HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: NegV vs. NegQ
Date: 10 Apr 92 08:36:47 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <12100@tamsun.tamu.edu>, e343mh@tamuts.tamu.edu (Michael Hand) writes:
> David A. Johns writes:
>      >My position is that the data you are using are not legitimate.  All
>      >the theory in the world is of no use if you can't decide what it's a
>      >theory of.
> 
> Let me introduce some terminology: an s-interpretation (semantical 
> interpretation, reading, etc.) is an interpretation of a sentence 
> generated by a compositional semantics on the basis of the syntactic 
> structure (LF, s-structure, whatever you like) of the sentence.  
> A p-interpretation is what a hearer might take to be the "intended 
> content" of the utterance...
> 	Now, you seem to think this is a *datum*: negQ is an 
> s-interpretation (maybe the only s-interpretation) of the sentence 
> in question.
> 	But this isn't a datum.  The datum is that negQ is the 
> preferred p-interpretation.  But no *data* require that all 
> p-interpretations be s-interpretations.  This is an issue about 
> how to cut up semantics and pragmatics in the theory.  My suggestion 
> was that the preferred p-interpretation is not an s-interpretation, 
> and that the only s-interpretation is negV.  Then pragmatics explains 
> why the preferred p-interpretation is negQ despite the semantical fact.
> 	You can't argue against my suggestion by merely insisting, as if 
> it is a matter of data alone, that negQ is an s-interpretation.  You
> and I agree that it's the preferred p-interpretation -- we agree on the 
> data.  The theoretical issue is whether this preferred p-interpretation 
> is an s-interpretation, and that's a highly theoretical question.
> ...  You seem to think that the data settle
> the question, but that's the mistake I'm diagnosing: data + theory
> settle the question.  Data + different theories settle the question
> in different ways.  Data alone don't even come close.)

No one could ever claim that data solved all (or even *any*) linguistic
questions by themselves.  But your theory of s-interpretation is
simply impossible if it requires, as you claim, an interpretation of
certain sentences which is simply wrong.

Further, it is far from clear what sort of interpretation has produced
the universally accepted negQ interpretation.  You're trying to save
your theory by claiming that it's a p-interpretation.  That remains
to be shown.  What evidence to you have to support this view?

Lacking such evidence, many of us will claim: any theory which does
not yield negQ *as an s-interpretation* is preposterous on its face
and should be abandoned.

--Leo Connolly
From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Summary: Early alphabets
Date: 13 Apr 92 13:00:24 GMT
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department

In article <1992Apr13.064950.21987@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:

			....................

>Actually, the early Greek alphabet had 27; the classical alphabet as it has
>come down to us from Ionic lost some of these because they either were not
>useful in Ionic (qoppa) or represented sounds that had disappeared from Ionic
>in its historical development (wau, AKA digamma).  The last, san, was retained
>in Doric alphabets at the expense of sigma, just as sigma was retained at the
>expense of san in Ionic alphabets.

There were many alphabets in use for various versions of Greek before it
was "settled."  The settled alphabet had 24; the 27 characters used for
numerals used 3 older letters, and there were undoubtedly many more
available if necessary.  Only later was there the deliberate adoption
of an alphabet anywhere, for any language.  Gradual changes in custom
was more the rule.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)  
{purdue,pur-ee}!pop.stat!hrubin(UUCP)
From: amunn@macbeth.umd.edu (Alan Munn)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Method of learning 17 languages
Date: 11 Apr 92 15:54:41 GMT
Distribution: sci
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park

In article <1992Apr11.074331.7011@s1.gov> lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
>In article <35012@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> daj@reef.cis.ufl.edu (David A. Johns) writes:
>>In article <2786@sersun1.essex.ac.uk> tysoj@essex.ac.uk (Tyson J R) writes:
>
>:# As to the questions of linguistic theory and ethnocentricity I
>:# differ again from the judgement I am imputing to Scott: I am afraid
>:# that I agree with Chomsky on the relative value of the narrow but
>:# insightful versus the broad but superficial.  I wish that we saw
>:# more work like Jelinkek's recent studies of Salish and recent
>:# studies by Evans in Mayali, but there is also little doubt that
>:# Universal Grammar proceeds best from people delving deeper and
>:# deeper into what they know well (language wise).
>
>:I have trouble grasping how this could possibly be true.  Unless you
>:believe some specially gifted researchers have access to their own
>:underlying abilities independently of the language they speak, there
>:is no way for a specialist to distinguish what is universal from what
>:is peculiar to his own language, is there?
>
>	Count me in on this one also.
>
>	If trying to analyze a language one knows well is the way to
>go, then it surely must be possible to have someone whose native
>language is not English to try to do a Chomskyan analysis on it.
>Surely there must be some noteworthy linguists around that do not have
>English as their native language; and if this is not a reasonable
>procedure, then why not?

