HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: needs washed
Date: 28 Sep 92 18:49:07 GMT
Reply-To: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com
Organization: Research & Technology

In article 14856@leland.Stanford.EDU, richwing@leland.Stanford.EDU (Rich Wingerter) writes:
>I'm from Ohio (I grew up in Canton) and "needs washed" sounds quite normal to
>me.  However, I doubt if it is that localized to one area, any more than "on
>line" is confined to New York.  Many people here (in SF Bay Area) say "on line"
>as well.  Of course, its probably just that people move around the country a
>lot these days.

You were under the Northern dialect boundary there.  That's a Midland dialect area.
Being from the Cleveland area, and having spent a lot of time in Canton, I was very
aware of the ill-formedness (for me) of the "needs washed" construction.  I first
became aware of it in college, and I conceived of it as an omission of "to be,"  as
in "This needs to be washed."  Probably, for most of my life, I unconsciously 
supplied the "to be" whenever people used that construction, which was pretty common
even in Cleveland.

-----
Disclaimer:  Opinions expressed above are not those of my employer.

    Rick Wojcik   (rwojcik@atc.boeing.com)   Seattle, WA
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: nsn@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Nick Nicholas)
Subject: Re: ASCII representation of IPA
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 07:21:01 GMT

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.

The nearest copy of the journal appears to be 1000km away from me, so
I suggest some other soul out there look into it, and report accordingly.

The fact that J.C.Wells is current president of the Universala Esperanto
Asocio does not influence me in the slightest :)

Some samples of transcription using the scheme in a Speech Processing
article I read:

German words	Transcription
nul		nUl
eins		aIns
zwei		tsvaI
zwo		tsvo:
drei		draI
vier		fi6
f"unf		fYnf
sieben		"zi:b@n
acht		axt
ende		"End@
wiederholen	vi:d6"hOl@n
rufumleitung	"ru"fUmlaiTUN
ebene		"e:b@n@

##############################################################################
# Der Mensch liegt in groesster Noth,      You are reading another .sig from
# Der Mensch liegt in groesster Pein;     the NICK NICHOLAS .sig Factory. Mail
# Je lieber moecht ich im Himmel sein.     [nsn@munagin.ee.mu.oz.au] for your
#    -- Des Knaben Wunderhorn, _Urlicht_   .sig suggestions. [Padding Space]
From: schiller@whorf (Eric Schiller)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: cyclical grammars
Date: 30 Sep 92 19:12:55 GMT
Article-I.D.: midway.1992Sep30.191255.10209
Reply-To: schiller@sapir.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations

In article <1992Sep30.060040.14597@midway.uchicago.edu>  
goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes:

> 
> To what extent would you have postlexical rules be permitted access to
> information such as syntactic category and word-internal morphological
> structure?
> 
It is not really a question of access in the autolexical approach, since  
each dimension is completely autonomous. Rather, the Interface compares  
the information from the various dimensions and checks for compatibility.  
There is no mechanism for the phonological component to access information  
to determine whether or not a rule can be triggered (in the present  
formulation of the thoery), it can only check the surface representations  
for acceptability.

But it is by no means clear that phonology operates in the same manner as  
all other components. It may be multistratal, as proposed by Goldsmith, in  
which case the interface could examine each of the levels. Or it may well  
be that phonology has direct links to the other dimensions. We are waiting  
for more phonologists to get involved with our framework, since at least  
here at UC, neither Jerry Sadock or I do phonology and are not really  
qualified to tackle these questions. The role of phonology is an open  
question, and we welcome all interest, proposals, and perhaps even one day  
a solution.

Given a concrete set of facts to account for, I might be able to twiddle  
my little gray cells into some sort of plausible account, but broad  
general statements are beyond my performance, and perhaps competence.

--
***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** ****
Eric Schiller                              schiller@sapir.uchicago.edu
Dept of Linguistics, Univ. of Chicago      schiller@whorf.uchicago.edu
From: oneil@husc10.harvard.edu (John O'Neil)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 3 Oct 92 21:12:54 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc10.ONEIL.92Oct3141254
Organization: Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services, Cambridge, MA
In-reply-to: rcj@engin.umich.edu's message of 3 Oct 92 14:45:03 GMT

In article <yz2-=F+@engin.umich.edu> rcj@engin.umich.edu (R o d Johnson) writes:
   In fact, it's very common for soi-disant VSO languages to exhibit an
   alternative SVO order.  See an article by John Myhill in Lingua from
   about 5 years ago on this.  I think Paul Hopper has done some work on
   it as well, and good grammars of "VSO" languages (Mark Durie's grammar
   of Acehnese, for example) usually have some discussion.  I think
   "pure" VSO languages are pretty rare.

