HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: lucas@WATSON.IBM.COM ("Bruce Lucas")
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: What for
Date: 3 Sep 92 15:55:37 GMT

But note that the two sentences

Why did you go to the supermarket?
What did you go to the supermarket for?

are not completely identical; consider their negations

Why didn't you go to the supermarket?
What didn't you go to the supermaket for?

don't seem to mean the same thing.  In fact, the second one seems rather
odd - it seems to presuppose that you bought a lot of things, rather than
that you didn't go at all.  By the way, interpeting these sentences seems
to require some rather specific world knowledge, namely that generally
one goes to a supermarket for only one reason (to get something), but that
there may be many kinds of reasons for not going to the supermarket.

Bruce Lucas
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 1992 00:57:23 GMT

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" [...] 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.

Maybe not to the professional ornithologist, but to the professional
cognitive psychologist,surely it is interesting.


>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.

Of course I agree with you totally. My nefarious purpose in starting
this discussion was to see if I could draw out from anyone a reason why
Lakovian "Cognitive" linguistics is a challenge to Chomskian syntax, as
Lakoff (at least publically) has certainly claimed. Even giving Lakoff
the benefit of the doubt concerning ostriches (which is more than I did
in my earlier messages), I don't see the challenge.

A syntactican has sharp boundaries in his nomenclature (one hopes) for
the same reason an ornithologist does.  But what is important is the
fact that syntax actually gets explained by theories with sharp
boundaries.  In other words, it's not merely a convention or a mistake
to eschew prototypes in syntax -- it seems to be the right way to do it.
At least that's what the field seems to show.  So even if a syntactician
can understand some notion like "a prototypical DP" or in a moment of
sloppiness refers to "some version of government", real explanation so
far never seems to call upon these notions.  I'm talking about
explanations of what people do, not linguistics articles. Now if there's
a real challenge from "Cognitive" linguistics, there must be arguments
out there that indicate where syntax needs prototypes or similar
apparatus.  I want to know where those arguments are.

-David Pesetsky
From: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: What for?
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 3 Sep 92 06:12:13 GMT

In article <1992Sep3.011921.13585@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu> rickertj@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu (John Rickert) writes:
>
>     Something seems to be odd with the expression "what for?"  While it
>does often mean "why, for what reason, for what cause," it seems not to
>be acceptable idiomatically in certain sentences.  We might well say, for
>example, "Why don't you write me?" but probably wouldn't say, "What don't
>you write me for?"  When I thought of other instances where the what-for
>construction sounded odd, I noticed the sentences were all negative ones.
>
>     Ideas?  Comments?

Only an Obcomment:

Of course there was going to be at least ONE person for whom this
construction didn't sound really odd.  I'm not about to call it a
feature of my own dialect, but I don't think I'd trip over it if I heard
it.

What don't you do that for?

Hmm.  A little unusual, perhaps, but nothing that would make me block my
ears.  Of course, after you repeat anything to yourself several times,
it starts sounding okay . . .

I do admit, though, that the negative sentences sound stranger than the
others.

>John Rickert					...up with which I will
>rickertj@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu		not put.
>							Churchill				
Awaiting further comments,
Janis
From: sampson@nosc.mil (Charles H. Sampson)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english,soc.culture.usa
Subject: Re: Problem with 'they' (etc) as 3p singular common gender pron.
Date: 2 Sep 92 16:05:36 GMT
Organization: Computer Sciences Corporation


     In this discussion a number of people seem to have characterized
this use of "they" as an attempt to express sex uncertainty in inpover-
ished English, which has the terrible disadvantage of not being gender
inflected.  In my limited knowledge of languages, citing the lack of
gender inflection seems to be off the mark.  Some gender inflected lan-
guages have only a masculine and feminine, so they have no way to ex-
press sex uncertainty either.  German has a neuter, but it's a gender
in its own right.  You can't switch from masculine or feminine to neuter
to express sex uncertainty.

     Does anyone know of a language that has a "apparently gramatical"
way of expressing sex uncertainty?  By "apparently gramatical" I mean
a way that does not appear to conflict with any other grammar rules of
the language.

