HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: amunn@gibbs.oit.unc.edu (Alan Munn)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 29 Sep 92 22:48:57 GMT
Organization: University of North Carolina

In article <1992Sep29.090038.3435@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>
>Actually, some of us think that the whole notion of VP is a lot of
>(expletive deleted).  It might be interesting to take a poll of the
>denizens of this group on that point.  What do the rest of you think?
>
>There!  That's my diatribe for the day.  Anyone care to contribute
>another?

Sure, let's do linguistics by polling sci.lang readers whether they
think VPs are a lot of (it/there) [expletive inserted].  How about
"here's some evidence that the arguments people have propsed for VPs
don't show what they show" instead.  Sheesh, next thing you know we'll
be electing presidents by polling people instead of having principled
arguments about the issues.

Alan


>
>--Leo Connolly


-- 
Alan Munn                     <amunn@gibbs.oit.unc.edu>
Dept. of Linguistics, CB# 3155 UNC Chapel Hill NC 27599
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: evan@hpl.hp.com (Evan Kirshenbaum)
Subject: Re: ASCII representation of IPA
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 16:34:43 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

In article <nsn.717751261@munagin> nsn@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Nick Nicholas) writes:
>Folks,
>
>I don't know how welcome the following piece of news will be, but as
>far as ASCII'sing IPA is concerned... it's been done. I don't know how
>well or not well, and I don't know to what extent it's merely a 
>codification of IPA as opposed to a universal phonetic transcription
>scheme, but the reference is
>
>J.C.Wells, _Computer Coded Phonetic Transcription_, Journal of the IPA,
>17(2): 94-114, 1987.

I'll definitely look into this (if I can track down a copy).  Thanks
for the pointer.

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

    kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com
    (415)857-7572
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Subject: cyclical grammars
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 14:47:46 GMT

Often I read of this or that linguist who believes in cyclical subsystems
within the grammar.  Sometimes the "loops" are big enough that post-lexical
rules can actually feed lexical ones.  How seriously do you phonologists
take such grammars these days?

I'm not fishing for an answer here.  Once again, I'm just interested in the
majority view.  I have some data that could be analyzed in this way.  I
could also claim morphologization of a certain process and in this way
avoid the cycle.

Any opinions?

-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
From: holger@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Holger Hank)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: deep/surface anaphora HELP!
Keywords: pronouns anaphors
Date: 26 Sep 92 10:58:28 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

I triggered some traffic on this newsgroup the other day by asking
about deep and surface anaphora.
Since I don't read this newsgroup, I missed everything (no emails arrived).

If any of you have saved the stuff (or sime of it) and feel like
mailing it to me, please do.

thanks in  advance

Holger

holger@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters)
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Organization: University of Tasmania, Australia.
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 05:17:09 GMT

pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:

>... it wasn't until
>the fairly recent work of people like Steven Harlow, Richard Sproat, Jim
>McCloskey and Sandra Chung ("Chomskyans" all) that VSO languages had any
>special interest for the syntactician beyond the fact that they were
>VSO.  What these researchers discovered was evidence that VSO languages
>are essentially SVO in structure, with the subject asymmetrically
>commanding the object, and verb movement or its equivalent accounting
>for the surface order.  To the best of my knowledge, this had never been
>shown before, and couldn't be shown before certain other discoveries
>were in hand (e.g. the command conditions on anaphora).

Does this not show how anglocentric the entire generative enterprise really
is? Would Chomsky, had he been a native speaker of a VSO language, not
have concluded that SVO languages are essentially VSO in structure, with
etc. etc. 

I found David Pesetsky's earlier remarks on cognitive vs generative ling-
uistics enlightening, but this latest one looks like it is particularly
weak indeed.

By the way, has there been any discussion on cognitive linguistics as a
broad category under the topic of "cognitive phonology" (which was at the
head of the message I reply to before I removed it)? I missed all of it,
in that case - and the reason I came back was that I saw Pesetsky's name.,
and wanted to know what he had to say.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Bert Peeters                         Tel: +61 02 202344
Department of Modern Languages               002 202344
University of Tasmania at Hobart        Fax: 002 207813
GPO Box 252C                            Bert.Peeters@modlang.utas.edu.au
Hobart TAS 7001
Australia
From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Cognitive Phonology (was Cognitive Linguistics...)
Date: 27 Sep 92 14:03:17 GMT
Article-I.D.: kuhub.1992Sep27.090317.43384
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <83595@bcsaic.boeing.com>, rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake) writes:

> at this point.)  Anyway, is this depiction of the psychological model wrong?
> Can someone supply a better one?  Just what is the data if not a pattern of
> well-formedness intuitions?  Anyone?

