________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-251. Wed 07 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 152 Subject: 4.251 Qs: E-mail in France, multistratalism, parsers, formants Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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, 4 Apr 1993 15:35 EST From: MORGAN@LOYOLA.EDU Subject: EMAIL in France 2) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1993 19:30:57 +1000 From: fcosws@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Subject: Query: Arguments for/against Multistratalism 3) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 93 13:01:47 +0200 From: stuckard@darmstadt.gmd.de (Roland Stuckardt) Subject: Grammars/Parsers for English Language? 4) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 16:24:42 +1200 From: Laurie.Bauer@vuw.ac.nz Subject: Query: Formants 3 and 4 -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1993 15:35 EST From: MORGAN@LOYOLA.EDU Subject: EMAIL in France Dear colleagues, I am planning on being in Paris from mid-June through mid-August. Does anyone have a suggestion for a way to remain e-mail connected? Is it possible to get a guest id at the Sorbonne (where I shall be studying), for example? Any suggestions are welcome. Thank you. Leslie Morgan (MORGAN@LOYVAX.BITNET or MORGAN.LOYOLA.EDU) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1993 19:30:57 +1000 From: fcosws@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Subject: Query: Arguments for/against Multistratalism I am seeking references to *recent* *easily accessible* arguments within a Relational-Grammar framework for the hypothesis that a given nominal may bear more than one or two grammatical relations in the derivation of a given clause in a given language, or that multiple strata are necessary to account for some syntactic phenomena in some language. (References to arguments against this hypothesis also welcome; i'm preparing a critical study.) By 'recent' i mean basically 'more recent than the papers contained in the 3rd volume of Studies in Relational Grammar (1990, University of Chicago Press)'. By 'easily accessible', i mean either (1) published somewhere where i can easily get at it/them, or (2) easily available from their authors. If you're bringing to my attention a paper in this second category, please include some address (electronic or snail) info on the author; if you yourself are the author, i'd appreciate it if you'd send me a copy of the paper, at either address below. If there's sufficient response/interest, i'll post a list of references. Sincerely, Steven Dr. Steven Schaufele c/o Department of Linguistics 712 West Washington Ave. University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 4088 Foreign Languages Building 707 South Mathews Street 217-344-8240 Urbana, IL 61801 fcosws@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 93 13:01:47 +0200 From: stuckard@darmstadt.gmd.de (Roland Stuckardt) Subject: Grammars/Parsers for English Language? We are working on a text analysis project. Our current approach comprises the implementation of a Grammar for German Language which is based on feature structures and uses an unification approach for parsing. However, to enhance the applicability of our approach, we would like to integrate a Grammar/Parser Component for English Language in our environment. To achieve this, we would like to ask the LINGUIST audience about Grammar/Parsing Tools for English Language that are already available - be it from commercial or from scientific sites. In particular, informations about the following items are most welcome: - name of the tool and address of the distributor - commercial or scientific product? - coverage of the grammar - conditions for obtaining a licence for research and/ or commercial use - implementation language - availability of the source code Please send your answers directly back to us. We will mail a summary of all answers to the LINGUIST list. Thanks a lot for your help. Roland Stuckardt Gruppe KONTEXT, Forschungsbereich MEANING Institut IPSI Geselschaft f"ur Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung Dolivostr. 15 W-6100 Darmstadt Germany -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 16:24:42 +1200 From: Laurie.Bauer@vuw.ac.nz Subject: Query: Formants 3 and 4 Can anyone direct me to published figures for formants 3 and 4 in the speech of male and female speakers of English? The information is required by a graduate student. Please reply to me, I'll summarise for the list if there's interest. Thanks Laurie.BAUER@vuw.ac.nz Department of Linguistics, Victoria University, PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand Ph: +64 4 472 1000 x 8800 Fax: +64 4 471 2070 "Morphology is inherently messy" (J.B. Hooper) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-251. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-252. Wed 07 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 116 Subject: 4.252 FYI: Austronesian Fulbright, update on Italian prosody Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1993 16:45:31 +1200 From: Elizabeth.Pearce@vuw.ac.nz Subject: Fulbright 2) Date: Mon, 05 Apr 93 12:32:01 MET From: Elina Savino Subject: Italian prosody -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1993 16:45:31 +1200 From: Elizabeth.Pearce@vuw.ac.nz Subject: Fulbright Fulbright Scholar in Austronesian Linguistics We wish to draw the attention of interested persons to the fact that the Dept. of Linguistics at Victoria Univ. of Wellington and the Dept. of Maori Studies at Waikato Univ. have a joint proposal for a Fulbright visitor in Austronesian linguistics under the 1994/1995 Fulbright program. Duration of visit: 3 months Application details: Council for International Exchange of Scholars 3007 Tilden St. NW Suite 5M Washington DC 20008-3009 Closing date for applications: 1 August 1993 Contacts for further information: Elizabeth Pearce Dept. of Linguistics Victoria Univ. of Wellington PO Box 600 Wellington New Zealand e-mail: pearceeh@matai.vuw.ac.nz phone: (64) (4) 472 1000, Ext: 8798 fax: (64) (4) 471 2070 Ray Harlow Dept. of Maori Studies Waikato Univ. Private Bag Hamilton New Zealand e-mail: rayharlow@waikato.ac.nz -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 05 Apr 93 12:32:01 MET From: Elina Savino Subject: Italian prosody I would like to add something to the summary I posted on Italian prosody. Firstly, I forgot to mention Elise Hofhuis among the people I wish to thank for their help (sorry, Elise). Secondly, I was asked for the complete titles of the refs I gave in shortened form, and the exact refs of papers by Lori Repetti I mentioned in the summary. Here they are (thanks to Lori) den Os, E. A. (1984) "Extrametricality and Italian Stress" M. P. R. van den Broecke and A. Cohen, eds. Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Dordrecht Foris) 499-503. den Os, E. and R. Kager (1986) "Extrametricality and Stress in Spanish and Italian" Lingua 69: 23-48. Sluyters, W. (1990) "Length and Stress Revisited: A Metrical Account of Diphthongization, Vowel Length, Consonant Gemination and Word Final Epenthesis in Modern Italian" Probus 2: 65-102. Vogel, Irene and Sergio Scalise (1982) "Secondary Stress in Italian" Lingua 58: 213-242. Wanner, Dieter (1973) "Is Stress Predictable in Italian?" in Issues in Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Henry and Renee Kahane (Urbana: U. Of Illinois Press) 875-896. Papers by Lori Repetti "Vowel Length in Northern Italian Dialects" Probus 4, 1992 (to appear) "A Moraic Analysis of Raddoppiamento Fonosintattico" Rivista di Linguistica 3: 307-330. "English Loans in Italian" Italica (1992) - to appear Elina Savino University of Bari - Italy -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-252. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-253. Thu 08 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 105 Subject: 4.253 Qs: Word frequency, writing systems, Etruscan, Pooley Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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, 7 Apr 93 8:37:38 PDT From: Bill Croft Subject: Query: word frequency dictionaries 2) Date: Wed, 07 Apr 93 21:55:07 EST From: wynne janis Subject: languages without writing systems 3) Date: 07 Apr 1993 20:27:16 -0700 (MST) From: WDEREUSE@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU Subject: Query on Etruscan 4) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 93 22:45:24 -0400 From: auger@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Julie Auger) Subject: Address for Timothy Pooley -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 93 8:37:38 PDT From: Bill Croft Subject: Query: word frequency dictionaries I am looking for word frequency dictionaries of non-European languages. In addition to published dictionaries, I would also be interested in computerized corpora of non-European languages that I could access and use a concordance program to construct such information. Please send replies to wcroft@csli.stanford.edu; I will post a summary of sources to LINGUIST is there is interest. Bill Croft CSLI Stanford University Stanford CA 94305-4115 USA wcroft@csli.stanford.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 07 Apr 93 21:55:07 EST From: wynne janis Subject: languages without writing systems Does anyone know what percentage (approximately) of the world's languages do *not* have writing systems (i.e., no writing system of any kind, not just not an alphabetic one)? A friend of mine needs this information for a paper, and we can't find any one who provides anything more specific than "many languages do not have writing systems". If you know this information or know of a possible source that might have it, please e-mail to me directly ASAP. Thanks, Wynne -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: 07 Apr 1993 20:27:16 -0700 (MST) From: WDEREUSE@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU Subject: Query on Etruscan Years ago, I heard rumors that Etruscan had actually been deciphered, and also that it is related to the Northwest Caucasian languages. I would appreciate knowing if there is any substance to this, and if there are any very recent treatments of Etruscan linguistic origins. i am familiar with the older lit. Please reply to me directly, and I will summarize for the list. Willem J. de Reuse Dept. of Anthropology University of Arizona wdereuse@ccit.arizona.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 93 22:45:24 -0400 From: auger@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Julie Auger) Subject: Address for Timothy Pooley Does anyone have an address, email or otherwise, for Timothy Pooley? Thanks in advance. --Julie Auger -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-253. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-254. Thu 08 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 147 Subject: 4.254 Sum: Language acquisition by hearing children of deaf parents Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 21:11:43 -0500 From: M Lynne Murphy Subject: Oral language acquisition by hearing children of deaf parents -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 21:11:43 -0500 From: M Lynne Murphy Subject: Oral language acquisition by hearing children of deaf parents Now that the responses have died down, here's the summary of responses to my query on oral language acquisition by hearing children of deaf parents (HCDs or CODAs--Child of Deaf Adults: you learn a new acronym every day!). I gratefully acknowledge responses from: Peter Bakker, John Cowan, Karen Emmorey, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Steven Hardy, Robert Hoffmeister, J Jewitt, Bill McKellin, Christine Monikowski, Jill Morford, Dave Moskovitz, Therese Shellabarger, Jenny Singleton, Beppie van den Bogaerde I also followed the suggestion from many respondents to re-post the query to the SLLING-L list (sign language linguistics), and received a lot of response. The funniest thing is, that I got almost no repetition among the responses. (Hey--wasn't someone on LINGUIST looking for "The thing is..." sentences? That was spontaneous, I swear.) Since I am not a member of the SLLING list, please do not post responses to me there, but send to me directly. Further additions and corrections are welcomed. The student of mine who needed this info is very, very grateful. Thanks to all. M. Lynne Murphy Dept. of Linguistics, U of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign lynne@cogsci.uiuc.edu _________________________________________________________________________ SUMMARY OF RESOURCES ON ORAL LANGUAGE ACQUISITION BY HEARING CHILDREN OF DEAF PARENTS WRITTEN SOURCES Bakker, Peter. Autonomous Languages. Amsterdam: Publikaties van het Instituut voor Algemene Taalwtenschap. (short chapter dealing with either hearing kids of deaf parents or deaf kids of hearing parents) Feldman, Diane Dyer. 1974. A comparative examination of language ability of preschool hearing children of deaf and of hearing parents. Dissertation. Johnson, JM, RV Watkins, and ML Rice. 1992. Bimodal bilingual language development in a hearing child of deaf parents. Applied Psycho- linguistics 13:1.31-52. Jones and Quigley. 1979. The Acquisition of Question Formation.... Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders. Maestas y Moores. Early Linguistic Environments. Sign Language Studies 26. Mayberry, R. 1976. An assessment of some oral and manual skills of hearing children of deaf parents. American Annals of the Deaf. Prinz, PM & EA Prinz. 1979. Simultaneous acquisition of ASL and spoken English (in a hearing child of a deaf mother and hearing father, phase I). Sign Language Studies 25:283-296. Prinz, PM & EA Prinz. 1981. Simultaneous aquisition of ASL and spoken English (phase II). Sign Language Studies 30:78-88. Schiff-Meyers, N. Hearing Children of Deaf Parents. In D. Bishop & K. Mogford (eds.), Language Development in Exceptional Circumstances. Edinburgh: Churchull Livingstone. Includes extensive literature list. Schiff and Ventry. 1976. Communication problems in hearing children of deaf parents. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders. Todd, Peyton. 1972. From sign language to speech: Delay language acquisition of a hearing child of deaf parents. Doctoral dissertation, UC Berkeley. (concerns hearing child with especially limited access to speech due to being home-bound by illness. native in ASL, with some idiosyncrasies in English that could represent transfer from ASL) SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES MLA CDROM Database Psychlit MSDOS Database OTHER PEOPLE WHO MAY HAVE WRITTEN ON THE TOPIC Paul Devillers (Smith College, works on oral language in Deaf kids of Deaf parents) Kathryn Meadow Paul Preston (Medical Anthropology, UCSF--just finished thesis related to this topic & has an article coming out in Social Science and Medicine) Boyce Rennsberger (education reporter who is child of deaf parents--may have written on his experience) Hilde Schlesinger Jenny Singleton (Psych prof at UI/Urbana-Champaign, psycholinguist specializing in sign languages, hearing child of deaf parents) Ronnie Wilbur (Purdue) OTHER RESOURCES CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) c/o Millie Brother (founder) PO Box 30715 Santa Barbara, CA 93130 KODA at Maryland School for the Deaf (Kids of Deaf Adults--for CODAs who haven't grown up yet) "Hearing and Deaf Children of Deaf Families" Research Project at Bristol (Jim Kyle, J. Ackerman, Bencie Woll) Jim Kyle Centre for Deaf Studies School for Educ. Res. Unit Univ. of Bristol 22 Berkeley Square BS8 IHP UNITED KINGDOM Language Aquisition of deaf & hearing children in Deaf families research Beppie van den Bogaerde Institute for General Linguistics Univesity of Amsterdam 1012 VT Amsterdam NETHERLANDS tel. 020-5253835 e-mail: beppie@alf.let.uva.nl fax: (0)20-5253052 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-254. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-255. Thu 08 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 95 Subject: 4.255 Conference: Japanese/Korean 93 Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 06 Apr 93 00:21 PDT From: Shoichi Iwasaki Subject: Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference 93 -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 06 Apr 93 00:21 PDT From: Shoichi Iwasaki Subject: Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference 93 CALL FOR PAPERS The Fourth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (Formerly The Southern California Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference) UCLA October 15-17, 1993 Deadline for the Submission of Abstracts: June 15, 1993 Keynote Speakers: Professor. Masayoshi Shibatani (Kobe University) Professor Susumu Kuno (Harvard University) Special Session: Contrastive Study of Japanese and Korean (This year, the conference especially encourages the presentation which take both languages into the domain of investigation and will set aside special slots for such comparative research.) This conference aims to provide a forum for presenting research in Japanese and Korean linguistics, thereby facilitating efforts to deepen our understanding of these two languages which have striking typological similarities. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology, pragmatics, historical linguistics, typology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, and discourse. Presentations are 20 minutes long, and will be followed by a short question period. Abstract submissions should be sent to one of the addresses below by June 15, 1993. The abstract should include: 1. Six (6) copies of a one-page abstract (no more than 500 words) with a title; Omit your name and affiliation from the abstract. The one-page (500 words) limit should be strictly observed; a second page may be used only for citing references. 2. A 3" by 5" card with the title of the paper, the name of the author(s), the mailing address of the author, and the author(s) affiliation, phone number and e-mail address. If your address, phone number and e-mail address will be different during summer, be sure to include it as well. 3. A self-addressed, stamped postcard if you wish to be notified whether your abstract has been received. (A Very Good Idea!!) Syntax, Formal Semantics, Phonology, and Morphology Professor Naoki Fukui Dept. of Linguistics School of Social Sciences UCI Irvine, CA 92717 NFukui @uci.edu Other topics: Professor Noriko Akatsuka or Professor Shoichi Iwasaki Dept. of East Asian Lgs. & Cultures UCLA 405 Hilgard Ave. Los Angeles, CA 93106 ibenauo@uclamvs.bitnet The proceedings of this conference will be published as Japanese/Korean Linguistics vol. 4 by CSLI (The Center for the Study of Language and Information) The proceedings of the preveous conferences can be ordered either directly from the University of Chicago Press, or through a local bookstore. UCP's address: 11030 S. Langley Ave., Chicago, IL 60628. Orders may also be placed by phone at 800-621-2736. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-255. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-256. Thu 08 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 101 Subject: 4.256 Sum: Grammar Shifts Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1993 20:40 CST From: AN ELECTRIC ELK Subject: SUM: Grammar Shifts -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1993 20:40 CST From: AN ELECTRIC ELK Subject: SUM: Grammar Shifts I have been asked to summarize the responses to my question on grammar shifts I posted a while ago. I asked if anyone knew of a language that had changed from synthetic grammar structure to an analytic grammar structure or vice versa. I was, however, most interested in any evidence of a language that had *reversed* this trend. That is, gone from synthetic to analytic back towords synthetic (or some variation therof). Being, for the most part, unqualified to accurately summarize the responses I got, I am resorting to including the majority of the replys. If this causes inconveniences, I apologize in advance. Without further ado here they are: From: David Stampe Subject: grammar shifts The Munda languages of India, one branch of the Austroasiatic family (the other being the Mon-Khmer languages of South-East Asia), have developed a dependent - modifier word order (Object - Verb, Adjective - Noun, Noun - Postposition) with morphological marking of grammatical relations (Subject and Object marked on the verb, some case marking), and relatively free word order. Some are even polysynthetic, i.e. whole sentences are expressed as one verb. The original grammatical type of Austroasiatic, which is preserved in the Mon-Khmer languages, has the opposite modifier - dependent order (Verb - Object, Noun - Adjective, Preposition - Noun) without any inflectional morphology at all, and therefore quite rigid word order. The two branches of Austroasiatic thus were distinguished by a change opposite that in Indo-European, and incidentally their now opposite structures are far more different from each other than the opposite structures of proto-Indo-European and modern Indo-European languages. A brief description of the evolution of Munda grammar is given in a short paper by Patricia Donegan and myself in John Richardson, Mitchell Marks, & Amy Chukerman, eds., Papers from the Parasession on the Interfaces of Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax, Chicago Linguistic Society, 1983, pp. 337-351. The paper also describes the opposite prosodic and phonological drifts of Munda and Mon-Khmer, and even alludes to opposite tendencies in their verse and music structures. From: Steve Matthews Subject: Grammar shifts I was interested in your question about direction of change. I gave a paper at the 1988 Georgetown Round Table on Variation and Change arguing that spoken French is undergoing a major typological shift as a result of grammaticalization of the clitic pronouns as agreement markers. This makes it a head-marking language in the sense of Nichols ('Language', 1986) and results in much greater freedom of word order than exists in standard written French. In particular, it is absurd to continue to analyse 'left-dislocated' and 'right-dislocated' constructions as such, when they are used ubiquitously as topicalisation and verb-initial (esp. interrogative) constructions respectively. At that conference my paper was next to one by Bernard Bihackjian (of Nijmegen; author of Evolution in Language) who argued forcfully for a one-way model of typological change (evolution, in his terms) from SOV with word order freedom to SVO without it. this view leads to a number of paradoxes, as does the situation described in your note. Part of the answer may involve the role of standardisation and written forms of language, in which word order changes and variation are sub stantially curbed. In French, incidentally, the 'spoken French' syntax does creep into written registers. From: Randy LaPolla Subject: Grammar Shifts It may not be what you are looking for, but in Sino-Tibetan the word order is to a large extent pragmatically based, and the languages have developed more morphology as time has gone on. Some of the languages changed from verb final to verb medial (the Sinic lgs and a couple of Tibeto-Burman lgs), but most often it is the morphology or pragmatics that determines argument relations, not word order. Those are the responses, for the most part, as received. Thank you to all who responded, Randy LaPolla, Steve Matthews, and David Stempe. Dan "Toby" Williamson Internet: acc_dtw@exodus.valpo.edu Bitnet: acc_dtw@valpo Realnet: Valpariso, Indiana and Chevy Chase, Maryland -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-256. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-257. Thu 08 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 62 Subject: 4.257 Not, one Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 06 Apr 93 14:27:14 EDT From: Larry Horn Subject: Re: 4.249 Earliest Citation of NOT; Journal Of Undergraduate 2) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 93 06:34:14 EST From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Dummy 'One' -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 06 Apr 93 14:27:14 EDT From: Larry Horn Subject: Re: 4.249 Earliest Citation of NOT; Journal Of Undergraduate In response to Bruce Nevin's posting on the 1905 retro-NOT from "Pigs is Pigs": That citation certainly does take pride of place as far as I know. I had earlier posted two citations from "Comrades of the Saddle", a juvenile Western (not featuring Irish immigrants as far as I can tell) published in 1910. The two relevant passages (contexts provided on request) were "You're a fine commander to be lieutenant for--not", declared Horace. (p. 68) "He's a fine neighbor--not", declared Larry. (p. 145) [Frank V. Webster, "Comrades of the Saddle". New York: Cupples & Leon.] Also published in 1910 was a "Little Nemo in Slumberland" comic strip, New York Herald, Feb. 13, 1910, in which the eponymous hero dreams up a "big flying machine" which he uses to deliver, as a favor to the postmaster, billions of Valentine's Day cards, one of which--dropped down to a bullying policeman, reads "YOU ARE A BRAVE COP NOT". The Nemo datum I owe to Richard Piepenbrock, and the Webster ones to John Wildanger. Pace Bruce, I'm pretty sure there were no citations provided by Larry Hyman, but he may have just been applying the well-known or-->yma/Larry H__n rule. --Larry Horn (I think) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 93 06:34:14 EST From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Dummy 'One' This may or may not be relevant to the discussion I caught the tail end of, but constructions with dummy 'one' need not involve adjectives, it seems to me. An NP like 'a history one' seems perfectly OK, and so do things like 'I want one, too' (where no modifier need be understood), and 'I want one with a cherry on top'. Thus, I am not sure that 'one' is a good example of what it was supposed to be the only attested instance of. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-257. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-258. Thu 08 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 56 Subject: 4.258 Indirect Speech Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1993 12:44:02 -0400 (EDT) From: J_LIMBER@UNHH.UNH.EDU (JOHN LIMBER) Subject: Indirect Speech -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1993 12:44:02 -0400 (EDT) From: J_LIMBER@UNHH.UNH.EDU (JOHN LIMBER) Subject: Indirect Speech NO INDIRECT SPEECH IN ANTIQUITY? " Several questions arise: (a) Should we attribute the lack or scarcity of indirectly reported speech in a language to grammar or to something else? (b) Are there languages in which we can establish that indirectly reported speech is impossible, so that a speaker is obliged to attribute actual words to a speaker?" One answer to this may be found in Julian Jayne's "The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" in which indirect speech and the corresponding subjectivity (opaque contexts, etc.) is seen as a reflection of the newly invented subjectivity of consciousness. Newly invented that is, some several thousand years ago. Here are some passages that happen to be in front of me (second edition,1990 Houghton Mifflin). "The Greek subjective conscious mind, quite apart from its pseudostructure of soul, has been born out of song and poetry. From here it moves out into its own history, into the narratizing introspections of a Socrates and the spatialized classifications and analyses of an Aristotle, and from there into Hebrew, Alexandrian, and Roman thought. And then into history of a world which, because of it, will never be the same again.p.292...preceding consciousness there was a different mentality based on verbal hallucinations.p.452" NEedless to say, Jayne's ideas are controversial, making language play a fundamental role in the acquisition and operation of human consciousness. One implication is that it places the evolutionary changes in language many of us take for granted as intrinsic to human language extremely--I used to think unacceptably--recently in human history. This in turn has implications for theories of language acquisition, etc. etc. It will be of interest to see what LINGUIST viewers offer in reponse to b) above! John Limber, Psychology, University of New Hampshire -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-258. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-259. Fri 09 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 183 Subject: 4.259 Conferences: SALSA Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 93 00:00:13 -0500 From: robinq@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (robin queen) Subject: SALSA Schedule -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 93 00:00:13 -0500 From: robinq@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (robin queen) Subject: SALSA Schedule FIRST ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ABOUT LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY-AUSTIN April 16-18, 1993 Friday, April 16 UTC 3.134 8:00-9:00 REGISTRATION and Coffee 9:00-9:15 OPENING STATEMENT-Joel Sherzer-UT Austin 9:15-10:15 KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Is it really "No problemo": Anglo Spanish in Mass Media and the Commodification of Mexican-American Labor / Jane Hill, University of Arizona 10:15-10:30 BREAK SESSION 1: Discourse/Pragmatics I CHAIR: Keith Walters, UT-Austin 10:30-11:00 Genre & Competence in UFO Discourse/Susan Lepselter, UT-Austin 11:00-11:30 Soft Fictions: Children, Narrative Events & Identity/Randy Tillery, UT-Austin 11:30-12:00 Working a Crowd with Sound: The Pragmatics of a Political Performance/Cynthia McLemore, Univ of Michigan 12:00-12:30 Language in Evidence: the Pragmatics of Translation in the Courtroom/Mary Bucholtz, UC-Berkeley 12:30-1:30 LUNCH SESSION 2: Methodological Concerns CHAIR: Greg Urban, UT- Austin 1:30-2:00 Why We Need Descriptive Studies: Phonological Variables in Hispanic English/Erik R.Thomas, UT-Austin 2:00-2:30 "Are you checkin' your breasts regularly?": Problems with Identifying and Quantifying the Directives in Doctor-Patient Talk/Marcia H. Edwards, UT- Austin 2:30-3:00 They Speak More Caucasian: Fragmentation in the Social Networks of Japanese- Americans and its Effects Across Generations/Norma Catalina Mendoza-Denton and Melissa Iwai, Stanford 3:00-3:15 BREAK SESSION 3: Language Attitudes and Identity CHAIR: Randy Tillery, UT-Austin 3:15-3:45 On Becoming a Nonnative Speaker of Tunisian Arabic: the Political Economy of Acquiring a 'Local' Language/Keith Walters, UT-Austin 3:45-4:15 Diglossia in Flux: Language & Ethnicity in Contemporary Ukraine/Laada Bilaniuk, Univ. of Michigan 4:15-4:45 Negotiation of Class and Ethnicity: Innovation in Mizrahi Dialect of Hebrew/Daniel Lefkowitz, UT-Austin 4:45-5:00 DISCUSSION Saturday, April 17 FAC 21 8:30-9:00-Coffee 9:00-10:00 KEYNOTE: A Principled Defense of the Propostion, 'When a Language Dies, a Culture Dies'/Anthony Woodbury -UT Austin 10:00-10:15 BREAK SESSION 1: Language Contact, Retention & Loss CHAIR: Rusty Barrett, UT-Austin 10:15-10:45 On the Possibility of an English-derived Gold Coast Pidgin in Use During the Slave Trade/Michael Aceto, UT-Austin 10:45-11:15 Spanish and English Bilingualism: The Other Side of the Coin/Florencia Cortes-Conde, UT-Austin 11:15-11:45 The Role of Gender in Minority Language Retention by Hispanic Children in Northern New Mexico/Eliverio Chavez, Texas Tech University 11:45-12:15 Structure Exaggeration in Language Death/Susan G. Guion, UT-Austin 12:15-1:30 LUNCH SESSION 2: Intersection of Discourse & Theoretical Approaches CHAIR: Robin Queen, UT-Austin 1:30-2:00 Prosodic Elements in Mandarin Natural Discourse/Li-chiung Yang, Georgetown University 2:00-2:30 Grammatical Roles and Participant Introduction in Native-speaker and Second- language Discourse/Lorraine E. Kumpf, Calif. State U-Long Beach 2:30-3:00 A Discourse Analysis Approach to Quantifier Floating in Korean/Soo-Yeon Kim, Harvard 3-3:15 BREAK SESSION 3: Discourse/Pragmatics II CHAIR: Juergen Streeck, UT-Austin 3:15-3:45 Variation in Japanese Honorific Use & Its Consequences/Cynthia Dickel Dunn, UT-Austin 3:45-4:15 Some Functions of Other-Repair in Children's Discourse/Margaret Field, UC- Santa Barbara 4:15-4:45 Aggravated Corrections as Disagreement in Casual Greek Conversations/Christina Kakava, Ohio State & Georgetown 4:45-5:00 DISCUSSION 8:00-PARTY- at the home of Angela and Tony Woodbury Sunday, April 18 FAC 21 8:00-9:00-Coffee 9:00-10:00 KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Pointed Lips, Thumbs Up, and Cheek Puffs: Some Emblematic Gestures in Ethnographic Context/ Joel Sherzer, UT-Austin 10:00-10:15 BREAK SESSION 1: Ethnography of Speaking CHAIR: John Files, UT-Austin 10:15-10:45 Kinship as Art: A Western Apache Case/David Samuels, UT-Austin 10:45-11:15 Gender and Verbal Art: The Case of the Akan/Akosua Anyidoho, UT-Austin 11:15-11:45 Mayan Conversation/Jill Brody, Louisiana State University 11:45-12:15 Speech Style, Grammatical Distinction & the Reproduction of Social Difference in Highland Nepal/Calla Jacobson, UT-Austin 12:15-12:30 CLOSING REMARKS PROCEEDINGS FROM THE SYMPOSIUM WILL BE PUBLISHED AS A SPECIAL ADDITION OF THE TEXAS LINGUISTIC FORUM. FOR A COPY OF THE PROCEEDINGS, PLEASE CONTACT: SALSA LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT UNIVERISTY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN AUSTIN, TX 78712-1196 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-259. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-260. Fri 09 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 83 Subject: 4.260 Jobs: Foundation Chair of Language Studies, Melbourne Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 09 Apr 1993 12:19:16 +1000 From: Gillian Wigglesworth Subject: Foundation Chair of Language Studies -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 09 Apr 1993 12:19:16 +1000 From: Gillian Wigglesworth Subject: Foundation Chair of Language Studies THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE FOUNDATION CHAIR OF LANGUAGE STUDIES AND HEAD OF THE SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES The University is seeking an outstanding leader, scholar and teacher as Foundation Professor of Language Studies and Head of the School of Languages in the Faculty of Arts, in the field of one of the languages taught in the School or in Applied Linguistics. This is a new position created following a review of language studies and has provided substantial additional resources to enable its objectives to be met. Two further Chairs, one in French and the other in German, are also being advertised at this time, and a Chair of Chinese will be advertised at a later stage. The Chair of Italian is held by Professor T.O'Neill and the Foundation Chair of Japanese by Professor W.H. Coaldrake. The Foundation Chair is a continuing position. The appointee will serve as Head of the School of Languages for an initial period of five years, and will exercise leadership in the development of language education for the University as a whole and for the Victorian community. The salary of a Professor is AUD77,900. Headship of the School attracts a loading. The closing date for applications is 15 June 1993. Applications for information should be addressed in the first instance to the Registrar, The University of Malbourne, Parkiville, Victoria 3052, Australia. Applications should be marked "Personal and Confidential" Telephone enquiries: 03 344 5003 (Mrs. Megan Gleeson) +61 3 Fax number: 03 344 6897 +61 3 Enquiries about the School of Languages should be directed to Professor Marion Adams, Dean, Faculty of Arts. Telephone: 03 344 5242 +61 3 Fax number: 03 347 0424 +61 3 The Council reserves the right to make no appointment or to fill the Chair by invitation at any stage. The University of Melbourne is an equal opportunity employer and has implemented a smoke-free work-place policy. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-260. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-261. Fri 09 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 261 Subject: 4.261 Conferences: ACL 1993 Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 93 22:27:49 -0400 From: walker@bellcore.com (Don Walker) Subject: ACL-93 Annual Meeting Program and Registration information -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 93 22:27:49 -0400 From: walker@bellcore.com (Don Walker) Subject: ACL-93 Annual Meeting Program and Registration information [Moderators' note: a more complete version of this posting, including a description of tutorials and registration information, is available on the server. To get the file, send a message to: listserv@tamvm1.tamu.edu (if you are on the Internet) OR listserv@tamvm1 (if you are on the Bitnet) The message should consist of the single line: get acl conf linguist You will then receive the complete file.] ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS 31st Annual Meeting ACL-93 22-26 June 1993 Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA INVITED TALKS Planning Multimodal Discourse Wolfgang Wahlster, German Research Center for AI Transfers of Meaning Geoff Nunberg, Xerox PARC Quantificational Domains and Recursive Contexts Barbara Partee, University of Massachusetts SPECIAL MEETINGS ACL Business Meeting with elections and voting on constitutional changes Student Member Lunch Meeting NOTICE CONTENTS PROGRAM INFORMATION TUTORIAL DESCRIPTIONS SPECIAL MEETINGS STUDENT SESSION INFORMATION REGISTRATION INFORMATION AND DIRECTIONS HOTEL INFORMATION APPLICATION FOR REGISTRATION APPLICATION FOR RESIDENCE HALLS ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS 31st Annual Meeting 22 - 26 June 1993 Fawcett Center, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA PROGRAM TUESDAY, 22 JUNE - FAWCETT CENTER AUDITORIUM 12:00-5:00 Tutorial Registration, Lobby 2:00-5:30 TUTORIAL SESSIONS Brain and Language Helen Gigley and Steve Small Mathematics of Language: How to Measure the Complexity of Natural Languages Alexis Manaster Ramer and Wlodek Zadrozny 7:00-9:00 Tutorial Registration and Reception, Lobby WEDNESDAY, 23 JUNE - FAWCETT CENTER AUDITORIUM 8:00-5:00 Tutorial and Conference Registration, Lobby 9:00-12:30 TUTORIAL SESSIONS Multimedia and Multimodal Parsing Kent Wittenburg Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval David D. Lewis and Elizabeth D. Liddy 12:00-9:00 EXHIBITS AND DEMONSTRATIONS, Room 10 & Exhibit Room LUNCH 1:30-1:45 OPENING REMARKS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS 1:45-2:10 Char_align: A Program for Aligning Parallel Texts at the Character Level 2:10-2:35 Aligning Sentences in Bilingual Corpora Using Lexical Information Stanley Chen 2:35-3:00 An Algorithm for Finding Noun Phrase Correspondences in Bilingual Corpora Julian Kupiec 3:00-3:30 BREAK 3:30-3:55 Structural Matching of Parallel Texts Yuji Matsumoto, Hiroyuki Ishimoto, Takehito Utsuro, & Makoto Nagao 3:55-4:20 Towards History-Based Grammars: Using Richer Models for Probabilistic Parsing Ezra Black, Fred Jelinek, John Lafferty, David M. Magerman, Robert Mercer, & Salim Roukos 4:20-4:45 Using Bracketed Parses to Evaluate a Grammar Checking Application Richard Wojcik, Philip Harrison, & John Bremer 4:45-5:15 BREAK 5:15-5:40 A Speech-First Model for Repair Detection and Correction Christine Nakatani & Julia Hirschberg 5:40-6:05 Gemini: A Natural Language System for Spoken-Language Understanding Mark Gawron, Doug Appelt, John Bear, Lynn Cherny, Robert Moore, & Doug Moran 7:00-9:00 RECEPTION WITH EXHIBITS AND DEMONSTRATIONS THURSDAY, 24 JUNE - FAWCETT CENTER AUDITORIUM 8:00-5:00 Conference Registration, Lobby 9:00-7:00 EXHIBITS AND DEMONSTRATIONS, Room 10 & Exhibit Room 9:00-9:25 The Effect of Establishing Coherence in Ellipsis and Anaphora Resolution Andrew Kehler 9:25-9:50 Temporal Centering Megumi Kameyama, Rebecca Passonneau, & Massimo Poesio 9:50-10:15 Inferring the Semantic Scope of Operators Massimo Poesio 10:15-10:45 BREAK 10:45-11:10 Two Kinds of Metonymy David Stallard 11:10-12:15 Planning Multimodal Discourse ***INVITED TALK*** Wolfgang Wahlster, German Research Center for AI 12:15-1:45 LUNCH 1:45-2:10 A Unification-Based Parser for Relational Grammar David E. Johnson, Adam Meyers, & Lawrence S. Moss 2:10-2:35 Parsing Free Word Order Languages in the Paninian Framework Akshar Bharati, Vineet Chaitanya, & Rajeev Sangal 2:35-3:00 Principle-Based Parsing without Overgeneration Dekang Lin 3:00-3:30 BREAK 3:30-3:55 Lexicalized Context-Free Grammars Yves Schabes 3:55-4:20 Parallel Multiple Context-Free Grammars, Finite-State Translation Systems, and Polynomial-Time Recognizable Subclasses of Lexical-Functional Grammars Hiroyuki Seki, Ryuichi Nakanishi, Yuichi Kaji, Sachiko Ando, & Tadao Kasami 4:20-4:45 Feature-Based Allomorphy Hans-Ulrich Krieger, John Nerbonne, & Hannes Pirker 4:45-5:15 BREAK 5:15-5:40 Intention-based Segmentation: Human Reliability and Correlation with Linguistic Cues Rebecca J. Passonneau & Diane J. Litman 5:40-6:05 Language-Independent Anaphora Resolution System for Understanding Multilingual Texts Chinatsu Aone & Doug McKee 7:00-10:00 RECEPTION AND BANQUET Presidential Address: Fernando Pereira FRIDAY, 25 JUNE - FAWCETT CENTER AUDITORIUM 8:30-3:00 Conference Registration, Lobby 9:00-6:00 EXHIBITS AND DEMONSTRATIONS, Room 10 & Exhibit Room 9:00-9:25 Contextual Word Similarity and Estimation from Sparse Data Ido Dagan, Shaul Marcus, & Shaul Markovitch 9:25-9:50 Towards the Automatic Identification of Adjectival Scales: Clustering of Adjectives According to Meaning Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou & Kathleen McKeown 9:50-10:15 Distributional Clustering of English Words Fernando Pereira, Naftali Tishby, & Lillian Lee 10:15-10:40 BREAK 10:40-11:45 Transfers of Meaning ***INVITED TALK*** Geoff Nunberg, Xerox PARC 11:45-12:40 BUSINESS MEETING, ELECTIONS, & CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGES See separate notice for description of special agenda items. NOMINATIONS FOR ACL OFFICES FOR 1994: President: Karen Sparck Jones, University of Cambridge Vice President: Doug Appelt, SRI International Secretary-Treasurer: Don Walker, Bellcore Associate Secretary-Treasurer: Judith Klavans, Columbia University Executive Committee (1994-1996): Ed Hovy, USC Information Sciences Institute Nominating Committee (1994-1996): Fernando Pereira, AT&T Bell Laboratories 12:40-2:10 LUNCH STUDENT SESSIONS 2:10-2:28 A Flexible Approach to Cooperative Response Generation in Information-Seeking Dialogues Liliana Ardissono, Alessandro Lombardo, & Dario Sestero, University of Torino 2:28-2:46 Identifying Relevant Prior Explanations James A. Rosenblum, University of Pittsburgh 2:46-3:04 Responding to User Queries in a Collaborative Environment Jennifer Chu, University of Delaware 3:04-3:22 The Imperfective Paradox and Trajectory-of-Motion Events Michael White, University of Pennsylvania 3:22-3:40 Text Segmentation Based on Similarity Between Words Hideki Kozima, University of Electro-Communications 3:40-4:10 BREAK 4:10-4:28 How Do We Count? The Problem of Tagging Phrasal Verbs in PARTS Nava Shaked, The City University of New York 4:28-4:46 Raisins, Sultanas, and Currants: Lexical Classification and Abstraction via Context Priming David J. Hutches, University of California, San Diego 4:46-5:04 Guiding an HPSG Parser using Semantic and Pragmatic Expectations Jim Skon, The Ohio State University 5:04-5:22 The Formal Consequence of Using Variables in CCG Categories Beryl Hoffman, University of Pennsylvania 5:22-5:40 Integrating Word Boundary Identification with Sentence Understanding Kok Wee Gan, National University of Singapore 5:40-5:58 Extending Kimmo's Two-Level Model of Morphology Anoop Sarkar, C-DAC, Pune University Campus 8:15-10:15 JUDY COLLINS & THE COLUMBUS SYMPHONY -- see separate notice Chemical Abstracts grounds, next to Fawcett Auditorium SATURDAY, 26 JUNE - FAWCETT CENTER AUDITORIUM 8:30-1:00 Conference Registration, Lobby 9:00-2:00 EXHIBITS AND DEMONSTRATIONS, Room 10 & Exhibit Room 9:00-9:25 A Complete and Recursive Feature Theory Rolf Backofen & Gert Smolka 9:25-9:50 On the Decidability of Functional Uncertainty Rolf Backofen 9:50-10:15 A Logical Semantics for Nonmonotonic Sorts Mark A. Young & Bill Rounds 10:15-10:45 BREAK 10:45-11:10 F-PATR: Functional Constraints for Unification Grammars Kent Wittenburg 11:10-12:15 Quantificational Domains and Recursive Contexts ***INVITED TALK *** Barbara Partee, University of Massachusetts 12:15-1:45 LUNCH and STUDENT MEMBER LUNCH -- See separate notice 1:45-2:10 Tailoring Lexical Choice to the User's Vocabulary in Multimedia Explanation Generation Kathleen McKeown, Jacques Robin, & Michael Tanenblatt 2:10-2:35 Automatic Acquisition of a Large Subcategorization Dictionary from Corpora Christopher D. Manning 2:35-3:00 An Empirical Study on Thematic Knowledge Acquisition Based on Syntactic Clues and Heuristics Rey-Long Liu & Von-Wun Soo 3:00-3:30 BREAK 3:30-3:55 Part-of-Speech Induction from Scratch Hinrich Schuetze 3:55-4:20 Automatic Grammar Induction and Parsing Free Text: A Transformation-Based Approach Eric Brill 4:20-4:45 A Competition-Based Explanation of Syntactic Attachment Preferences and Garden Path Phenomena Suzanne Stevenson LINGUIST List: Vol-4-261. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-262. Fri 09 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 128 Subject: 4.262 Qs: Interlingua, discourse & video, negator, transfer Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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, 8 Apr 1993 15:09 EDT From: CLIN@GUVAX.bitnet Subject: deficiencies of the interlingual approach to machine translation 2) Date: Thu, 08 Apr 93 12:53:15 -0700 From: Kate Finn Subject: Discourse Analysis of VideoTeleconferencing, CSCW,... 3) Date: Fri, 09 Apr 93 11:37:47 +0100 From: RichardHudson50 Subject: A rude negator 4) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1993 09:56:29 -0500 (EST) From: "Kate Ksiazek" Subject: Lexical transfer -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 15:09 EDT From: CLIN@GUVAX.bitnet Subject: deficiencies of the interlingual approach to machine translation Hello everybody, I am writing to request whether you know any literature on the posted subject: the deficiencies of the interlingual approach to machine translation. I will summarize the responses. Any pointers or suggestions would be highly appreciated. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 08 Apr 93 12:53:15 -0700 From: Kate Finn Subject: Discourse Analysis of VideoTeleconferencing, CSCW,... Hello, I'm trying to find out what, if any, work has been done in the area of analyzing on-line dialogues, in environments such as computer- supported collaborative work (CSCW) or videoteleconferencing. For comparison purposes, analysis of face-to-face collaborative meetings or design sessions would also be very helpful. The sorts of data I'm interested in would include utterance type and length, pauses between speakers, number and type of interruptions or collisions, etc. If anyone has worked in these areas or knows of someone else's work, could you please send me the references? Thanks in advance, Kate Finn -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Fri, 09 Apr 93 11:37:47 +0100 From: RichardHudson50 Subject: A rude negator I've just spotted a new English negator: BOLLOCKS. This has been around for a long time as in "Bollocks!" meaning `That's rubbish!", but it's just been used, twice in half an hour, by my 15-year old daughter in "Bollocks he did", meaning `That's rubbish - he didn't', with no intonation break. Further interrogation revealed that she distinguished it clearly from "Bollocks, he did", meaning `That's rubbish - he did'. Has anyone else heard this? Is the same possible with any other expression of disagreement (e.g. NONSENSE)? For me at least, "Nonsense he did" is quite impossible, with no intonation boundary and meaning `He didn't'. Will it last? Dick Hudson Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT (071) 387 7050 ext 3152 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1993 09:56:29 -0500 (EST) From: "Kate Ksiazek" Subject: Lexical transfer I am experimenting with implementing lexical transfer for the purpose of machine translation and would be very interested in the following: - examples, in which the difficulties of one to many translation (one word in source language corresponds to several in the target language) can be resolved on the basis of the style of the text (style: eg. formal, informal, technical, etc.) For example: German Magen can be translated into English as stomach or belly depending on the informality of the context, the French word domicile can be translated both as home or domicile. - I am also interested in examples where a verb phrase or noun phrase in the source language translates into one word in the target language. For example: commit suicide in English se suicider in French I would be very grateful for any examples of the above. _______________________________________ Kate Ksiazek kksiazek@cs.indiana.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-262. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-263. Sat 10 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 179 Subject: 4.263 Rude negators Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 93 12:07:45 EDT From: rh@dsd.camb.inmet.com (Rich Hilliard) Subject: "A Rude Negator" 2) Date: Fri, 09 Apr 93 13:35:02 EST From: mark Subject: rude negators 3) Date: Fri, 09 Apr 93 13:05:35 CDT From: Michael M T Henderson Subject: Re: 4.262 Qs: Interlingua, discourse & video, negator, transfer 4) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 93 17:23 EST From: KINGSTON@cs.umass.EDU Subject: Re: 4.262 Qs: Interlingua, discourse & video, negator, transfer 5) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 20:34 BST From: URGENT !! ** Subject: "Rude" Negators -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 93 12:07:45 EDT From: rh@dsd.camb.inmet.com (Rich Hilliard) Subject: "A Rude Negator" Dick Hudson points out "a new English negator: BOLLOCKS" and asks whether there are any other expressions can be used in a similar fashion insofar as meaning, position and intonation. In my speech, such an expression is, "the hell" as in: The hell you say! The hell he did! As far as I'm aware, this is not a recent construction; I can remember it as a child (1960s). For me, the phenomenon seems restricted to VERY SIMPLE sentences: *The hell I did it! *The hell Susan knows! *The hell you say it's a boy! *The hell my mom thinks! Maybe as simple as: Pronoun-Verb; although perhaps these can be explained via discourse rules. Rich Hilliard PS - "Bollocks" is such a great word; makes me want to go home and play the Sex Pistols' album :-) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Fri, 09 Apr 93 13:35:02 EST From: mark Subject: rude negators Richard Hudson asks about rude negators comparable to the newly-observed "Bollocks he did!", approximately equivalent to "Rubbish - he didn't!" That looks to me like almost the same construction as "The {hell/devil} he did!", which can be translated as either a contradiction, "You're completely wrong: he did!", or an exclamation of surprise and dismay, "What??!! He did??" (For those non-UK subscribers who may not know it, "bollocks" literally means 'testicles', and I think it's about equivalent in register to its close kin "balls" in US usage.) "The {hell/devil}!" ("devil" strikes me as somewhat literary or old-fashioned, but that may just reflect the usage I'm used to), without a ... complement? ... is more likely to be dismay than contradiction. But "Balls!" is definitely a contradiction, or a refusal to a request or command. (Wasn't there a famous use of that in WWII, usually euphemized to "Nuts!"?) "The {h/d} I will!" is a refusal. Can ?"Bollocks I will!" be so used? Mark A. Mandel Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : mark@dragonsys.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Fri, 09 Apr 93 13:05:35 CDT From: Michael M T Henderson Subject: Re: 4.262 Qs: Interlingua, discourse & video, negator, transfer Re Rude Negators: Dick Hudson's "Bollocks he did", with no intonation break, seems to match "The **** he did", where **** is "hell" or "fuck" (but not "damn" or "shit"). Can the fact that it is not "The bollocks" be put down to syllable count? ==================================================\ | | | Michael M. T. Henderson \ | Linguistics Department | | University of Kansas | | Lawrence, KS 66045-2140 | | (913)864-3450 | | BITNET: MMTH@UKANVM | | INTERNET:mmth@ukanvm.cc.ukans.edu | ===================================================== -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 93 17:23 EST From: KINGSTON@cs.umass.EDU Subject: Re: 4.262 Qs: Interlingua, discourse & video, negator, transfer "Bollocks he did" seems to be a variant on "The hell he did," also produced as a single intonational phrase (I think necessarily with the nuclear accent on "hell"). John Kingston -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 20:34 BST From: URGENT !! ** Subject: "Rude" Negators Just to follow up Dick Hudson's posting about constructions such as "Bollocks he did" meaning "He didn't", I can safely say that I've been using that sort of construction for as far back as I can remember using many swear words at all (I'm 23 now). Another form that springs to my mind right now is "My arse she did", meaning "She didn't", although I would not say "My bollocks..." (it sounds strange). My immediate thoughts are that there are some indeterminate forms which right now sound a bit odd, but which I can imagine using once in a while. These are forms such as perhaps "Crap they were" (as before, as opposed to a OSV regional form, distinguishable by intonation, as Dick Hudson mentioned) or "Shite it was!". Quite odd, though, that "Bollocks" and "My arse" (in those precise forms) are the only ones that I would use or that I can imagine anyone I know using. Is there a reason (literature-related?) why this might be the case? (I shall resist the temptation to say "Bollocks there is!" at this point. Yours, clean of tongue and pure of mind, Dave David E Newton Department of Language and Linguistic Science University of York Heslington York YO1 5DD (0904) 432650 den1@uk.ac.york -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-263. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-264. Sat 10 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 107 Subject: 4.264 Sum: Linguistics of euphemism Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 09 Apr 93 13:23:24 -0400 From: anderson@sapir.cog.jhu.edu Subject: Linguistics of euphemism: Summary -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 09 Apr 93 13:23:24 -0400 From: anderson@sapir.cog.jhu.edu Subject: Linguistics of euphemism: Summary A while ago I asked (in Linguist Vol-4-171, Wed 10 Mar 1993) for references to the linguistics of euphemism, on behalf of a colleague of mine here at Hopkins. I got a number of replies, for which I am grateful, from the people listed at the end of this note. I promised to summarize, and I've even gotten a couple of requests to do so, so here's what I learned. The majority of replies pointed me to the following work, which I was even (given the vagaries of library acquisitions in this age of scarcities) able to find in our library: Keith Allan & Kate Burridge "Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon", Oxford University Press, New York, 1991 (ISBN 0-19-506622-7) I was also referred to: Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press. Coleman, Julie (1992) 'Sexual euphemism in Old English'. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 93: 93-8 Enright, D J (ed) (1985) Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism. Oxford. Galli de' Paratesi, Nora. Semantica dell'eufemismo.Torino: Oscar Mondadori. 1969. Montagu, Ashley. The Anatomy of Swearing, New York: Collier-Macmillan. 1967. Rawson, Hugh, A Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk, Crown Publishers, Inc., 1981 As well as the two _State of the Lge_ volumes (1980, 1990) edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, from California. Some less specific references: "Jay Powell did a study of Australian euphemisms many years ago. He gave a paper on it which I heard at WECOL in 1972 and so may have done more work on euphemisms although I don't know for sure. The last I heard he was at UBC but am not sure of that either." "Mary Haas wrote some interesting remarks on euphemism in Thai and cross-linguistically between Thai and English. The paper I am thinking of was I think reprinted in the reader on language and culture edited by Dell Hymes, ca. 1965." "Two starting places would be Marckwardt's American English, which has a good section of euphemism as a product of Victorian mentality, and Greenough and Kittredge's Words and Their Ways in English Speech, which similarly discusses euphemism and taboo in primitive societies and relates the phenomenon generally to cultural/social matters. More might come to me later, but these are the first two that come to mind. Another thought--what about Hayakawa's work--I'm almost sure that some of his semantic studies at least border on the processes of euphemism and dysphemism." Thanks to the following for their assistance: Justine Cassell Geoffrey Nunberg Vicki Fromkin Ursula Doleschal "Bruce E. Nevin" Alan Slotkin bert peeters Istvan Kenesei "Michael Hancher" Randy Allen Harris Keith Allan David Denison Janine Scancarelli Cynthia A Read -- Oxford University Press -- Humanities Paul Saka Laurie.Bauer@vuw.ac.nz Janet Gordon Laura Liao --Steve Anderson -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-264. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-265. Sat 10 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 112 Subject: 4.265 New Books: Theory, creoles, discourse, Indo-european Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------- Note ------------------------------------------ Additional information on the following books, as well as a short backlist of the publisher's titles, is available from the Listserv for some of the publishers listed here. To get this information, simply send a message to: Listserv@tamvm1.tamu.edu (Internet) or Listserv@tamvm1 (Bitnet) The message should consist of the single line: get publishername lst linguist For example, to get more information on a book published by Mouton de Gruyter, send the message: get mouton lst linguist At the moment, the following lists are available: mouton lst benjamin lst ------------------------------New Books------------------------------ LINGUISTIC THEORY Fanselow, Gisbert (ed.). The Parametrization of Universal Grammar 1993 xvii, 232 pp. Cloth. ISBN: 1 55619 226 6 $59.00 John Benjamins >internet:70461.1236@compuserve.com Ling Theory, Syntax Addresses parametrization through various perspectives, ranging from learn- ability, the form and nature of parametrization, the role of the interface between morphology and syntax and the parameters of X-bar syntax, to the lexical parametrization hypothesis. Waugh, Linda R. & Stephen Rudy (eds.) New VISTAS IN GRAMMAR 1993 (paper ed.) x, 540 pp. Paper. ISBN: 90 272 3585 6 $34.95 John Benjamins Cloth. ISBN: 90 272 3543 0 $85.00 >internet:70461.1236@compuserve.com Ling Theory, Discourse Papers in this work are subcategorized into five sections: 1) the question of invariance; 2) invariance and grammatical categories: 3) grammar and discourse; 4) grammar and pragmatics and 5) typology and universals. (New paperbound edition) VanValin, Robert D (ed.) ADVANCES IN ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 1993 xii, 560pp. Cloth. ISBN: 1 55619 137 5 $140.00 John Benjamins Paper. ISBN: 1 55619 552 4 $29.95 >internet:70461.1236@compuserve.com Ling Theory, Syntax Major research in syntactic theory within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar with a new and detailed introduction to the theory itself, and numerous comparisons and contrasts to other syntactic theories. GENERAL LING Kibrik, Aleksandr E. OCHERKI PO OBSHCHIM I PRIKLADNYM VOPROSAM JAZYKOZNANIJA (Essays in general and applied issues in linguistics). In Russian. 1992. Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta (Moscow University Press) 336 pp. Hdbd. Approx. $30. ISBN 5-211-01538-X Collection of articles of last two decades. Linguistic theory and typology (linguistic postulates, cognitive studies, ergativity, subjecthood), descriptive (Caucasian languages) and applied studies. CREOLES Winer, Lise TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO 1993 xii, 368pp. Paper. ISBN: 1 55619 440-4 $75.00 John Benjamins Spoken examples on tape: ISBN: 1 55619 441 2 $27.00 A complete description of the English and English Creole of these two islands which includes detailed descriptions of the historical background, the sound system, grammar and vocabulary, speech styles, social and linguistic interaction of Creole and English, and implications for education and spelling. DISCOURSE Norrick, Neal R. CONVERSATIONAL JOKING: HUMOR IN EVERYDAY TALK 1993. 192 pp. Clothbound. ISBN 0-253-34111-6 $29.95 Indiana University Press Linguistics Investigates forms of humor that enliven everyday conversation. Demonstrates that an account of joking is a necessary part of any complete description of conversation. Shows that conversation is the natural home of many forms of humor. Provides new insights into both verbal humor and the nature of conversation. INDO-EUROPEAN Salmons, Joseph C. THE GLOTTALIC THEORY: SURVEY & SYNTHESIS 1993. vii, 88 pp. Paper. ISBN 941694-40-2 $20.00 Institute for the Study of Man: Journal of Indo- European Studies, Monograph 10. Hist. phonology, Indo-European This work presents the most complete overview to date of the various recent proposals for revising the PIE obstruent system in a broader historical and phonological context. It introduces several new argu- ments and points toward possible middle ground on several key issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-265. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-266. Tue 13 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 78 Subject: 4.266 Qs: Review of administrators, foreign language requirement Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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, 12 Apr 93 10:32:43 CDT From: Gregory K. Iverson Subject: Administrator review 2) Date: Fri, 09 Apr 93 17:20:33 EDT From: Stanley Dubinsky Subject: foreign language requirement -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 10:32:43 CDT From: Gregory K. Iverson Subject: Administrator review A colleague here at UW-Milwaukee is seeking information for a committee of the faculty senate which is formulating recommendations relating to the periodic review of administrators in the university. His questions are the following: (I'd be happy to summarize responses received from colleagues in American universities if there is general interest in the topic.) *********************************** Are the performances of Deans subjected to formal evaluation at your institution? If so, how often and by what methods? Are the evaluations of faculty members solicited? Is the faculty consulted on whether Deans should be reappointed? ********************************** Thanks for responding... -- Greg iverson@convex.csd.uwm.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Fri, 09 Apr 93 17:20:33 EDT From: Stanley Dubinsky Subject: foreign language requirement We are interested in finding out about non-IE/"exotic" language requirements (at the Ph.D. level) in other linguistics departments and programs. (1) Does your program have such a requirement? (2) How many semesters of the language must be taken to meet the requirement? (3) What (semester) level of competence must be achieved to meet the requirement? If there is sufficient interest in the results, I will post to the list. Thanks, Stanley Dubinsky Linguistics Program University of South Carolina dubinsk@univscvm.bitnet -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-266. ________________________________________________________________ header: Ron Reck, a graduate student in the linguistics program at Eastern Michigan U., will be assisting us this year in the editing of LINGUIST. Ron has a B.A. in linguistics from Wayne State U. and a strong computational background, so he is particularly willing and able to answer questions about such things as file transfer and Listserv functions. His e-mail address is: rreck@emunix.emich.edu He's been very helpful to us already, having been training on LINGUIST for some weeks. So we feel it's time to introduce him to subscribers and officially welcome him to the staff. -Helen & Anthony ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-267. Tue 13 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 101 Subject: 4.267 Qs: Jacaltec, generation and LFG, frequency differences Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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: Sat, 10 Apr 93 09:37:36 EDT From: Michael Newman Subject: Jacaltec 2) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 12:23:58 -0700 From: cwebb@sciences.sdsu.edu (Charlotte Webb) Subject: Frequency differences 3) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 10:40:54 -0400 From: John Hughes Subject: Lexical-Functional Grammars for generation -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 09:37:36 EDT From: Michael Newman Subject: Jacaltec I am posting this for someone who is not on this list. He would like to get into contact with anyone who has done research on the syntax of the Mayan language, Jacaltec. Send responses to Francisco Ordonez, ORDGC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU. Thanks -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 12:23:58 -0700 From: cwebb@sciences.sdsu.edu (Charlotte Webb) Subject: Frequency differences I am doing research which uses Kucera and Francis' Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English published in 1967. They published a corpus of more than 1 million words with a frequency count, as well as other summaries. Matsumoto in an article claimed that for words in this corpus which differed in number by 100 (e.g. 46 vs 150), this frequencyt difference was a statistically significant difference. Does anyone know if Matsumoto is correct? Specifically our experiment has to do with words which are identical with respect to a particular phonemic contrast, e.g. /f/ "fan" vs "fin" but which differ in frequency of occurrence. We constructed minimal pair lists using the values in Kucera and Francis and Matsumoto's claim that a difference of 100 is a significant difference. Now, having done some chi sqare analyses on some of our word pairs, it appears that Matsumoto's claim is probably incorrect. Please send replies to me directly and I will summarize and publish the responses. Thank you. cwebb@sciences.sdsu.edu Charlotte Webb Dept. of Linguistics and Oriental Languages San Diego State University San Diego, CA 92182 (619) 594-1910 cwebb@sciences.sdsu.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 10:40:54 -0400 From: John Hughes Subject: Lexical-Functional Grammars for generation Could anyone here point me to work done in natural language generation using lexical-functional grammars? Also, does anyone know where I might find a fairly large, detailed grammar of LFG for English (not necessarily implemented in any computer laguage) to inspect as a model for such an enterprise? Please respond by e-mail. Thanks. John hughes@cis.udel.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-267. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-268. Tue 13 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 81 Subject: 4.268 Qs: Middle Korean, Arabic MT, transcription software Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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, 12 Apr 93 17:25:18 CST From: HYUNUK@SIUCVMB.SIU.EDU Subject: Voiced plosives in Middle Korean 2) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1993 21:35:59 -0400 From: kuhns@world.std.com (Robert J Kuhns) Subject: Arabic MT and Phonology 3) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 23:28:42 EST From: Kenneth Simon Subject: Transcription software? -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 17:25:18 CST From: HYUNUK@SIUCVMB.SIU.EDU Subject: Voiced plosives in Middle Korean Does anybody know about voiced plosives in Middle Korean? I'd appreciate some information on this and would like to have responses sent directly to me. Thanks. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1993 21:35:59 -0400 From: kuhns@world.std.com (Robert J Kuhns) Subject: Arabic MT and Phonology I would appreciate any references to research or commercial products involving Arabic-English machine translation or text-to-speech technology. Thank you in advance. Bob Kuhns -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 23:28:42 EST From: Kenneth Simon Subject: Transcription software? Hello all -- I am working in the field of conversation analysis and will be involved in making detailed transcriptions of recorded talk. These transcriptions will include timed pauses, inflection notations, numbered lines, etc. Is there any software out there to help facilitate the transcription process? I use a Macintosh computer, so Mac recommendations are preferred, but I'll be happy to entertain any suggestions. Please reply via e-mail -- and thanks again! Ken Simon e-mail: Internet: KSSIMON@INDIANA.EDU Bitnet: KSSIMON@IUBACS.BITNET -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-268. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-269. Tue 13 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 109 Subject: 4.269 Conferences: NELS, ACH-ALLC Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 11 Apr 1993 11:45:53 -0400 (EDT) From: NELS 24 at UMass Subject: NELS 24 Call for Papers 2) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 17:02 EDT From: ACH-ALLC93 Conference Subject: ACH-ALLC93 Conference -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 11 Apr 1993 11:45:53 -0400 (EDT) From: NELS 24 at UMass Subject: NELS 24 Call for Papers NELS 24 University of Massachusetts, Amherst November 19-21, 1993 Featured Talk by John McCarthy and Alan Prince ** CALL FOR PAPERS ** Abstracts are invited for twenty minute talks in all areas of theoretical linguistics (including phonology, morphology, psycholinguistics, semantics, historical linguistics, and syntax). Abstracts should be one page of no more than 500 words (plus an additional page with examples and references if needed). WORD LIMIT WILL BE STRICTLY ENFORCED. Send nine anonymous copies of the abstract and one copy with the name of author(s) and institution(s). Include a TYPE-WRITTEN 3" x 5" index card with the following information: name of author(s), title of paper, address and affiliation, phone number, student/nonstudent, and email address (if available). Send all material to: NELS 24 Department of Linguistics South College University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003 USA Abstracts must be received by: MONDAY AUGUST 16, 1993 Please no email or fax submissions and only one abstract per person (including co-authoring). If you would like acknowledgement of receipt of your abstract, include a self-addressed stamped envelope or an email address. Abstract decisions will be made by late September 1993. PREREGISTRATION deadline: Friday October 15, 1993. Preregistration fees are $15 for students and $25 for nonstudents. Please send a check or money order in US$ payable to NELS 24 to the above address. On-site registration will be $25 for students and $40 for nonstudents. INFORMATION: email NELS24@linguist.umass.edu, or call 413/545-0885 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 17:02 EDT From: ACH-ALLC93 Conference Subject: ACH-ALLC93 Conference ACH-ALLC93, the joint international conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, will be held at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, June 16-19, 1993. The conference announcement/registration form and the provisional program can be obtained in several ways: 1. by email request to ACH_ALLC93@GUVAX.GEORGETOWN.EDU 2. by anonymous FTP to GUVAX.GEORGETOWN.EDU in directory ACH_ALLC93 3. by gopher to GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY in directory ACH_ALLC93 4. by surface mail from Paul Mangiafico, Project Assistant Center for Text and Technology Academic Computer Center 238 Reiss Science Building Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057 USA -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-269. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-270. Tue 13 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 63 Subject: 4.270 Just for fun: novel, pro-drop Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 12 Apr 1993 18:26:10 +1000 From: CALIX Subject: A Novel for Computational Linguists 2) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 10:34:10 PDT From: Joseph Pentheroudakis Subject: English pro-drop -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 12 Apr 1993 18:26:10 +1000 From: CALIX Subject: A Novel for Computational Linguists I'd like to share with you the title of a comic romance I enjoyed over the weekend. Set in a software company employing linguists, it was great fun: Rosenheim, Andrew. 1993. Hands On. Mandarin Paperbacks. ISBN 0-7493-1361-7 Lloyd Holliday edulh@lure.latrobe.edu.au -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 10:34:10 PDT From: Joseph Pentheroudakis Subject: English pro-drop I don't mean to reignite the pro-drop discussion, but I simply couldn't resist pointing out the following nice example from the recent New Books posting on Linguist: =============================================== DISCOURSE Norrick, Neal R. CONVERSATIONAL JOKING: HUMOR IN EVERYDAY TALK 1993. 192 pp. Clothbound. ISBN 0-253-34111-6 $29.95 Indiana University Press Linguistics Investigates forms of humor that enliven everyday conversation. Demonstrates that an account of joking is a necessary part of any complete description of conversation. Shows that conversation is the natural home of many forms of humor. Provides new insights into both verbal humor and the nature of conversation. ============================================== Joseph Pentheroudakis LINGUIST List: Vol-4-270. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-271. Tue 13 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 328 Subject: 4.271 Sum: Adjectives (Part 2) Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 12:38:18 SST From: David Gil Subject: SUM & NEW QUERY: ADJECTIVES -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 12:38:18 SST From: David Gil Subject: SUM & NEW QUERY: ADJECTIVES Following is a second summary of responses to my query on adjectives. The first part consists of 9 slightly-edited responses to my query and/or the first summary, arranged according to language; the second part contains some general comments of my own, and a new query. ------------------------------------------------------- ENGLISH (Larry Gorbet) Just read your summary of responses to your query about adjectives in NP positions. Some of the English data is questionable in relevance, I think. In particular, many (classes of) "adjectives" that occupy N or NP position act very much like lexical nouns, not adjectives. In particular, signs of this lexicalization include 1. idiosyncratic number 2. idiosyncratic nominal content (i.e. the "adjective" is interpreted only as a noun of a particular class modified by the adjective) 3. idiosyncratic senses (i.e. the "adjective" is only interpreted with a proper subset of its possible senses) 1. IDIOSYNCRATIC NUMBER Note that while (a) is OK, (b) is not: (a) The carnivorous are ferocious (b) *The carnivorous is ferocious. Or (c) Lonely are the brave. (d) *Lonely is the brave. (e) *The obvious are not always correct. (f) The obvious is not always correct. 2. IDIOSYNCRATIC NOMINAL CONTENT Lots of "adjectives" only refer to humans despite in principle being applicable to other classes of nominals (g) Only the tall will make the team. [humans] (h) ?*Only the tall will be preserved. [trees] (i) *Only the tall are unstable. [buildings] Others, like (f) above, only apply to abstract propositions 3. IDIOSYNCRATIC SENSES (a) I'll take the large. [nominal clothing size] (b) *I'll take the large. [actual size of "unsized" shawl] The distribution of these supports the fact that they are lexicalized nouns. That is, the distribution of particular "adjectives" and of certain semantic (etc.?) classes of "adjectives" fits the nominals (and senses) with which one would expect them to be used most often. ------------------------------------------------------- DUTCH (Jan Rijkhoff) In response to your query some time ago on the use of dummies in terms "headed" by adjectives: I believe that might be a correlation with (grammatical/noun inherent) gender. For instance, Dutch (gender): de rode (the red one), de grote (the big one), de lelijke (the ugly one); notice that English (no gender) has the dummy. A short time after I thought of this possible correlation (several years ago), I read an article by Pieter Muysken and Frans Hinskens, who seemed to have had the same idea (more or less), so I let it rest. If you are interested I can send you a (non-final) copy of their article (in Dutch I'm afraid), which I must have somewhere in my "archives". ------------------------------------------------------- GREEK (Stavros Macrakis) There appear to be three issues here, and it's not clear which one you're interested in: 1) Can you use an adjective without a noun to form an NP? 2) In this case, do you need to mark the adjective in some special way, different from a noun? 3) Is there some sort of "pronoun" like "one" which takes the place of the noun. In Modern Greek, you have (1) but not (2) or (3): Pjo fustani protimas? Which(n) skirt(n) prefer(2s pres. ind.)? Which skirt do you prefer? To kokino. The(n) red(n). The red one. To kitrino ine fthinotero. The(n) yellow(n) is cheaper(n). The yellow one is cheaper. ------------------------------------------------------- HINDI (Bhuvaneswari Narasi) I just saw the responses to your request for examples of adjectives that occur as complete NPs'. Here's an example from Hindi: "Lal gadi" = red car "Lal vala" = the red one "Vala" (or "wallah" as the British spell it), also attaches to various nouns as an agentive suffix - e.g. "dhobi-vala" (washerman). With adjectives however, it has the meaning "one"..... ------------------------------------------------------- ARABIC (Maher Awad) [...] regarding your questions of adjectives occupying NP slots by themselves, Arabic has constructions equivalent to: I want the red. (meaning I want the red one) I want a red one. same meaning. But you cannot have: I want the red one. In short, you cannot have 'one' with an indefinite article (zero in Arabic). ------------------------------------------------------- TURKIC (Vern M. Lindblad) The common wisdom about Turkic langs. is that there are two sets of stems, nominals and verbals (leading to the Turkological convention of using + to mark nominal morpheme boundaries and - to mark verbal morpheme boundaries). There are very few stems that can take both sets of suffixes (though there are various suffixes that change nominals into verbals and vice versa). However, many 'nominal' stems quite freely take both nominal and adjectival suffixes, so that there is only minimal differentiation between nouns and adjectives. Thus, it probably easier for an adj. in a Turkic lang. to stand alone as an NP than in most other langs. However, this is not something that I've looked into seriously, so my comments should be taken as suggesting a possible line of inquiry, rather than as authoritative. ------------------------------------------------------- JAPANESE (Bart Mathias) As a specialist in Japanese, I refrained from responding to your question about "red one" type languages because, as you surmise on the basis of the notes you got on Japanese, the "no" in question is a nominalizer, but not a noun (or even a word, though I know of one problem that gets in the way of calling it a suffix) apparently of the type you mention in your original query. I'm just writing this to confirm that surmisal, because your correspondents did not make it quite clear. "No," unlike "one," is not an independent word; it must follow--attach to--a tensed form or a noun(! the situation transformationalist types like to consider a reduction of "no no," where the former "no" is a genitive, but that doesn't help much). When it follows a tensed form it can be thought of as the head of a relative clause (thus closer to "one that is red" than to "red one"), but in fact it also ends "headless relatives," and should be considered as giving a syntactic role to the word it ends rather than playing its own syntactic role. ------------------------------------------------------- ASL (Therese Shellabarger) I am a second language user of ASL, so don't have to take my word for this exactly, but in ASL one can sign using what English uses as adjectives for nouns, and specifying quantifiers so that you could sign an equivalent of "I want the Red one" with "red" being the noun and "one" being how many, only if there were more than one "Red" objects of the same kind to pick from. Red would be used as a distinguishing feature of the object in question. If you used "one" simply to match the equivalent English sentence, then you would be using signed English, which gets into a totally other ballgame. As an example of the above, a deaf woman I used to live with pointed out to me the good ASL of her children one time to me when they were cold and wanted the "orange hot"--meaning, the heater which when hot the elements glowed orange. My gloss of their signs is not meant to be taken as an English translation, but rather to clarify what they signed for readers who know ASL... ------------------------------------------------------- GENERAL (Kate Kearns) I just read your summary of responses to your query. I felt people were responding with two different types of phenomena because there were two types in your query: NPs with dummy heads, as in your example "I want the red one", where the dummy is anaphoric or otherwise contextually identified, and "adjectives standing by themselves as NPs", maybe with some morphology, but presumably distinguished from the other construction by the absence of a separate nominal element as head of NP. A candidate for the second type in English would be 'The good, the bad and the ugly', 'Eat the rich', (movies) or 'the poor are always with us'; these don't have any context-dependence. Maybe there is an empty category bound by 'the', but it's not clear how it is governed if the whole NP is in subject position. Also 'The secret of life is taking the rough with the smooth, the good with the bad' - here I think 'good' and 'bad', presumably also 'rough' and 'smooth', strike me as zero conversions to nouns. ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- SOME GENERAL COMMENTS (David Gil) My original impetus in posing the query was to check out a hypothesis that was suggested to me by Martin Haspelmath, and is similar to that proposed by Jan Rijkhoff above, namely that the ability of an adjective to stand alone as head is correlated with the richness of adjectival morphology in the language in question. That is to say, if an adjective bears lots of nominal- like inflections, it will be able to head an NP, whereas if it is morphologically bare, it will need some kind of dummy "one", nominalizer, or other such prop. The results of the query, and my own work, cast some doubt on this hypothesis, while perhaps supporting a modified version of it, involving a uni-directional implicational universal. The following table provides a very rough classification of languages in accordance with the richness of their adjectival morphology [columns] and their strategies for letting an adjective constitute the main semantic element of an NP, ie. for saying "(I want the) red one" [rows]. little or no A rich A morphology morphology bare A Hungarian, Estonian Dutch, Hebrew Malay (Peranakan) Tagalog, A plus English, Sinhalese dummy "one" A plus Mandarin, Japanese nominalizing Malay (Standard) (particle) particle or (particle) affix Lezgian, Malayalam (affix) Note that the top left corner cell, containing languages with little or no adjectival morphology but nevertheless allowing adjectives to head NPs, is well-documented: these languages thus violate the proposed universal. However, the middle and bottom right cells are still rather weakly attested; so there may perhaps be some basis for a uni-directional implicational universal, to the effect that if a language has rich adjectival morphology, then it will permit its adjectives to head NPs (but not vice versa). (The only counterexample that I am familiar with to the latter, weaker claim, is Punjabi, which, as suggested by the angular brackets, simultaneously fills four out of the six cells. What this means is as follows: in Punjabi there are two classes of adjectives, one with gender marking, the other without; and *both* classes can either occur as bare heads of an NP or in construction with a nominalizing particle "vaala", similar to Japanese "no", Mandarin "de", Malay "yang", etc. Thus, Punjabi singlehandedly refutes any correlation between morphological richness and the ability of an adjective to stand alone as NP head.) So here's a more specific query: can anybody provide better examples of languages to fill the middle and bottom right cells? That is to say, is anybody familiar with a language that has rich adjectival morphology, but in which adjectives cannot stand by themselves as heads, but need a dummy "one", or nominalizing particle or suffix? Finally, a methodological/philosophical observation. At the same time that I posed the original query on adjectives, a rather heated discussion of pro-drop was taking place over the list. Although there are some interesting parallels between the two issues (they both concern the licensing of "empty" positions; in both cases correlations with morphological richness have been proposed), the adjective query didn't generate anywhere near as much interest as the pro-drop issue. These days, it would seem, verbs are just plain sexier than adjectives. Any ideas why? (And is this a fact about verbs and adjectives, or a fact about us linguists?) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-271. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-272. Tue 13 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 130 Subject: 4.272 Rude negators Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 10 April 1993, 18:11:23 CST From: Geoffrey S. Nathan GA3662 at SIUCVMB Subject: Bollocks| 2) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1993 17:39 +0800 From: "Tze-wan Kwan, Hongkong (twkwan@cuhk.hk)" Subject: Rude Negators 3) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 93 22:41:37 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw Subject: Bullocks and the hell 4) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 14:36:11 EST From: mark Subject: Rude negator, correction 5) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 14:32 CDT From: TB0NRN1@NIU.bitnet Subject: rude negators -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 10 April 1993, 18:11:23 CST From: Geoffrey S. Nathan GA3662 at SIUCVMB Subject: Bollocks| Further to Dick Hudson's question I note that in American English an equivalent construction has existed for a long time (with the same contrast depending on whether there are one or two tone contours). Consider the following: A: John has a million dollars. B: Bullshit he has| compare A: John doesn't have any money. B: Bullshit. He DOES| P.S. Sorry if I have violated an Internet taboo, but this is the only word that works this way in my dialect. Geoff Nathan -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1993 17:39 +0800 From: "Tze-wan Kwan, Hongkong (twkwan@cuhk.hk)" Subject: Rude Negators Richard Hudson's question brings me for the first time to such phenomenon as rude negators in language. To contribute to the ongoing discussion I would like to give some examples I find in Chinese. Ta hui chang ge pi. She can sing (piece) wind from bowels. And the sentence means literally: She cannot sing! Besides this structure, there are obviously many other variations of rude negators in Cantonese (a dialect in South China and in Hongkong) where male and female organs are used to replace "wind". Tz Tze-wan Kwan Department of Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 93 22:41:37 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw Subject: Bullocks and the hell I see I wasn't the only one who's heard "the hell" used in the way Richard Hudson described "bullocks" being used (I responded, at first, directly to him). I know of one actual record of the usage, but I don't know the date or title (I think it's the Quiet Man, 1952), but I know it's a John Wayne movie. In the movie,Wayne has the dialogue: "I ain't gonna hit 'im. I ain't gonna hit 'im. THE HELL I AIN'T." (followed by Wayne hitting another character). I wonder what other examples are out there? -- Paul Kershaw, Michigan State University -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 14:36:11 EST From: mark Subject: Rude negator, correction In my recent posting on the "rude negator" "Bollocks he did!", I made a dumb and possibly confusing mistake. The translation of "The {hell/devil} he did!" should, of course, have been "You're totally wrong: he didn't!" rather than "You're totally wrong: he *did!" My apologies for the confusion. Mark A. Mandel Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : mark@dragonsys.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 14:32 CDT From: TB0NRN1@NIU.bitnet Subject: rude negators Not only THE HELL but also LIKE HELL works as a negator in front of a clause, though LIKE FUCK doesn't sound right to me in the same position. MY ASS tends to come after a clause or NP rather than before them in the brand of American English I'm most used to hearing, e.g. IT'S CHEAP MY ASS or NO WATER MY ASS. MY BALLS could work in this post-position for me as well, though not in initial position. MY EYE fits in this same syntactic class, but I guess it wouldn't count as "rude" in Dick Hudson's sense. Neal R. Norrick tb0nrn1@niu.bitnet -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-272. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-273. Wed 14 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 99 Subject: 4.273 Qs: Frequency, temporal, French historical, Slavic Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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, 13 Apr 93 11:09:06 -0400 From: Richard Larson Subject: Frequency Counts 2) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 00:08:16 +0800 From: "Sze-wing Tang" Subject: temporal expressions 3) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 13:09:31 -0700 From: Ellen Kaisse Subject: Q: French textbook 4) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 13:29:50 UTC+0200 From: Angel Alonso Cortes Subject: slavic palatalizations -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 11:09:06 -0400 From: Richard Larson Subject: Frequency Counts I am interested in obtaining frequency counts for English demonstrative expressions: the determiners 'this' and 'that', their plurals 'these' and 'those', nominals constructed from them (e.g., 'this building', 'those books'), and the adverbs 'here', 'there', 'then', 'thus' and 'so'. Does anyone know how I might obtain this info? More generally, does anyone know how one obtains frequency count info? Please reply directly to my address (rlarson@semlab1.sbs.sunysb.edu) not to Linguist. I will post a summary of the replies on Linguist. -Richard Larson -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 00:08:16 +0800 From: "Sze-wing Tang" Subject: temporal expressions Could anybody here point me to the works done in the origin of the temporal expressions like 'yesterday', 'today' and 'tomorrow' in Mandarin as well as in other Chinese dialects. Thank you in advance. Sze-wing Tang The Chinese University of Hong Kong -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 13:09:31 -0700 From: Ellen Kaisse Subject: Q: French textbook A Francophone student in my introductory historical linguistics class asks if there is a good textbook in historical linguistics written in French (and, I add, likely to be easily accessible in the U.S.). We use Hock's admirable text, and I don't expect to be able to replace it for her, but the closer to his coverage, the better. -Ellen Kaisse -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 13:29:50 UTC+0200 From: Angel Alonso Cortes Subject: slavic palatalizations I am teaching the thorny (so I think it) problem of slavic palata- lizations,in particular the Ukranian case.I am not an expert in such a field,does any one know recent references on the topic? particularly, within autosegmental phonology. Angel Alonso-Cortis -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-273. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-274. Wed 14 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 109 Subject: 4.274 Rude negators Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 19:17 PDT From: benji wald Subject: Re: 4.272 Rude negators 2) Date: 13 Apr 1993 10:49:20 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Stemberger Subject: Re: 4.272 Rude negators 3) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 12:38:39 -0400 From: raha@watarts.uwaterloo.ca (Randy Allen Harris) Subject: Rude negators 4) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 17:25:59 EDT From: bb08179@bingsuns.cc.binghamton.edu (Angus Grieve-Smith) Subject: Rude negators -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 19:17 PDT From: benji wald Subject: Re: 4.272 Rude negators I'd like to point out that rude negators also have euphemistic versions like "like fish" (no doubt related to "fishy", so *"like meat", but also *"like tuna": "like a wooly mammoth" has potential) and "my foot", "my eye" (but not "my hand", "my thigh", but "my scrotum" has potential. The bridge between euphemism and rudeness is explicit in the following early 1960 exchange with a Harlem teenager. A: Yeah, like Nelly. B: Huh? A: Like Nelly. She though shit was a bowlful of jelly. That's why she's dead. Any more geographical variants of euphemisms? Bollocks is a popular word in Hyde Park Corner, London on Sundays. Bullshit is a popular academic word. Seems to mean "undocumented". Not much ruder than British "rubbish". I imagine "garbage" would be stronger than "bullshit" in American academese. I encourage more examples of equivalents to rude negators in other languages, like the Chinese example. Also encourage expanded discussion of rudeness -- also like to see if any disagreements can emerge on what's rude or not. How uniform a culture is this network? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: 13 Apr 1993 10:49:20 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Stemberger Subject: Re: 4.272 Rude negators A number of years ago, I saw a sociolinguistics article on Australian English that maintained that Australians can use "PIG'S ARSE" as a preposed rude negator: "Pig's arse we do" was the example. The article was about linguistic ways to be harass immigrants. Apparantly, some businesses had signs in the windows saying things like "We cash checks". On a second line, there'd be a picture of a pig seen from the rear, looking over it's shoulder, followed by the words "we do". Native speakers of Australian English would know that that business did NOT cash checks. Immigrants would not, and were in for an unpleasant experience. Can't recall the reference, though. ---joe stemberger -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 12:38:39 -0400 From: raha@watarts.uwaterloo.ca (Randy Allen Harris) Subject: Rude negators The following contrast exists in (at least) my (West-coast Canadian) dialect. Bullshit he did! (= He couldn't have. You're mistaken.) Fuck you he did! (= He couldn't have. You're lying.) Both follow the intonation pattern in Dick Hudson's initial posting. Randy Allen Harris South Hanoi Institute of Technology -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 17:25:59 EDT From: bb08179@bingsuns.cc.binghamton.edu (Angus Grieve-Smith) Subject: Rude negators In the colloquial speech of upstate New York, at least, there is an expression, "my ass," equivalent the "bullocks" described by Dick Hudson: "My ass, he did!" I seem to remember seeing it with other body parts, and it might also have been used at the end of a sentence as with "my eye" an expression I've seen in books, e.g. "Priest my ass!" implying that the person is in no way a priest. -- -Angus Grieve-Smith bb08179@bingsuns.cc.binghamton.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-274. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-275. Wed 14 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 149 Subject: 4.275 FYI: Available from SCHOLAR Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 17:25:40 EDT From: Joe Raben Subject: Announcing Release BZ of SCHOLAR -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 17:25:40 EDT From: Joe Raben Subject: Announcing Release BZ of SCHOLAR The next release of SCHOLAR, to be distributed shortly, contains the following items. To receive this release and information on retrieving similar items already in the database, send a message to as follows: sub scholar your-full-name . You will receive instructions on how to retrieve any of the items or all of them in one package. - - - - - - - - - - A notice that GRAMmar Cracker has been withdrawn from the market. A book summary of Theodore H. Nelson, _Literary: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu_. A book summary of Charles R. McClure et al., _Public Libraries and the Internet/NREN_. A book summary of _Philosophy and the Computer_, ed. Leslie Burkholder. A book summary of Sandra Carberry, _Plan Recognition in Natural Language Dialog_. Contents and abstracts from _Computational Linguistics_ 18:3 (September 1992), A note on the British National Corpus, a 1 million-word corpus of Modern British English for linguistic analy- sis. A note on a Hebrew version of the Old Testament. A note of network resources for Islamic studies. A note on a new catalog for the Oxford Text Archive. A note on the CD ROM of the Index Thomisticus. A note on a Greek New Testament, a Greek Old Testament, and a Henrew Old Testament. A Calendar of events through 1994. A position notice for an information retrieval re- searcher at Siemens in New Jersey. A position notice of a one-year postdoctoral position in machine translation in Paris. A position notice for a researcher in computational linguistics in England. A position notice for a linguistics programmer at the University of Canterbury. A notice of a new network conference on statistics, nat- ural language, and computing. A notice of a new network conference on natural language processing in Turkish. A notice of a new network conference on history. A notice that the _Journal of Technology Education_ is available free on the Internet. A Call for Papers for the _ACM Transactions on Informa- tion Systems_ special issue on text categorization. A notice of a special issue of _Library Trends_ contain- ing 200 pp. on "Electronic Information for the Humani- ties" A list of publications from the Centre for Modern Lan- guages of the British Computers in Teaching Initiative. A list of guides to ftp and listservs. A notice of a paper by Wendy Plotkin on TEI and IPA entities. A note on a report from the ACL/SIGGEN (Special Inter- est Group on Natural Language Generation). A report by Michel Lenoble on "La Tres Grande Biblio- theque and the Library of the Future." A news story on a project by Paramount Communications to combine books, movies, television and electronic tech- nology, A report on the text-oriented sessions at the Modern Language Associations's Annual Meeting. The latest newsletter of the ARTFL Project. A report on the Network Services conference in Pisa. A report on the Information Arcade at the University of Iowa. A report on a conference on Electronic Network Publish- ing. A notice of dictionary maintenance utilities. A notice of an attribute logic engine. A notice of a morphological parser for Turkish. A notice of a search program for Greek databases. A notice of "The Poor Man's Hypermedia" for IBM pc's and compatibles. A note on Philologic, a search program for the ARTFL database. A note on teaching foreign languages with facilities from the Internet. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-275. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-276. Wed 14 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 101 Subject: 4.276 Qs: Number & markedness, phonological reversal, Schachter Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 18:35:50 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw Subject: Query: Morphological markedness of number 2) Date: 13 Apr 93 16:40:31 GMT From: "RAD232" Subject: Linguistic reversal 3) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 16:18 EDT From: "Minglang.Zhou" <21798MIZ@msu.edu> Subject: Schachter, Thomas -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 18:35:50 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw Subject: Query: Morphological markedness of number One major difference between the analysis in Ojeda's (1993) Linguistic Individuals and Link's (1983-1984) famous series of papers on the singular/plural distinction in languages with such a distinction is that Link treats the singular as the unmarked member of the pair and Ojeda treats the plural as unmarked. Ojeda's stance is attractive in many ways, but for the resultant mismatch in English between the semantics (where plurality is unmarked) and the morphology (where the plurality is marked by virtue of having an (overt) morpheme). My query is this: for those languages that mark number morphemically through affixation and the like (that is, excluding Japanese, Chinese, etc.), are there any out there that have a morpheme for singular and not for plural, where by plural is meant that number which is left over when all other numbers, such as singular, paucal, dual, trial, are treated? Are there any languages that require someovert marker for ALL numbers, singular, plural, etc.? I'm looking for, for example, a language that behaves such as: (1) One dogs, two dog, three dog, four dog,... (2) One dogs, two doga, three dog, four dog,... (3) One dogi, two doga, three dogs, four dogs, ... Thanks in advance, Paul Kershaw (Michigan State University) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: 13 Apr 93 16:40:31 GMT From: "RAD232" Subject: Linguistic reversal Some friends and I were recently discussing the alleged backwards satanic messages supposed to be in some rock music, and I put forth the theory that a fairly straightforward reversal of the phonetic components would have the same result as playing in reverse. That is, reversing the word "vacation" would give n-(short u)-sh-(long a)- k-(long a)-v....Nushaycave, more or less. Someone else then countered with the claim that there is no conservation of syllables when vocal tracks are reversed: that syllables A-B-C don't necessarily reverse to syllables C-B-A (even if the phonetic components of each syllable are reversed as well). Since I'm exploring word reversals as a possible informational conveyance mechanism (a language is struggling to be born in my head these days), I was wondering if anyone could clarify for me what the effect of reversing actual vocalisations has with relation to the phonetic and syllabic structure. For example, if the spelling of a word in a phonetic alphabet is reversed, how close will that come to approximating how the word would actually sound in reverse? Does reversal actually change the number of syllables (it wouldn't seem so, but I've no experience trying to see and no access to the equip- ment to find out)? Is it too dependent on individual cases to be generalised, or are there some fairly standard ways of predicting the effect of reversal? Thanks for any help you can give. Scott Edgar -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 16:18 EDT From: "Minglang.Zhou" <21798MIZ@msu.edu> Subject: Schachter, Thomas Does anyone know Paul Schachter and David D. Thomas' e-mail addresses? I need to check some Tagalog and Chrau data with them. It will be nice if any Tagalog and Chrau speakers can help me. Please contact me directly. Thanks in advance. Minglang Zhou (21798miz@msu.edu) Michigan State university -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-276. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-277. Fri 16 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 204 Subject: 4.277 Sum: Rude Negation Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 12:03:25 +0100 From: RichardHudson50 Subject: Naughty negatives: summary -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 12:03:25 +0100 From: RichardHudson50 Subject: Naughty negatives: summary My message about "Bollocks he did!" aroused more interest than anything else I've ever written - no fewer than 47 replies, either via Linguist or direct. We linguists obviously enjoy writing about naughty words! This message is a summary of the responses. I'm sending a separate message about some challenges to syntactic theory. Here's a list of all my correspondents, with thanks to them all for taking the trouble. I've divided them into male and female (with one wild guess!), because of the gross difference in numbers (38 male, 9 female). Does this show anything about gender differences in use of / expertise in / interest in naughty words? Male: Milton Azevedo, Laurie Bower, John Bro, Ed Burstynsky, Paul Chapin, John Cowan, Tom Cravens, Robert Davis, Alexis Dimitriadis, Sam Glucksberg, John Goldsmith, Angus Grieve- Smith, Steve Harlow, Randy Allen Harris, Peter Hendriks, Michael Henderson, Rich Hilliard, Larry Horn, Daniel Karvonen, Paul Kershaw, John Kingston, (?) Randy LaPolla, Tze-Wan Kwan, John Limber, Mark Mandel, Geoffrey Nathan, Bruce Nevin, David Newton, Stewart Nichols, Neil Norrick, Nick Ostler, Harold Schiffman, Andy Spencer, Joe Stemberger, Joe Tomei, Larry Trask, Max Wheeler, Nick Youd Female: Georgia Green, Heidi Hamilton, Cat McGlothlin, Melissa Macpherson, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Elise Morse-Gage, Mary Neff, Benji Wald, Cherilyn Young ************************************************************* THE FACTS 1. The main point is that my example (1) is *not* very revolutionary in principle, because there are clear precedents based on other naughty words, notably THE HELL: (1) Bollocks he did! (meaning "No, he didn't") (2) The hell he did! Let's call this the *cataphoric* use, because BOLLOCKS etc relates to the status of the following proposition. 2. On the other hand, none of my correspondents claimed to have heard BOLLOCKS used in this way before, so it is a (little) first (and maybe last ...). (Actually, Steve Harlow, another Brit but based in York, said it sounded fairly normal, so maybe it all started in (old) York?) 3. Other words/word-pairs that are acknowledged by one or more correspondent in the cataphoric pattern are: BULL CRUD, BULLSHIT, CRAP, FUCKALL, (LIKE) HELL, LIKE FISH, LIKE FUCK, LIKE FUN, LIKE HECK, LIKE SURE, MY ASS/ARSE, MY EYE, MY FOOT (?), NONSENSE, PIG'S ARSE, (LIKE) SHIT, SHITE, THE DEVIL, THE FUCK, THE HECK, THE HELL, YOUR ASS But most correspondents recognised only two or three forms, and some geographical differences emerge (e.g. LIKE FUN came from an Australian). E.g. Joe Tomei explicitly rejects THE SHIT in this pattern, and I rejected NONSENSE which Stewart Nichols explicitly accepts. Nick Ostler finds THE DEVIL and THE HELL `rather club-land (UK) in tone' (I agree, incidentally). The question-mark after MY FOOT is because it comes from Benji Wald, who is really discussing the forms rather than where they occur; it is allowed by others at the end of the sentence, but can she use it at the start? Keep your eyes open for BULL CRUD - it was supplied by a 20-year old in person. It's Texan, apparently. Incidentally, Randy Allen Harris (West-Coast Canadian) says that FUCK YOU can be used cataphorically, but means "... isn't true, you're lying". 4. Another cataphoric use of some similar words expresses surprise, not disagreement. For Laurie Bauer, for instance, (3) is like this. (3) The bugger it is! John Bro recognises this use as well, though he thinks it's distinguished from the negative one by the intonation - it has the focus on the naughty word, and the rest of the sentence defocussed (see para 8). 5. Another pattern in which BOLLOCKS is used (the only pattern till now), is *anaphoric*, meaning "That's *** not true!". Some of these words can be used cataphorically but not anaphorically, and vice versa. The following can apparently be used anaphorically: BALLS, BULL CRUD, BULLSHIT, BOLLOCKS, LIKE HELL, SHIT 6. A third pattern of use, which we might call *exclamative*, doesn't seem to have any propositional content at all, but expresses intense dissatisfaction with the way the world currently is - used e.g. when you hit your thumb with a hammer, or delete a file by accident. The forms used here are as follows: HELL, SHIT I think Mark Mandel includes THE HELL and THE DEVIL here, but I'm not sure. There may of course be far more than this, because this people weren't commenting on this use. 7. Some correspondents link some or all forms directly with *phonetics*. Tom Cravens says the vowel in anaphoric SHIT is longer than the one in exclamative SHIT. 8. Some commented on *intonational* restrictions. Sam Glucksberg thinks NONSENSE may be ok cataphorically provided its first syllable is heavily stressed. Harold Schiffman and John Kingston think the intonation is limited in cataphoric cases - fall on the naughty word, then rising thereafter. On the other hand, John Bro thinks this intonation pattern means something like "Gosh, you don't say?", whereas the negative meaning requires intonation focus, with a fall, on the last word, e.g. DID. [beware of misunderstanding!] 9. Rich Hilliard comments on the syntax of the sentence following a cataphoric word. It has to be very simple, and maybe it has to consist of nothing but a pronoun and a verb. His starred examples are: (4)a *The hell I did it! b *The hell Susan knows! c *The hell you say it's a boy! d *The hell my mom thinks! This seems to move it into the same world as tag questions. Maybe the rest of the sentence has to be entirely *anaphoric*, so even our `cataphoric' use is in effect anaphoric. 10. Nick Ostler points out the possibility of having the negator at the *end* of the sentence, which seems to combine the cataphoric and anaphoric functions, and which seems to link up with the recently- discussed use of clause-final NOT, doesn't it? . His example is (5a), and John Limber provided a similar example, (5b). (5)a He did, my foot. b Safe my ass. (meaning it's definitely not `safe' [baseball]) Neal Norrick makes the same point, and adds MY BALLS as a possible end-position negator (though not possible in initial position). He also allows MY EYE here. Also Angus Grieve-Smith for MY ASS and MY EYE in final position. 11. Other languages. Nick Ostler provided a similar example from French (interesting reappearance of MY EYE, listed above!): (6) Il est arrive mon oeil! Tze-wan Kwan gives a Chinese (Mandarin?) example: (7) Ta hui chang ge pi. She can sing (piece) wind from bowels. (i.e. she can't sing) Apparently Cantonese uses male and female organs instead of wind. 12. BOLLOCKS is a Britishism. It's recognised (with that spelling) by the Collins Cobuild Eng Lang Dictionary as (1) a rude swearword which is used in very informal English to express disagreement, dislike or defiance, (2) a noun meaning testicles (but `a very rude and offensive use'). Some correspondents didn't believe the spelling and converted it, without comment, either into BULLOCKS or BALLOCKS. (According to John Cowan, BALLOCKS is the normal American spelling of the word.) Apparently both of these are etymologically justifiable, because it goes back to the Middle English BALLOCK, Old English BEALLUC, meaning `testicle', which is related not only to BALL but also to BULL. I don't know what the second morph "ock" meant. (Question: are testicles called balls because they look like balls, or the other way round?) Well, there it is folks - just goes to show there's more to grammar than you might expect. I'll highlight some of the issues in a separate message. Thanks for your help. Dick Hudson Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT (071) 387 7050 ext 3152 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-277. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-278. Fri 16 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 160 Subject: 4.278 Rude Negation Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 12:33:42 +0100 From: RichardHudson50 Subject: Naughty negatives & linguistic theory 2) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 21:49:08 EDT From: Larry Horn Subject: Re: 4.274 Rude negators 3) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 11:20 From: BLACKWELLSA@vax1.bham.ac.uk Subject: RE: 4.263 Rude negators 4) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 15:31:47 +0100 From: "James M. Scobbie" Subject: Re: 4.274 Rude negators -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 12:33:42 +0100 From: RichardHudson50 Subject: Naughty negatives & linguistic theory Re "X he did", where X may = THE HELL, ...... I've summarised the facts, as gathered over the LINGUIST net, in a separate message to LINGUIST. In this message I want to raise some questions for linguistic theory that seem to arise out of these facts. The basic data are summarised in the following examples, with NW standing for `naughty word': (1) Bullshit/*balls/hell/like hell/my ass/... it is. (2) It is my ass/*bullshit/*balls/... (3) Bullshit/Balls/..! (= what you've just said is false) (4) *Bullshit/Hell/*Like hell/Shit/...! (= Damn!) (5) *Bullshit/... nobody came. Q1. If (1-4) are grammatical, they must be generated by a grammar. How, given that they don't have canonical sentence structures with verbs etc.? Q2. What is the syntactic structure of (1-2)? In particular, is the NW subordinate or superordinate to the rest of the sentence? a. If it's subordinate, then it's (presumably) like NO WAY in (5). (5) No way am I going down there! Since the meaning is negative, why no subject-aux inversion? b. If it's superordinate, why doesn't the rest of the sentence behave like a subordinate clause/CP, with a subordinator such as THAT? (6) The hell (*that) he is! In other words, what does the NW subcategorize for? IP? Q3. How can a sentence-final NW like (2) subcategorise for a preceding IP? Q4. It seems that the rest of the sentence must consist of nothing but a pronoun and an auxiliary (e.g. "it is", but not "that happened"). If so, how can a grammar impose this restriction? Q5. What is the semantic structure of a sentence like this, such that it can be distinguished from a simple negation? There are a good few PhDs in all this, especially when other languages come into consideration! Dick Hudson Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT (071) 387 7050 ext 3152 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 21:49:08 EDT From: Larry Horn Subject: Re: 4.274 Rude negators In connection with Benji Wald's intuitions on the euphemistic value of certain rude-negator-substitutes, my own intuition is that the differentiation of his "like fish" (with which I'm not familiar) vs. *like meat, *like tuna depends more on the initial consonant of the object of pseudo-comparison than on its referential content. In fact for me, the euphemistic pre-canceller of choice is "Like fun, I am!", which exhibits the same crucial phonological property of containing a, but not the, F-word. (Or is 'an, but not the, F-word'?) And for what it's worth, I get "...my {ass/foot/ eye}", but all of them only after the cancelled item, thus functioning quite like retro-NOT, ironic "I don't think", and their ilk, as opposed to the cancellation-initial "Like {hell/fuck} I am" or "The fuck he is". Larry Horn P.S. I think "Like fudge" is OK too, but it's only in my passive grammar. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 11:20 From: BLACKWELLSA@vax1.bham.ac.uk Subject: RE: 4.263 Rude negators There is a variant on "the hell she did/bollocks she did" etc. involving a reversal of word order, in my idiolect at least: Did he hell! or Did he fuck! where the latter is to be interpreted as a rhetorical question implying a negative answer, rather than an enquiry about the referent's sexual history. (Falling intonation on the last word). As far as I am aware these can only be used in reply to a question, i.e. they are parodying the syntax of the original enquiry: A: Did he pay you the money he owed you? B: Did he fuck! Anyone else come across these? These rude negators are getting ruder all the time. Sorry. Sue Blackwell (BLACKWELLSA@UK.AC.BHAM) University of Birmingham, U.K. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 15:31:47 +0100 From: "James M. Scobbie" Subject: Re: 4.274 Rude negators As well as "bullshit he did" form, there's the inverted "did he bullshit" form, e.g. "did he fuck" (though "the fuck he did"). A: I saw you! B: Did you hell/fuck/shite. The hell/fuck you did. It must be that CLS time of year. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-278. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-279. Fri 16 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 104 Subject: 4.279 Qs: Before=while still not, Spanish tagging, reading Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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, 14 Apr 93 15:20 CDT From: George Aaron Broadwell Subject: Q: before = while still not 2) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1993 09:46:41 -0400 From: Inderjeet Mani Subject: POS tagging - Spanish 3) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 14:19:27 EDT From: rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU (William J. Rapaport) Subject: "miracle of reading" -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 15:20 CDT From: George Aaron Broadwell Subject: Q: before = while still not In Choctaw and Creek there seems to be no specific complementizer/ subordi nating conjunction with the meaning 'before'. Translations of English sentences with 'before' are translated with a sequence of morphemes meaning 'while' + 'still' + 'not': (Choctaw) Ik-oklhiliik-ok-i_sha-kma_, chokka falammih. neg-darken-neg-still-while house return 'He went home before it got dark.' (lit. While it still wasn't dark, he went home.) A student of mine is interested in examining this pattern in more detail. Do any LINGUIST readers know of references to such a pattern or other, non-Muskogean, languages with this property? Reply to me personally, and I'll summarize if there is sufficient interest. Aaron Broadwell, U. of Oklahoma (aa2492@uokmvsa.bitnet) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1993 09:46:41 -0400 From: Inderjeet Mani Subject: POS tagging - Spanish Hello, I'm interested in information on any part-of-speech taggers for Spanish. If you wish, you may reply to me and I will post a collected reply. Thanks, Inderjeet Mani Artificial Intelligence Technical Center Mail Station Z401 The MITRE Corporation 7525 Colshire Drive McLean, Virginia 22102-3481 mani@starbase.mitre.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 14:19:27 EDT From: rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU (William J. Rapaport) Subject: "miracle of reading" Can anyone supply me with a reference to the following idea, which I read several years ago but neglected to keep? I call it "the miracle of reading". The idea is that reading is miraculous, strange, weird, ...: From a third-person point of view, it consists of a person looking at some physical object with strange markings on it. Yet that person is learning something, getting information, by this process. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-279. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-280. Fri 16 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 158 Subject: 4.280 FYI: Tagger code available, bibliographical database Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 19:59:16 PDT From: Doug Cutting Subject: Xerox part-of-speech tagger available 2) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1993 17:05:20 -0400 (EDT) From: sabourco@ere.umontreal.ca (Sabourin Conrad) Subject: Bibliographical database -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 19:59:16 PDT From: Doug Cutting Subject: Xerox part-of-speech tagger available The Common Lisp source code for version 1.0 of the Xerox part-of-speech tagger is available for anonymous FTP from parcftp.xerox.com in the file pub/tagger/tagger-1-0.tar.Z. This code has been tested in the following CL implementations: . Franz Allegro Common Lisp version 4.1 on SunOS 4.x; . CMU Common Lisp version 16e on SunOS 4.x; and . Macintosh Common Lisp 2.0p2. Enjoy. Doug Cutting , and Jan Pedersen -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1993 17:05:20 -0400 (EDT) From: sabourco@ere.umontreal.ca (Sabourin Conrad) Subject: Bibliographical database COMPUTERS - LINGUISTICS - COMMUNICATIONS BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DATABASE For the last 15 years, we have been compiling a bibliographical database on all aspects of computer processing of natural language communications. The bibliography, which now holds more than 67,000 references, is indexed with a thesaurus of over 3,400 keywords. More than 13,000 titles are related to artificial intelligence. The references cover the period beginning with the inception of the computer to the present and include theses, research reports, books, articles from specialized periodicals, papers in conference proceedings, etc. The entries were obtained mostly by systematically scanning more than 400 periodicals and 800 conference proceedings. Some of the thematic sections of the database are near completion and will be published in print in the coming months. Each thematic volume will have a two-level analytical index. Many researchers collaborated by sending us their lists of publications. All others who are interested are invited to do so. In the list that follows, the numbers refer to the approximate number of entries of some of the subsections of the database. ===================================================================== NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES (3000) Conversation, interfaces to database, to expert system, to robot, to operating system, to question answering system, etc. TEXT UNDERSTANDING (3800) PARSING (7000) Syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, semantic interpretation. COMPUTATIONAL MORPHOLOGY (2000) Morphological analysis and generation, lemmatization. TEXT GENERATION (2000) Generation from data or linguistic structure, explanation generation, paraphrasing, etc. SPEECH ANALYSIS, CODING, AND SYNTHESIS (2800) Speech compression, encryption, transmission, speech to tactile display, phoneme identification, speaker identification, tone recognition, etc. SPEECH RECOGNITION AND UNDERSTANDING (3000) Connected, continuous, isolated words, speaker dependent and independent, etc. TEXT INFORMATION EXTRACTION (2000) Indexation (automatic and computer aided), text condensation, content analysis, etc. INFORMATION RETRIEVAL (3000) Full text, conceptual. COMPUTER TRANSLATION (7000) Bilingual, multilingual, aids to translation MATHEMATICAL AND FORMAL LINGUISTICS (3000) COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND PSYCHOLINGUISTICS (1600) LITERARY COMPUTING (3000) Concordances, author identification, style analysis, poetry analysis and production, text collation, literary criticism, etc. QUANTITATIVE AND STATISTICAL LINGUISTICS (2400) Frequencies of characters, phonemes, words, grammatical categories, syntactic structures; lexical richness, word collocations, etc. COMPUTER ASSISTED LANGUAGE TEACHING (5500) Teaching foreign languages, composition, writing, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, reading, translation, listening, speaking; text composition aids, etc. ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT PROCESSING (2300) Document editing, formatting, typesetting, coding, storing, interchanging, etc. COMPUTATIONAL LEXICOGRAPHY (3000) Dictionaries, thesauri, terminological databanks; parsing, transfer and generation dictionaries; lexical semantics, etc. OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION (2900) Character preprocessing, feature extraction, isolation, segmentation, thinning; multi-font recognition, writer identification, etc. CHARACTER PROCESSING (2200) Character coding (external and internal), input, output, synthesis, ordering, conversion, encryption, string matching, font design, etc. COMMUNICATING THROUGH COMPUTERS (2100) E-Mail, computer conferencing, electronic publishing, hypermedia, hypertext, etc. CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND DIALECT STUDY (1000) ===================================================================== Conrad F. Sabourin sabourco@ere.umontreal.ca P.O. Box 187, Snowdon Montreal, Qc, H3X 3T4 Canada ===================================================================== -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-280. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-281. Fri 16 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 165 Subject: 4.281 Conferences: Logic, language & information; Mixed languages Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1993 16:04:44 +0200 From: Sten.Lindstrom@philos.umu.se Subject: Colloquium Logic, Language and Information 2) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 15:30 MET From: PBAKKER@alf.let.uva.nl Subject: mixed languages workshop -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1993 16:04:44 +0200 From: Sten.Lindstrom@philos.umu.se Subject: Colloquium Logic, Language and Information The Department of Philosophy and the Department of Linguistics, Ume} University, S-901 87 Ume}, Sweden (Phone: (46) 90-165670, FAX: (46) 90-167777) will arrange UmLLI-93, the Ume} Colloquium on Dynamic Approaches in Logic, Language and Information, September 24-26, 1993. Preliminary list of speakers: Patrick Blackburn, Robin Cooper, Eva Ejerhed, Luis Farinas del Cerro, Andr~ Fuhrmann, Peter G{rdenfors, Sven-Ove Hansson, Risto Hilpinen, Hans Kamp, Sten Lindstr|m, Michael Morreau, Glyn Morrill, Peter Pagin, Dag Prawitz, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Hans Rott, Erik Sandewall, Krister Segerberg, Keith Stenning, Dag Westerst}hl. For further information contact: Sten.Lindstrom@philos.umu.se. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 15:30 MET From: PBAKKER@alf.let.uva.nl Subject: mixed languages workshop Leiden/Amsterdam workshop on MIXED LANGUAGES/ LANGUAGE INTERTWINING Date: May 24 1993 Time: 9.30 to 17.00 Place: University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Witte Singel -Doelen complex, 1166-003. It will be a real workshop in that no papers will be presented by the participants, but questions on specific aspects will be discussed by each participant in turn concerning the mixed language of his or her speciality. All participants have first hand experience with the language discussed or otherwise gathered original data. The questions relate to the structure and nature of the mixture, the processes of genesis of mixed languages, language acquisition aspects, the language community, the reconstruction of the social context of their genesis and mixed languages as a type versus other results of language contact. The following people have agreed to participate to share their knowledge of a particular mixed language: Peter Bakker (University of Amsterdam) Michif (Cree-French) Cor van Bree (University of Leiden) Stedsk (Frisian-Dutch) A. Drewes (University of Leiden) Maltese (Arabic-Italian) Evgenij Golovko and/or Nikolai Vakhtin (St. Petersburg) Mednyj Aleut/ Copper Island Aleut (Russian-Aleut) Miel de Gruiter Javindo (Javanese-Dutch) Ian Hancock (University of Texas at Austin) (Angloromani and other Romani [Gypsy] mixed languages) Berend Hoff (University of Leiden) Island Carib (Carib-Arawak) Maarten Mous, (University of Leiden) Ma'a (Bantu-Cushitic) Pieter Muysken (University of Amsterdam) Media Lengua (Quechua-Spanish) and Callahuaya (Quechua-Puquina) Derek Nurse (Memorial Univ. St. John's/ Universit t Bayreuth) Ilwana (Bantu-Bantu) Hadewych van Rheeden (University of Amsterdam) Petjo (Malay-Dutch) Thilo Schadeberg (University of Leiden) Mwena (Swahili-other Bantu) The discussion will take place in room 003 of building 1166 at the Witte Singel, Leiden. The structure of the workshop is as follows: 9.00 - 9.30 COFFEE 9.30 - 10.00 Introduction of speakers and the languages discussed 10.00-10.30 First cluster of questions: Structure: the nature of the mixture 10.30-11.00 Second cluster of questions: Structure: questions of genetic relationship and typological distance of source languages 11.00-11.30 Third cluster of questions: Process(es) of genesis 11.30-12.00 Fourth cluster of questions: Community: The mixed language in a wider geographical and social context 12.00-14.00 LUNCH BREAK 14.00-14.30 Fifth cluster of questions: Language acquisition aspects 14.30-15.00 Sixth cluster of questions: Genesis: reconstruction of the social context of genesis 15.00-15.30 Seventh cluster of questions: Mixed languages and language contact models 15.30-16.00 COFFEE BREAK [B16.00-16.30 Eighth cluster (open discussion) Mixed languages as a type: similarities and dissimilarities 16.30-17.00 Ninth cluster (open discussion) Evaluation: How, why and when do mixed languages come into being? 18.00-??? Dinner party The more detailed questions to be discussed are available from the organizers. The workshop is open to the public, who are encouraged to participate in the discussion. After every question session, they will have the opportunity to give comments. For more information, contact the organizers: Peter Bakker / Linguistics/UVA Spuistraat 210 1012 VT Amsterdam tel: -31-20-5253860 (office) -31-20-6316808 (home) e-mail: pbakker@alf.let.uva.nl fax: -31-20-5253052 Maarten Mous/Afrikaanse Taalkunde/RUL Postbus 9515 2300 RA Leiden tel. -31.71.272242 (office) -31-71-218377 (home) e-mail: mrtmous@rulcri.LeidenUniv.nl -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-281. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-282. Fri 16 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 86 Subject: 4.282 Fellowships in information transfer Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1993 15:35:10 EDT From: Liz Liddy Subject: Phd Student Fellowship in Information Transfer -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1993 15:35:10 EDT From: Liz Liddy Subject: Phd Student Fellowship in Information Transfer AASERT Phd Student Fellowships The School of Information Studies at Syracuse University announces the availability of two 3-year PhD fellowships towards a PhD in Information Transfer. To be considered for an award, an applicant must be a citizen of the United States or a native resident of a possession of the United States. Citizens of another country who have applied for US citizenship do not meet this requirement. The Fellowships are made available by funds provided by Augmentation Awards for Science and Engineering Research Training (AASERT) Program and are used to support additional student researchers on ongoing Department of Defense funded research projects. The project on which the awardees will work is the DR-LINK Project, an Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA) funded effort in developing innovative approaches to information retrieval. The DR-LINK Project's research emphasis is on the use of computational linguistic analysis and conceptual graph representation for the provision of high-precision document retrieval. For each of the three years, the fellowship covers 24 hours of tuition, student activity and health fees, stipend for 20 hours of work a week during the academic year, and 40 hours of work a week during the summer. The students will begin the PhD program with the Fall, 1993 semester. Admission to the PhD program according to our established guidelines is required. The completion of a Syracuse University Graduate Application, three letters of recommendation and GRE scores are required. Completed application materials should be submitted by June 15. The PhD in Information Transfer at Syracuse University is a research-oriented program which focuses on the advancement and dissemination of new knowledge, both basic and applied, about the design, use, and evaluation of information systems in all segments of society. The program is interdisciplinary, bringing together relevant knowledge from information science, the behavioral sciences, and a range of research methodologies. Students who are interested in pursuing research in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing, computational linguistics, or knowledge representation are encouraged to apply. For further information and application materials, contact: Prof. Elizabeth D. Liddy or Prof. Sung H. Myaeng School of Information Studies Syracuse University 4-206 Center for Science and Technology Syracuse University Syracuse, New York 13244-4100 (315) 443-2911 liddy@mailbox. syr. edu shmyaeng@mailbox.syr.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-282. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-283. Wed 21 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 221 Subject: 4.283 Rude negation Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 21:04:13 -0500 From: lambrec@emx.cc.utexas.edu (Knud Lambrecht) Subject: Re: 4.278 Rude Negation 2) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 17:28:07 BST From: caoimhin@sabhal-mor-ostaig.ac.uk (Caoimhin P. ODonnaile) Subject: Re: Rude negators 3) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 03:12:31 PDT From: "Don W." Subject: Rude negation query 4) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 16:30:04 +0100 From: gburnage@natcorp.ox.ac.uk (Gavin Burnage) Subject: More bollocks 5) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 93 20:33:54 +0100 From: RichardHudson50 Subject: Us and US 6) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 20:21 CET From: Nicholas Ostler Subject: 4.277 Sum: Rude Negation -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 21:04:13 -0500 From: lambrec@emx.cc.utexas.edu (Knud Lambrecht) Subject: Re: 4.278 Rude Negation Re: Dick Hudson's question Q1 "If (104) are grammatical, they must be generated by a grammar. How, given that they don't have canonical sentence structures with verbs etc.? I don't have an answer to the question, but I'd like to advertise a hitherto in my opinion not sufficiently known fact, i.e. that there's a bunch of linguists, led by Chuck Fillmore at Berkeley (they include Paul Kay, Cathy O'Connor, Adele Koenig, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Laura Michaelis, myself and others) who've spent the past, oh, ten years or so trying to come up with a theory or framework whose purpose it is precisely to answer this sort of question and, in doing so, answer all other questions of syntax-semantics-pragmatics at the same time (the idea being that, if such complicated "non-canonical" sentences can be accounted for by a theory, then the well-known rest will automatically follow - hence our interest in such weird constructions). It's called "Construction Grammar". It's a theory in which the grammatical construction, together with the word, is the basic unit of linguistic description, and where any relationships between two or more constructions (formal, semantic, pragmatic) are captured by postulating inheritance relations from one construction to the other. I haven't thought much about the "The hell he dit" - construction but I'm sure many Berkeley- and other crazy California-infected brains (lik mine) are already working on a formal description of it, or will be soon. To do a little more, and even more obnoxious, advertising, I have a paper in BLS 90 on what Akmajian called the "Mad Magazine" sentence, in which I try to show that the way Adrian thought sentences like "What me worry?", "Him, a doctor" etc. could be generated--i.e. with existing very simple phrase structure rules (in this case the rule that also generates imperatives) and a neat universal theory of speech acts to weed out undesirable formations--doesn't work, and that instead this construction needs to be described for itself, but with formal, semantic, and pragmatic inheritance relations with other constructions (except that in 1990 I didn't know about `inheritance' yet so didn't use the fancy term). I would be delighted if Dick Hudson's theoretical questions gave rise to a debate on the theoretical relevance of crazy constructions like the one so many linguists (perhaps for not quite licit reasons) sent in their comments about. Knud Lambrecht UT Austin -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 17:28:07 BST From: caoimhin@sabhal-mor-ostaig.ac.uk (Caoimhin P. ODonnaile) Subject: Re: Rude negators The book "Modern Irish: Grammatical structure and dialectal variation" by Micheal O Siadhail has a section on "Diabhal 'devil' etc. as a syntactic device" for marking negatives. Kevin Donnelly -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 03:12:31 PDT From: "Don W." Subject: Rude negation query In the lists of rude negators I've seen a lot of "bullshit" but no "horseshit." Can anyone tell me what the difference is? Regional or diachronic? And is "chicken-shit" ever used other than adjectivally? Interestingly, "bullshit" can be abbreviated to "bull" and "chicken-shit" to "chicken," as in "I want out of this chicken outfit" ("Outfit" = a military or, by extension, any other group, not a suit worn by a baseball mascot), however, "horseshit" cannot be abbreviated to "horse." *"Pigshit," as far as I know, does not exist as a rude negator. The closest I can come to it is "pigfart," an adjective denoting a methane-fueled engine. I'm out of animals, for the moment. Don W. (DonWebb@CSUS.Edu) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 16:30:04 +0100 From: gburnage@natcorp.ox.ac.uk (Gavin Burnage) Subject: More bollocks Richard Hudson's queries about the use of "bollocks" as a negator has had me searching some of the new transcribed spoken material currently coming into the British National Corpus. From the first one million words of transcribed conversations (recorded by volunteers carrying walkmans around with them in their daily activities), I found no occurrences of the "bollocks he did" and similar negatives, but I did find a few instances of bollocks adapted in another way. With -ed on the end it is used as a straightforward past tense verb or past participle/adjective with a variety of vaguely negative meanings: (1) get wrong: Well you bollocksed that didn't you? (2) told off: You haven't got them? Where are they? Probably at home, I got bollocksed for having them last night as well. (3) tired: no, we'll leave this on. I thought we'd be too bollocksed by the time we get up there anyway. Although there's no BNC evidence of it yet (we have another 9 million words due for transcription so it may yet happen), I've heard "balls" adapted in a similar way -- "ballsed up" means "got wrong" as in (1) above. Finally, an example of bollocks as a regular noun. I enclose it by way of cautionary advice for visitors to Britain worried about the finer points of etiquette and social manners in our public houses: I think people who drink from the bottle want their bollocks chopped off. === Gavin Burnage gburnage@natcorp.ox.ac.uk British National Corpus gburnage@vax.ox.ac.uk Oxford University Computing Services 13 Banbury Road 0865-273280 (work) OXFORD OX2 6NN 0865-273275 (fax) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 93 20:33:54 +0100 From: RichardHudson50 Subject: Us and US One interesting by-product of the recent debate about negatives like THE HELL is that I've just been told that the word RUDE is understood differently in the USA from the way we take it here. For us, it can mean simply `impolite, rough', as in "a rude joke"; or it can mean `insulting', as in "He was rude to me". But in USA it can only have the second of these two meanings. When I called BOLLOCKS a `rude negative', I meant it (of course) in the first sense, which must have caused a good deal of confusion across the Atlantic. A nice example of Bill Labov's point of some decades ago: that semantic variation is far more prevalent than we think. Dick Hudson Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT (071) 387 7050 ext 3152 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 20:21 CET From: Nicholas Ostler Subject: 4.277 Sum: Rude Negation Just a minor addendum. I shouldn't think there's any problem with the -ock of "bollock". Cf. hillock, bullock. It's recognized by Onions in the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology as a diminutive, though most of his other examples (tussock, mattack, ruddock...) are no longer related to any independent noun. Nicholas Ostler -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-283. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-284. Wed 21 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 191 Subject: 4.284 Jobs: Cambridge, Utrecht, Taiwan Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1993 09:08:38 +0100 From: Ted.Briscoe@cl.cam.ac.uk Subject: Vacancies 2) Date: 19 Apr 1993 16:02:35 +0000 (GMT) From: Brigitte.Burger@let.ruu.nl Subject: Research Assistants 3) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 93 23:59:48 EST From: "Warren A. Brewer " Subject: Jobs in Taiwan: English literature & lx -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1993 09:08:38 +0100 From: Ted.Briscoe@cl.cam.ac.uk Subject: Vacancies RESEARCH ASSISTANTSHIPS -- UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, COMPUTER LABORATORY 1) ACQUILEX-II, `Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge', is an Esprit funded Basic Research project investigating a) semi-automatic acquisition of lexical knowledge from machine-readable versions of conventional dictionaries and from textual corpora, and b) issues in the linguistic representation of lexical knowledge in unification-based formalisms. Cambridge is the coordinator of ACQUILEX-II and the participating sites are University of Amsterdam (Dept. of English); Universita Politecnico di Barcelona (Dept of Computer Science); Pisa University (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale); Biblograf, Barcelona; Van Dale, Utrecht and Cambridge University Press. There is vacancy for an RA(1A) for a period of up to 24 months commencing 1 August 1993 (or asap thereafter) on this project. The post will most likely be based in Cambridge and preference will be given to postdoctoral candidates with background in linguistics or computational linguistics interested and able to work on one or more of the following topics: linguistic description within a unification-based framework of processes of regular polysemy (such as `grinding'), of derivational morphology (such as agent nominalisation), and of verbal diathesis alternations (such as the causative-inchoative alternation) in a multilingual context with emphasis on the lexical semantic nature of such phenomena. 