HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: baron@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Dennis Baron)
Subject: Re: Problem with 'they' (etc) as 3p singular common gender pron.
Organization: University of Illinois
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1992 16:41:57 GMT

In article <BtIBDA.9y2@acsu.buffalo.edu> v106lr4h@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (Eric T Sasse) writes:
>From: v106lr4h@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (Eric T Sasse)
>Subject: Re: Problem with 'they' (etc) as 3p singular common gender pron.
>Date: 24 Aug 92 22:22:00 GMT
>In article <baron.30.714685399@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>, baron@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Dennis Baron) writes...
>>>English doesn't *have* linguistic genders, except for a grand total of
>>>six (6) words.  And it lacks a generic singular other than "they."  
>
>  OK, I'll bite. What were the ones you were thinking of? I came up with 11,
>but I will admit to possibly 9. They are:
>          Mas.     Fem.    Neut.                Mas./Fem.     Neut.
>Nom.      he       she     it                      who        what
>Gen.      his      her(s)             and        
>Acc.      him      her                             whom 
>
> I am thinking of the fem. gen. as possibly 2 different words, as well as a
>distinction between the fem gen. and acc. to account for the 11, but "her"
>gen. and "her" acc. could be just one word. And, am I just completely wrong
>with thw who/what relation? Seems correct to me.
>
>                                               Whatever,
>                                                    -Eric

Yes, Eric, you're wrong.  For one thing, I never fixed gendered words at
a certain number.  Only the 3rd person sg. pronouns have gender.  The others
may distinguish between human and nonhuman, or animate and inanimate.  But
they (no longer) distinguish gender.

There are also many gendered nouns in English (and many of these are in
dispute: is author masculine? some have claimed that it is; is authoress
dead? some have claimed that it is; are these words sexed but not 
gendered? some have claimed that they are).  Are waitrons gendered?

Additionally, speakers of languages with grammatical gender no longer treat
gender as a non-issue, if they ever did.  Debate in French and German, for
example, over whether masculines can include feminines (e'crivain,
professeur) or whether feminine terms must be used (invented).

If a significant number of English speakers feel that the masculine no
longer includes the feminine, and that it never did, then, to put it
simply, it simply doesn't.  Which is not to deny the existence of 
variation or of conflict.

Dennis
__


debaron@uiuc.edu               (\                   217-333-2392
                               \'\             fax: 217-333-4321
Dennis Baron                    \'\           __________
Department of English           / '|         ()_________)
Univ. of Illinois               \ '/          \ ~~~~~~~~ \
608 S. Wright St.                 \             \ ~~~~~~   \
Urbana IL 61801                   ==).            \__________\
                                 (__)             ()__________)
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6794 alt.usage.english:6996
From: crawford@ben.dev.upenn.edu (Lauren L. Crawford)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: New words for gender neutral pronouns in English
Date: 28 Aug 92 13:45:52 GMT
Followup-To: sci.lang
Organization: University of Pennsylvania

In article <10523@scott.ed.ac.uk> iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
>
>
>Fine.  "He" is masculine (implies maleness).  "They" is plural
>(implies two or more of 'em).  Now let's suppose you know that you are
>talking of only one person of unknown sex.  If you use "he", the odds
>of your being right or wrong are about equal. 

And if you use "she", you'd have the same odds.  So by this logic,
why not just use "she"?  

Think I'll go lift some weights now.

 
-- 
Lauren Crawford  //  crawford@ben.dev.upenn.edu

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.
            -- J. Danforth Quayle
From: 00hfstahlke@bsu-ucs.uucp
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Baron's Fourth Law of Linguistic Thermodynamics
Date: 31 Aug 92 21:34:35 GMT

In article <1992Aug30.184233.26019@enea.se>, sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
> Dennis Baron (baron@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu) writes:
>>Baron's Fourth Law of Linguistic Thermodynamics states that the more
>>people object to a trend in language, the more likely it is that the
>>trend has gone beyond the point of now return.
> 
> Shudder. It makes me think of some of the trends in current
> Swedish which I don't like. For instance dividing compounds
> in two when they should be one word. Often it is harmless
> with respect to understanding, although it looks awful, but
> there are exceptions. There is a big difference between 
> "fel meddelanden" (wrong messages) and "felmeddelanden" (error
> messages).
> 

Baron's FLLT sound like a linguistic implementation of Gresham's Law:  Bad
money drives out good.  Any highly marked usage seems to suppress an unmarked
usage.  The meaning shift involved in "gay" is an example.  However, when the
shift is away from a form, like generic he, to varied stylistic devices, we've
got a strange sort of linguistic change.  Can anyone cite changes of that sort
that have been successful, case and gender excepted?

