealed that very little structure was common to all the parses. For example, an analysis revealed that the following three Brown Corpus sentences (taken from what we call the "consensus" parses) display only the indicated phrases in common to all of the bracketings: The famed Yankee Clipper, now retired, has been assisting (as (a batting coach) One of those capital-gains ventures, in fact, has saddled him (with (Gore Court He said this constituted a (very serious) misuse (of the (Criminal court) proce A rather more encouraging result was obtained when phrases were selected which appeared bracketed in a majority of the analyses (the "majority" parses): ((((The famed (Yankee Clipper)) , (now retired) ,) (has been (assisting (as (a batting coach))))) .) (((One (of (those capital-gains ventures))) , (in fact) , (has (saddled him (with (Gore Court))))) .) ((He (said (this (constituted (a (very serious) misuse (of (the (Criminal court) processes)))))) The lack of structure for the consensus parses is a reflection of the diversity of approaches to such phenomena as punctuation, the employment of null nodes by the grammar, and the attachment of auxiliaries, negation, pre-infinitival `to', adverbs, and other types of constituents. But the results for the majority parses indicated that a good foundation of agreement exists among the several grammars. The challenge was to find an evaluation method that would not penalize even those analyses that diverged from the majority in ways that would be considered generally acceptable. The proposed solution, explored in depth by hand analysis at the workshop, involves 1) the systematic elimination of certain problematical constructions from the parse tree (resulting in trees that show a much higher degree of structural agreement) and 2) systematic restructuring of constituents to a minor degree for particular constructions if the grammar being evaluated differs from the evaluation standard for these constructions. The evaluation program itself carries out the elimination of constituents for both the standard parse and the parse being tested (hereafter the test or candidate parse, provided by the client grammarian for evaluation). The client is responsible for restructuring the special constructions in the test parse. These restructurings will be discussed after the evaluation procedure itself. The proposed evaluation procedure has been implemented and is still undergoing analysis and modification, but generally, it has these characteristics: it judges a parse based only on the constituent boundaries it stipulates (and not the categories or features that may be assigned to these constituents); it compares the parse to a hand-parse of the same sentence from the University of Pensylvania Treebank, (the standard parse); and it yields two principal measures for each parse submitted: Crossing Parentheses and Recall. The procedure has three steps. For each parse to be evaluated: (1) erase all word-external punctuation and null categories from both the standard tree and the test tree; use the standard tree to identify and erase from both trees all instances of: auxiliaries, "not", pre-infinitival "to", and possessive endings ('s and '). (2) recursively eliminate from both trees all parenthesis pairs enclosing either a single constituent or word, or nothing at all; (3) using the nodes that remain, compute goodness scores (Crossing Parentheses, and Recall) for the input parse, by comparing its nodes to a similarly-reduced node set for the standard parse. For example, for the Brown Corpus sentence: Miss Xydis was best when she did not need to be too probing. consider the candidate parse: (S (NP-s (PNP (PNP Miss) (PNP Xydis))) (VP (VPAST was) (ADJP (ADJ best))) (S (COMP (WHADVP (WHADV when))) (NP-s (PRO she)) (VP (X (VPAST did) (NEG not) (V need)) (VP (X (X to) (V be)) (ADJP (ADV too) (ADJ probing))))) (? (FIN .))) After step-one erasures, this becomes: (S (NP-s (PNP (PNP Miss) (PNP Xydis))) (VP (VPAST was) (ADJP (ADJ best))) (S (COMP (WHADVP (WHADV when))) (NP-s (PRO she)) (VP (X (VPAST ) (NEG ) (V need)) (VP(X (X ) (V be)) (ADJP (ADV too) (ADJ probing))))) (? (FIN ))) And after step-two erasures: (S (NP-s Miss Xydis) (VP was best) (S when she (VP need (V be (ADJP too probing))))) The University of Pennsylvania Treebank output for this sentence, after steps one and two have been applied to it, is: (S (S (NP Miss Xydis) (VP was best)) (SBAR when (S she (VP need (VP be (ADJP too probing)))))) Step three consists of comparing the candidate parse to the Treebank parse and deriving two scores: (1) The Crossing Parentheses score is the number of times the candidate parse has a structure such as ((A B) C) and the standard parse has one or more structures such as (A (B C)) which "cross" with the test parse structure. (2) The Recall score is the number of parenthesis pairs in the intersection of the candidate and treebank parses (T intersection C) divided by the number of parenthesis pairs in the treebank parse T, viz. (T intersection C) / T. This score provides an additional measure of the degree of fit between the standard and the candidate parses; in theory a Recall of 1 certifies a candidate parse as including all constituent boundaries that are considered essential to the analysis of the input sentence by the Treebank. (Treebank parses are in general underspecified because certain structures, such as compound nouns, are not bracketed.) For the above example sentence, there are no crossings and the recall is 7/9. The last element of the proposed evaluation method involves the restructuring of trees by the client, which is necessary only if the parse submitted treats any of certain constructions in a manner different from the standard. At the workshop, three constructions were identified: extraposition, modification of noun phrases by post-head phrases such as PP, and sequences of prepositions which occur constituent-initially and/or particles which occur constituent-finally. Briefly, for extraposition sentences like "It is necessary for us to leave" the extaposed phrase "for us to leave" should be attached at the S level and not, for example as a sister of "necessary". For NP modification, post-head modifiers should be attached to the NP and not at the N-BAR level. Finally, for sequences of prepositions/particles we attach to the top node of the constituent. Thus if the initial client analysis is (We (were ((out of) (oatmeal cookies)))) then the restructured analysis should be (We (were (out of (outmeal cookies)))). These three constructions were identified from a hand analysis of a limited amount of data and we are currently examining more data to see whether the list should be extended. Generally, there are two strategies that can be followed in cases where a client's analysis differs systematically from the standard: modify the evaluation program so that it deletes certain nodes, or specify a procedure that can be adopted by clients to bring their trees into conformity with the standard. However, we have seen that there are instances where reconciliation is very difficult or impossible and are working to assess the expected frequency of such cases. Before the evaluation software was available, we applied the method by hand, using the UPenn Treebank as a standard, to 14 of the above-mentioned 50 Brown Corpus sentences which were given their "ideal" analyses by the grammarians. (Canonical modifications as specified above were required.) The sentences were selected because they had been successfully run by one of our automated systems (NYU's) and were expected to give some hint of the method's reliability for sentences that are easy for automated systems. The Crossing score was zero in every case and the corresponding Recall average score was 94%. We were