I know of no alternative depiction of the psychological model, but I
think it would be mistaken to believe that in saying that the data
consists of intuitions, we have said something meaningful about
present-day linguistics.  How would present-day linguistics be
different from what it is if the data were something else?  

Contemporary linguists often offer reanalyses of phenomena that were
dealt with in an earlier period by linguists who were not assuming a
psychological model.  Do the new analyses differ from the old in ways
that can be attributed to different beliefs about what the data
is/was?

Note that in many if not most cases of reanalysis, the "data" for the
new analysis really consists of *the earlier (presumably
non-psychologistic) analysis*.  This is especially evident in
phonology, where you constantly find an entire edifice of generativist
and post-generativist work erected on the basis of an earlier
structuralist analysis (which may or may not be explicitly mentioned). 

Notice also that in spite of intuitions being demonstrably inconstant
and inconsistent, our theories are still much like the structuralist
ones and are not discarded in favor of statistical theories.  As you
said earlier, people don't talk about it...

********************************** +.............................+
*- Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>* :All opinions expressed herein:
*There is no privileged position.* :are my own and are not to be :
*	-God, Derrida, others    * : attributed to my employer   :
********************************** +.............................+
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: Metalleus: the Voiced Snore Debunked
Organization: LLNL
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 00:45:45 GMT


	"Moundsbar" is a joke, right?

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: A5711DAA@vm.univie.ac.at
Subject: text comprehension, strategies
Organization: University of Vienna
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 19:01:18 GMT

hi,
at time I am working on a semiar paper about the notion of strategy used
in linguistics - specially text comprehension.

I wonder if the processes involved in text comprehension are compatible
with problem solving theory taken from AI-research. Are we building
searching trees, do we use searching algorithms? I guess, not. But what
does strategy mean then?
And how are strategies selected?
And THE question (which I should have stated earlier): what IS a strategy
(and what's your source for this definition?)

*------------
A totally different question: I wonder if there are no applied linguistis
using internet, or are there discussions about discourse analysis, the
empirical problems, the difficult question of the hermeneutic process
involved in "interpreting" data (as a critical linguist) somewhere else?

gertraud (a5711daa@awiuni11.edvz.univie.ac.at)
Xref: sparky sci.lang:7492 alt.usage.english:7659
From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Subject: Re: Cognitive Phonology (was Cognitive Linguistics...)
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 05:53:43 GMT

With reference to well-formedness judgments, rwojcik@atc.boeing.com writes:

>There should be some kind of psychological
>model that you could articulate which would license your claims about the
>data.  

Just on a historical note, Chomsky introduced the notion of well-formedness
judgments as a basis for data since, as he claimed, this is what linguists
had really been interested in all along - even though *they* claimed to be
interested in what he labeled as "observational adequacy" (i.e. the ability
to account for a given range of data).  In his view, collections of data were
not terribly interesting in and of themselves.  More so was the mechanism
by which these collections were produced.  If generalizations could be made
about this ("descriptive adequacy") then we might actually be saying some-
thing significant about language.  Ultimately, though, he was interested in
"explanatory adequacy," i.e. the ability to account for why, given a certain
range of input, human beings develop a given grammar.  I may misunderstand,
but in classical generative theory well-formedness judgments form the main
reservoire only for "descriptively adequate" generalizations.

-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
From: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Subjectless verbs; was: Re: SVO / VSO
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 3 Oct 92 05:11:08 GMT

In article <1992Oct3.032614.29258@athena.cs.uga.edu> mcovingt@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington) writes:
>In article <1992Oct3.014340.22802@news.Hawaii.Edu> lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee) writes:
>
>>
>>1. subjectless verbs: "It rained."  I don't know whether there are such
>>verbs in any language that never permit a subject, as opposed to allowing
>>at most a dummy.
>
>Latin _pluit_ 'it rains' never takes a subject.

Is this just a mark of a prodrop language?  A case can be made that in
Spanish, for example, the pronoun is actually part of the morpheme that
gets stuck on the end in the conjugation.

Subjectless verbs occur all the time, and this never causes problems
with a prodrop language like Spanish -- "llueve."  In English, there
MUST be a pronoun of some sort there to soak up the nominative case,
since English is not a prodrop language.

Regards,
Janis C.


Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee)
Subject: Re: Subjectless verbs; was: Re: SVO / VSO
Organization: University of Hawaii
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 11:31:50 GMT

In article <1992Oct3.032614.29258@athena.cs.uga.edu> mcovingt@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington) writes:
}... Latin _pluit_ 'it rains' never takes a subject.

Thanks for the example.
}...
}The question of course is whether you consider these non-nominative 
}arguments to be subjects.