Jamal Ouhalla's recent (1991) book, "Functional Categories and
Parametric Variation" discusses the differences among VSO languages,
including whether the languages allow the SVO order as an alternative.

Of course, those of you who believe that GB theory is an
anarchosynicalist plot will probably not want to read it.


--
John O'Neil
"Occasionally I believed I had thoughts of my own --  who does not now
 and then become the victim of such delusions?"
						-- Paul Feyerabend
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Subjectless verbs; was: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 3 Oct 92 07:49:36 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <2ACD2B6C.12513@news.service.uci.edu>, cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
> 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."

I'm not sure what you mean.  I hope you're not trying to say that Spanish
_llover_ acquires an empty subject pronoun as we do and then attaches
the thing to the verb.  That would be a lot of work to accomplish exactly
nothing!  But it can hardly be coincidental that a language with zero
subject anaphora will precisely permit zero-subject, as in _llueve_.
(I am consciously avoiding the term "prodrop".)

By the way: if 3.sg. pronouns are suffixed to the verb, as you say,
where do they appear?  The 3.sg. ending in most tenses is Null!

--Leo Connolly
From: reinpost@wsinis02.info.win.tue.nl (Reinier Post)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: subject + predicate (was: Re: SVO / VSO)
Date: 30 Sep 92 11:44:46 GMT
Reply-To: reinpost@info.win.tue.nl
Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands

In article <1992Sep29.214201.25109@trl.oz.au> jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:
>connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>
>>  And let's face it:
>>whatever justification for VP may have been presented later, the
>>original version is a rewrite (that famous word!) of the schoolmarmish
>>notion that the sentence consists of the "complete subject" and the
>>"complete predicate".

[...]

>Yes. The notion of predicate as what-is-left-once-you've-removed the
>subject-from-the-sentence is itself Anglocentric. I was taught,
>in French grade school and later that the predicate was the verb,
>around which hung subject and various complements. I  have noticed 
>that this also seemed to be the case in Russian teaching. Latin and
>Greek were explained to us in the same terms. Nor was that only
>for the benefits of pea-brained grade-school toddlers. Tesnieres
>used the same analysis.

At my school, we were taught that the notion

   sentence = subject + predicate 

stems from Aristoteles.

I suppose he was referring to the semantic structure of propositions, not
to case assignment or word order.

-- 
Reinier Post						reinpost@win.tue.nl
From: colin@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Colin Matheson)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Real-time parsers
Date: 2 Oct 92 12:40:53 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In a recent email discussion I had with Richard Goerwitz he wondered
if such a thing as a real-time parser exists.  My immediate answer was
negative, if it is assumed that a grammar and lexicon of any decent
size are being used.  I was thinking of systems such as the HP core
language engine and the Alvey NL grammar and parser, both of which are
large and (as far as I know) far from real-time.  I certainly find it
remarkably easy to produce a small grammar which results in my 24Meg
Sparcstation taking minutes to parse long strings (I typically have to
process strings of 30-40 words) or running out of Lisp stack space.

Any comments? (Apart from "learn to program/write grammars" - valid
though they be :-).  Would anyone like to suggest what the current
state of the art is?  I think it's fair to say that a common
assumption is that some of the speed problems are merely mechanical -
faster processors and bigger memories will fix them.  My experience is
that it's horrifyingly easy to expand a grammar and lexicon to fill
any available space when increasing the data coverage.

Many factors come in to play in this area, of course, such as the
relationship between coverage and ambiguity - as I said to Richard, a
reasonable rule of thumb is "the greater the coverage, the greater the
ambiguity".  Various methods of reducing ambiguity (with the
possibility of increasing speed by pruning unlikely hypotheses) have
been proposed.  Two examples would be Marcus' work on determinism and
the approach of Ted Briscoe and colleagues at Cambridge (England) in
adding probablities to LR parse tables.

Anyway, I'd be interested to know what's going on in this field.  I'll
summarise and post any email responses if you think that's more
appropriate.