encouraged by this initial result to pursue the development of software to carry out the scoring. After the evaluation program became available, we ran it on the entire 50 sentence corpus and obtained the following results: crossings recall AT&T 3 (1) .88 BBN 4 (1) .86 Bellcore 10 (5) .87 Boeing 4 (1) .97 HP 4 (0) .97 IBM 4 (2) .96 Logos 3 (0) .86 NYU 10 (10) .79 The first number in the crossings column is the total number of sentences that contained a crossing while the second number in parentheses is the number of sentences with crossings that remain after certain policy changes are implemented in the standard parse and the node deletion protocol of the evaluation procedure. There are several points to made about the above data: We feel that the number of crossings initially obtained is unacceptably high and that changes in the standard bracketing procedures or changes in the deletion protocols need to be adopted. Second, the number of crossings obtained after a few suggested changes are implemented (the number in parentheses) is an acceptable level of crossings for a 50 sentence corpus for all but two of the grammars. However, until more data are examined, we will not know whether this level of crossings can be maintained with a fixed evaluation method. We are still in a "training phase" as far as the bracketing and deletion policies go and the actual level that will be attained may turn out to be less than is acceptable. The policy changes themselves are still being debated by the group. Finally, we note that two of the grammars (Bellcore's and NYU's) differ significantly from the others with respect to crossings. The Bellcore grammar is based on a new grammar methodology called "chunking" which results in non-standard phrasal groupings in some instances while the NYU grammar has significantly different in that it does not use any category corresponding to verb phrase, which results in non-standard attachments. It is unclear at this time whether convenient transformations can be found to allow these grammars to be compared to the standard so as to reduce their crossings scores. There are four proposed changes to the evaluation method and the standard that are being debated at this time by our group. If the four policies below are adopted, then the crossing scores obtained are the ones in parentheses in the above table. The four policies are: 1) Delete left-recursive subnodes of type S from the standard. The Treebank uses recursive attachment at the S level for adverbial attachment in sentences like Miss Xydis was best when she did not need to be too probing which results in a structure of the form (S (S (A ..)(B...))(C ...)). Several of us preferred to attach the rightmost constituent (the `when' phrase) at a lower level. With a structure of the form (S (A ...)(B ...)(C ...)) all of the crossings are eliminated from our data. This policy can be implemented by the evaluation program. 2) Flatten structures in the standard containing the collocations "less than, more than, greater than," etc. when they precede a number or adjective. Some of us take these collocations as constituents (under a certain reading of the sentence) while others always build phrases with "than" and phrases to its right before combining with "less, more," etc. The lack of agreement among practitioners can be accommodated only if the standard is neutral. So the phrase "more than 4000,000,000 inhabit ants" would need to be bracketed something like (NP (ADVP more than 400,000,000) inhabitants), The same requirement would also be imposed for phrases such as "more than likely". 3) Flatten certain common sequences involving preposition, noun, preposition such as "in light of" and "in violation of". Here again, there is a diversity of practice in our group as to whether the preposition, noun, preposition sequence is treated as a multi-word preposition or has NP and PP structures built between the words, as exemplified by: (PP in (NP light (PP of (NP his success)))) A neutral bracketing of this phrase is (PP in light of (NP his success)) 4) Delete copular "be\fP when it precedes an adjective. A phrase such as "is happy to leave\fP would receive both of the following bracketings in our data: ((is happy)(to leave)) and (is (happy (to leave))). The deletion policy will eliminate any crossings for this type of phrase. Even with these additional policies, there is still a residual set of eight sentences with crossings for some of the grammars (excluding, for the sake of brevity, some sentences for which the NYU grammar has crossings). We present here the eight sentences along with a discussion of the differences in analyis that led to the crossings: 1. The petition listed the mayor's occupation as attorney and his age as 71. The standard analyzes this by coordinating "listed ... as attorney" with "his age as 71". (The second coordinate is taken to be a verb phrase with a ellipted verb.) One of us prefers an analysis in which "the mayor's occupation as attorney" and "his age as 71" are treated as the coordinated constituents, creating a phrase crossing with the first coordinate phrase of the standard. 2. His political career goes back to his election to city council in 1923. The standard analysis makes a constituent out of "back to ... 1923" while one of our analyses postulates "goes back" as a constituent. 3. All Dallas members voted with Roberts, except Rep. Bill Jones, who was absen The standard attaches non-restrictive relative clauses to NP. In this case "who was absent" is attached to "Rep. Bill Jones". Two of us attach non-restrictive relative clauses at the sentential level. 4. The odds favor a special session, more than likely early in the year. The standard attaches "more than likely early in the year" to the NP associated with "session" while some of us attach it higher. 5. The year will probably start out with segregaton still the most troublesome issue. One of our grammars attaches the adverb "probably" at a low level to the verb "start" while that standard associates it with the S and specifies a verb phrase from "start" to the end of the sentence, which produces a crossing. 6. The dinner is sponsored by organized labor and is scheduled for 7 p.m. The standard coordinates "is sponsored by organized labor" and "is scheduled for 7 p.m." while another analysis coordinates "the dinner is sponsored by organized labor" with "is scheduled for 7 p.m." 7. He is willing to sell it just to get it off his hands. There is significant disagreement in our group over how to attach the phrase "just to get it off his hands". The standard attaches it under the root S, while others attach it variously to phrases beginning with "is willing, willing", and "sell". (A recursive attachment to "is willing to sell it" would not produce a crossing with the standard.) 8. Mr. Reama, far from really being retired, is engaged in industrial relations counseling. The standard takes "far" as an adverb that subcategorizes a PP, while one of our grammars treats "far from" as a multi-word lexical item. In conclusion, we believe that the degree of disagreement that remains after the application of our deletion and restructuring method does not pose a significant barrier to the use of hand bracketed corpora for evaluation purposes for most of our grammars. However, the amount of data that we have been able to examine so far is limited and our judgements about the success of the method are still tentative. We will continue with our hand analyses, but also start to use the evaluation program with the real output of our parsers in a realistic test of the complete evaluation methodology. We invite other groups to participate and will make our evaluation software (which runs in Common Lisp) available. Linguist List: Vol-3-587. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-588. Sat 18 Jul 1992. Lines: 92 Subject: 3.588 Rules Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 17 Jul 1992 11:41 EET From: EITKONEN@sara.cc.utu.fi Subject: Rules -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 17 Jul 1992 11:41 EET From: EITKONEN@sara.cc.utu.fi Subject: Rules In a message sent on 30 May Alexis Manaster Ramer writes: > If we are to accept that linguistics is a natural science ... we must take > behavior ("performance") as what linguistics studies [thus getting rid of > normativity]. This is perfectly correct (and also otherwise, Manaster Ramer has got my meaning). It is just that we cannot get rid of normativity and study (mere) behavior, for reasons I tried to explain in chap. 7 ('The ineliminability of linguistic normativity') of my 1978 book (=Grammatical theory and metascience). It follows that those who study 'language as such' (or 'E-language') are in reality studying linguistic norms; and those who study psychology of language or cognitive linguistics (or 'I language') must still presuppose the existence of linguistic norms (inherent in correct or incorrect sentences). Knowing the sentences (norms, E-language) is a prerequisite for making hypotheses about how one learns to understand and produce sentences. Personally, I am working on cognitive linguistics (explaining language universals etc.), but I make no value judgement between the study of E-language and the study of I-language, if only because Panini was a student of E-language, and he wipes the floor with any bunch of I-language aficionados. The important thing is that one knows what kind of linguistics one is practicing (which surprisingly seldom turns out to be case). I have always held that there are (at least) two different types of linguistics: the study of language as such (='autonomous linguistics') and the study of the psychological mechanisms 'behind the language as such (=traditionally, 'psycholinguistics'). I remember vividly debating this issue with some prominent Chomskyans in the 70's and early 80's.They repeated over and over again that just like there is only one physics (they didn't know of Lorenzen's protophysics, and they still don't), there is only one type of linguistics. Suddenly, almost overnight, I discovered that they had changed their minds (read: Chomsky had changed their minds for them). Now there were two types of linguistics (misrepresented, to be sure, and burdened with misleading value judgements): the study of E-laguage (i.e. autonomous linguistics) and the study of I-language (i.e. psycholinguistics). I made another discovery as well. These ('prominent') Chomskyans had totally forgotten having ever denied the existence of two different types of linguistics. Let me heal one more case of collective amnesia. In his 1955 [1975] dissertation Chomsky was a student of E-language, as I defined this notion above: > An attempt to construct discovery procedures for grammar is faced > by the difficulty that it must deal in a neutral manner with the total > linguistic behavior of the informant, including slips, slurred speech, > interrupted utterances, etc. A more limited approach will be satisfied > with a grammatical description of a partially hypothetical language > underlying actual speech in the sense that actual linguistic behavior > can easily be characterized as a special deviation from underlying > norms [sic] (p.149, n.21.) This is the issue Manaster Ramer raises. As he notes, Chomsky's solution ('competence') amounts to a de facto acceptance of linguistic ('underlying') norms. To Rob Stainton: The discussion has never been confined to grammatical theory. Rather, it has included standard human sciences, physics, (philosophical) logic, and conceptual analysis as practiced within analytical philosophy. The last point crucial. If you compare grammatical theory only to physics, you are bound to see similarities; but if you compare it to philosophical logic or conceptual analysis (which you regrettably never do), you are bound to see more significant similarities. The 'ceteris paribus' argument was taken care of twenty years ago. Esa Itkonen, University of Turku, Finland -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-588. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-589. Sat 18 Jul 1992. Lines: 47 Subject: 3.589 Accents in the Classroom Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 09:00 PDT From: Vicki Fromkin Subject: Re: 3.576 Accents in the Classroom 2) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 18:11:11 -0400 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: Re: 3.576 Accents in the Classroom -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 09:00 PDT From: Vicki Fromkin Subject: Re: 3.576 Accents in the Classroom re accents: my son pronouned the initial vowel of ORANGE, the color with an /a/ like I do, and with an /o/ like his California peers. Vicki F -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 18:11:11 -0400 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: Re: 3.576 Accents in the Classroom i just wanted to point out that, at least in new york city 30 years ago, one couldn't teach if one had a 'speech defect'. a cousin of mine was rejected because her /l/'s weren't clear--exactly the same problem that barbara walters has and that hasn't seemed to hinder her... and it goes without saying that children do NOT 'pick up' speech defects that they hear in others, whether in peers or parents or teachers (the apocryphal story about how castilian got its intervocalic fricative notwithstanding). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-589. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-590. Sat 18 Jul 1992. Lines: 79 Subject: 3.590 Comparatives Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1992 13:01 EST From: JOHN FRAMPTON Subject: for the List -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1992 13:01 EST From: JOHN FRAMPTON Subject: for the List In response to Nevin's "incremental paraphrase" (my term) analysis of comparatives in Linguist List 3-567. The analysis of (1) I think this is rarer than Allan does. can't be correct. Consider (2) I think there are more birds in the yard than Allan does. Nevin's proposal would require the paraphrase (3) I think there are birds in the yard more than Allan does. But this is not a paraphrase. I think Nevin is correct in thinking that what is at stake here is the ability of /more/ to move out of its clause and appear, in some representation, in the main clause. (This is implicit in the sequence of paraphrases which he gives.) Consider (4) a. *I regret that there are more birds in the yard than Allan does. b. *I think there aren't more birds in the yard than Allan does. c. *I wonder whether there are more birds in the yard than Allan does. Verbs like /regret/, negative elements, and wh-islands are typical obstacles to movement. The problem seems to be analagous to "neg raising". (5) a. I don't think he is happy. b. I think he isn't happy. c. I don't regret that he is happy. d. I regret that he isn't happy. Some analysis must account for the fact that (5a) and (5b) have readings which are more or less equivalent, but that (5c) and (5d) do not. Under some analyses, the surface structure of (5a) is derived from an underlying structure in which the negative element is generated in the lower clause. Movement carries it to the upper clause where it appears in surface structure. In order for a parallel analysis of (1) and (2) to go through, however, one must be prepared to accept a level of representation in which /more/ (or the corresponding element which appears in the comparative /-er/) moves to the higher clause. Note that his level must be "higher" than surface structure and must be fairly abstract, in the sense that it is not amenable to a transparent semantic interpretation. But no more abstract than the surface structure of (5a), which is also not amenable to a transparent semantic interpretation. John Frampton Northeastern University -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-590. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-591. Sat 18 Jul 1992. Lines: 59 Subject: 3.591 Queries: Hedges; Shibatani Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 12:48:32 PDT From: wade@samish.stanford.edu (Elizabeth Wade) Subject: Query: Hedges & Intensifiers 2) Date: Fri, 17 Jul 92 08:31:38 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Query: Shibatani on passives -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 12:48:32 PDT From: wade@samish.stanford.edu (Elizabeth Wade) Subject: Query: Hedges & Intensifiers For a dissertation on metadiscourse about accuracy, I'm looking for information (especially references) on the meaning, scope, distribution, and/or use of hedges (such as, but not limited to, constructions like "kind of," "sort of," "like," and "or whatever") and also intensifiers (like "really" and "very," as well as related issues like the referential scope of words like "always" and "everyone"). Please email me if possible; if there's interest I'll post a summary. Thanks, Liz Wade wade@psych.stanford.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Fri, 17 Jul 92 08:31:38 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Query: Shibatani on passives Does anybody have a reference to a paper of Shibatani's on passives in Philippine languages? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-591. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-592. Sat 18 Jul 1992. Lines: 78 Subject: 3.592 Narrative Voice Switches; Physics and Language Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 16:13:03 BST From: Martin Wynne Subject: Narrative voices 2) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 15:49:12 EDT From: Stavros Macrakis Subject: Physics and language -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 14 Jul 92 16:13:03 BST From: Martin Wynne Subject: Narrative voices Wynne Janis (Vol.3-559) asks for linguistic studies of narrator/character voice switches. I think the key work on this is 'Discourse in the Novel' by M.M.Bakhtin in THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION, (ed. Michael Holquist), Austin, 1981. This is an original and groundbreaking study (preceded only by Volosinov in 'Marxism and the Philosophy of Language', in which Bakhtin had a hand.) Hirschkop and Shepherd, BAKHTIN AND CULTURAL THEORY, Manchester University Press, 1989 includes various discussions and an extensive critical bibliography. I don't really know about works using different methodologies, and I would be interested to hear about them. Martin Wynne Department of Linguistics and Phonetics University of Leeds -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 92 15:49:12 EDT From: Stavros Macrakis Subject: Physics and language bert peeters says in 3.559 that a physicist friend claims that physics is culture-neutral. Peeters continues: I'm trying to tell him he is wrong.... could anyone come up with languages where there is no concept for the (physical) concept of "force"? The linguistic argument won't get very far, since words such as `mass', `force', `field', `energy' are technical and do not have anything like their everyday meaning. (In fact, there were several counter-culture-type books some years ago (e.g. The Dancing Wu Li Masters) which claimed that Chinese philosophy foreshadows quantum mechanics, and that the Chinese language is more appropriate for it; bunkum according to all my physicist friends (including Chinese ones).) Now to what extent is the modern understanding of physics dependent on Western world-view? A vast question, but how do you answer it? For that matter, how do you define physics in a culture-neutral way? Do you accept the experimental method? etc. Anyway, I suspect you can't make much headway on this from a linguistic point of view. Perhaps the philosophers of science have something interesting to say? -s -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-592. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-593. Sat 18 Jul 1992. Lines: 95 Subject: 3.593 Citing LINGUIST Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 12:12:31 EDT From: Ron Smyth Subject: Re: 3.577 Citing LINGUIST 2) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 12:50:32 EDT From: John.M.Lawler@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 12:12:31 EDT From: Ron Smyth Subject: Re: 3.577 Citing LINGUIST I doubt that we should be citing our LINGUIST contributions on our annual reports, as they are not subject to peer review; any great ideas that come while tapping out a msg can be pursued in a paper. However, I did find a spot on my reporting form for reporting activities in academic associations, where I mentioned that I read and sometimes contribute to this list. Regarding privacy and email, in 1989 as I was leaving Carleton University, the email postmaster contacted my department to complain that she had read a message I had sent (received?) which contained personal correspondence instead of serious academic discourse. She threatened to cancel my email privileges, but since I was leaving anyway I don't know whether or not she was serious. At the time I contacted Canada's Privacy Commissioner, who informed me that the issue of privacy in electronic mail was unregulated but was a matter of some urgency for him. Ron Smyth smyth@lake.scar.utoronto.ca -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 12:50:32 EDT From: John.M.Lawler@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: 3.575 Citing LINGUIST If I might add a couple remarks to the suggested citation...? 1) Linguist is archived and will continue to be archived at the net archives at the University of Michigan. The ftp address is linguistics.archive.umich.edu, and the appropriate directory is linguistics/linguist.list/volume.N (where N is the volume number, which is equal to (year_of_issue minus 1989), hence volume.3 currently). The issues are archived in bunches of 50, together with obiter dicta like the How-To messages. The first of each volume is no.001-050, the second no.051-100, etc. Each has about 200-400 KBytes and all are accessible for anonymous ftp, along with everything else on the linguistics archive. A mail server is in the works, but is not currently available. 2) As David Powers points out, Linguist is not a bulletin board, and careful citation practice should distinguish this. Calling it a bulletin board (as the newspaper report Christine Kamprath posted does) and using verbs like "call in to" (ditto) gives quite the wrong impression. I was very discouraged at the low level of understanding evidenced by the article. It's bad enough we have to deal with public ignorance of language and linguistic issues; if we have technological ignorance on top of that, we're sunk. 3) It's *very* important to put the year, and only slightly less to note the month. Linguist 3.575 is not enough, even though it may allow one to find the citation; you shouldn't have to look it up to know what year it comes from. This is all new to us, but it will be old stuff ten years from now, and we won't be able to tell '92 from '93 or '91. So, an amended version of the citation (which needs paring, I'm afraid): Christine Kamprath (LIFY460@orange.cc.utexas.edu.internet), "Re: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news", Linguist List 3.575, July 1992, linguistics/linguist.list/volume.3/no.551-600, linguistics.archive.umich.edu.internet (Linguist (linguist@tamsun.tamu.edu) is an electronic mail list edited by: Anthony Aristar (e311aa@tamuts.tamu.edu.internet) and Helen Dry (hdry@emunix.emich.edu.internet).) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-593. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-594. Sun 19 Jul 1992. Lines: 66 Subject: 3.594 Citing LINGUIST Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 19 Jul 92 13:28:32 +0200 From: Stephen P Spackman Subject: Re: 3.593 Citing LINGUIST -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 19 Jul 92 13:28:32 +0200 From: Stephen P Spackman Subject: Re: 3.593 Citing LINGUIST John.M.Lawler@um.cc.umich.edu provides valuable comments on the information that should be present in an electronic citation (such as to Linguist). I'd like to add some comments about the form of such citations: Suffixing ".internet" to internet addresses is a bad idea, since there is a very real sense in which RFC 822 domain addresses are a standard; worse yet, the suffix syntactically conforms to the standard but won't work (because there is no top level .internet domain). Since as far as I know all of the other networks are proprietary or national, we would do well to restrict ourselves to internet and/or X.400 addressing - which by now is usable information for almost eveyone anyway. That said, the official convention for embedding 822 addresses in text fields is to surround them in ASCII angle brackets, and it avoids both syntactic and semantic confusion to adopt this convention elsewhere. (It has the added benefit that if the copy is machine readable the address can be used directly, without further editing). In addition, it is essential to note the mode of access of an archive (in this case ascii-mode anonymous ftp) and to give people enough information to locate the "publisher" - which in this case is presumably NOT Anthony's and Helen's email addresses, but the linguist-request address (Journal editors are not usually cited, but approximate addresses of obscure publishers are). So here's my version: Christine Kamprath . "Re: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news". In Linguist List 3.575 (July 1992) . Archive ftp (ascii) anonymous@linguistics.archive.umich.edu: linguistics/linguist.list/volume.3/no.551-600 . (Note that I've inserted a space between the filename and the trailing period. Since the '.' character is legal at the end of a Unix filename, this distinction too is essential). stephen p spackman spackman@dfki.uni-sb.de _________________________ [Moderators' note: This seems like a very sensible format to us. In fact, we're thinking of adding the Lawler/Spackman citation form (as above) to the LINGUIST "How-To's". However, we'll wait a bit to see if other worthwhile suggestions grow out of this discussion. -Helen & Anthony] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-594. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-595. Tue 21 Jul 1992. Lines: 112 Subject: 3.595 Conferences: Pidgins & Creoles; ICL Sessions Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 12:47:45 PDT From: marthasw@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Martha Swearingen) Subject: Pidgin & Creole languages 2) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 11:11:06 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: International Congress of Linguists -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 12:47:45 PDT From: marthasw@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Martha Swearingen) Subject: Pidgin & Creole languages *************************************************************** * * * CALL FOR PAPERS!!! PIDGIN & CREOLE LANGUAGES * * * * SPCL will hold a conference on pidgin and creole languages * * in conjunction with the next LSA meeting. * * * * Conference dates: 7-11 January 1993 * * Place: The Biltmore Hotel * * Los Angeles, California * * * * Deadline for submission of abstracts = JULY 31, 1992 * * * * For abstract forms and/or information write to: * * Prof. Armin Schwegler * * Spanish & Portuguese * * UC Irvine * * Irvine, CA 92717 / U.S.A. * * * * E-mail: aschwegl@orion.oac.uci.edu (Internet) * ************************************************************ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 11:11:06 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: International Congress of Linguists Please note the updated schedule for the Language in Prehistory Symposium at the ICL in Quebec City (Aug. 10): Symposium on Language in Prehistory Organizer: Alexis Manaster Ramer Presentations: Gerard Diffloth (Cornell University): South-east Asia (N.B. Gerard with accent aigu on the 'e'). Martha Ratliff (Wayne State University): East Asia Alexis Manaster Ramer (Wayne State University) : Western Eurasia and North America Joe Salmons (Purdue University): Global Etymologies Discussants: Laurent Sagart (CRLAO) Vyach. Vs. Ivanov (UCLA) Harold Fleming (University of Pittsburgh) Philp Baldi (Pennsylvania State University) ************* Please note the following updated schedule of the Construction Grammar symposium at the ICL, Quebec City, Aug. 11. Symposium on Construction Grammars Organizers: Charles Fillmore and Alexis Manaster Ramer Adele Goldberg, 'Capturing Relationships Among Constructions' Knud Lambrecht, 'C'est pas con comme ide'e: The post-focal comme-N construction in spoken French' Jean-Pierre Koenig 'Shared Structures vs. Constructional Autonomy in Construction Grammar' Alexis Manaster Ramer 'Ever since Bloomfield' Wlodek Zadrozny 'Constructions in formal and computational linguistics' -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-595. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-596. Tue 21 Jul 1992. Lines: 96 Subject: 3.596 Queries: Unidentified language; Spanish Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 23:51:01 MET DST From: hartmut@ruc.dk (Hartmut Haberland) Subject: Inquiry about unidentified language 2) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 21:01:52 EST From: decio@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Gabriel Decio) Subject: Spanish -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 23:51:01 MET DST From: hartmut@ruc.dk (Hartmut Haberland) Subject: Inquiry about unidentified language A friend of mine (who is not on Linguist), Sysse Engberg (sysse@anne.ihi.ku.dk), has a question about the identification of the language (possibly Ossetic, or a near cognate) from which the following words or phrases are taken: avdesir/autesir week, or perhaps: monday avdesir stur holy and great week/monday asir evening ? tu theologos ioannu pan, michail pan, timitiri pan, apostol(on) pan, ilia pan, grigori pan all these show that pan must mean holy, or saint - or feast ? pi pinlachu tzau pan (the day before) midpentecost sara varan istipan saturday of pentecost aste makpan the birthday of the holy virgin ini patzi kr(..) kukani dedication of the church of the holy resurrection tzu var urnag (?) the exaltation of the holy cross zirin kam pan (the day before the feast of) john chrysostomos - could zirin mean gold(en) ? pachil pasil pan (the day before) the circumcision of our lord jesus christ avina ti pani (in memory of) the assault of the enemies fiti vani pani the birthday of john the baptist (the forerunner, in greek) titi va(...)a(...)n kura (...)a the death of john the baptist (the cutting off of his head, literally) These are glosses from a Greek liturgical manuscript. The source of the ms. is not known, but identifying the language might help to solve this problem. The glosses are in Greek letters (with accent marks, omitted here) in the original. Please write directly to Sysse Engberg (sysse@anne.ihi.ku.dk) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 21:01:52 EST From: decio@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Gabriel Decio) Subject: Spanish I am studying Spanish and English verbs, and I would appreciate information on the following: 1. Is there a *frequency dictionary* of Spanish words (along the lines of the frequency German dictionary _Haeufigkeitswoerterbuch der gesprochenen Sprache_)? 