				Charlie
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 19:00:49 GMT

In article <1992Sep3.143452.6705@news.columbia.edu> blz1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Betsy L Zucker) writes:
>
>Pesetsky's persistent questioning of mental representation /
>behavior is a good question but he's putting up a straw dog --
>I'm not aware that anyone has claimed what he is arguing against.
>Neither Lakoff nor Rosch argue that prototypes are direct mental
>representations, as the quotes below make abundantly clear (my
>emphasis added):
>
>       "Such [prototype] effects are superficial.  THEY SHOW
>	NOTHING DIRECT ABOUT THE NATURE OF CATEGORIZATION."
>		-- Lakoff,1987:136
>
>       "to speak of a prototype at all is simply a convenient
>       grammatical fiction; what is really referred to are
>       judgments of degree of prototypicality...PROTOTYPES DO NOT
>       CONSTITUTE A THEORY OF REPRESENTATION FOR CATEGORIES."
>		-- Rosch,1978, quoted in Lakoff, ibid

Striking quotations, but does Lakoff take his own advice to heart?  If
so, whence all the fuss about "cognitive linguistics" and all his
conclusions about language?

-David Pesetsky
From: v187ef4y@ubvmsd.cc.buffalo.edu (Patrick J Crowe)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Date: 27 Aug 92 14:44:00 GMT
Organization: University at Buffalo
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41

In article <1992Aug26.160927.12506@ils.nwu.edu>, pautler@ils.nwu.edu
 (David Pautler) writes...
>In article <1992Aug26.120018.9260@athena.mit.edu>, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu
> (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>> There's another way you can get the appearance of prototypicality
>> without the essence: the answer to a question is "yes" (e.g. is an
>> ostrich a bird, is the Pope a bachelor), but there is some other
>> property of ostriches or Popes that comes much closer to defining them,
>> so that the property being questioned is not exactly salient to the
>> categorizer.
>> 
>> So there really is a difference.
> 
>How does this avoid prototypicality?  One property is still "closer" than
>another to the "central" meaning of the category.  The fact that we have
>misidentified the prototype here doesn't explain away the observation of
>*a* prototype effect.
> 
[hope I didn't mess up the citations with my editing!]
Correct me if I'm wrong (gently, please!), but isn't it part of the prototype
approach that the prototype is a member of the category?  Is it really possible
to get everyone who uses the category "bird" to agree on exactly which is the
prototypical bird?  Is there really any individual who is the prototypical
bachelor?  Am I making any sense?

Pat Crowe
Dis: If you claim my views represent the opinions of my department, you'll be
laughed out of acedemia.
From: evan@hpl.hp.com (Evan Kirshenbaum)
Subject: Re: New (beta) ASCII representation of IPA
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1992 01:18:15 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard

It just got pointed out to me that I am going to be out of the office
until next Thursday, so I won't be able to mail/post the spec until
then.

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:6710 alt.usage.english:6913 soc.culture.usa:6848
From: 00hfstahlke@bsu-ucs.uucp
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english,soc.culture.usa
Subject: Re: Problem with 'they' (etc) as 3p singular comm
Date: 25 Aug 92 18:28:08 GMT

What dialects and registers of English have been influenced by
either nineteenth century prescriptivist generic "he" or late
twentieth century avoidance of generic "he"?  PC speech and PC
bashing aside, I've read enough of the literature on the social
and psychological effects of the prescriptive generic "he" to
include those issues in my grammar courses and to avoid its use
in formal speech and most of my writing, formal or otherwise. 
But I'm not consistent in it because I do not speak a generic
"he" avoidance dialect natively.  Nor does anyone I know.  

Just as the generic "he" rule was a prescriptive superimposition
on formal, educated English, the socially motivated "he"-
avoidance rules are also a superimposition on formal, educated
English.  There should be no problem with this.  If we agree to
respect gender sensitivities, a proposition that doesn't strike
me as unreasonable, then in appropriate registers we will speak
and write accordingly.  I doubt, though, that many of us can
maintain this register when cheering on the Cubs, after too much
beer, or in the heat of an argument with one's spouse.  As this
thread has shown repeatedly, informal registers and non-standard
dialects have no problem with "they" for generic singulars and
seldom do much to avoid use of a generic singular pronoun.

Similarly, I suspect that the formal use of pronoun case is just
such superimposition as well.  How many of us would say,
casually,

It is she.

instead of 

It's her.

Wh-relatives are probably a more highly grammaticized example of
an earlier superimposition.  As I understand it, wh-words started
being used as relative pronouns around the tenth century and
arrived at their current grammar sometime during Early Modern
English.  However, the prescriptive rule on "that" versus "who",
namely, non-human vs. human, isn't even worth wasting time on in
freshman English.  And non-standard dialects sometimes exhibit
interesting uncertainties as to when or whether to use wh-words. 
Examples like

We were going to go on a picnic Saturday, which it rained.

abound, and "which" and "what" find much more frequent usage than
"who", and "whom"'s doom has been sealed, if it ever lived.