Colin

-- 
Colin Matheson     Phone: +44 31 650 4413    | Centre for Cognitive Science
                   Fax:   +44 31 650 4587    | University of Edinburgh
JANET:  colin@cogsci.ed.ac.uk                | 2 Buccleuch Place
        or Colin.Matheson@edinburgh.ac.uk    | Edinburgh EH8 9LW Scotland
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: cockburn@edieng.enet.dec.com (Craig Cockburn)
Subject: Re: needs washed
Organization: Digital Equipment Co. Ltd., Reading, England
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1992 08:35:45 GMT


In article <1992Sep27.041016.14856@leland.Stanford.EDU>, richwing@leland.Stanford.EDU (Rich Wingerter) writes...
> 
>I'm from Ohio (I grew up in Canton) and "needs washed" sounds quite normal to
>me.  However, I doubt if it is that localized to one area, any more than "on
>line" is confined to New York.  Many people here (in SF Bay Area) say "on line"
>as well.  Of course, its probably just that people move around the country a
>lot these days.
> 
The construction "needs washed" etc is commonplace in Scotland. Probably
it was brought to the US by emigrating Scots. If you're wondering where
the expression is used, a good place to try would be areas with large
Scottish populations. Is the expression used much in Canada?

Craig

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Craig Cockburn, Digital Equipment Co. Ltd, Reading, England.     Suas
  Internet: cockburn@edieng.enet.dec.com                           leis
  UUCP:..!decwrl!edieng.enet.dec.com!cockburn                      a'
                                                                   Gha\idhlig!
  Views here are my own, and are not necessarily those of Digital
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 29 Sep 92 09:00:38 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1992Sep28.105812.3871@athena.mit.edu>, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
> Look, we might be phrasing it differently: "Wow! English is just like
> Welsh except the verb doesn't move", but the discovery would be just the
> same, if the same tools were being applied.  Remember that verb movement
> was one of the earliest discoveries of generative grammar, used by Emmon
> Bach and Manfred Bierwisch in the early 1960s to explain German word
> order, but the tools weren't there to drive the same point home for
> VSO languages.
> 
> 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?

And while I'm at it: for someone who dissertated on Hebrew and was (if
I remember rightly) hired to teach scientific French and German at
MIT, Chomsky seems to have made damned little use of this knowledge
in _Syntactic_Structures_.  Example: the rule which essentially
conflated tense and verb agreement, which isn't even right for
English (else we'd have to say _they was_ or _he were_) but sure
doesn't have any parallel in any language I know.  "Conflated":
possibly not the right term; the rule says we can have *either*
verb agreement *or* past tense, but not both.  And let's face it:
whatever justification for VP may have been presented later, the
original version is a rewrite (that famous word!) of the schoolmarmish
notion that the sentence consists of the "complete subject" and the
"complete predicate".  I never liked "complete predicates" when I
was in grade school in the early 50's, and I don't like them any
better when I see them in linguistic studies masquerading as VPs.

There!  That's my diatribe for the day.  Anyone care to contribute
another?

--Leo Connolly
From: fbr@astro.as.utexas.edu (F. B. Ray)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: German->English translation software
Date: 6 Oct 92 14:01:15 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: McDonald Obs. Advanced Projects Group
Originator: fbr@astro.as.utexas.edu

If you know of German to English translation software,
preferably public domain, please reply to me via Email.

Alternative:
I would be interested in purchasing such a program if it
runs in the Macintosh environment.

-- 
SNAILmail:         Frank B. Ray, McDonald Observatory
                   University of Texas at Austin
		   Austin, Texas 78712     Tel.: (512) 471-3334
**ELECTRIC**mail:  {backbones}!{noao,cs.utexas.edu}!utastro!fbr   (UUCP)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee)
Subject: Re: syllables (was Re: phonological constraints)
Organization: University of Hawaii
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 23:19:17 GMT

In article <1992Sep24.142130.15548@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
}... Anyone
}care to firm up the level in the grammar at which they think syllabification
}comes in?  Is it lexical in German - is this the assertion?

To the last question:
If lexical means "present among the forms of their language people must
memorize", then no, since the syllabification under discussion would be
predictable from morphemic composition and so needn't be memorized.  If
lexical means "present among the (phonemic forms of) words of the
language", then yes, since to influence the allophony, the syllabification
must be present in the phonemic form of the word (under the assumption of
locality).

--
Greg Lee <lee@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Real-time parsers
Date: 3 Oct 92 16:56:23 GMT
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations

colin@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Colin Matheson) writes:

>In a recent email discussion I had with Richard Goerwitz he wondered
>if such a thing as a real-time parser exists.
                               ^
                               |
                               + --- natural language


-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: amunn@gibbs.oit.unc.edu (Alan Munn)
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Organization: University of North Carolina
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 17:05:23 GMT

In article <peeters.717657429@tasman> peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters) writes:
>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. 