2. Are there any Spanish or American English dictionaries or grammar books that list all the possible syntactic frames (i.e. the possible argument structures) for each verb? I recall seeing these frames for British English in the introduction to Longman's _Advanced Learners' Dictionary of Current English_ years ago. Thanks, Gabriel Decio -- ----decio@mace.cc.purdue.edu---------decio@mentor.cc.purdue.edu--------- |Gabriel A. Decio | xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx | |Dept. of English | xxx xxx xxx xxx | |Purdue University | x x x x | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Linguist List: Vol-3-596. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-597. Tue 21 Jul 1992. Lines: 152 Subject: 3.597 FYI: Prof. Zhu Dexi; CNN; Minitel Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1992 09:54 PDT From: HSLAPOLLA@ccvax.as.edu.tw Subject: Prof. Zhu Dexi 2) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 1:06:32 EST From: raskin@j.cc.purdue.edu (Victor Raskin) Subject: Franz Boas on CNN--NOT! 3) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 00:26:01 -0400 From: "Jack Kessler" Subject: FYI France: some new information sources -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1992 09:54 PDT From: HSLAPOLLA@ccvax.as.edu.tw Subject: Prof. Zhu Dexi Prof. Zhu Dexi, one of the most respected and renowned linguists of China, passed away at 6:06a.m., Sunday, July 19, at the age of 71. His death is a great loss to linguistics, and to all who knew him. Prof. Zhu had been diagnosed as having an advanced stage of lung cancer last Dec. while visiting at the University of Washington. Subsequently he left for Palo Alto, CA to be with his children and received qigong treatment from a qigong master from China who also used Chinese medicine for his treatment. This May, because of some severe pain in his leg, he went to the Stanford University Hospital for radiation treatment. At the same time, he was also using a new drug recently invented in China. Unfortunately he contracted some kind of infection or cold and had been quite sick since some time in June. In the early morning of July 16, his son found him suddenly out of breath. Within 5 minutes he was sent to the Stanford University hospital by ambulance but by that time he had already suffered brain damage because of the lack of oxygen. A Zhu Dexi Memorial Fund has been set up to help his family and to remember him not only as an eminent leader-scholar in our field, but also as a beloved friend. Please send contributions to: Zhu Dexi Memorial Fund 424 College Ave., Apt. A Palo Alto, CA 94306 (Tel. of the Zhu family: 415-327-3309) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: raskin@j.cc.purdue.edu (Victor Raskin) Subject: Franz Boas on CNN--NOT! 2) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 1:06:32 EST Yet another media alert... Did anybody see the 90-second feature on CNN Headline News Sunday, July 19, 1992, evening about endangered languages of Mexico and an anthropologist from the University of Florida who is trying to record them? The correspondent (I think Frank Cable was the name--seriously!) presented it as something nobody had ever done before and the anthropologist as an unsung hero. I wonder whether the LSA Secretariat considers it its duty to call the network and set the record straight. I know that CNN will not run a disclaimer, but maybe somewhere in their database endangered languages will be entered under linguistics and linked to Franz Boas and his illustrious company for four-five generations down. -- Victor Raskin raskin@j.cc.purdue.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 00:26:01 -0400 From: "Jack Kessler" Subject: FYI France: some new information sources Two new ideas for those of you who have been wondering what's been happening at the Bibliothe`que de France and in French libraries generally: 1) The Bibliothe`que de France's "3615 Tolbiac" information service now has been launched on Minitel. It presents a very good overview and current events summary for anyone wishing to obtain an introduction to the B.de France controversy or for someone wanting to catch up with the latest news. For those of you who haven't yet used Minitel: this is the same Minitel service which is so omnipresent -- 6 million distributed terminals, many millions more free distributed pc software, every hotel, home, and bicycle shop -- in France. Joint ventures now have been launched with four of the US BabyBells -- Pacific Telesis' is called "101 Online" -- but still the easiest thing is to telephone (914) 694-6266 and request their free pc or MAC diskette. The simple login procedure on the diskette will set up an account which will bill to your VISA card. Use charges vary from free to many dollars per minute, but there is a great deal of interest which you can reach for under 30 cents per minute. Minitel will give you access to about 14,000 French online services, including the French telephone books and train schedules and the CNRS' enormous PASCAL/FRANCIS (their online "Bulletin Signaletique"), and now including many library services and an increasing number of French online public access catalogs (all the bibliothe`ques municipales are working hard on this). All the services are divided among a set of different "kiosk" numbers, which correspond to different rates of fee for their use. These are "3614", "3615", "3616", etc.: numbers which you enter from your main Minitel screen (in the US I believe you still must use the prefix "F" before the above numbers to connect to France). The Minitel "Guide des Services", reached by entering "MGS" from the main screen, is an incomplete but still very useful indexing system for finding service names and kiosk numbers (The Bibliothe`que de France's "Tolbiac" is on 3615.) 2) For those of you who simply can't get enough of Parisian controversy, the latest issue of _Le De'bat_ (mai-aou^t 1992 nume'ro 70, ISSN 0246-2346) contains a hair-raising article by the journal's director, Pierre Nora, dredging up all the criticism and juicy gossip which has been flung against the B.de France project so far, and flinging it once again. Nora is not a fan of the Bibliothe`que de France. His renewed attack is seconded by George Le Rider, in a second piece subtitled "...des correctifs insuffisants." These two are followed, however, by three articles on the impending grave problems of, respectively, the university libraries, the Sorbonne library, and the BPI library at the Beaubourg Centre Pompidou. This naive outsider wonders whether, if Nora and other critics have such violent objections to the solutions being proposed for the Bibliothe`que Nationale collection, they might have some constructive suggestions for what apparently is a deteriorating situation among French libraries generally, according to their own journal? Jack Kessler kessler@well.sf.ca.us -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-597. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-598. Tue 21 Jul 1992. Lines: 178 Subject: 3.598 Citing LINGUIST Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 19 Jul 92 11:35:48 HST From: David Stampe Subject: 3.594 Citing LINGUIST 2) Date: Sun, 19 Jul 92 18:17:51 CDT From: "Richard L. Goerwitz" Subject: Re: 3.594 Citing LINGUIST 3) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1992 10:31:45 +0200 From: Swann Philip Subject: 3.593 Citing LINGUIST -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 19 Jul 92 11:35:48 HST From: David Stampe Subject: 3.594 Citing LINGUIST Re the form of citations, Stephen Spackman suggests: Christine Kamprath . "Re: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news". In Linguist List 3.575 (July 1992) . Archive ftp (ascii) anonymous@linguistics.archive.umich.edu: linguistics/linguist.list/volume.3/no.551-600 . But most of the information here goes beyond traditional bibliographic citations, and is actually quite ephemeral: * The author's address, for one, is not traditionally given, because it is likely to change. This is even more true of email addresses. The place for the address of an individual is a subscriber list, name server, etc. (Unfortunately some mailers still do not supply the author's name, and in that case, unless the posting is signed, the email address is the only name available. But in the case of a digest like LINGUIST, the editors should simply require signatures.) * Including the posting address for LINGUIST is like including the address for submitting manuscripts to a journal. Including the subscription address also seems to me superfluous. The question that the citation is trying to answer is where to find the posting (see the next item). Again, these addresses are ephemeral. They are best obtained from announcements, programs that list mailing lists, etc. (And on those, Bitnet as well as Internet addresses should be included.) * Listing an archive address is convenient but we don't typically include booksellers' ordering instructions. Archives come and go, means of access change, and certainly directory pathnames change. Many sites should have local archives. The place for instructions on where to get copies is (1) local archive directories, (2) files of instructions or faq (frequently-asked-questions) files posted by the editors, (3) archive information programs like archie. (The latter require files or parent directories to have a unique name. If one were settled on, *that* would be useful in a citation.) This leaves the following information: Christine Kamprath. "Re: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news". In Linguist List 3.575 (July 1992). This information is entirely available from the original posting. But as noted above, ideally it should also include somewhere the unique name that archives *should* use for the parent directory of archived postings. If we followed the Michigan example, where the pathname is linguistics/linguist.list/volume.3/no.551-600, then the relevant name for programs like archie would be "linguist.list". The weakest part of such citations is the "title", quoted from the Subject line, which often provides no information whatever about the actual content of the posting. But as a student recently pointed out to me, this problem is not limited to titles of postings: he had found a dissertation on linguistics entitled "How I spent my summer vacation". How the information should be formatted depends on the citation style of the paper or electronic journal in question. (I don't think the LINGUIST editors have opted for any particular style.) I hope that eventually we'll replace printed style citations with logical markup, but just now even the best markup systems leave a lot to be desired in clarity, portability, etc. (However, a discussion of whether the Language style, with titles not internally capitalized, is likely to be compatible with electronic systems of referencing, is long overdue!) Re the "value" of postings to mailing-lists (or for that matter to Usenet newsgroups) for any particular purpose, surely that must depend on the intrinsic value of the posting, not the manner or place of its publication. Judging books by their covers, or articles by their journals, is as silly as judging grammars by counting features. David Stampe , Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of Hawaii/Manoa, Honolulu HI 96822 [Moderators' Note: David Stampe is right that the citation-style proposed earlier is inconsistent with the bibliographic style used elsewhere. However, there are practical reasons to depart from tradition with electronic media. The aim of a citation is to make the source used by an author accessible to readers. A citation which refers only to a list-name and the relevant issue fails in this, for there are no standard ways of locating electronic sources. To locate a book or a journal article we simply go to the library. In difficult cases, we consult a librarian. But seekers of electronic sources are likely to be searching on their own, from a personal computer. And there are no standard reference works which will tell them where to look. So it seems only reasonable to include the place where the archives of a source are to be found. One further point: the true "name" of LINGUIST is LINGUIST@TAMVM1, and all networked machines running Listserv software know it by this name. This also happens to be its Bitnet address. It's best to refer to it this way, not only for the convenience of Listservs, but also because a list has no exclusive right to its "first name." Another Internet list could call itself Linguist too. Anthony & Helen] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Sun, 19 Jul 92 18:17:51 CDT From: "Richard L. Goerwitz" Subject: Re: 3.594 Citing LINGUIST Stephen Spackman suggests the following citation format for our group: Christine Kamprath . "Re: 3.562 Accents: LINGUIST in the news". In Linguist List 3.575 (July 1992) . Archive ftp (ascii) anonymous@linguistics.archive.umich.edu: linguistics/linguist.list/volume.3/no.551-600 . Two questions, Stephen. How can we work into this format a more explicit indication of the source's nature (i.e. that it is an electronic discussion forum)? Also, are e-mail addresses really useful information? Machines die, and domain configurations change. Is the e-mail address really going to be worth the space? Other questions come to mind, now that I'm thinking about the matter. Does anyone else find the above format to be verbose? Note: not everyone snarfs files using a program called "ftp." And do we actually have assurances from umich.edu that the archives will be online for at least, say, five years or so? The archive site is not important unless we have a semi-permanent address. Nit: capitalize ASCII. If FTP is meant in its generic sense, then capital- ize this as well. Has anyone actually made use of references of this type? If so, what was the context? -Richard L. Goerwitz goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet goer@midway.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1992 10:31:45 +0200 From: Swann Philip Subject: 3.593 Citing LINGUIST Stefan Harnad runs a list called PSYCHOLOQUY (or some such spelling!). This is rather more formal than LINGUIST and most of the issues regarding citation and so on have been carefully resolved in a direction that seems pretty good to me. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-598. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-599. Tue 21 Jul 1992. Lines: 135 Subject: 3.599 Call for Nominations: IJCAI Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 19 Jul 92 10:28:55 -0400 From: walker@flash.bellcore.com (Don Walker) Subject: Call for Nominations for IJCAI-93 Awards -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 19 Jul 92 10:28:55 -0400 From: walker@flash.bellcore.com (Don Walker) Subject: Call for Nominations for IJCAI-93 Awards INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCES ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, INC. *** Call for Nominations for IJCAI-93 Awards *** THE IJCAI AWARD FOR RESEARCH EXCELLENCE The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence is given at an IJCAI to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality yielding several substantial results. If the research program has been carried out collaboratively, the Award may be made jointly to the research team. Past recipients of this award are John McCarthy (1985), Allen Newell (1989) and Marvin Minsky (1991). The Award carries with it a certificate and the sum of US$ 2,000 plus travel and living expenses for the IJCAI. The recipient will be invited to deliver an address on the nature and significance of the results achieved and write a paper for the conference proceedings. Primarily, however, the Award carries the honour of having one's work selected by one's peers as an exemplar of sustained research in Artificial Intelligence. We hereby call for nominations for The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, which will be presented at IJCAI-93 in Chambery, France, 29 August - 3 September 1993. The accompanying note on Selection Procedures provides the relevant details. THE COMPUTERS AND THOUGHT AWARD The Computers and Thought Lectures are presented at IJCAI conferences by outstanding young scientists in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Past recipients of this honour have been Terry Winograd (1971), Patrick Winston (1973), Chuck Rieger (1975), Douglas Lenat (1977), David Marr (1979), Gerald Sussman (1981), Tom Mitchell (1983), Hector Levesque (1985), Johan de Kleer (1987), Henry Kautz (1989), Rodney Brooks (1991) and Martha Pollack (1991). The Award carries with it a certificate and the sum of US$ 2,000 plus travel and living expenses for the IJCAI. The lecture is given one evening during the conference, and the public is invited to attend. The lecturer is encouraged to publish the lecture in the conference proceedings. The lectureship was established with royalties received from the book Computers and Thought, edited by Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman; it is currently supported by income from IJCAII funds. We hereby call for nominations for the Computers and Thought Award, which will be presented at IJCAI-93 in Chambery, France, 29 August - 3 September 1993. The accompanying note on Selection Procedures provides the relevant details. SELECTION PROCEDURES FOR IJCAI AWARDS Nominations for the IJCAI Research Excellence Award and the Computers and Thought Award are invited from everyone in the international Artificial Intelligence community. There should be a nominator and a seconder, at least one of whom should not be from the same institution as the nominee. Nominees for the Computers and Thought Award cannot be older than 35 at the start of the conference. They must agree to be nominated. There are no other restrictions on nominees, nominators or seconders. The nominators should prepare a short submission of less than 2,000 words, outlining the nominee's qualifications with respect to the particular award. An IJCAI Awards Search Committee has been established to encourage high quality nominations for IJCAI Awards. It consists of the three most recent past IJCAI conference chairs, currently: Alan Bundy (convenor), Wolfgang Bibel and Barbara Grosz. Members of this committee can be contacted for advice on nominations. The IJCAI Award Selection Committee is the union of the Board of Trustees and the former Trustees of IJCAII, the Advisory Committee of IJCAI-93, the program chairs of the last three IJCAI conferences, and the past recipients of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and the IJCAI Distinguished Service Award, with nominees excluded. Nominations should be sent to the Conference Chair for IJCAI-93 at the address below. The deadline for nominations is 1 December 1992. To avoid duplication of effort, nominators are requested to submit the name of the person they are nominating by 1 November 1992 so that people who propose to nominate the same individual may be so informed and can coordinate their efforts. Prof. Wolfgang Wahlster Conference Chair, IJCAI-93 German Research Center for AI (DFKI) Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 D-W-6600 Saarbruecken 11, Germany Tel: (+49 681) 302-5252 Fax: (+49 681) 302-5341 E-mail: wahlster@dfki.uni-sb.de %%% overflow headers %%% To: aimag@sumex-aim.stanford.edu, arpanet-bboards@mc.lcs.mit.edu, astark@bbn.com, bobrow@xerox.com, colinb@paramount.nikhefk.nikhef.nl, comp-ai@ucbvax.berkeley.edu, comp-phon@cogsci.ed.ac.uk, fj-ai@etl.go.jp, g.dixon@manchester.ac.uk, humanist@brownvm.brown.edu, ian@epas.utoronto.ca, imd7vaw@uclamvs.BITNET, ir-l@uccmvsa.BITNET, jqrqc@cunyvm.cuny.edu, judithd@cogs.sussex.ac.uk, linguist@tamvm1.tamu.edu, llsfonet@cms.am.rdg.ac.uk, ln@frmop11.BITNET, masrani@arcsun.arc.ab.ca, mod-ki@unido.informatik.uni-dortmund.de, nesca@frlim51.BITNET, nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu, nnsc@nnsc.nsf.net, otten@swi.psy.uva.nl, ringle@reed.edu, sergei@NL.CS.CMU.EDU, sigart@vaxa.isi.edu, steve5@cluster.mx.ac.uk, stuart@vax.ox.ac.uk, vision-list@ads.arpa, weischedel@bbn.com, wielinga@swi.psy.uva.nl %%% end overflow headers %%% -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-599. ________________________________________________________________ Linguist List: Vol-3-600. Tue 21 Jul 1992. Lines: 83 Subject: 3.600 Queries: Phonetics; Prescriptivism in Spanish Moderators: Anthony Aristar: Texas A&M University Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan University Assistant Editor: Brian Wallace: bwallace@emunix.emich.edu REMINDER [We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.] -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 10:50:08 EDT From: maxwell@jaars.sil.org Subject: Phonetics question 2) Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 16:13 MST From: BRETON Subject: Prescriptive/descriptive Spanish -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 92 10:50:08 EDT From: maxwell@jaars.sil.org Subject: Phonetics question In Hayes 1986 "Assimilation as spreading in Toba Batak" (Linguistic Inquiry 17:467-499), he shows on pg. 479 a chart of the results of consonant sandhi in Toba Batak. According to Hayes, geminate voiceless stops become preglottalized (e.g. pp -> ?p), while a sequence of nasal plus homorganic voiceless stop becomes geminate (by virtue of the nasal consonant being denasalized), but NOT preglottalized. (A few other consonant pairs result in geminate consonants as well, e.g. n + voiceless stop--in this case, because assimilation of n to the point of articulation of the following consonant feeds denasalization.) My question is not about Hayes' analysis, but about his data. Is there really a phonetic difference between glottal + voiceless stop and geminate voiceless stop? If so, is the difference detectable acoustically, or only articulatorily? I was under the impression that the point of articulation information of a consonant was mainly detectable acoustically in its release (which explains why the point of articulation of unreleased stops is nearly impossible to distinguish by listening alone). I might have believed that the distinction would be audible only in slow speech, but Hayes says (pg. 480), "The four major rules [that produce preglottalized stops and geminate stops, as well as some other forms]... may all be suppressed in slow, careful speech, but they apply regularly at normal speaking rates." I'm asking the question because I worked for awhile on a language that had SOMETHING like this--either preglottalized voiceless stops or geminate stops--but I could never decide which I was hearing. Do I have tin ears? Mike Maxwell maxwell@jaars.sil.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 16:13 MST From: BRETON Subject: Prescriptive/descriptive Spanish Could someone give me a few examples of archaic prescriptive grammatical principles applied to the use of spanish pronouns, things along the lines of : "One should'nt say "it's me" but rather "it is I". Brett Rosenberg Brosenbe@ccit.arizona.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguist List: Vol-3-600.