Trends in whose language?  That of educated speakers in formal contexts?  Of
high school graduates in unskilled work environments?

Herb Stahlke
Ball State University
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: amunn@gibbs.oit.unc.edu (Alan Munn)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Nasalisation
Date: 30 Aug 92 03:29:14 GMT
Organization: University of North Carolina

In article <peeters.715141056@tasman> peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters) writes:
>Whatever the case may be, it should be pointed
>out that nasalisation is not phonemic in English, whereas it is in French
>(I don't like the generative account which analyses [a~] as [a] + [n]). 

How do you propose to account for the alternation between [bo~livr]
'bon livre' and [bonami] 'bon ami' then?  Just curious.

Alan
<amunn@gibbs.oit.unc.edu>
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6801 alt.usage.english:6999
From: evan@hpl.hp.com (Evan Kirshenbaum)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english
Subject: New (beta) ASCII representation of IPA
Date: 28 Aug 92 16:35:43 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard

I've put together a first cut at a new representation of IPA in ASCII.
It still needs a bit of work, but I think it's better than the one
we have now.  In particular, it should make it possible to use *all*
of the IPA while still being simple and readable (especially for
phonemes which occur regularly in English).

The document I've put together is rather formal and aimed at people
familiar with phonetic notation (those who know what a "voiceless
pharyngeal fricative" is).  Once the details have been nailed down, we
should also put together an example-heavy introduction to at least the
English phoneme set for non-linguists.

Now I'm looking for volunteers to go over it and smooth out the
obvious flaws and typos (those of you who got unsolicited manuscripts,
I've already found and fixed a couple) before I post it.  Or, if
there's a consensus, I could just post it to the net, and we could
hash it out here (it's 385 lines).

Evan Kirshenbaum
    HP Laboratories
    3500 Deer Creek Road, Building 26U
    Palo Alto, CA  94304

    kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com
    (415)857-7572
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6663 alt.usage.english:6859 soc.culture.usa:6806
From: roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english,soc.culture.usa
Subject: Re: Problem with 'they' (etc) as 3p singular common gender pron.
Date: 24 Aug 92 02:24:47 GMT
Organization: Princeton University
Originator: news@nimaster

In article <1992Aug23.052841.161@news.columbia.edu> gmw1@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Gabe M Wiener) writes:
>In article <1992Aug23.023626.22025@midway.uchicago.edu> gal2@midway.uchicago.ed\
>u writes:

>>I don't think anyone has mentioned yet that in today's English 'they' /
>>'them' / 'their(s)' cannot refer to (some?) specific singular antecedents:

>>* Every good chef knows their ingredients.

>20 years ago, this would have been properly written as "every good chef
>knows his ingredients."  But since the PC crowd has been jumping up and
>down about nonsexist usage,

Sneering *and* misinformed.  What a terrible combination.

Gabe, good writers have, when they felt they needed to, avoided the
generic-singular "he" for centuries.   It's nothing new.  Jane Austen
did it.  Southey did it.  

20 years ago, or 200 years ago, many writers would have properly avoided
the "he."

> today I would write the sentence as "all good
>chefs know their ingredients."  Seems a lot better than the his/her
>business, especially since the English-speaking world is unable to grasp
>the linguistic concept so prevalent in other languages, namely that a
>generic male pronoun can refer to people in general, not just men.

Right.  English doesn't work that way.  You just said it yourself.  

English doesn't *have* linguistic genders, except for a grand total of
six (6) words.  And it lacks a generic singular other than "they."  