2) ILD, the Integrated Language Database, is a SALT-IED funded project due to start soon. The project is coordinated by Sharp Laboratories of Europe, Oxford and involves Cambridge, University of Edinburgh (Centre for Cognitive Science) and Cambridge University Press. The aim of the project is to develop a software system capable of supporting semi-automatic construction of a lexical database in tandem with the analysis of textual and transcribed spoken corpora. A vacancy exists in Cambridge for a RA(1A) for a maximum of 3 years, probably commencing 1st October 1993. Preference will be given to postdoctoral candidates with a background in artificial intelligence, computational or corpus linguistics and experience of unification-based and/or probabilistic parsing systems to work on the construction and evaluation of software prototypes for robust phrasal-level syntactic analysis of free text based on probabilistic parsing techniques. Candidates interested in these positions should write to me enclosing a CV and the names and email (if possible) addresses of two referees by 7th May 1993. Ted Briscoe Computer Laboratory Cambridge University Pembroke St. Cambridge CB2 3QG, UK -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: 19 Apr 1993 16:02:35 +0000 (GMT) From: Brigitte.Burger@let.ruu.nl Subject: Research Assistants The Research Institute for Language and Speech (OTS) at Utrecht University is able to offer 3 positions for RESEARCH ASSISTANTS who wish to obtain a PhD in linguistics Starting September 1, 1993. The OTS research program comprises research in the areas of generative linguistics (syntax & semantics, phonology & morphology), phonetics, and computational linguistics & logic. Individual research projects for the assistants will be in one of these areas. Research assistants are appointed as 'trainees' (AIO's), who participate in the graduate program of the institute. Besides individual supervision of doctoral research, the OTS offers basic courses and organizes specialized seminars. Part of the training will also be provided through participation in the Dutch National Graduate School of Linguistics and the Dutch National Graduate School in Logic. A list of research proposals for PhD projects is available at the OTS and can be obtained from the graduate supervisor. Candidates can also submit their own research proposals, which will be evaluated against the background of the overall OTS research program. Applicants for an AIO-position should have: - completed their undergraduate training at a Dutch university or have a degree that is equivalent to the Dutch `doctoraal examen' (appr. an MA degree); - adequate knowledge of English Research assistants will be appointed on a full-time basis for a period of four years, at a starting salary of Dfl. 1,962.- per month, rising to Dfl. 3,499.- in the fourth year. AIO's receive a salary which provides sufficient financial support to cover living expenses. The OTS is able to offer good working facilities, including travel allowances for conferences and summer schools. General information about the OTS and the above positions can be obtained from: Dr. M. Everaert (graduate program supervisor) phone: 31-30-536006/6528 fax: 31-30-53600 Email: everaert@let.ruu.nl Applications should be sent to the following address, before May 7: (state vacancy number 68312 on the envelope) Universiteit Utrecht Afdeling Personeel en Organisatie van de Faculteit der Letteren J.Th.M. van Dort Kromme Nieuwegracht 46 3512 HJ Utrecht The Netherlands -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 93 23:59:48 EST From: "Warren A. Brewer " Subject: Jobs in Taiwan: English literature & lx The Graduate Institute of Western Languages & Literature and the English Department of Tamkang University in Taiwan has three associate professorships to fill beginning AY 1993-94. Applicants must already hold the Ph.D. The responsibilities of these joint appointments include directing M.A. theses and Ph.D. dissertations and teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels. English is the language of instruction. Teaching will include both graduate seminars in Western literature and undergraduate EFL courses. For the M.A. and Ph.D. programs in Western Languages & Literature, a specialization in English literature and any area of linguistics is desirable. Annual pay for associate professor is about US$32,000, and recent research grants have ranged from US$1,100 up to $12,000. Interested applicants are invited to contact Warren Brewer at ncut054 @ twnmoe10.bitnet. Deadline for receipt of application materials is May 20, 1993. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-284. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-285. Wed 21 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 153 Subject: 4.285 Sum: Number Markedness Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 93 3:10:50 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw Subject: Summary: Number markedness -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 93 3:10:50 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw Subject: Summary: Number markedness This is a summary of the query I posted last week. I would like to thank everybody who responded, to wit: Zev Bar-Lev, Aaron Broadwell, Alan Cienki, Matthew Dryer, Kathy Eberhard, David Gil, Heidi Harley, Almerindo Ojeda, Luiz Arthur Pagani, John Paolillo, David Powers, Don Ringe, Agurtzane Elordui Urkiza, Wlodek Zadrozny, and one anonymous commentator. The query requested an example of a language containing a phonetically null plural morpheme and a phonetically overt singular morpheme or, lacking that, a language in which both the singular and the plural (and all other number affixes) are phonetically overt. The query was inspired by a problem of Ojeda's (1993) analysis, in comparison to Link's (1983) analysis, of semantic number. Link provides a function which generates from a set of atomic entities (i.e., singular) to a set of atomistic entities (roughly, plural), while Ojeda provides a function which selects the set of atomic elements from the set of atomistic ones. In answer to Powers' question, these functions are intended to be universal (as I read them), although Ojeda suggests that the choice of one or the other might be a parameter between languages (1993: 78-79). Link hence treats the singular as unmarked; Ojeda, the plural. Link's analysis is bolstered by the fact that it matches the morphological behavior which Greenberg (1966, 28) claims is universal: "The singular frequently has no overt mark while the plural is marked by affix as in English, except for plurals of the type 'sheep'. A more careful statement would therefore be that in no language is the plural expressed by a morpheme which has no overt allomorph, while this is frequently true for the singular." (quote provided by Eberhard: complete reference not given) Ojeda's analysis, then, would be bolstered by any examples of the opposite behavior, of the type I queried for. I received several different examples of linguistic behavior, none of which provided a language which always displayed the behavior sought, but which nonetheless weaken Greenberg's universal and/or create problems for Link. First of all, in Polish (Zadrozny) and Russian (Bar-Lev, Cienki) some nouns, but not all (Zadrozny is unclear on this point), exhibit a phonetically null plural. There are three numbers in these languages (and in Ukrainian, which I know something about): singular, paucal, and plural. The singular is used for one, the paucal for two/three/four, and the plural for five-twenty. At twenty-one, the cycle is repeated, although the way the cycle repeats differs between languages (at least, it appears to). At any rate, in Russian, genitive feminine and neutur nouns have affixes only on singular and paucal; e.g.: odno jabloko, dva jabloka, pjat' jablok one apple, two apples, five apples (data from Cienki). Other nouns, though, exhibit the opposite behavior: odin dom, dva doma, p'at' domov one house, two houses, five houses (data from Bar-Lev). The issue is further complicated by the fact that these morphemes are, after all, fusional (as Ringe notes). Some languages apparently have phonetically null plural morphemes for a special set of nouns which are somehow inherently plural. This ought to be distinguished, or so I suss, from mass nouns in that the inherently pluarl nouns can be given singular readings through affixation, which mass nouns (in English) can't. Two examples of languages with this phenomenon are British Celtic (Ringe) and Kiowa (Broadwell). In British Celtic, the class of nouns affected is, roughly speaking, "those that occur more often in the pl[ural]". The affix which makes these nouns singular differs from noun to noun. In Kiowa, number is lexical, and the suffix /ga/ reverses the number (making singulars plural and plurals singular). Kiowa is indeed an interesting case, since it jeopardizes even Ojeda compromisory theory of parametricization (as Broadwell notes). The facts of Kiowa, however, are further confounded by the presence of a dual which interacts in an unspecified way with the above system. A third type of phenomenon is present in (certain dialects of) Arabic (Gil, Anon.). In this case, the morphologically unmarked member is neither the singular nor the plural but rather the collective (for a small class of nouns). That is: (1) singular N-a (2) plural N-iet (3) collective N (affixes from Maltese, provided by Gil). The collective type is, as Gil asserts, properly speaking a non-singular, i.e., either plural or mass. This is an intersting situation indeed, in light of English, where the mass terms typically behave like singulars (i.e., with non-overt number and with singular verb argument: Spaghetti is..., *Spaghetti are...). Gil further reports that Grev Corbett has data of African languages with the pattern: (1) singular N-x (2) plural N-y (3) "general" N where "general" is semantically unmarked for number. Two other languages were mentioned. Sinhala (Paolillo) inanimate nouns have no overt affix in the singular, while the singular affix is -a and the indefinite affix (available only in sg.) is -k. This pattern does not carry through to the animates, where all three noun types (plur, sg.def., sg.indef.) have endings. Basque (Urkiza) has endings for both singular and plural, but the affixless stem is used when specific number terms are used: txakura dog txakurak dogs txakur bat one dog txakur bi two dogs hiru txakur three dogs This calls to mind the issue of Morphological Blocking, as in Andrews (see bib below). Bibliography: In addition to the above information, several sources were offered. I give these here (with all the information that was given), along with the complete references to Ojeda and Link (which I apologize for not giving in the original query) and Andrews above. Andrews, A. 1990 Unification and morphological blocking. Natural Language and Linguistic theory 8: 507-557. Croft, William 1990 Typology, U of Cambridge Press Gair 1970 Colloquial Sinhalese Clause Structures, Mouton Gair, Fairbanks, and DeSilva 1968 Colloquial Sinhalese (Sinhala), Cornell University South Asia Program Lewis, Henry and Holger Pedersen 3d Ed, English trans. of Pedersen below Link, G. 1983 The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms: A lattice-theoretical approach." In R. Bauerle, C. Schwartze, and A. von Stechow (eds.) Meaning, Use, and Interpretation of Language. Berlin: de Gruyter. Noyer, Rolf 1992 Dissertation, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics Ojeda, A. 1993 Linguistic Individuals. CSLI Lecture notes 31 Paolillo, John C. 1992 Functional Articulation in Diglossia: A case study of grammatical and social correspondences in sinhala. Dissertation. UMI, Ann Arbor. Pedersen, Holger 19?? Vergleichende Grammatik der keltischen Sprache Watkins, Laurel ca. 1984 Grammar of Kiowa. Nebraska Wurzel, W. U. 1989 Inflectional Morphology and Naturalness. Dordrecht: Reidel -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-285. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-286. Wed 21 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 229 Subject: 4.286 Sum: Arabic MT and Text-to-Speech Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1993 22:24:24 -0400 From: kuhns@world.std.com (Robert J Kuhns) Subject: Summary - Arabic MT and Text-to-Speech -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1993 22:24:24 -0400 From: kuhns@world.std.com (Robert J Kuhns) Subject: Summary - Arabic MT and Text-to-Speech In response to my query for reports on research and development on Arabic machine translation and text-to-speech technology, I would like to thank Jean-Pierre Angoujard, Ken Beesley, Mary Flanagan, and Marwan Shaban. Their combined responses are provided below. Thanks again. Bob Kuhns ********************** Arabic Machine Translation ******************* Products English -> Arabic App-Tek may have a PC product for English-to-Arabic translation. App-Tek 1420 Beverly Rd. Suite 120 McLean, VA 22101 703-821-5000 Systran has English to Arabic, but not the reverse direction. Their software runs on IBM mainframes, but is available through dial up service and leasing. The software can also be leased to run on a PC equipped with an IBM 370 adapter card. Their address is: Systran Translation Systems 7855 Fay Avenue, Suite 300 P.O. Box 907 La Jolla, CA 92037 For an on-line morphological analyzer with dictionary contact: Thomas F. Seal President ALPNET 4444 South 700 East Salt Lake City, UT 84058 801 227-2300 Arabic machine translation reports Vauquois, B. (1986): "The Approach of Geta to Automatic Translation: Comparison with some other methods", in: Wahab, A. and M. Sieny (eds.) (1986): Studies in Machine Translation, Riyadh, 29-96. Vauquois, B. (1983): "Automatic Aided Translation and the Arabic Languages", in: ASST (1983): Proceedings, 157-176; also in: GETA (1983), Chapter 9, 1-20. Douglas Clarke, J., A. Fahmy and M. Ibrahim (1989): 'Arabic in Machine Translation', in: CAM PROC 1, session 2a.1, 1-12. Ewell, O. (1986): 'Computer Aided Translation: Design and Implementation', in: Wahab, A. and M. Sieny (eds.) (1986): Studies in Machine Translation, Riyadh, 143-49. [Middle East Computing] (1984): 'Arabic Translation by Computer', Middle East Computing, May 1984, 16-18. Aboul-Ela, M. and M. Gheith (1980): 'Automatic translation and Arabic', in: ProcKuw2, 489 (Abstract). Wahab, A., A. Razzak and M. Sieny (eds.): Studies in Machine Translation: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computer Aided Translation, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh. Abdo, D. (1989): 'Some Difficulties in Machine Translation from English to Arabic and From Arabic to English', in: ProcKuw2, 508-527 (Arabic). Abdelhamid, A. (1973): 'A Transfer Grammar of English and Arabic, Ph.D., Austin: University of Texas. Aristar, A. and J. Slocum (1986): 'The Treatment of Grammatical Categories and Word Order in Machine Translation', in: Wahab, A., and M. Sieny (eds.): Studies in Machine Translation, Riyadh, 155-183. Sieny, M. (1985): 'Computer Aided Translation with Reference to Arabic', in: WP KUWAIT, published in ProcKuw89, Section 11, 241- 248. Sieny, M., A. Razzak and A. Wahab (eds.) (1986): Studies in Machine Translation: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computer Aided Translation, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh. IRSIT (1988): Proceedings of the Regional Conference on Informatics and Arabization, Vol. 1, Tunis: IRSIT (Institut Regional des Sciences de l'Informatique et des Telecommunications). IRSIT (1988): Proceedings of the Regional Conference on Informatics and Arabization, Vol. 2, Tunis: IRSIT (Institut Regional des Sciences de l'Informatique et des Telecommunications). Everhard Ditters is currently editing the "Processing Arabic Report." Everhard Ditters TCMO, Nijmegen University PO Box 9103 6500 HD Nijmegen The Netherlands email: u279300@hnykun11.bitnet For Arabic-French MT, contact CNRS-LLAOR and Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Telecommunications de Tunis. Jean-Pierre Angoujard CNRS-LLAOR 250, rue Albert Einstein 06560 Valbonne France tel: 93 95 43 52 fax: 92 96 07 55 e-mail: jpa@llaor.unice.fr Arabic-English MT is another project of Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Telecommunications de Tunis (contact: Salem Ghazali, email: ghazali@tnearn.bitnet). ********************** Arabic Text-to-Speech ******************* Elshafei, A., M. Ahmed and A. Marzooq (1988): 'An Arabic Text-to-Speech System', in: IRSIT (1988): Proceedings, 68-85. Elshafei, M. (1989): 'A PC Board Bilingual Allophone-Based Speech Synthesis', in: FKCC, 395-400. Elshafei, M. (1989): 'Allophone-Based Arabic Speech Synthesis', in: NCC 11, Vol. 1, 401-411. Al-Ghanimi, M., and M. Abu Yazid (1989): 'A Proposed System for Real Time Synthesis of Arabic Words Using a PC', in: ProcKuw2, 453-461 (Arabic). Al-Saad, A. and N. Al-Ahdadh (1989): 'A New Method for Arabic Text-to-Speech Synthesis', in: ProcKuw2, 461 (1-11) (Arabic). Al-Saad, A., N. Al-Ahdadh and W. Mahmoud (1989): 'Multi-pulse Excitation Arabic Speech Synthesis', in: Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Robotics and Manufacturing, USA. Chiadmi, D., A. Mouradi, M. Najim, M. Ouadou and A. Rajouani (1986): 'Text-to-Speech Conversion in Arabic Language', in: WP Baghdad, B.1- 2. Rajouani, A., A. Mouradi and M. Najim (1982): 'Synthesis of Arabic Speech by Linear Prediction Coding', in: PWSPA Proceedings, Porto. Rajouani, A., A. Mouradi and M. Najim (1983): 'On Text to Speech Synthesis in the Arabic Language', in: ASST (1983): Proceedings. Rajouani, A., A. Mouradi and M. Najim (1985): 'Arabic Text-to-Speech Generation', in: WP Kuwait, published in ProcKuw89, Section 8, 135- 42. Rajouani, A., A. Mouradi and M. Najim (1985): 'Unlimited Vocabulary Synthesis System for Arabic Language', in: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Digital Processing of Signals in Communication, Laughbourgh University, UK, 329-31. Rajouani, A., D. Abutajdine, M. Najim, M. Salhi and M. Zyoute (1988): 'Reconstruction of Arabic Long Vowels using Time Varying Linear Prediction Technique', in: Proceedings of ICASSP 88, International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, New York, USA, Vol. i, 319-22. Al-Imam, Y. (1988): 'Synthesis of Arabic Speech using Partial Syllables', in: ARSIT, Vol. 1, Arabic Section, 1-15. Al-Imam, Y. (1989): 'A Text-to-Speech Conversion System using sub-phonetic Segments', in: IEEE Transactions on ASSP, Vol. 37, December 1989. Al-Imam, Y. (1989): 'Arabic Speech Synthesis', in: Processing Arabic, Report 4, 21-28. Al-Imam, Y. (1989): 'Synthesis of Arabic Speech', in: NCC 11, Vol. 1, 412-421. Al-Imam, Y. and K. Banat (1990): 'Text-to-Speech Using a Personal Computer', in: IEEE MICRO, 1990. Al-Sultan, A. and M. Ahmed (1989): 'A Letter-to-Sound Algorithm for Automatic Conversion of Voweled Arabic Text to Speech', in: NCC 11, Vol. 1, 330-341. Mrayati, M. (1985): 'Electronic Speech Synthesis: Arabic Computer Speech Output', in: ASST (1985): Informatics, 2B1 1-19. Mouradi, A. (1985): 'Arabic Speech Synthesis', in: WP KUWAIT, published in ProcKuw89, Section 8, 135-42. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-286. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-287. Wed 21 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 37 Subject: 4.287 Sum: Instrumentals Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 15:33:33 -0400 From: bhuvana@acs.bu.edu (Bhuvaneswari Narasimhan) Subject: summary - Instrumental NPs' -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 93 15:33:33 -0400 From: bhuvana@acs.bu.edu (Bhuvaneswari Narasimhan) Subject: summary - Instrumental NPs' Here's a summary of the responses I got to my posting a few weeks ago regarding instrumental NPs'. I had commented on the alternations of instrumental NPs' between the subject, object & adjunct positions as in the following: John cut the bread with the knife. The knife cut the bread. John shot the bullet at the bird. Thanks to those who responded. --------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-287. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-288. Wed 21 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 80 Subject: 4.288 FYI: Boston U., Racial terms Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 19:38:56 -0400 From: langconf@louis-xiv.bu.edu (BU Conference on Language Development) Subject: BU Conference 2) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 93 1:08:32 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw Subject: The limits of racial slurs -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 19:38:56 -0400 From: langconf@louis-xiv.bu.edu (BU Conference on Language Development) Subject: BU Conference To all of you who sent letters in support of the Boston University Program in Applied Linguistics and the annual Conference on Language Development: THANK YOU! We are very pleased to announce that the Program in Applied Linguistics now appears to be secure. In fact, we expect that we will be announcing a new Master's Degree program in Applied Linguistics in the near future. Thanks to an offer from the Linguistic Society of America, the BU Conference on Language Development *WILL* be held during the coming year jointly sponsored by the LSA, in conjunction with the annual LSA conference that will take place in Boston in January of 1994. A call for papers will be sent out within the next month, with abstracts due by July 31. We plan to resume our annual fall conferences as of October or November of 1994. Carol Neidle, on behalf of the Program in Applied Linguistics and the 1993-94 Conference Committee -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 93 1:08:32 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw Subject: The limits of racial slurs An interesting tidbit that might interest you sociolinguists out there: A recent firing of a Central Michigan University coach has raised the question of the issue of the boundaries of the usage of racial terms, in this case "nigger". Keith Dambrot, head coach of the CMU Chippewas basketball team, was fired for saying, "What this team needs is a few more niggers," and then indicating his assistant coach as an example. Dambrot is white, and the assistant coach and most of the players are black. None of the players complained; the firing followed public outrage as the incident leaked to the media. Dambrot is suing that his 1st Amendment rights are being breeched, since he and everyone in the room knew that by "nigger" he meant "aggressive African-American" (the meaning of the term in my idiolect as well, although I don't use it in public). He also stresses (as is known) that the term is in wide use of the term "nigger" between African-Americans. His firing suggests that context is irrelevant: that ANY use of a racial term with a negative connotation used by a member of a power group towards a member of a non-power group, regardless of the speaker's intention (which in this case, I think, is fairly clear), is inappropriate. (The sharp-eyed among you might have noticed a true irony in this story: the name of the team is the Chippewas, despite the concern a few years back by Native American groups about such team names. Is P.C. giving preferential treatment to certain groups?) -- Paul Kershaw, Michigan State University -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-288. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-289. Wed 21 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 96 Subject: 4.289 Qs: Color, parsing and psychology, 'to dis' Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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: 17 Apr 93 20:12:50 EDT From: Roslyn Kalifowicz-Waletz <71773.2606@CompuServe.COM> Subject: color terms 2) Date: 21 Apr 1993 14:09:41 GMT+1200 From: bungle@gandalf.otago.ac.nz Subject: Psychological Basis for Parsing 3) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 93 14:22:02 -0500 From: Subject: 'to dis' -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 17 Apr 93 20:12:50 EDT From: Roslyn Kalifowicz-Waletz <71773.2606@CompuServe.COM> Subject: color terms (1)Does any one know of any study or published texts on color terminology in any Middle Eastern or Oriental languages (other than Hebrew) from any period? (2)The findings by Paul Kay and Brent Berlin of the of the universal evoulutionary pattern of color encoding as expressed in their book "Basic Color Terms" have been widely accepted. But I have seen almost no critical response on the 1978 article of Paul Kay and Chad McDaniels called "The Significance of the Meanings of Basic Color Terms" (Language, Vol.54, No. 3) that finds the Berlin and Kay evolutionary pattern to be physiologically determined. Does any one know of any critcal literature on this article or what acceptance this part of the Kay & McDaniel's work has found among their peers? Please respond to my address directly and I will post a summary of these replies to Linguist. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: 21 Apr 1993 14:09:41 GMT+1200 From: bungle@gandalf.otago.ac.nz Subject: Psychological Basis for Parsing I am currently working on the parsing of English sentences to do with the law domain. I have chosen one implementation of a parser, and would like to say that this is psychologically valid. Does anyone know of any psychologically based experiments (published in journals) on determining how humans parse sentences? Matt Adams AI Research Laboratory Department of Computer Science University of Otago Dunedin New Zealand e-mail : bungle@otago.ac.nz -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 93 14:22:02 -0500 From: Subject: 'to dis' Some time ago the LINGUIST listserve had a discussion of the express 'to dis' in the sense of showing disrespect to someone. A student now inquires whether other English words can be identified which originate from affixes and have come to be used as free morphemes and as inflecting bases. Please reply privately. Mimi Klaiman Indiana-Purdue University, Ft. Wayne IN 46805 (219) 481-6772 klaiman@cvax.ipfw.indiana.edu klaiman@ipfwcvax.bitnet -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-289. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-290. Wed 21 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 150 Subject: 4.290 Rude Negation Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 93 14:29:08 BST From: Y No Subject: Hudson's Questions Answered 2) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1993 11:47:42 +0100 (BST) From: Dr M Sebba Subject: rude infixes in English 3) Date: 20 April 1993, 08:53:43 CST From: Geoffrey S. Nathan GA3662 at SIUCVMB Subject: Bollix/Bollocks etc. 4) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 93 17:52:50 CST From: "Sheri Wells (gt1270@siucvmb.siu.edu)" Subject: 4.278 Rude Negation -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 93 14:29:08 BST From: Y No Subject: Hudson's Questions Answered Richard Hudson recently raised a number of questions regarding the Rude Negation Construction in English, an instance of which was "Bollocks he did." He suggests that these questions are PhD dissertation topics. As if I had foreseen this interest in what I would call semiproductive constructions, I wrote a dissertation whose main concern was about the generative mechanism appropriate for seemingly strange syntactic restrictions on constructions which are less than fully productive. One such mechanism, called "Depth-$n$ Grammar", was proposed in the 1991 dissertation (The Ohio State University). I quote a paragraph from Chapter V of "Case Alternations on Verb-Phrase Internal Arguments" This chapter shows how a change can be made to the definition of CF grammars, particularly to the rule format, in such a way that a rule can describe dependencies between any pair of nodes in a finite tree. Section 2 introduces Depth-$n$ Grammars and proves that their weak generative capacity is the same as that of Type 2 Grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy. In section 3, examples from natural languages are analyzed in a Depth-$n$ Grammar. Metarules are formulated for manner-adverbs and a subject-to-subject raising verb in Icelandic. Semiproductive constructions from English and case alternations on the object NP of Korean emotion verbs are shown to be amenable only to a Depth-$n$ Grammar. I suggest topics for future research in the extension of this chapter, in the last section. I dare to say that Hudson's Questions 1 and 4 were answered by my dissertation to the extent that the points I made have not been refuted. Yongkyoon No School of East Asian Studies The University of Sheffield -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1993 11:47:42 +0100 (BST) From: Dr M Sebba Subject: rude infixes in English For anyone who is not suffering fatigue from the discussion of rude words: Casting about for examples to illustrate the notion of "infix" to students, probably many English-speaking linguists have come up with examples like: absobloodylutely These seem to follow the formula X-R-Y, where R is a rude word and X and Y are the first and second part of a word of several syllables. Query 1: Which words can be R in this formula, and why? At a guess, they must be of at least (or exactly) two syllables, and adjectival (or potentially so). The only examples I can think of conform to these specifications: bloody blooming fucking effing Query 2: What constraints are there on X and Y in terms of length, prosody etc., and does anyone know a reason for this? Incidentally, "absobloominglutely" occurs in a song in My Fair Lady. This may or may not provide a clue to its origins, but I suspect there are not many examples attested in print. Yours rudely only in the interests of science Mark Sebba -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: 20 April 1993, 08:53:43 CST From: Geoffrey S. Nathan GA3662 at SIUCVMB Subject: Bollix/Bollocks etc. While we're on the subject (sort of), does anyone know what is the relationship between 'bollocks' (a rude negator (etc.)) and the VERB 'bollix', which means to make a mess of things. My impression is that this is used at least as much in North America as in the UK, which makes it very different from the exclamation. My OED supplement doesn't list the verb. I assume they are etymologically the same. Any ideas? Geoff Nathan -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 93 17:52:50 CST From: "Sheri Wells (gt1270@siucvmb.siu.edu)" Subject: 4.278 Rude Negation Not to continue beating a possibly dead negator, but: It seems to me to be true that negators which precede the material they negate can only be followed by very short sentences as in: (A) Like hell it was. but cannot be followed by longer material: (B) *Like hell it was a great idea. On the other hand, the same sentence is okay if the rude negator follows: (C) It was a great idea my ass. I TEND to have 'like hell etc.' at the beginnings and 'my various-body-parts' at the ends of sentences, (almost but not quite in complementary distribution) so I can't tell if it's the positional variation or the specific negator chosen that makes the difference. Sheri Wells Linguistics department SIUC -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-290. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-291. Wed 21 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 259 Subject: 4.291 Sum: Instrumentals (Resent) Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 14:43:09 -0400 From: bhuvana@acs.bu.edu (Bhuvaneswari Narasimhan) Subject: summary - Instrumentals -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 14:43:09 -0400 From: bhuvana@acs.bu.edu (Bhuvaneswari Narasimhan) Subject: summary - Instrumentals [The summary on this topic which was previously posted to the list was apparently distributed in a truncated form by the Listserv. The summary is thus being reposted. The Moderators] Here's a summary of the responses I got to my posting a few weeks ago regarding instrumental NPs'. I had commented on the alternations of instrumental NPs' between the subject, object & adjunct positions as in the following: John cut the bread with the knife. The knife cut the bread. John shot the bullet at the bird. Thanks to those who responded. ************************* Assuming that instrumentals are marked in English with 'with', you might find the following alternations of interest: Susan planted the garden with tulips. Susan planted tulips in the garden. Joanie smeared the wall with paint. Joanie smeared paint on the wall. Note that in the first sentence of each pair there is a 'holistic' reading -- that the whole garden/whole wall has been affected, whereas this is not the case in the second sentence of either pair. This is very old data; I believe first pointed out by Anderson in the 60s, but it's still cute. I have more examples, and probably some more references at home. Rich Hilliard __________________________________________________ Have a look at Jan van Voorst, *Event structure* (Amsterdam: John Benjamins). It contains some interesting observations and a contrastive study between English and Dutch. Dr Bert Peeters *************************************** Hi - you asked for observations rather than references, but I thought these might be useful anyway: 1) Richard H Wojcik "Where do Instrumental NPs come from" in M Shibatani (ed) 1976 The grammar of causative constructions (Syntax and Semantics vol 6) Academic Press 2) Howard Lasnik 1988 "Subjects and the theta-criterion" in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6, 1-17 3) I M Schlesinger 1989 "Instruments as agents: on the nature of semantic relations" in Journal of Linguistics 25, 189-210 4) George Lakoff 1968 "Instrumental adverbs and the concept of deep structure" in Foundations of Language 4, 4-29 and references cited in these papers - Regards, Kate Kearns ************************* You should read a thesis by Barbara Brunson, at the University of Toronto. Her email address is: brunson@epas.utoronto.ca ************************** I have something to say about all this, with most particular, but not exclusive, reference to Sanskrit, in my thesis "Case Linking - A Theory of Case & Verb Diathesis" which is available in the MIT Woking Papers In L x series. It first came out in 1979. Regards Nicholas Ostler ****************************** What is interesting, I think, is that you can say (in addition to your examples) John shot the bird with a bullet. (redundant, perhaps, but not ungrammatical, because maybe (for example) he was shooting other creatures with water) On the other hand, you can't say John cut the knife at/to/in/on the bread. (ungrammatical) Also, I don't particularly care for The bullet shot the bird. But, that is one you might want to check with other people. Best, E. Laurencot ****************************8 You will want to read my paper in: Shibatani, M., ed., 1976 Syntax and Semantics. v. 6 The Grammar of Causative Constructions. Academic Press. "Where Do Instrumental NPs Come From?" -Rick Wojcik ************************************** In a traditional approach, Russian has six distinct morphological cases which are used to mark NPs in a sentence. One of these is the Instrumental. a) Ivan rezal xleb nozhom. Ivan-NOM cut-PAST bread-ACC knife-INST 'Ivan cut the bread with a knife' b) Xleb byl narezan nozhom. bread-NOM be-PAST cut-PastPart. knife-INST 'The bread was cut by a knife' but: c) *Nozh rezal xleb. knife-NOM cut-PAST bread-ACC 'A knife cut the bread' >From their comments, my informants do not accept (c) because 'knife' has been "upgraded", so to speak, from an instrument to an agent. Russian also uses the Instrumental case to encode agents, but this is almost always limited to passive constructions. No doubt you've run into the fine distinction between agents and instruments (cf. 'The bread was cut with a knife/by a knife' but 'John cut the bread with a knife/*by a knife'). BTW, one often finds in the literature that Russian does not allow both an agent and an instrument in the same sentence if each are in the Instrumental case (e.g. 'The barge was loaded _by the workers_ _with a crane_.' should be ungrammatical if both 'workers' and 'crane' are in the Instrumental), but I've got a number of examples of this type of construction in my Russian corpus. The third sentence in your posting -- John shot the bird with a bullet -- cannot be phrased in Russian with the Instrumental case, according to my informants (the Russian word for 'shoot' already incorporates a projectile), but similar constructions exist. d) Malchiki brosili kamni v sobaku. Boys-NOM throw-PAST stones-ACC in dog-ACC 'The boys threw stones at the dog' e) Malchiki brosili kamnjami v sobaku. Boys-NOM throw-PAST stones-INST in dog-ACC Ibid. Lest one think that the PP in (d) and (e) is simply a locative phrase, compare (f) and (g) f) Malchiki brosili kamni v ozero. Boys-NOM throw-PAST stones-ACC in lake-ACC 'The boys threw stones into the lake' g) *Malchiki brosili kamnjami v ozero. Boys-NOM throw-PAST stones-INST in lake-ACC Ibid. Note that when there is a DO, the verb often requires a prefix, as in (h), which often gives the verb a slightly different lexical shade: h) Ljudi zabrosali geroja cvetami. people-NOM throw-PAST hero-ACC flowers-INST 'People showered the hero with flowers' i) *Ljudi brosili/zabrosali cvety na geroja. people-NOM throw-PAST flowers-ACC at hero-ACC Ibid. j) Ljudi brosili pomidory v xuligana people-NOM throw-PAST tomatoes-ACC in hoodlum-ACC 'People threw tomatoes at the hoodlum' >I am interested in seeing whether a better worked out account of >argument structure along the lines of work done by Grimshaw, >Jackendoff, etc.might help us provide an explanation for why the >instrument projects on to these different syntactic positions in >the sentence I could provide other examples, but I think that we're focusing on two related, but distinct issues. I am interested in the semantics of one 'surface' grammatical category (the Instrumental case), while you seem more interested in the encoding of a single 'deep' category (call it Instrumentality or whatever you will). If you're interested in citable Russian data, you might want to check out Anna Wierzbicka's monograph on the Russian Instrumental (_The Case for Surface Case_. Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1980). I mention this work specifically, as she deals with a lot of instrumental phrases and their syntax, as well as problems -- she points out, for example (p. xv), that as of yet, no one has explained why (k) is ungrammatical, but (l) is fully acceptable: k) *David ubil Goliafa prashchej. David-NOM kill-PAST Goliath-ACC sling-INST 'David killed Goliath with a sling' l) Ivan ubil Petra toporom. Ivan-NOM kill-PAST Petr-ACC axe-INST 'Ivan killed Petr with an axe' I don't have an answer for you as to the ungrammaticality. I'm still collecting data for my dissertation -- perhaps I'll be able to give you an explanation in two years ;-). Other English-language sources for Russian data/analysis: Channon, Robert. 1987. "A Function of the Instrumental Case in Russian," _In Honor of Ilse Lehiste/Ilse Lehiste Puhendusteos_, 339P355 ed. by Robert Channon and Linda Shockey. Dordrecht: Foris. Kilby, David A. 1977. _Deep and Superficial Cases in Russian_. Frankfurt and Munich: Kubon and Sagner. Neidle, Carol. 1988. The Role of Case in Russian Syntax. ???: Kluwer Academic. Neidle, Carol. 1982. "Case Agreement in Russian." _The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations_, ed. by Joan Bresnan et al., 391P426. Cambridge: MIT Press. Sullivan, William J. 1986. "Russian Prepositional Phrase of Locus: Instrumental." _Language Sciences_ 8 (1): 17P35. jake Moscow jjacobson@glas.apc.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-291. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-292. Wed 21 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 144 Subject: 4.292 Rude Negation Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1993 15:42:32 -0400 (EDT) From: Mark H Aronoff Subject: expletive infixation 2) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 16:06 EDT From: Subject: rude neg: chinese 3) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 16:06 EDT From: Subject: rude neg: chinese 4) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1993 22:34:54 -0500 From: fcosws@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Subject: Idiolectal variation in Rude Negation -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1993 15:42:32 -0400 (EDT) From: Mark H Aronoff Subject: expletive infixation In response to the query about expletive infixation in English, I invite everyone to read John McCarthy's absolutely lovely piece on this topic in Language 58: 574-590 (1982). It should answer most questions and save a lot of electrons to boot. M. Arofuckinnoff -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 16:06 EDT From: Subject: rude neg: chinese In case anyone is interested in in more on "rude" negation in languages other than English, as far as I can tell, the following is another instance of "post-clausal" rude negation in Mandarin: A: Ni yinggai lai. you should come B: Wo yingai lai, jian nide da tou gui. I should come, see your big-headed ghost. As far as I can tell, B's rude negator means "I shouldn't come" or "I could care less whether you think I should come." Maybe some native speakers could tell us whether it's a frozen expression or the possessor can vary (his/her/their big-headed ghost etc.) and what the regional distribution is.I'm familiar with it from Taiwan. Is this the only rude negator mentioned so far that is itself a clause? David Wible -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 16:06 EDT From: Subject: rude neg: chinese In case anyone is interested in in more on "rude" negation in languages other than English, as far as I can tell, the following is another instance of "post-clausal" rude negation in Mandarin: A: Ni yinggai lai. you should come B: Wo yingai lai, jian nide da tou gui. I should come, see your big-headed ghost. As far as I can tell, B's rude negator means "I shouldn't come" or "I could care less whether you think I should come." Maybe some native speakers could tell us whether it's a frozen expression or the possessor can vary (his/her/their big-headed ghost etc.) and what the regional distribution is.I'm familiar with it from Taiwan. Is this the only rude negator mentioned so far that is itself a clause? David Wible -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1993 22:34:54 -0500 From: fcosws@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Subject: Idiolectal variation in Rude Negation Sheri Wells remarks (4.290), >It seems to me to be true that negators which precede the material they negate >can only be followed by very short sentences as in: > >(A) Like hell it was. > >but cannot be followed by longer material: > >(B) *Like hell it was a great idea. > >On the other hand, the same sentence is okay if the rude negator follows: > >(C) It was a great idea my ass. > >I TEND to have 'like hell etc.' at the beginnings and 'my various-body-parts' >at the ends of sentences, (almost but not quite in complementary distribution) >so I can't tell if it's the positional variation or the specific negator >chosen that makes the difference. I wish to note that there may be some idiolectal complications here. While i agree that 'like hell' tends to precede and 'my X' (where X = {ass, eye, foot}) tends to follow the expression it 'modifies', for me all three sentences A-C are OK. In fact, i tend to prefer B to C; for me, 'my X' (where X = {ass, eye, foot}) is more likely to 'modify' an NP, as in D: (D) Great idea my ass! while i prefer 'like hell!' as a modifier of a whole proposition (either 'left-adjoined' to a whole sentence as in (B) or to a 'pro-sentence' as in (A) or by itself in dialogue as in (E)). (E) Speaker 1: In that case, you will have to bail out immediately. Speaker 2: Like hell! For whatever any of these remarks is/are worth ... ------ Dr. Steven Schaufele c/o Department of Linguistics 712 West Washington Ave. University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 4088 Foreign Languages Building 707 South Mathews Street 217-344-8240 Urbana, IL 61801 fcosws@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-292. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-293. Thu 22 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 157 Subject: 4.293 Markedness and Exception Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 22:31:22 PDT From: Bill Croft Subject: Number markedness revisited 2) Date: Wed, 22 Apr 93 10:11:02 CST From: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar Subject: Markedness and Exceptions -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 22:31:22 PDT From: Bill Croft Subject: Number markedness revisited The summary of markedness in number contains a number of inaccuracies (to my knowledge, at any rate) and can be presented in a slightly wider typological perspective. The phenomenon is better described as "zero-marking" because the typological pattern of markedness involves many other cross-linguistic phenomena than simply whether or not a grammatical category is expressed by an overt morpheme or not. These phenomena tend to correlate, but a full understanding of exceptions requires the examination of these other phenomena, so my remarks here will necessarily be incomplete. The Russian data does not have to do directly with the grammatical category of number. They have to do with the form of nouns after numerals, in which (in standard Russian) a noun takes the nominative singular after 1, the genitive singular after 2-4, and the genitive plural after 5-10. This pattern is repeated after numerals that end in 1, e.g. 21, 31, 101, etc. and likewise for numerals ending in 2-9. However, it is not found in other syntactic environments. While this pattern is interesting in its own right (see for example the Greenberg articles on number in his recent anthology "On Language", ed. K. Denning and S. Kemmer, Stanford), it isn't a part of grammatical number. (In fact, in many languages, the noun form after the numeral has no number marking at all.) Russian has suffixes indicating both number and case which are obligatory in all syntactic contexts. There is in fact an anomalous pattern there, namely that for certain declension classes the genitive plural is zero-marked (see below). It should be mentioned that some languages overtly mark both singular and plural (e.g. Latvian), though languages that zero-mark the singular are much more common. (Languages that zero-mark both are normally said simply to lack the category of number.) So the problematic case in typological marking theory are languages that zero-mark the plural but overtly mark the singular. There seems to be a fairly well-motivated pattern that runs contrary to this rule, which is found largely among Afroasiatic and Nilo- Saharan languages of North Africa, and also in Celtic (Orin Gensler, are you reading this?). In these languages, many nouns have a 'collective' form which seems to be a plural, and an overtly-marked singular which is called the 'singulative'. These nouns denote entities which are likely to occur together naturally (e.g. herd of sheep---note the zero-marked plural in English), which Anna Wierzbicka argues is cental to the understanding of the assignment of countability in languages ("Oats and wheat", in her "Semantics of Grammar", John Benjamins). It is not surprising that such nouns would have zero- marked plurals or collectives. Typical collectives include animals, insects, fruits that occur in bunches, people, etc. Of course, this likelihood is a gradient phenomenon, and languages in this area differ as to how many nouns have collective forms; Kanuri has only one, the noun for 'man'. And it is rather irregular in some other languages, so that the semantic motivation is no longer transparent (assuming it was there in the first place). Finally, some of these languages also form a plural off of the singulative with an overt marker called the 'plurative'. This has suggested to some that the collective-singulative relation is actually derivational, not inflectional. So much for the motivated exceptions. Now for the real exceptions. The Russian zero-marked genitive plural is one; another is Old French and Old Provencal, in which the nominative singular ends in -s and the plural in zero. However, this anomalous situation corrected itself by the modern versions of the latter languages, and is in the process of doing so for some Slavic languages other than Russian (see Greenberg, "Some methods of dynamic comparson", in the aforementioned anthology). Icelandic is similar to Old French in the nominative, but hasn't shown any tendency to "correct itself" that I know of. Matthew Dryer has pointed out to me that Imonda, a Papuan language, has a zero-marked plural and an overtly-marked singular. The Sinhala case may be related to the evolution of determiners, which are sometimes the sole carriers of number marking in noun phrases, to noun markers. The Kiowa language is by far the most bizarre number marking system I have ever seen. A more complete though highly simplified description of Kiowa is as follows. Kiowa has a singular, dual, or plural. Depending on the noun class, any one (or two) of singular, dual or plural is marked with -ga, the other(s) being zero-marked. But there is no semantic rhyme or reason behind the classification of the nouns. Nevertheless, these genuine exceptions are quite rare in the run of languages. The typological evidence for Link vs. Ojeda is thus rather mixed. It seems that some noun types are more inclined to "unmarked" plurals than "unmarked" singulars, which suggests that a more complex story must be told for their semantic representation. Bill Croft -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 22 Apr 93 10:11:02 CST From: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar Subject: Markedness and Exceptions Bill Croft's message (immediately above) is, I think, a useful corrective to some of the assertions about markedness which have been made here on the list, and elsewhere. While it's always difficult for anyone who works in typology to assess the data they use in their work adequately--by the very nature of the field researchers cannot know well most of the languages they are examining--it's nevertheless true that "exceptional" cases have to be defined with considerable care. Thus, as Bill has pointed out with regard to the Russian data, the zero-marking found in the plural after certain numerals is primarily an issue related to the requirements of numerals, and secondarily an issue of case-marking. It is only tangentially related to number-marking as such. There's another group of cases, however, which I'm disturbed to hear called "exceptions" to marking patterns. This group comprises those languages where exceptional patterns have been produced from diachronically earlier, unexceptional, patterns by sound-change. The Russian genitive plural is one of these, as is the Old Provencal/Old French nominative pattern. Underlying the categorizing of these as exceptional is the assumption that universals are defined exclusively on the basis of synchronic pattern, i.e. that the patterns themselves in some sense instantiate the universals. Now, it's obvious that universals are largely only visible from synchronic patterns. But it is a considerable theoretical leap to assert as a corollary of this empirical reality that the patterns are direct representations of universals. After all, universal patterns are not like other synchronic patterns: they cannot be discerned from the point of view of speakers of the language containing the pattern, for they have no access to the patterns of other languages. Thus universals must be of a fundamentally different nature from other parts of a synchronic grammar. I'd like to suggest that there are two possible reasons for the existence of "universal" synchronic patterns. One is that the patterns themselves are universal. The other is that the synchronic patterns we see are simply side-effects of what may be called universal processes, i.e. are the result of the process by which categories, through time, initially come into existence. If the first reason is valid, then indeed Russian and Old French are exceptions. If the second reason is valid, then they are not, for what happens to a pattern after the process which caused it to arise is complete is essentially irrelevant. After all, the pattern, in this view, is not itself the universal. Which of these views is valid is a matter for research. But it does seem to me that the possibility that synchronic universal pattern is essentially a side-effect of language change should be investigated. It does, after all, seem to offer us more of an understanding as to why so many of the universals we have proposed seem to have exceptions. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-293. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-294. Fri 23 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 154 Subject: 4.294 Qs: Phoneme frequencies, Racial epithet, Schemas & Text Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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, 19 Apr 93 10:25:35 BST From: "J.J. Higgins" Subject: Phoneme frequency list 2) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1993 16:09:38 EDT From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: racial epithet query 3) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 10:24:59 MEZ From: Uwe Hauck Subject: Schemas and Text-Generation -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 93 10:25:35 BST From: "J.J. Higgins" Subject: Phoneme frequency list RP PHONEMES AND MINIMAL PAIRS As a by-product of my electronic search for minimal pairs, I have generated a frequency list of RP-phonemes in the Advanced Learners Dictionary which colleagues might find interesting. I would be grateful to anybody who could point me towards any similar work on sounds in transcriptions of speech. By the way, I now have about thirty minimal pair lists derived from the pronunciation field in the electronic ALD, and have edited and annotated about ten of these. In the long run I hope to create all the 480 or so lists that are theoretically possible, just for the sake of statistical comparison. Meanwhile anyone who wants to see a particular list can get in touch; I can e-mail it, and will generate the list if it does not exist yet. John Higgins, University of Bristol J.Higgins@bristol.ac.uk ********************************************************************* RP phonemes in the Advanced Learner's Dictionary (1973 electronic edition with Roger Mitton's additions--text 710 in the Oxford Text Archive). Total number of dictionary entries: 70646 Alvey-RP Keyword Total Words % of wds rank Vowels 1 i bead 6721 6525 9.24% 9 2 I bid 51830 37729 53.41% 1 3 e bed 11312 10940 15.49% 5 4 & bad 11603 11149 15.78% 3 5 A bard 4215 4141 5.86% 14 6 0 pot 7960 7747 10.97% 6 7 O port 4730 4627 6.55% 12 8 U put 1977 1959 2.77% 17 9 u boot 4794 4743 6.71% 11 10 V bud 7124 6917 9.79% 8 11 3 bird 3095 3083 4.36% 15 12 @ about 31009 26813 37.95% 2 13 eI bait 10234 10029 14.20% 4 14 aI bite 7441 7236 10.24% 7 15 oI boy 788 784 1.11% 20 16 aU cow 2179 2135 3.02% 16 17 @U no 6685 6416 9.08% 10 18 I@ beer 4174 4034 5.71% 13 19 e@ bear 965 962 1.36% 19 20 U@ poor 1053 1053 1.49% 18 Consonants 21 p pop 15553 14569 20.62% 9 22 b bib 10907 10420 14.75% 11 23 t teat 34260 29441 41.67% 1 24 d died 21275 19125 27.07% 7 25 k cake 22453 20308 28.75% 6 26 g go 6239 6079 8.60% 14 27 tS chin 2672 2639 3.74% 21 28 dZ judge 3869 3802 5.38% 18 29 f fine 8839 8606 12.18% 13 30 v vine 6007 5859 8.29% 16 31 T think 1602 1591 2.25% 22 32 D then 596 593 0.84% 23 33 s see 33922 28548 40.41% 2 34 z zoo 19972 18808 26.62% 8 35 S shy 6117 6039 8.55% 15 36 Z rouge 334 334 0.47% 24 37 m my 14823 13988 19.80% 10 38 n near 31934 27020 38.25% 3 39 N sing 9181 8958 12.68% 12 40 l low 27373 25435 36.00% 4 41 r raw 23069 21434 30.34% 5 42 w west 4600 4523 6.40% 17 43 j year 3560 3518 4.98% 20 44 h high 3699 3625 5.13% 19 Average vowel phonemes per word: 2.55 Average consonant phonemes per word: 4.43 Average length of word in phonemes: 6.98 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1993 16:09:38 EDT From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: racial epithet query has anyone ever heard the term _water buffalo_ used as a racial epithet? you may answer me privately: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu. thanks. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 10:24:59 MEZ From: Uwe Hauck Subject: Schemas and Text-Generation As a part of my Masters Degree Paper I am currently doing some research on schema based approaches to text-generation. Does anyone have some references, bibliographic hints or papers available on that topic. I am expecially interested in the way one can represent a Domain using Schematas and how a planer deals with them... Uwe Hauck Uwehauck at dosuni1.bitnet uwehauck at dosuni1.rz.uni-osnabrueck.de Uwe Hauck University of Osnabrueck PoBox 4469 Sedanstr.4 Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence 4500 Osnabrueck Germany -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-294. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-295. Fri 23 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 183 Subject: 4.295 Marking Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 00:39:36 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Subject: Number markedness 2) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 19:49:25 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw Subject: Kiowa number -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 00:39:36 EDT From: Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.cc.Wayne.edu Subject: Subject: Number markedness I am not wholly convinced by some of what was said in recent postings on this subject: Date: Tue, 20 Apr 93 3:10:50 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw and Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 22:31:22 PDT From: Bill Croft In Bill Croft's, I am surprised by the following statement in response to Paul Kershaw: << The Russian data does not have to do directly with the grammatical << category of number. They have to do with the form of nouns after << numerals, in which (in standard Russian) a noun takes the nominative << singular after 1, the genitive singular after 2-4, and the genitive plural << after 5-10. This pattern is repeated after numerals that end in 1, e.g. 21, << 31, 101, etc. and likewise for numerals ending in 2-9. However, it is << not found in other syntactic environments. While this pattern is << interesting in its own right (see for example the Greenberg articles on << number in his recent anthology "On Language", ed. K. Denning and S. << Kemmer, Stanford), it isn't a part of grammatical number. (In fact, in << many languages, the noun form after the numeral has no number << marking at all.) Russian has suffixes indicating both number and case << which are obligatory in all syntactic contexts. There is in fact an << anomalous pattern there, namely that for certain declension classes the << genitive plural is zero-marked (see below). I do not see why these facts have nothing to do with number. If we found a language in which a special form was used only with the numeral for '2', would that mean that this language has no dual? Also, the facts are more complicated. First, a few nouns have a different form when used with numerals ending in 2-4 than they do in genitive singular, notably, chas 'hour'. Second, we must consider the syntax of the whole phrase, not just the form of the noun, I think, and it is significant that adjectives cooccuring with numerals ending in 2-4 do NOT take singular-looking forms. For ex., krasnogo karandasha is the gen. sg. of 'red pencil', while '2 red pencils' is 'dva krasnyx/*krasnogo karandasha'. Thus, it is appropriate to say, I think, that Russian has special number categories that appear in the presence of these classes of numerals. And further: << So much for the motivated exceptions. Now for the real exceptions. << The Russian zero-marked genitive plural is one; another is Old French << and Old Provencal, in which the nominative singular ends in -s and the << plural in zero. However, this anomalous situation corrected itself by << the modern versions of the latter languages, and is in the process of << doing so for some Slavic languages other than Russian (see Greenberg, << "Some methods of dynamic comparson", in the aforementioned << << Bill Croft The Russian zero-marked genitive plural is a property of some classes of nouns only. Other classes take the suffixes -ov or -ej. And I think that something like this must have been true of Old French and Old Provencal nominative singulars (surely the feminines in -e did not have a nominative in -s, did they?). It would be interesting to ask whether any language that has counterexamples like these to the usual assumptions about number marking is any more consistent than these languages. That is, is there any language where EVERY plural form is zero and EVERY singular is marked (or where every plural is longer than the corresponding singular)? If not and if there are languages where plurals are always longer than singulars (e.g., Turkish), then I think we do have a fairly solid universal here, or do we? And in Paul Kershaw's summary, I was not quite happy with the statement about Sinhalese for a similar reason: >> Sinhala (Paolillo) inanimate nouns have >> no >> overt affix in the singular, while the singular affix is -a and the >> indefinite >> affix (available only in sg.) is -k. This pattern does not carry through to >> the animates, where all three noun types (plur, sg.def., sg.indef.) have >> endings. Again, while more or less accurate, this account leaves out some (to my mind crucial) facts. First, a few inanimates have overt endings in the plural and in the singular (the reverse of the normal situation), e.g., kaTA (T = alveolar as opposed to dental, A = schwa) 'mouth', raTA 'country', paarA 'road', gee 'house', dee 'thing', all of which take the plural suffixVal. Second, when we look beyond the direct case, we find that the plural is more marked than the singular. Thus, consider the NORMAL inanimate pattern Sing. Plural Direct potA pot Dative potATA potvAlATA Genitive potee potvAlA Instru. poten potvAlin [The final n is actually a velar nasal.] TheVAl- we find in all the oblique plural forms is the same morpheme as theVal we found in the anomalous plurals like kaTAval from kaTA, the a/A alternation being automatic. Thus, again, on the whole, the Sinhalese plural is not really zero-marked or less marked than the singular. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 19:49:25 EDT From: Paul T Kershaw Subject: Kiowa number Having been confused by the two accounts of Kiowan grammar (one by Bill Croft, which you all have seen), I sought out the horse's mouth, to wit, Laurel J. Watkins 1984 A Grammar of Kiowa. Lincoln: U of Neb Press. The number business is described on pp. 78-92 (sec. 3.12). There are three numbers and four classes of nouns. The numbers are singular, dual, and plural. The classes are: animate (I), inanimate tangible/count (II), inanimate intangible/mass (IV), and other (III). The Roman numerals are Watkins', the category labels mine, and there is of course a great deal of mismatch between class membership and the real world -- "star", for example, is class I, as are the loanword "car" and "knee", while "foot" is class II. Watkins doesn't provide enough data, though to support or refute Croft's claim that there is "no rhyme or reason" to membership. In all cases, there is no overt marking on the noun for dual. The other classes can be distinguished by the four possibilities of overt marking on singular and plural, namely: SG PL I -- ga II ga -- III ga ga IV -- -- Ambiguities are resolved in some cases bacause the verb carries an agreement prefix that also indicates number. I hope this description, for those of you interested, has been cleare than the previous ones. Paul Kershaw, Michigan State University -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-295. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-296. Fri 23 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 142 Subject: 4.296 Qs: Stemming, Taps, Frequencies, Klingon Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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, 22 Apr 93 10:33:58 -0400 From: Tom Donaldson Subject: Word "stemming" methods request 2) Date: 22 Apr 1993 15:29:25 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Stemberger Subject: query: taps 3) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1993 22:58 EST From: TTWILA@YALEVMS.bitnet Subject: Part of speech Frequencies 4) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 22:57:47+0700 From: Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong Subject: klingon -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 10:33:58 -0400 From: Tom Donaldson Subject: Word "stemming" methods request A computational linguist suggested that someone on this list might be able to point me in the right direction. A common feature for full text retrieval engines is the ability to do "stemmed" searches. For example, a stemmed search on "computer" might be functionally transformed into a search for: "compute", "computers", "computing", and so on. I am told that "word stemming" falls under the liguistic rubric of "morphological analysis". I am looking for algorithms or existing software to perform this small subarea of "morphological analysis" for a variety of languages, but am especially interested in German and Japanese. Can someone direct me to software vendors or other sources of software, or to relevant literature? Thanks, --------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: 22 Apr 1993 15:29:25 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Stemberger Subject: query: taps While reading the most recent book by James Herriot, in which he frequently uses non-standard spellings to give the flavor of Yorkshire speech, I came across this: spelling: gerrim for: get him I assume that the {rr} spelling here represents the tap that British dialects have for intervocalic /r/. But it's not for /r/ here, but for an alveolar stop. Now, I've always thought that taps for /t/ and /d/ was a North American phenomenon, but here it is for a British dialect. Are there dialects on THAT side of the Atlantic that have taps for /t/ and /d/, then? And is there any historical connection with the North American English tap (such as: North America got a lot of immigrants from Region X in England, where taps are used for /t/ and /d/)? Do any of you British folk know? This makes me wonder about the Jethro Tull song, SKATING AWAY ON THE THIN ICE OF A NEW DAY. Ian Anderson sings with a blatant British accent, yet taps the /t/ in SKATING. I always thought he was intentionally doing a North-Americanism, but it's bothered me. ---joe stemberger -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1993 22:58 EST From: TTWILA@YALEVMS.bitnet Subject: Part of speech Frequencies Does anybody out there have any hard data on the following? 1) frequencies (types and tokens) of parts of speech (specifically nouns and verbs) in adult-to-child speech in English or other languages; 2) relative frequencies with which nouns and verbs appear at the BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES, and ENDS of sentences in adult-to-child speech or even in casual adult-to-adult speech in English and any other languages? 3) the above categorized by utterance types? I am looking for something with which I can compare my own findings for adult-to-child speech in Mandarin Chinese. Specifically, I found that 8 out of 10 of my Chinese-speaking toddlers (22-26 months, each less than 200-word vocabularies from 1-hr samples) use more verb types than noun types and 9 out of 10 of these children used more verb tokens than noun tokens. Interestingly, the caregivers in all 10 families ALSO used more verb types and tokens than noun types and tokens AND were more likely to place transitive verbs in sentence-initial position than any other word class (about 20% of the time for multi-word utterances, compared to just 5% for nouns). Given that the children's propensity for early verbs is VERY UNLIKE English and acquisition data from other languages (except perhaps Korean, cf. Gopnik & Choi), I am very interested to know what the frequency of adult verbs vs. nouns (types, tokens, and position X frequency) is for the other languages that we have acquisition data on. Any and all responses will be much appreciated and I will happily post a summary if there is enough interest! Twila Tardif Department of Psychology Yale University -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 22:57:47+0700 From: Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong Subject: klingon I read in Time (Asia Edition) April 9th, in an article about Klingon language, that there's Klingon info available somewhere via internet. Does anyone know the internet address for that? Please reply to: yui@ipied.tu.ac.th Thanks. Yuphaphann. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-296. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-297. Fri 23 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 202 Subject: 4.297 Rude Negation Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 13:49 EDT From: TODLIN@OHSTMVSA.ACS.OHIO-STATE.EDU Subject: Re: 4.292 Rude Negation 2) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 11:47:30 EDT From: Zhiqun.Xing@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: Rude negation in Mandarin 3) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 19:55:36 +0100 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Subject: Re: 4.292 Rude Negation 4) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1993 21:32:16 UTC+0200 From: Celso Alvarez-Caccamo Subject: Rude Counter-Assessers 5) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 09:52:55 EST From: MORSEGAG@ucs.indiana.edu Subject: bollix/bollocks -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 13:49 EDT From: TODLIN@OHSTMVSA.ACS.OHIO-STATE.EDU Subject: Re: 4.292 Rude Negation I have been working on an article on the use of DEVIL as a negator in Irish and Scottish English. In at least the traditional varieties of these dialects, there is a rich range of possibilities (e.g., Devil a hear ever I heard of it in in the world of God = Indeed, I never heard of it). As some may suspect, such usages appear to be due to crosslinguistic influence from Irish (and probably Scottish Gaelic, though I haven't been able to find much yet DEVIL negation in S.G.). Devil negation exists to one degree or another in at least the following languages: English, Irish, French, German, Icelandic, Slovak, and Russian. In some languages it seems to be more grammaticalized than in others. The Chinese examples of rude negation have been interesting for me--I had suspected that some pan-linguistic principles of discourse are at work, and such evidence strengthens my conviction. Probably not all languages have devil negation, but I suspect most have some fairly close cousins. Anybody interested in sources for what I've said can best contact me at TODLIN@MAGNUS.ACS.OHIO_STATE.EDU. Terry Odlin -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 11:47:30 EDT From: Zhiqun.Xing@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: Rude negation in Mandarin This is to reply David Wible's message about rude negation in Mandarin. The phrase: jian nide da-tou gui see your big-head ghost is not common in the Northern part of China, at least not common in my dialect. However, a very similar and simpler phrase often heard is "jian gui qu ba" (lit: see ghost go) meaning "forget about it or I am not going to do it". If someone said something and you don't like it, you also could also use the phrase. To me, anything one does not like or does not want to do could "go to see ghost". Zhiqun Xing University of Michigan -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 19:55:36 +0100 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Subject: Re: 4.292 Rude Negation In case someone is about to do their PhD on rude negators, I should like to add one more datum. As has been pointed out, in some (British?) lects (including mine), when the RN is utterance-final, subject-auxiliary inversion is triggered: Bollocks he did. Did he bollocks. But, going by the lect of a friend of mine from Southern Lancashire, it is not just the subject and auxiliary that invert: Like heck he did. Did he heckers like. - a complete reversal in word order. [Note that this last example is entirely equivalent in meaning to _Did he heck_ - that is, this is not the adverb _like_ in _He did, like, (but...)_ which is found in dialects of the North West of England.] ------ And Rosta -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1993 21:32:16 UTC+0200 From: Celso Alvarez-Caccamo Subject: Rude Counter-Assessers It seems to me that rude negators shouldn't be subjected to any particular restrictions, or any additional constraints on the sequential organization of speech acts. As rude-negator constructions are interpretable as second-part counterassessments to previous propositional content, whether they are "rude" or "not rude" is circumstancial here. Distributional restrictions apply similarly to, say, "bollocks" and "no way": (1) Bollocks he did! (2) *He did bollocks! (3) No way he did! (4) *He did no way! Apparent constraints on utterance length which might cause the oddness of (5) Like hell she will have it ready by tomorrow. can be explained in terms of unnecessary information redundancy. (5) contains two elements: (a) Like hell - (MARKER OF) COUNTERASSESSMENT (b) "She will have it ready by tomorrow" - QUOTED ASSESSMENT/STATEMENT Thus, segments (b) in rude-negator constructions constitute embedded, invisible quotations of previous material. Quoting the previous utterance entirely or not depends on situated communicative efficacy. That explains literal quotations or deletions of some material. In Galician-Portuguese: (6) A: --Que gente mais agradavel [What a good wine] B: --Que gente mais agradavel uma merda! [lit., "What nice people", a shit = my ass] or (6b) B: --Gente agradavel uma merda! or simply (6c) B: --E uma merda! One more note: Postponed rude negators form together with main assessments only one intonational phrase: (7) He is intelligent my ass. not (8) He is intelligent. My ass. Why? (the above is not a trivial observation). Previous assessments should be treated as the focalized referent of the counterassessment: (9) "He is intelligent" is inaccurate. I'd rather call them "rude counter-assessers". Celso Alvarez-Caccamo lxalvarz@udc.es Linguistica Geral e Teoria da Literatura Univ. da Corunha, Galiza, Spain -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 09:52:55 EST From: MORSEGAG@ucs.indiana.edu Subject: bollix/bollocks In response to Geoff Nathan's query: bollix (vb), also spelled bollox, is the same word etymologically as bollocks (n), also spelled ballocks, as you suspected. The verb, unlike the noun, is as you say common in North America and is used by people who would be both surprised and deeply embarrassed to learn its roots. The verb bollix (bollox) is an entry in the American Heritage Dictionary; the noun bollocks/ballocks is not. The noun (only under the spelling ballocks) is in the OED, "obs. in polite use"; the spelling bollocks makes it into the Supplement, and so does the verb, spelled bollix; they give a third spelling possibility, bollux, and call it "low slang", although in the U.S., as I've mentioned, it is used by people who would not say "balls". In a final grammatical twist, the OED Supplement says that "bollix" can by extension of the verbal meaning be used to mean a mess, confusion. Their first quote is Dylan Thomas in a 1935 letter: "I've been meaning...to learn about...the bollix of the old gang." I think this quote is well chosen to illustrate the fact that the meaning of bollix (n) is not identical with that of bollocks (n). --Elise Morse-Gagne -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-297. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-298. Fri 23 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 77 Subject: 4.298 Sum: Reversal Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: 17 Apr 93 21:08:56 GMT From: "RAD232" Subject: Lasrever Citsiugnil -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: 17 Apr 93 21:08:56 GMT From: "RAD232" Subject: Lasrever Citsiugnil A few people have already heard from me privately, but I wished to send thanks to EVERYONE who responded to my inquiries regarding linguistic reversal, and individual replies were seriously encroaching on my workload (so said my boss, but you know how they are...]). Either I hit a topic nearly as interesting as the rude negators, or there are LOTS of people out there. For those interested, evidently it is possible to approximate very closely the sounds of reversed speech (several people wrote with examples of class exercises involving trying to phonetically reverse a word or phrase "in-the-head" and reversing the tape of these to see how closely they came to the original), although it sounds like it takes a lot of practice. No-one was clear on whether reversing tapes of vocal tracks can change the number of syllables (sounds like I've got a few people trying, however), but reversing the spelling of a word can. Example given was a language with syllabic nasals and prenasalised stops. would have two syllables, but would have one. How closely the pronunciation of a reversed phonetic spelling will approximate the actual reversed sound of a word is (obviously) a function of how much phonetic detail the alphabet can capture. As to whether Satan is using this method to consume the minds of our youth, I think he'd be better off putting messages in forwards (incidentally, it was mentioned that "Jesus loves me" played backwards sounds a bit like "We smell sausage"; evidently Satan works at Pizza Hut..:-). If there is some subconscious recognition of backwards mes- sages, no-one has demonstrated it yet. All this gookledegob has been interesting to me as I am trying to conjure up a language based upon a reversible alphabet. It's fairly phonetic, but the reversibility throws a twist into it from the stand- point that words are never upside-down, they just read differently (and presumably have contrasting meanings). The question is an interesting one: how would a language develop and/or utilize such a property? I'm currently trying to figure a way to define the individual phonetic particles (a la d'Olivet's Hebraic Language Restored) to give me something to work from in defining words, but the construction of same is proving no mean feat. Prefix/suffix takes on a new meaning when each has to serve the purpose of the other (and do it upside-down)] Sentence structure shall not even be considered in this lifetime. Anyhow, I'm raving now, and this was meant to take up as little space as possible (alas...). Thanks to all for your responses (and patience), and as always, any information or advice is welcome. I'm off to the speech lab. Cheers, Scott Edgar *Another Actual Fact: The meaning of the word "mutant" has changed gradually over the years.* -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-298. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-299. Sun 25 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 134 Subject: 4.299 Qs: Infixes, Rhyming slang, taps, sex of linguists Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck 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: Fri, 23 Apr 93 16:22:27 BST From: Spencer A J Subject: Suffixing infixes 2) Date: 23 Apr 1993 21:58:09 -0400 (EDT) From: RBURNS@ren.IR.Miami.EDU Subject: cockney rhyming slang 3) Date: Sun, 25 Apr 93 09:59 +8 From: "Tom Lai, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong" Subject: Taps and Flaps 4) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 93 12:32:48 +0100 From: RichardHudson50 Subject: Sex and linguists -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 16:22:27 BST From: Spencer A J Subject: Suffixing infixes Infixes always seem to be found as prefixes rather than suffixes. Thus, it is common to find languages in which um + sulat ===> s-um-ulat, but I can't think of any language in which talus + mu ===> talu-mu-s. Do such cases exist? Andrew Spencer Department of Language and Linguistics University of Essex Colchester CO4 3SQ U.K. spena@essex.ac.uk -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: 23 Apr 1993 21:58:09 -0400 (EDT) From: RBURNS@ren.IR.Miami.EDU Subject: cockney rhyming slang I am working with a student who is planning a field project on Cockney Rhyming Slang. The library search has resulted in few sources and most of them quite old. Any suggestions? Please reply to me directly. Thanks very much. Rebecca Burns-Hoffman -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Date: Sun, 25 Apr 93 09:59 +8 From: "Tom Lai, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong" Subject: Taps and Flaps Joe Stemberger wrote in a recent posting: >While reading the most recent book by James Herriot, in which he >frequently uses non-standard spellings to give the flavor of Yorkshire >speech, I came across this: > spelling: gerrim for: get him >I assume that the {rr} spelling here represents the tap that British >dialects have for intervocalic /r/. But it's not for /r/ here, but for >an alveolar stop. This prompts me to ask a question: If one distinguishes between a flap (as an articulatory gesture) and a tap (a very short stop) as in Clark and Yallop (1990), then is intervocalic /r/ in some varieties of English a flap or a tap? (Or are both attested?) Put another way, my question is whether /r/ (in English as well as in other languages of the world) can be realized as taps besides trills, flaps and approximants. Tom Lai Hong Kong -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 93 12:32:48 +0100 From: RichardHudson50 Subject: Sex and linguists Actually, `sex *of* linguists'. Gillian Sankoff has just pointed out to me that I shouldn't have quoted the raw figures for male vs female responses to my message about rude negators as though they showed something significant about male vs female interest in the subject. It all depends what the normal balance is among contributors to Linguist. True I found a 5:1 ratio of male:female, but maybe this is the normal ratio and not worth commenting on. Sorry. Does anyone have any idea what the normal ratio might be? Or what it is among linguists as a whole (e.g. among members of LSA)? I tried to count a few pages of the LSA membership list but gave up because so many people were unclassifiable (on the basis of their names alone). Dick Hudson Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT (071) 387 7050 ext 3152 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-299. ________________________________________________________________ LINGUIST List: Vol-4-300. Sun 25 Apr 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 141 Subject: 4.300 Conference: Athapascan Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editor: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 15:30 EST From: SPEAS@cs.umass.EDU Subject: Athapaskan Language Conference -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 15:30 EST From: SPEAS@cs.umass.EDU Subject: Athapaskan Language Conference ATHAPASKAN LANGUAGE CONFERENCE June 3-4, 1993 The 1993 Athapaskan Language Conference will be held in Santa Fe, on the Campus of the College of Santa Fe, co-hosted by the Center for Research and Cultural Exchange of the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Athapaskan Language Institute. Below is a preliminary program. Thursday, June 3 9:00 Registration 9:45 Welcome 10-10:30 Theodore Fernald University of California, Santa Cruz 'A Level Ordering Account of Navajo Inflection' 10:30-11 Ferdinand de Haan University of Southern California 'Definiteness and the Animacy Hierarchy in Navajo' 11-11:30 Break 11:30-12 Leslie Saxon University of Victoria 'Raising in Dogrib' 12-2 LUNCH 2-2:30 Sharon Hargus and George Holland Univ. of Washington Moricetown Band 'Epenthetic Vowels in Witsu Wit'en' 2:30-3 Keren Rice University of Toronto 'On Fricative Voicing Alternations' 3-3:15 Break 3:15-3:45 Adeline Raboff Yukon Flats School District 'Dinjii Zhuh Ginjik: A Gwich'in Indian Junior High Text Book developed for the Yukon Flats School District' 3:45-4:15 Patrick Maun University of Vienna 'Multi-Media and Native American Languages: A Discussion on the Use of Multi-Media Computer Systems in Native American Language Communities' 4:15-5 Jeff Leer Alaska Native Languages Center 'Comparative Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit Database' Friday, June 4 10-10:30 Leonard Faltz Arizona State University 'Structure, Rules and Memory: Navajo Verbs' 10:30-11 Eloise Jelinek and Mary Willie Univ. of Arizona and Univ. of New Mexico 'Pronoun Attachment to the Verb in Navajo' 11-11:30 Break 11:30-12 Ted Taylor University of Southern Colorado 'Implications of Navajo Progressive Vowel Harmony for Feature Geometry' 12-2 LUNCH 2-2:30 Eung-Do Cook University of Calgary 'The Morphological Status of "Third Person Prefix" in Northern Athapaskan' 2:30-3 Keren Rice and Leslie Saxon Univ. of Toronto and Univ. of Victoria 'Y - subjects in Hupa?' 3-3:30 Break 3:30-4 Martha Wright Syracuse, NY 'Obviative Agreement Factors Determining [e] in Object Position in Native American Languages' 4:00-4:30 Peggy Speas Univ. of Massachusetts 'Classifying Verbs and Agreement in Navajo' 4:30-5 Business Meeting Registration fee is $20, Late registration after May 17, $50. Some dormitory rooms have been reserved, but space is limited. For more information on housing or logistics, contact Marilyn Goodrich or Bea Quintana at the Center for Research and Cultural Exchange, IAIA. (505) 988-6434. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-300.