The following is a list of people who come to mind, and the languages
they speak and work on.  I've just given one name per language; for
most there are quite a few more names.  Are all these people
'noteworthy'?  Well, they've probably all uncovered facts and
generalisations about their languages which weren't known before.

Saito - Japanese, Huang - Chinese, Raposo - Portuguese, Rizzi -
Italian, Hoekstra - Dutch, Sportiche - French, Aoun - Arabic, Borer
- Hebrew, Torrego - Spanissh, Haider - German, Mahajan - Hindi,
Mohanan - Malayalam, Yang - Korean, Picallo - Catalan, Thrainsson -
Icelandic, Platzack - Swedish, Kiss - Hungarian



>/Loren


Alan
<amunn@umd5.umd.edu>
From: djbpitt@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David J Birnbaum)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Date: 13 Apr 92 20:28:14 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

In article <1992Apr13.172155.34811@spss.com> markrose@spss.com 
(Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

>>>For good reasons.  All languages are spoken, while only a minority are
>>>written; you learn a spoken language before learning a written one;
>>>writing loses much of what goes on in speech; more speaking is done 
>>>than writing; writing is heavily influenced by speech; writing is
>>>more prestigious so speech needs a little theoretical boost.
>>
>>This is not true.  
>
>Which of these six statements are you disagreeing with?

All of them. Although none of these is completely false, none is absolutely
true.

>All language are spoken. 

ASL is not spoken. 

>You learn a spoken language before learning a written one.

Monolingual ASL users do not learn a spoken language at all.

Additionally, whether people learn a spoken language first
is irrelevant in determining whether there are any languages
that are primarily written; bilingual or diglossic lin-
guistic cultures where people speak one language and write
another are not unknown. 

>Writing loses much of what goes on in speech.

And speech loses much of what is recorded in writing.

>More speaking is done than writing.

This is true, but irrelevant.  More Chinese is spoken than Bulgarian,
but Bulgarian is not dependent on or secondary to Chinese.

>Writing is heavily influenced by speech.

And speech by writing.
 
>Writing is more prestigious so speech needs a little theoretical
>boost.

I have no idea what the second clause here is supposed to mean.

--David
=======================================================================
Professor David J. Birnbaum         djbpitt@vms.cis.pitt.edu [Internet]
The Royal York Apartments, #802     djbpitt@pittvms.bitnet   [Bitnet]
3955 Bigelow Boulevard              voice: 1-412-687-4653
Pittsburgh, PA  15123  USA          fax:   1-412-624-9714
From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: What is a dialect?
Date: 13 Apr 92 21:11:07 GMT
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine

In article <1992Apr10.200823.9953@kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca> userisra@mts.ucs.ualberta.ca (Mark Israel) writes:
|
|   Written Mandarin and written Cantonese are virtually identical.  
|That seems to imply that there is a one-to-one mapping between Mandarin
|words and Cantonese words.

No, I'm afraid this does not follow.  The reading of written Chinese
does not necessarily quite follow the local 'dialect', it is rather
related to it as Church Latin is to Italian.

Now the fact that all Chinese learn almost the *same* writtern language,
rather than learning to write thier native tongue makes it *seem* lke the
languages are more similar than they actually are.

This is also the source of the 'dialectal' variants of written Chinese,
they are attempts to use the Classical Chinese orthography to represent
the local 'dialect'.  These writings show significant variance from
one form of chinese to another, except that they use the same *characters*,
so the overall graphic appearance is the same.  But the same is true of
English and Dutch.
-- 
---------------
uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)
From: cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: feminine as the generic case
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 13 Apr 92 18:07:36 GMT

In article <5838@charon.cwi.nl> aeb@cwi.nl (Andries Brouwer) writes:
>sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>
>>By the way, is not "m{nniska" not feminine in Danish?
>
>No, Danish says "mennisket" - it is neuter.
>Moreover, Danish does not have a feminine gender.

Speaking of odd genders (I *had* to mention this), it always struck me
as really perverse that the words "verga" and "barba" were feminine in
Spanish.  Anybody know why?

Regards,
Janis C.

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: house@helios.usq.EDU.AU (ron house)
Subject: Re: Devanagari: Syllabary or Alphabet?
Organization: University of Southern Queensland
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 02:59:19 GMT

>_pancam_: Do Hindi-speaking kids really learn hundreds of syllabic
>"basic units"?  Why are foreigners only taught forty-odd letters plus
>a few diacritics and ligatures?

How about: because Devanagari is a proper alphabet, through and through?
The assumption of a vowel in a consonant really amounts to little more
than saying that the base vowel has a null representation.