I'll tell you a story.  A true one.  In 1850, one state legislated that
"he" would be used as the generic singular in all legal documents.  30
years later, one such document was used to exclude women from the law
school, on the grounds that the law stated "he."

Clearly it is *not* obvious in English that "He" sometimes means "he or
she."  It's often hard to tell which is meant.

In short, an essential distinction is blurred when you insist on the g-s
"he."

Roger
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: avlb@aplcomm.jhuapl.edu (A V Louis Biggie)
Subject: Re: inclusive/exclusive
Reply-To: avlb@aplcomm.jhuapl.edu (A V Louis Biggie)
Organization: JHU/Applied Physics Laboratory
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 11:06:52 GMT

I remember reading ages ago (perhaps in Quirk's Use of English) of an English-
based Creole that distinguished "Yumi" (speaker and listener) and Mifela 
(speaker and buddies, but not listener).

Louis.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: ***** NEED HELP TO FIND ARABIC SOFTWARE *********
From: gilardon@sc2a.unige.ch
Date: 26 Aug 92 10:02:46 +0200
Organization: University of Geneva, Switzerland


NEED HELP FROM THE MASTER MINDS !!!!!!!!!!!!

     I WOULD LIKE TO USE A SOFTWARE,AN EASY-TO USE-  ONE, WHICH SHOULD
      BE ABLE TO WRITE ARABIC CARACTERS, OR BE USED AS A DICTIONNARY 
      (ARABIC  <-------> ENGLISH/FRENCH/ITALIAN OR SPANISH)
          
          AS I SHOULD BE USING SUCH SOFTWARE FOR MY EXAM PREPARATION,
             I WOULD  G R E A T L Y  APPRECIATE ALL ADVICE AND INFORMATION!!


          NAME OF SUCH SOFTWARE ?
          IS IT EASY TO USE ?
          WHERE CAN I GET IT   -- BY FTP OR OTHER MEANS--  ?
          IS IT COMPATIBLE WITH MERE PC (IBM, OLIVETTI....) ?
            WHAT ARE THE REQUIREMENT TO MAKE IT WORK ACCURATELY ...


                DO NOT HESITATE TO CONTACT ME....






     FRANCOIS GILARDONI              GILARDON@SC2A.UNIGE.CH
                                     GILARDON@CGEUGE52





         SHUKRAN!!!
From: harold@ccl.umist.ac.uk (Harold Somers)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: needs washed
Date: 26 Aug 92 17:29:49 GMT
Organization: Manchester Computing Centre

This structure is also found in dialects of British English. I have heard
it in the North West, and also in Belfast (where there may be influence
from Irish). The form is found with any quasi-modal verbs like want,
need, even 'could use' as in

These clothes could use washed.

In each case, in my own dialect I would prefer a present participle, but
the use of the past participle is readily understood, perhaps because it
is logically more approporiate,as in the explanation offered earlier that
it is an ellipsis: needs (to be) washed.

Anyway, please note that it is certainly not a phenomenon restricted 
to some small part of the mid-Western USA!
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Date: 29 Aug 92 09:19:47 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Aug28.160327.19391@athena.mit.edu> pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>In any case, I know of no evidence, for example, that
>syntactic movement can "more or less happen" (HPSG language, "that a
>category can be not a particularly good instantiation of SLASH") or any
>evidence that a preposition "belongs inside a particular NP, but not as
>well as some other category does" or that a morpheme is a mediocre
>example of 3pl object agreement or that "X sort of c-commands Y".

I may be missing something, but the sharp boundaries of syntactic
categories don't make them any different from birds, bachelors, or
Boston locations, do they?  You're approaching this concept from the
point of view of a syntactician.  From a zoo"logist's point of view,
nothing can be more or less a bird, sort of a bird, or anything like
that, and an ostrich is as good a bird as a robin or a raven.  It is
true that a layman may use some other definition, or even several of
them at once, and may wind up excluding ostriches or calling a bat a
bird, but this is not interesting to the professional.

If you ask people in the street to give an example of a noun, some
will certainly be heard more frequently than others, and syntactic
theory won't tell you why.  Similarly, one may think of a reason to
call a certain morpheme a mediocre example of 3pl object agreement
(one that makes intuitive sense), but it won't have any impact on
actual speech generation and processing.

