HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: Subjectless verbs
Organization: LLNL
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 09:33:24 GMT

In article <1992Oct11.140719.23157@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>Leo Connolly (connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu) writes:
$ If there were only one Spanish conjugation, you'd be right.  But there
$ are three, and so one can analyze a verb such as _amar_ as having the
$ root _ama-_ rather than _am-_.  Similarly, second conjugation verbs
$ would have base forms such as _come-_, and third conjugation verbs
$ would be _pedi-_.  While allowance must be made for morphophonemic
$ changes where an ending and the vowel of the root come together, the
$ simplest explanation would be approximately:
$ 
$         -o      -mos
$         -s      -is
$         -0      -n
>
>I think this analysis is to simple-minded. What says that there is
>exactly one morpheme which means third person singular? Permit
>me to switch to Italian where we have
>
>     parl-are      cred-ere       part-ire     fin-ire
>         -o            -o             -o          -isc-o
>         -i            -i             -i          -isc-i
>         -a            -e             -e          -isc-e
>         -iamo         -iamo          -iamo       -iamo
>         -ate          -ete           -ite        -ite
>         -ano          -ono           -ono        -isc-ono
>
>If we look at subjunctive present we see a similar difference between
>the 1st conjugation and the other two: parl-i, -i, -i, -iamo, -iate,
>-ino; cred-a, -a, -a, -iamo, -iate, -ano; part-a, -a, -a, -iamo,
>-iate, -ano.
>
>(All hyphenation taken from my Italian grammar.)
>
>Of course all this morpheme business is just a recontruction post
>facto; more or less rules for a recreational game we've made up.

	Let us forget about their Latin origin:

	-a:re	-e:re	-i:re	-ere	*-re
	-o:	-e:o	-i:o:	-o:	*-o:
	-a:s	-e:s	-i:s	-is	*-s
	-a:t	-e:t	-i:t	-it	*-t
	-a:mus	-e:mus	-i:mus	-imus	*-mus
	-a:tis	-e:tis	-i:tis	-itis	*-tis
	-a:nt	-e:nt	-i:nt	-unt	*-nt

	[from memory]

	It would be interesting to look at other archaic Indo-European
languages, especially Greek, Sanskrit, and Hittite.

	If I remember correctly, the reconstructed IE paradigm looks
something like:

	-o:/-mi
	-si
	-ti
	-mes
	-tes
	-nti

	The ultimate origin is probably from suffixed pronouns.

	Someone mentioned the Finnish verb conjugation once as looking
a lot like Latin. What is it, again?
From: ddailey@williams.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Les primitifs semantiques d'Anna Wierzbicka
Date: 14 Oct 92 13:56:04 GMT
Reply-To: ddailey@williams.edu
Distribution: usa
Organization: williams college

In article <2340@cix.cict.fr> clary@xdata.cnrm.meteo.fr (Olivier CLARY) writes:

>En voyant cette liste je me demande comment decrire a partir de ces
>primitifs quelque chose de concret, pour lequel les langues ont en
>general un mot simple et sans ambiguite.
>
>Par exemple: de l'eau. Un arbre.
>
>-- Olivier Clary
>
Some years ago as I formulated a system of my own with about 70 primitives
(which seemed to occur at least in English, French, Navajo, Quechua, Russian,
and Mongolian, I found precisely the problem referred to above: I could write
just about anything I wanted to within the world of ideas; but when it came
time to describe the differences between olives and artichokes, for example, my
semantic primitives were somewhat lacking. I did however do a reasonable job of
convincing myself that each of the 70 was, in some sense, required and
non-reduceable to combinations of the others. Backing up a bit, I concluded
that the primitives captured the essence of any language that could be shared
by conscious beings who do not necessarily share the same senses as humans
(extra-terrestrials, two-dimensional folk and so forth). Though, for example,
knots, hinges, axles, and (probably) magnetism don't work well in two-space, I
see no reason that desire, pain, greed, and love cannot.