I suspect the argument over generic pronouns will continue as long as their
usage remains a feature of a formal register, and I doubt if any of us will be
around when children start learning the gender-sensitive language of the
Associated Press style sheet.
From: lucas@WATSON.IBM.COM ("Bruce Lucas")
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: compounds
Date: 1 Sep 92 03:08:37 GMT

> As I understand it, in English there is no difference in pronunciation
> between "road bed", "road-bed", and "roadbed"

I don't think this is quite true: the stress is a little different
between "roadbed" (first syllable stressed) and "road bed" (more equal
stress, and perhaps a slight pause).  I don't think this is the case
for all English compounds; on the other hand, some display this
distinction even more: I believe I would pronounce
"I live in the white house" differently from "I live in the Whitehouse",
in the same way as the difference between "roadbed" and "road bed".
I would conjecture that there must be some rules for intra-word stress
and some others for inter-word stress, and which are applied depend
on whether the words are taken to form a compound or not.

Bruce Lucas
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6945 alt.usage.english:7121 soc.culture.usa:7064
From: roger@crux.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: 2 Sep 92 18:03:17 GMT
Reply-To: roger@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig)
Organization: Princeton University
Originator: news@nimaster

In article <1992Sep2.160536.28325@nosc.mil> sampson@nosc.mil (Charles H. Sampson) writes:
>     In this discussion a number of people seem to have characterized
>this use of "they" as an attempt to express sex uncertainty in inpover-
>ished English, which has the terrible disadvantage of not being gender
>inflected.  In my limited knowledge of languages, citing the lack of
>gender inflection seems to be off the mark.  Some gender inflected lan-
>guages have only a masculine and feminine, so they have no way to ex-
>press sex uncertainty either.  German has a neuter, but it's a gender
>in its own right.  You can't switch from masculine or feminine to neuter
>to express sex uncertainty.

I don't think that's the point of the no-gender-inflection argument.

Gender-inflected languages make it conceptually easy to separate the
idea of gender from that of sex.  As I said, nobody thinks of genitalia
when hearing "der Tisch" or "la table."  

This separation does *not* happen in English.  Accordingly, there is
confusion when one  gender or the other is used to denote the generic.
In gender-inflected languages, the generic does not cause confusion
because the separation of the gender idea from the sex idea is sufficient.

Roger
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: What for?
Date: 4 Sep 92 11:45:26 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1992Sep3.215845.733@math.ucla.edu>, alex@luna.math.ucla.edu (Alex Langley) writes:
> 
> Does anyone know why/how_come/what...for "why" replaced "wherefore"?
> Isn't "why" Old English "hwy", the dative case form of "hwaem" (Mod. Eng.
> "whom") or something like that?  (My OE book isn't present, sorry.)

If I'm not mistaken, _hwaem_ is dative, _hwy_ instrumental.

--Leo Connolly
From: t9114148@phillip.edu.au
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: no-self-talk
Keywords: thinking gone wwrong
Date: 28 Aug 92 09:33:03 GMT
Organization: RMIT (Bundoora Campus)

hello,
	I have this problem. I know people that do not think
using words at all except when you talk with them. They think
using images and inspiration so I am not surprised that they
are quite impulsive, emotional, illogical and unorganised.
	I read in books that people are supposed to verbalise
silently to themselves because humans have that advantage over
animals. That is why we are so intelligent.
	How is that there are people that have these autistic
tendencies and what can be done to change them out of this
style of thinking? Sometimes I wonder if they can think at all
or are aware. 
	In particular, I know a person who has spent 20 years of
his life not uttering a word to himself in the back of his mind
and now has realised that he is different to most people. 
Apart from not having had the chance to learn to internalise
his speech for general thinking like decision making and
analysing the world, rather preferring dreaming and waiting
for instant ideas to come from other people, he has
somehow managed to survive - he is intelligent.

He is having a hard time dealing with it now and wishes to
attempt the transition to using words as his primary thought
process to see if it will make him more aware of things and
even increase his present intelligence. At present he is
struggling with acquiring silent verbalisation. 
	Are there are other peope like that, and will this
person become more intelligent with his new skill he is
trying to master? He doesn't want to be a guinea pig
for too long.

Any comments on the thinking process described above would
be appreciated.

JW
--
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Lojban: a constructed human language
Date: 26 Aug 92 09:43:53 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Aug24.222638.42539@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>In article <10491@scott.ed.ac.uk>, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
>> If it is true that natural (and planned but natural-like, such as
>> Esperanto) human languages are learnable only because they are built
>> upon a hardwired structure (Universal Grammar), then Lojban should not
>> be learnable in the natural way, as it violates much if not most of
>> what is currently thought of as being universal.  I'm afraid that we
>> won't get away with running an experiment, though, as its side effects
>> may include a few language-impaired kids, if my expectations are correct.
>
>I dunno -- consider A. N. Prior, a guy who has written a lot on tense
>logic: he uses symbolic logic in the Polish notation, which is sort of
>like Japanese syntax backwards.  With a little practice, you can start
>thinking in it in a sense--you become "fluent" in it, as he is.  (You
>have to, to read his works.)