--

Ron House.                 USQ
(house@helios.usq.edu.au)  Toowoomba, Australia.
From: arild@milan.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de (Arild Hestvik)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Animal Grammar
Date: 14 Apr 92 18:55:52 GMT
	<ARILD.92Apr14164413@milan.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de>
	<29EB1A80.22713@noiro.acs.uci.edu>
Reply-To: arild@adler.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de
Organization: IMS, University of Stuttgart, Germany

In article <29EB1A80.22713@noiro.acs.uci.edu> cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:

   [...stuff deleted...]

   No, I'm not saying that animals are "just like people."  But I think
   that simply saying, "They're just parroting" or something like that, as
   if they are simple little (or big) machines, is an incredible
   oversimplification. 

   Regards,
   Janis C.

Nothing of what I said, at least, implied that animals are stupid. All I
said was that animal communication tells us NOTHING about human language!
I'm sure animals are capable of non-instinctive action and even thought,
for that matter. 
-A Hestvik
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: alderson@elaine36.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: -ze and -the in Attic Greek
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@elaine36.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University LOTS Computer Facility
Distribution: sci
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 92 19:02:31 GMT

In article <ARA.92Apr4122710@camelot.ai.mit.edu>, ara@zurich (Allan Adler) writes:
>Stanlet Friesen says that -ze and -the are postpositions. Rich Alderson
>says that according to Chantraine they are adverbial formants, which turn
>the nouns they are attached to into adverbs.
>
>Whom should I believe  ?

In his discussion of -de, Chantraine refers to it as a postposed particle, and
goes on to state how it forms directional adverbs.  So both Stanley and I are
correct, and you should believe both of us.  (1/2 :)
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_
From: steiny@steiny.UUCP (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Summary: Only two inflected
Date: 12 Apr 92 16:57:04 GMT

> 
> Hold it.  I don't know about Latin, but I have been taught that
> English has sixteen tenses.
> 
	There are two inflected tenses in English , present and past.   Future 
is paraphrased.     There really cannot be more than three tenses because
there is only now, the future, and the past.  Maybe some languages use
a different metaphor for time, but not Latin.  I think you are confusing 
tense with mood and aspect.   For instance, the subjunctive is a mood
that is refelected with a verb inflection, it is not a tense, though 
it sort so seems like one.    Mood in English is expressed with 
"helping verbs" like "should," "will," "might," and more.  

	Another quality of verbs is "aspect."     That is whether the 
action is completed, progressing, iterative, and other distinctions.   
For instance, "she had run" means she finished running in the past.  "She 
was running" means she was running in the past, but she might still be
running.   

	Because English uses "helping verbs" to express tense, mood, and
aspect, it is unusually rich in distinction and it is hard to compare to
other langauges.

Don Steiny
-- 
Don Steiny
Don Steiny Software
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
(408) 425-0382
From: dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Date: 9 Apr 92 04:36:27 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

In article <1992Apr8.183008.26240@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
>In article <204596@unix.cis.pitt.edu>, dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate) writes:

[Scott Horne expressed indignation that the long 's' that occurs in several
 languages over a span of many centuries is to be treated as a "glyphic
 variant" (i.e. alternative letterform, same letter) of modern small 's'.]

><You lost me here.  Why isn't 'great s' a glyphic variant?
>
>Why isn't capital `S' a glyphic variant?

I don't think your question is well-formed, but I didn't do much better, so
I'll try again.

Why do you think long 's' is a separate letter from 's', and not just a 
different way of drawing the same letter?  Would you make the same argument
for, say, 

	       -   		_
	     /   \|           /  \
	     |    |   vs.       _|
	     |    |           /  |
	      \__/|           \__\

?  (Those are meant to be lower-case 'a's...)

Saying that "capital 'S' is a glyphic variant" doesn't mean anything, because
capital 'S' is not a particular letterform/glyph (it's a family of them), and
you haven't specified which glyph it's supposed to be a variant *of*.  It's
certainly not a glyphic variant of lower-case 's', but that's because the two
are not even remotely interchangable in use.



-- 
          David M. Tate            |"The man who hath no music in himself
     dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu       | Nor is not moved by concord of sweet sound
  A poem should be dumb, / As old  | Is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils
 medallions to the thumb.-MacLeish | 	Shakespeare, "Merchant of Venice", A.V
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Date: 17 Apr 92 16:55:30 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: SPSS Inc.