Later, I proved (and published) a nifty little theorem to the effect that the
task of reducing an arbitrary language (with a lexicon of N words) to a minimum
set of primitives was NP-complete (in N).
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: schiller@whorf(Eric Schiller)
Subject: Re: Publically available parsers and English grammars
Reply-To: schiller@sapir.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 21:08:19 GMT

In article <1992Oct2.082451.28057@usage.csd.unsw.OZ.AU>  
tedr@aix00.csd.unsw.OZ.AU (Ted Rofe) writes:
> In article <1992Sep25.192924.23356@sei.cmu.edu> im@sei.cmu.edu (Ira  
Monarch) writes:
> >
> >I've been following the Prolog for NLP discussion.  I was hoping the
> >discussion would expand to cover the functionality and public
> >availability of parsers and other nlp tools written in various
> >langauages.  
> >
> 
> Some time ago I downloaded a copy of a 1st edition draft 
> dated February 1991 of the _Natural Language Software Registry_
> It was edited by Elizabeth Hinkelman of the Center for Information
> and Language Studies, University of Chicago
> 
> Unfortunately I have lost the internet address I downloaded
> it from.
> 
> Can anyone supply the address or suggest another, similar, source
> of information?
C.I.L.S. R.I.P. 30 June 1992.
Some of the relics of CILS are in our possession at the Department of  
Linguistics here at the University of Chicago, but not much. Elizabeth  
Hinkelman is now at heidelberg. You may need to do some real hunting.

The CILST tagger will be available from us when I get around to
setting up anonymous FTP, sometime later this term. it is in
C, and it works. The autolexical approach is adopted via the
lexicon, so unbelievers can implement their own theories and
religions. We use PC-KIMMO's mechanisms for tagging words not
in our lexicon, but with our own morphological lexicon.

For further information, wait a while and e-mail me in, say,
November, unless you are in a big rush.

Please use the sapir address, whorf is not receiving mail yet.
--
***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** ****
Sometimes my head is in the clouds of theory, but often it is just a fog.
My feet, meantime, tend to stay more or less on the ground. I think.
***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** ****
Eric Schiller                              schiller@sapir.uchicago.edu
Dept of Linguistics, Univ. of Chicago      schiller@whorf.uchicago.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: linnan@batgirl.cs.hut.fi (Matti Linnanvuori)
Subject: Re: Latin/PIE/Finnish verbs (was:Subjectless verbs)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, CS lab
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 13:36:13 GMT

 The 1.sg. verb suffix in Finnish -n possibly evolved from the ancient
1.sg. pronoun 'mi', which looks similar to the IE verb suffix. The
2.sg. suffix -t likewise from the pronoun 'ti'. The 3. forms evolved from
participle -va (plural -vat). The present 1. and 2. pl. pronouns 'me'
and 'te' seem to have been appended to form the verb personal suffices
-mme and -tte.

Reposted after failure.

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: andrews@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Avery Andrews)
Subject: SVO / VSO --> NP-MOvement
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 02:44:15 GMT
Re: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky),
    <1992Oct2.151844.22435@athena.mit.edu>

(apologies if this shows up twice, but my Australian posting of it
 doesn't seem to be able to make it accross the Pacific.)

>The problem is not a lack of imagination that can develop "accounts",
>but a lack of any real understanding concerning the cross-language and
>language-internal asymmetries found.  I, for one, have yet to see a
>discussion of these matters that looked insightful, ...

Hmm.  It seems to me that Sigurdsson's 1991 NLLT article shows that
case-marking of a position may be necessary for an NP to appear in
it, but *can't* be sufficient.  So maybe the difference between
Icelandic and English is that Icelandic has case-marking rules
that can get at more positions than in English, so Icelandic
(and presumably various other Western European languages) illustrate
the non-case theoretic aspect of NP-licensing.  In particular, one
thing that Sigurdsson shows is that there is a visible case-transmission
effect from `subject-raised-to-object' to `original object' position:

(a)  thad var kosinn  einhver leikari  til forsetaembaettis
     it   was elected some    actor(N) to  Presidency

(b)  their segja hafa    verid kosinn einhvern leikara til forsetaembaettis
     they  say   to-have been elected some     actor(A)

So the post-verbal nominative in (a) could well be getting its case
via transmission from the subject, by a rule/effect that Lasnik argues
doesn't exist in English, but in (b) we can really see that it is
happening.