Certainly you can learn to think in it (and you can become fluent in
it), but the kind of learning it takes is quite different, isn't it,
from a child's acquisition of his first language.  I'm not convinced
that you could have learned symbolic logic in your mother's lap, using
the same miraculous language acquisition mechanism that you used to
learn English ("for although we've been talking since we were three, /
how anyone can is a big mystery").  Neither am I convinced that you
couldn't; I'm just wondering.

And it just might be the case that you must use the first few years of
your life to acquire some natural or natural-like language, and if you
don't, you'll never be able to learn any later on.  I'm not sure that
a child whose only native language is symbolic logic won't grow up as
a live computer, fluent in that system, but unable to deal with
natural language.  Again, I'm not sure of the opposite either.
Project "Mowgli", anyone?

>Maybe some people have learned to speak Lojban fluently.  That alone
>would be interesting.  It certainly ought to be worth fooling around with.

So far all of those who can generate and understand Lojban text have
learnt it as a foreign language, moreover, as an incarnation of
predicate logic, to which all have had a prior theoretic exposure.
That's not how we learnt our respective first languages.

-- 
 `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: matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: [pronouns] Re: Other properties of pronoun usage
Summary: Where is the "themself" corresponding to "yourself"?
Keywords: FEMINISMUS DELENDUS EST
Date: 28 Aug 92 13:08:25 GMT
Organization: U.S. ARMY MATERIEL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS ACTIVITY (AMSAA), APG, MD.

In article <1992Aug20.175726.4398@efi.com> dchung@efi.com (Daniel Chung) 
writes:

>     I am surprised by the fact that English does not distinguish between
>one-you and plural-you, when I first learned English.  [Daniel Chung]

The second-person singular subject pronoun used to be "thou," with
"thee" when used as the object of a sentence, and "thy" as the
possessive.  The second-person plural used to be "ye," with "you"
as object and "your" as possessive.  "You" has taken over for both
singular and plural, subject and object.  Since it started out as a
plural pronoun, "you" takes a plural verb, even when used to refer
to a singular:  "You do" vs. *"You does."

There are those who are using "they" as third-person subject pronoun,
with "them" as object pronoun and "their" as possessive, whether
referring to a singular antecedent.  This usage goes back several
centuries.  It is a recognized usage, just as the singular "you" is
a recognized usage.

But is the singular "they" recognized quite as much as the singular
"you"?  Let's look at the reflexive pronouns:

                           Plural          Singular
        Second person   "yourselves"      "yourself"
        Third person    "themselves"          ?

Everyone is comfortable with the singular reflexive, "yourself."
Yet, those who use the singular "they" will use a plural reflexive
pronoun in a sentence like, "Whoever wants dressing with their salad
will have to add it themselves."  How come people are not as comfortable
using "themself" as they are using "yourself"?  Is "themself" really 
an English word?   _Webster's Third New International Dictionary_ 
lists "yourselves," "yourself," and "themselves," but not "themself."  
If singular "they" is as much a part of the language as singular "you,"
how come English has not developed its third-person singular reflexive
counterpart as English developed the second-person singular reflexive
"yourself"?

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
					(matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil)
From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com (Bruce Robert Gilson)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Lojban: a constructed human language
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 92 07:37:42 PDT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world
 ug20.071542.424 <64887@cup.portal.com>
  <1992Aug29.085205.42647@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>

My recollection was that LeChevalier
stated himself that he was only close
to fluency -- though this is a re-
collection of about a year ago. I also
applied my own criterion, which is
somewhat subjective, namely that any
person who has to halt to think up a
word more than once or twice in a long
conversation cannot be described as
really fluent. I consider that the
foreign language I come nearest to
fluency to is German, but I would at
no time characterize myself as fluent
in German; Bob's fluency in Lojban is
hard to assess because I don't know
the language that well, but I feel it
is only comparable to mine in German.
                    Bruce R. Gilson
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: choy@skorpio.usask.ca
Subject: Appropriateness
Organization: University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 19:59:36 GMT

The number of possible things to say at any moment is infinite, but
one can say only one thing at a time. Is there an algorithm or a
set of rules to tell what to say?

Sincerely,
Ignorant
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6658 alt.usage.english:6854