In article <1992Apr17.080307.23297@news.Hawaii.Edu> jmu@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (James M. Unger) writes:
>In article <1992Apr16.145737.10539@cbnewsi.cb.att.com> hlin@cbnewsi.cb.att.com (hua.t.lin) writes:
>>
>>Let me put this question to you: Why is it that spoken chinese
>>dialects (or languages as some prefer here) differ only little bit from
>>each other, as compared to classical chinese which sticks out like a sore
>>thumb from all other chinese dialects/languages? [...]
>
>Good question.  The answer, in my opinion, is that the earliest forms of
>written Chinese were used by persons who followed reading rules whereby
>unwritten syllables were supposed to be supplied by the reader.  [...]
>As dialects diverged and the number of literate
>individuals increased, these reading traditions fell into disuse:
>literati began treating wenyan as an unspoken language.  [...]
>
>Note also that the punch of your argument depends crucially on the
>(correct) observation that a proto-Chinese reconstruction, UNLIKE classical
>Chinese, must have contained quite a few dissyllabic words; this is because
>the dialects/languages on which the reconstruction must be based themselves
>contain quite a few dissyllabic words--precisely the fact denied way back
>at the beginning of this string.

The traditional explanation is that sound changes have eliminated many
phonetic distinctions, with the result that many words that used to be
distinct are now pronounced the same.  This motivated the use of extra
syllables to avoid the resulting ambiguity.

There's good evidence for these sound changes.  For instance, there are
25 characters all pronounced jian4 in one modern dictionary.  In the
Qie4yun4 dictionary (AD 601), these characters represent 18 distinct
syllables.

I don't see the advantage to your alternative explanation, and I see 
several problems with it.  One is the rather bizarre postulation of unwritten 
syllables in the ancient texts.  It's as if I postulated that, because
the possessive is indicated with _de_ in French, Italian, Spanish, and
Portuguese, there must have been a spoken but not written _de_ before
the genitive in Latin.

Another is the lesser frequency of disyllabic words in Cantonese.  By the
traditional explanation, there's less need for them, because Cantonese
has more distinct syllables (~ 1800 as opposed to ~ 1300 in Mandarin).
In your theory, you need to explain either how Cantonese lost a bunch of
disyllables, or how Mandarin created them (but if it did so, what's the
point of your theory at all?).

Also, should there not be, somewhere in the Chinese grammatical works,
a reference to this practice of supplying unwritten syllables?
For that matter the wen2yan2 *was* spoken; there always existed reading
pronunciations of it; poetry was rhymed; it heavily influenced drama
and storytelling; and in none of these do we see a remnant of this
hypothetical practice of inserting unwritten syllables.
From: jmu@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (James M. Unger)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Date: 11 Apr 92 17:41:55 GMT
Article-I.D.: news.1992Apr11.174155.665
Organization: University of Hawaii

In article <44833@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>Mathematics uses an essentially infinite set of pronouns,
>which can even be restricted, and one can even have difficulties at
>a lecture because the spoken expression of these, and of standard 
>notation, is quite different from language to language.  A chemist
>can write down a structure which is quite clear to another chemist,
>even en if they might have difficulty introducing themselves. Greektch
>typesetter could set this in type without understanding a word of it
>orally.  
>
The point is that you cannot express using mathematical notation everything
you can express using, say, English.  Strings of mathematical symbols are
logographic inasmuch as they can be "read" differently in different
(spoken) languages, and the set of all well-formed strings may be
"infinite"; they obviously are not, however, coextensive with the
permissible strings of any natural language.  In order to merit being
called a writing SYSTEM, it is necessary that the entity in question be (1)
coextensive with a natural language and (2) practically learnable/usable by
ordinary individuals.  Military codes (NOT ciphers) come close to meeting
condition (1) but certainly not condition (2).  Compared with Mandarin
writing, they are far closer to being genuine logographic writing SYSTEMS.
The fact that thousands of Chinese do learn how to read Mandarin whereas
few human beings (if any) ever succeed in memorizing codebooks that
approach the size of complete lexica shows that Mandarin writing is NOT a
good example of a lographic writing SYSTEM even though any one particular
Chinese character may, in a given orthographic context, may be legitimately
said to function as a logogram.


--
J. M. Unger, Chairman
Department of E. Asian Languages & Literatures
University of Hawaii
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Optative and Admirative
Date: 8 Apr 92 15:38:12 GMT
Distribution: sci
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Apr7.161905.15300@88opensi.88open.ORG> sf@88opensi.UUCP (Steven Finney) writes:
>In article <92094.160925IO11412@MAINE.MAINE.EDU> IO11412@MAINE.MAINE.EDU writes:
>>Bulgarian has a mood that is used to describe an event which is known
>>to the narrator indirectly <...>

It is known in English as renarrated mood.

>I believe this is not uncommon in languages of that geographical region; e.g.
>Turkish (I think) has it as well.

I don't think it is not too common.  But Turkish has it, of course,
and that's the only reason why Bulgarian has it as well.
-- 
---- --- -- -  Long Live the Rose and the Heather!  - -- --- ----
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