-- 
 `If ye hiv ears oan yer heid - then use them tae lissen.' (The Glasgow Gospel)
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
From: pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Date: 31 Aug 92 15:28:03 GMT
Article-I.D.: ils.1992Aug31.152803.17752
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences

In article <10559@spark.ed.ac.uk>, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
> In article <1992Aug28.160327.19391@athena.mit.edu> pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
> >In any case, I know of no evidence, for example, that
> >syntactic movement can "more or less happen" (HPSG language, "that a
> >category can be not a particularly good instantiation of SLASH") or any
> >evidence that a preposition "belongs inside a particular NP, but not as
> >well as some other category does" or that a morpheme is a mediocre
> >example of 3pl object agreement or that "X sort of c-commands Y".
> 
> I may be missing something, but the sharp boundaries of syntactic
> categories don't make them any different from birds, bachelors, or
> Boston locations, do they?  You're approaching this concept from the
> point of view of a syntactician.  From a zoo"logist's point of view,
> nothing can be more or less a bird, sort of a bird, or anything like
> that, and an ostrich is as good a bird as a robin or a raven.  It is
> true that a layman may use some other definition, or even several of
> them at once, and may wind up excluding ostriches or calling a bat a
> bird, but this is not interesting to the professional.

1) "Bird" is a folk concept borrowed by zoologists.  I don't think the
"layman's" version should be so easily dismissed, since it largely determines
the expert version.

2) Even experts disagree on the meaning of "bird", e.g. the Archaeopteryx.
How do zoologists determine if the Archaeopteryx is a bird or not?  Do
they compare it to an intensional description of necessary and sufficient
conditions, or do they compare it to other near-reptiles they have already
decided are birds?

3) Categories often undergo revision.  What determines correctness here?

I'd be very surprised to find out there are no syntactic categories that
play the role of the Archaeopteryx.

	-dp-
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6837 alt.usage.english:7029
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: Problem with 'they' (etc) as 3p singular common gender pron.
Date: 30 Aug 92 17:33:43 GMT
Organization: Enea Data AB

Roger Lustig (roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU) writes:
>gal2@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>>* Every good chef knows their ingredients.
>>  Everyone in the kitchen knows their ingredients.
>
>The former sentence is used less often, and criticized more often; but
>it's certainly acceptable in informal usage. (See Urdang, for instance.)
>In formal usage, many people nowadays recast it with "All chefs..."

Yes, recasting to all plural is often a good idea. However, consider
an instruction: "When the operator sees the red light blink he must 
press the blue button." We can probably make some good recasting,
but not to "all". Neither can we use "they" instead of "he", particularly
is the instruction is to be read by non-native speakers. Being one
myself, I can guarantee you that this usage of "they" is utterly
confusing.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
F|rst till kvarn f}r f|rst vankiva
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: crawford@ben.dev.upenn.edu (Lauren L. Crawford)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english,soc.culture.usa
Subject: Re: Problem with 'they' (etc) as 3p singular common gender pron.
Date: 27 Aug 92 14:41:11 GMT
Followup-To: sci.lang
Organization: University of Pennsylvania

In article <1992Aug26.211044.2221@nosc.mil> sampson@nosc.mil (Charles H. Sampson) writes:
>In article <1992Aug26.183558.5583@Princeton.EDU> roger@crux.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
>
>>At any rate, we only gender-inflect to describe sexed things: humans,
>>animals.
>
>     And ships?
>
>				Charlie


How about hurricanes?




-- 
Lauren Crawford  //  crawford@ben.dev.upenn.edu

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.
            -- J. Danforth Quayle  
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 14:19:18 GMT

In article <1992Aug27.040415.22469@ils.nwu.edu> pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler) writes:
>
>But the degree to which your Boston restaurant recommendation counts as a lie
>*is* a reflection of a prototype-based definition.  It's not a binary-valued
>judgement, for one thing, and the pragmatics doesn't provide its gradedness.
>
Well there is a leap from not being binary-valued to being graded.  Can
one ever argue convincingly for the latter over the former, by the way?
I imagine there's a field about that somewhere.  What's it called?