YES YES, but now there's a shift underway to Germano-centrism (or is
that Turko-centrism, or Hindi-centrism, or Korean-centrism?) because
Kayne is saying that all languages are underlyingly SOV with word
order being determined by how far you move the verb....

Not to mention how we had better get rid of hierarchy in language
because some think that hierarchical systems are inherently oppressive
(cf Marie-Odile Junker, Topic/Comment NNLT 10 (1992))

Alan


>Dr Bert Peeters
>Bert.Peeters@modlang.utas.edu.au



-- 
Alan Munn                     <amunn@gibbs.oit.unc.edu>
Dept. of Linguistics, CB# 3155 UNC Chapel Hill NC 27599
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: msanseve@sol.UVic.CA (Mary Sanseverino)
Subject: Canadian Computer Assisted Language Learning Conference
Summary: Call for Papers for 2nd Canadian Computer Assisted Lang. Learning Conf.
Keywords: Computer Assisted Language Learning
Organization: University of Victoria
Date:  1 Oct 92 19:26:43 GMT

This is a CALL for PAPERS and Conference Announcement



		THIS IS A CALL FOR CANADIAN SUBMISSIONS.

			CCALL FOR PAPERS
                              CCALL2
                        April 30 - May 2 1993
                      University of Victoria, BC

The first national conference on CALL in Canada was held at the Universities
of Guelph and York in 1989.  Its success in bringing together about 250
creators, users, thinkers and teachers who were just as curious encouraged
us to plan even then for a second CCALL

As well as presentations by CALL experts from across Canada, there will be

                - Keynote speakers of international, national stature.
                - Poster sessions for CALL projects & presentations
                - Market Place of latest hardware, software from
                  major international & regional suppliers
                - SIGs "Happy Hour"

You are invited to submit a 100-word proposal for a 30 min. presentation
(10 - 15 mins of which should be allowed for discussion), on any aspect of
Computer - Assisted Language Learning.  You may also reserve a following
poster session for a more practical demonstration of your project.

        - grammar, vocabulary, syntax           - authoring programs
        - non-Roman alphabets                   - expert systems
        - collaborative development             - multimedia
        - integrating CALL & curriculum         - future watch

Graduate students and public school teachers are especially encouraged to
submit proposals.

Proposals will be assessed by a national committee and will be submitted with
the grant application in late October.  Proposals may be submitted in English
or French.

A one - page cv including your degrees, position, institutional affiliation,
relevant publications and academic activities is also required for grant
submission.

Submissions may be made electronically (using a standard wp program on
diskette or e - mail), by FAX or by regular mail.  Please include your
address for all three, where available (This is important, in case of
follow - up questions).

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS TO BE IN OUR HANDS IS THURSDAY, OCT. 15 1992

You will be notified a.s.a.p. thereafter if you are to be on the programme
and receive a preliminary schedule of proceedings, with other details on
registration and accommodation as they are available.

The organizing Committee intends to publish a selection of the
presentations from the Conference.


THE LANGUAGE CENTRE             Electronically at:              FAX:
University of Victoria          LANGCEN@UVVM.UVIC.CA      (604)721-8778
Box 3045
Victoria BC  V8W 3P4
ATTN: CCALL2

OR YOU MAY CALL IN YOUR SUBMISSION TO (604) 721-8294
From: rec@nobska.Idbsu.EDU (Robert E. Conant)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Russian->English Xlation S/W
Date: 5 Oct 92 20:49:24 GMT
Reply-To: rec@nobska.Idbsu.EDU (Robert E. Conant)
Organization: Boise State University

I'm looking for Russian to English translation software.  Does anyone
have experience
or recommendations for commercial or public domain stuff?  Any help
would be 
appreciated.

Bob
From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 29 Sep 92 16:50:49 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <1992Sep29.031644.17442@athena.mit.edu>, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:

[claims that TG is anglo-centric]

> I'm going to stop fighting this particular sci.lang battle, because the
> discussion is getting a bit silly.  No one makes the claim that any
> language is a deviation from any norm.  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.

In phonology, of course, we've until recently been assuming
that languages are underlyingly agglutinating, and that long before
Chomsky & Halle... Does that mean we've been regarding agglutinating
languages as norms?  Etc. etc.  (Note that the dominant European
languages are not especially agglutinating...)

[...]
-- 
********************************** +.............................+
*- 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