In the Bemba example and similar instances in other Bantu languages,
the verb agrees with the locative as it would with a subject (except
that the agreement prefix resembles the preposition instead of a
classifier prefix).  And the locative occupies the sentence position
of a subject.

--
Greg Lee <lee@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: ENG101@ukcc.uky.edu (Greg Stump)
Subject: Conference announcement
Organization: University of Kentucky
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 18:21:24 GMT

The 46th annual Kentucky Foreign Language Conference will be held
on April 22-24, 1993, at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
The conference will include sessions devoted to linguistic theory
and TESL.  If you wish to present a paper in one of these
sessions, send one copy of a one-page abstract to Greg Stump
(sessions on linguistic theory) or to Barbara Kennedy (sessions
on TESL) at the following address:  Department of English,
University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY  40506-0027.  Alternatively,
abstracts may be submitted by e-mail to the following addresses:
eng101@ukcc.uky.edu (Stump), engblk@ukcc.uky.edu (Kennedy).
Please specify whether your abstract is for a 20-minute or a
45-minute paper.  The deadline for submission of abstracts is
November 15, 1992.
From: bthurman@uncavx.unca.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: subjects of pluit & brechei
Date: 5 Oct 92 17:34:02 GMT
Organization: University of North Carolina at Asheville
Nntp-Posting-User: rcrisp

Can one find other kinds of subjects with pluere than (1) material that comes
down, e.g. saxa pluunt 'it's raining rocks' or (2) the source of the rain, e.g.
caelum pluisse 'that the sky had let go its load'?  Should one not ask, when in
Greek one can document synchronically with brechei 'it's raining' such godly
phraseology as ho Zeus brechei 'Jove is wetting [his britches?]'?
From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Cognitive Phonology (was Cognitive Linguistics...)
Date: 28 Sep 92 01:06:10 GMT
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In article <1992Sep27.153555.43396@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>
>Major international languages, perhaps; but the development of
>Chomsky's thought, and that of the MIT school in general, suggests a
>lack of familiarity at the beginning with a variety of languages.

Wasn't Matthews at MIT writing a transformational grammar of Hidatsa,
and Postal doing research on Mohawk morphophonology and syntax?  Is the
index to SPE devoid of discussion of other languages?  What topic did
Kuroda's dissertation discuss? Of course, the sort of data relevant and
available for generative grammar did make it much more fruitful for
people to work on their native language or on languages they knew well.
Hence the efflorescence of research on English syntax by the largely
American pioneers of generative grammar, and hence the explosion of new
research on South-East Asian and West European languages in the last
15-20 years.

>Things which a Sapir or a Bloomfield would have seen as rather
>run-of-the mill seem to have been belatedly discovered by the Chomskyans,
>such as the existence of VSO languages, 

Their existence was never in doubt, I'm quite sure.  But it wasn't until
the fairly recent work of people like Steven Harlow, Richard Sproat, Jim
McCloskey and Sandra Chung ("Chomskyans" all) that VSO languages had any
special interest for the syntactician beyond the fact that they were
VSO.  What these researchers discovered was evidence that VSO languages
are essentially SVO in structure, with the subject asymmetrically
commanding the object, and verb movement or its equivalent accounting
for the surface order.  To the best of my knowledge, this had never been
shown before, and couldn't be shown before certain other discoveries
were in hand (e.g. the command conditions on anaphora).

> or languages in which position
>classes do not match hierarchical structure.  

What do you mean?  Split ergativity?

> I am neither
>anti-Chomsky nor anti-theory; it was useful for nearly the entire
>field to work within the same paradigm for a while.  But I believe
>that at the outset Chomsky knew little more than English and Hebrew.
>As for English, I think his famous "Remarks on nominalization" paper
>revealed a surprising earlier naivete.

How so?  The paper itself is naive about morphology, especially when
read with 1990s eyes, but it was, I think, Chomsky's first discussion of
the topics discussed there, so how does it reveal earlier naivete?

-David Pesetsky
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters)
Subject: Re: reality and appearance (Was: VSO/ SVO)
Organization: University of Tasmania, Australia.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 22:58:00 GMT

lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee) writes:

>The whole bit was an
>exercise in distinguishing appearance (semantics) from reality
>(syntax).

I'm probably missing something here - but why do you say that semantics is
appearance whereas syntax is reality? Aren't both as real one as the other?
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Bert Peeters                         Tel: +61 02 202344
Department of Modern Languages               002 202344
University of Tasmania at Hobart        Fax: 002 207813
GPO Box 252C                            Bert.Peeters@modlang.utas.edu.au
Hobart TAS 7001
Australia
From: andaling@durras.anu.edu.au (Avery Andrews)
Subject: SVO / VSO --> NP-Movement
Organization: Computer Services Centre, Australian National University
Date:  1 Oct 92 20:48:51 GMT

In Icelandic, NP's in passives & unaccusatives move optionally into
subject position, regardless of whether they have structural nominative
or some kind of quirky case.  The movement seems to be subject to a
definiteness effect, however.

Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au
From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 30 Sep 92 17:46:17 GMT
Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <1992Sep29.090038.3435@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
|In article <1992Sep28.105812.3871@athena.mit.edu>, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
|> Actually, in my view, it's pretty damn fortunate that the founders of
|> generative grammar worked mainly on a language with an intact VP.
|
|Actually, some of us think that the whole notion of VP is a lot of
|(expletive deleted).  It might be interesting to take a poll of the
|denizens of this group on that point.  What do the rest of you think?

Well, I might not put it *quite* so strongly :-)

Really, given the evidence form typological research, especially the post-
Greenberg work, the idea of SVO being a more fundamental type than *either*
of the other two types is unsupportable.

It turns out that in terms of other features SVO languages are a grand,
inconsistant *mixture*.  They simply *do* *not* form a cohesive category.
On the other hand both VSO and SOV langauges form very cohesive, internally
consistant sets.  This has resulted in most recent typological literature
shifting to the terms 'pre-field' and 'post-field', or some equivalent of
them, rather than using the three way S/O/V categorization.

Thus *some* SVO language show greater similarity to VSO languages, and
are considered post-field, while *other* SVO languages are more similar
to SOV languages, and are treated as pre-field.  There is also a small
residuum of SVO languages that are schizophrenic about such things, and
do not fit either category well (but there really aren't very many of them).

Personally, I like the Functional Grammar approach in which the 'deep
structure' is *unordered*, thus avoiding problems of typological primacy.
[All word order type are *equally* derived].

-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
From: koontz@cam.nist.gov (John E. Koontz X5180)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 30 Sep 92 20:31:34 GMT
Organization: National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD

In article <1992Sep29.031644.17442@athena.mit.edu>, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
|> In Welsh, according to Harlow
|> and Sproat, and in Irish, according to McCloskey, there is evidence that
|> the finite verb in a VSO sentence is related to an empty verb position
|> elsewhere in the sentence.  Evidence. Facts. Arguments.

|> >Perhaps. The very notion of a VP, although familiar to constituent analysis
|> >and American structuralism, might not have had the same prominence it
|> >has today. Isn't it ironical to see that the importance of VP's has led
|> >cohorts of generative grammarians into believing that there are internal
|> >and external arguments, whereas it has been argued recently that that
|> >distinction may be illusory? 
|> 
|> By whom?  What are some of the arguments?

It would be nice to see both arguments summarized, actually.

----
John E. Koontz (koontz@bldr.nist.gov)

Disclaimer:  Views and recommendations, express or implied, are my own, and
do not reflect the opinion or policy of my employers.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 05:35:12 GMT

pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>>>
>>>Forgive the rudeness, but please read the literature before passing off
>>>sociological speculation as fact.
>>
>>No one is trying to pass anything off on you.
>
>On me, no. On others, yes.

Oh David, if you'd just be pleasant....  Of course I've read Sproat.  We've
corresponded on occasion, and he has sent me material to read (the last thing
I have is marked AT&T Bell Labs - anyone know if he's still there?).

>I don't think there was invective from either side, but there was a lot of
>sneering from yours.

My apologies for putting you off in this way.

-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 29 Sep 92 10:39:37 GMT
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In article <1992Sep29.013948.13230@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>>>
>>>Given the already extremely anglocentric nature of generative grammar, it
>>>is a bit suspicious, isn't it?  Given the logical unity of predicate (V-O) and
>>>subject (S), isn't it clear why order-happy linguists would want them to
>>>be discrete and non-interleaved?  I hate to hear bad stuff said of Richard
>>>Sproat, though...
>>
>>Forgive the rudeness, but please read the literature before passing off
>>sociological speculation as fact.
>
>David, most of us here are able to conduct a civil and enjoyable discussion
>here without descending into invective.  No one is trying to pass anything
>off on you.

On me, no. On others, yes.  You persist in trivializing serious and
interesting research which, I suspect, you have not read (given your
remark concerning Sproat).  For the benefit of those who read sci.lang
but do not participate, I simply wanted to bring out that perspective on
the debate.  I don't think there was invective from either side, but
there was a lot of sneering from yours.  If I am wrong in my assumption
that it was ignorant sneering, I apologize, but it was sneering none the
less, and that is a poor substitute for discussion.  If you have an
alternative idea concerning VSO syntax, let's hear it.

That's it for me for now (unless some substance is injected in to the
discussion by someone),

-David Pesetsky