In any case, I've been assuming that Cognitive linguistics is
"mentalist", not behaviorist.  That is the only way I could interpret
the claim that people's categories "are" prototypes.  If my assumption
is right, there is a difference between categorization behavior and the
mental categories this behavior touches upon, and my questions are
relevant: are the mental categories discussed by Lakoff prototypes or
not, and how can we tell? If Cognitive linguists assume a priori that
there is no *conceivable* gap between categories and categorization
behavior (the issue of an *actual* gap being the point I am raising),
then there's little point in the discussion.  Cognitive linguistics then
doesn't even touch upon the stuff of traditional/generative linguistics,
and any debate between them is like arguing whether a car is a machine
or a mode of transportation.

-David Pesetsky
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: avlb@aplcomm.jhuapl.edu (A V Louis Biggie)
Subject: Re: What for?
Reply-To: avlb@aplcomm.jhuapl.edu (A V Louis Biggie)
Organization: JHU/Applied Physics Laboratory
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 13:19:22 GMT

I think it has something to do with the fact that "why" is used in two 
different ways.  Sometimes it means "for what reason" and sometimes is means 
"for what purpose."

For example: 

Why did you go to the supermarket?
(This means what was your purpose in going to the supermarket.)

Why does hot air rise?
(Provide an explanation for hot air rising.)

The first can be paraphrased as:

What did you go to the supermarket for?

But,

* What does hot air rise for?

is (at least to me) not a paraphrase of "Why does hot air rise?"

I concede that sometimes reasons and purposes are sometimes pretty close, but 
scientific phenomena tend to demand reasons rather than purposes.  Humans 
tend to have (or think they have) rational purposes for doing things.

What am I writing all this for?

Regards.

Louis.
From: le01167@portal.lasc.lockheed.com (Ron Nadel (x2025))
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Need ideas for Biology demo...
Date: 1 Sep 92 22:03:34 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Co. - Rye Canyon
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41

In article <1992Aug31.181210.7531@ncsu.edu>, happy@garfield.catt.ncsu.edu (Rusty Soots) writes...
> 
>  I have to do a demonstration , for biology, in my teaching materials
>class and I was wondering if anyone out there had any good ideas.  The
>demo can't last more than `OC15
>sorry backspace doesnt work.......more than 15 minutes.  Also, primitive
>equipment is the only stuff available for lworking in the lab.  I'd appreciate
>any ideas!  Thanks again!
> 
Here's one I came up with:  The principle of the demo is to demonstrate taxonomy,
you will need items like a nut, bolt, button, piece of wood, die or dice, string,
coin, and similar things.  You then have the _students_ create their own categories
for the different items based on their own ideas of how they are similar or differnt.

In a college course, you can pick some fellow students to be you _class_, and 15 minutes
is plenty of time for you to get your point across.  In a real middle/high school you would
most likely pair up students to work as teams, and there is enough food for thought to
take an entire period.

Another one I like requiring the simplest of equipment demonstrates inter/intra species
competition and adaptations.  You'll need a bag of black-eye peas, plastic forks, knives,
and spoons, paper cups.

The idea is that in order to survive, one of the _plastic_ species has to be able to eat
n number of bean/minute (or something like that).  Eating requires picking up a pea and
putting it in their cup.  In a classroom setting I take them out on  a lawn where I had
already spread the bag of beans around (so they have to find the beans as well), and then
I time them.  It won't be long before species of he knife adaptation are extinct.

You can demo this exercise quite easily to a college class.  Interestingly, in the
grassy area the spoons are the winner, but on the class floor or a desk the forks
are the winners.

Good Luck!

Ron Nadel
From: le01167@portal.lasc.lockheed.com (Ron Nadel (x2025))
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: RE: Sexual Selection:  breasts and penises
Date: 2 Sep 92 22:40:55 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Co. - Rye Canyon
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41

In article <2SEP92.15524801@cc4.crl.aecl.ca>, roihar@cc4.crl.aecl.ca writes...

>Note the use of the word nibbles in the third sentence. A freudian slip
>if ever there was one!
> 
There are not other kind of slips...
Newsgroups: sci.bio