On the other hand, postverbal nominatives coocurring with dative
subjects do keep their nominative case in `SOR' constructions,
so these might involve nominative assigned by the (lower) verb:

(c)  their segja str'akunum  hafa   verid gefnir hestarnir
     they  say   the-boys(D) to-have been given  the-horses

(some people do accept accusative here, however, suggesting that
case-transmission & assignment by the verb are both possible).

So maybe the difference is that in English the expletive is case-greedy,
& won't share it with the object, while western european expletives
are more generous (or wimpy).

Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au
From: Olivier.CLARY@meteo.fr (Olivier CLARY)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin/PIE/Finnish verbs (was:Subjectless verbs)
Date: 14 Oct 1992 06:40:32 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

In article <1992Oct12.220755.27219@s1.gov>, lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
> In article <1992Oct12.103446.3624@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
> >In article <1992Oct12.093324.19518@s1.gov>, lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
[...]
> $ 	If I remember correctly, the reconstructed IE paradigm looks
> $ something like:
> $ 
> $ 	-o:/-mi
> $ 	-si
> $ 	-ti
> $ 	-mes
> $ 	-tes
> $ 	-nti
> >
> >More or less, but the -i is apparently a present-time morpheme; the
> >"secondary" endings of past tenses in languages such as Greek and
> >Sanskrit lack it, as does the subjunctive.
> >
> $ 	The ultimate origin is probably from suffixed pronouns.
> >
> >Possible, but it's not easy to prove, since the forms of the pronouns
> >are actually quite unlike verb endings (with the sole exception of
> >1sg verbal -m and pronominal oblique stem m-).
[...]
> 	It might be interesting to see what the Finnish pronouns look
> like. And how do other Uralic languages compare?

Here is Hungarian data: present indicative and conditional.
(The remaining conjugation endings: past and imperative, are rather similar
to present; conditional has the endings of the archaic past indicative)

( ' and " are single and double accents, ~ is diaeresis; vowels in suffixes
have alternate forms conforming to harmony rules; forms included in
parentheses are rare: irregular verbs or archaic forms)

           pronoun     subjective conjgn           objective conjgn
                      ( with main meaning         ( with main meaning
                         'I ...', etc.)          'I ... it/him/her', etc.)
                     indic.           cond.      indic.        cond.

'I'          e'n     -ok / (-om)      -e'k       -om           -a'm
'you'        te      -sz / -ol        -a'l       -od           -a'd
'he/she/it'  o"      - / -ik / (-on)  -a         -ja/i         -a'
'we'         mi      -unk             -a'nk      -juk          -a'nk / (-o'k)
'you (pl)'   ti      -tok             -a'tok     -ja'tok/itek  -a'tok
'they'       o"k     -nak             -a'nak     -ja'k/ik      -a'k


The -k of plural endings is the plural mark for nouns. The -n- in 'we' forms
comes from -m : in old texts -unk is -muk.

So a part of the table is not related to pronouns (like -ok 'I', -sz 'you'),
but the other part supports first person _m_, second  _t_/_d_, and for third
person there may be something hidden behind _o"_ and the objective marks
_i_/_j_/lengthened vowel.

-- Olivier Clary
From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 9 Oct 92 15:53:22 GMT
Reply-To: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com
Organization: Research & Technology

Sorry, but I must drop participation in this interesting subject until our
site begins updating sci.lang again.  I can post to the group, but I can't
read replies.  Anyone who wishes to respond to my last post must do so by
email.  Our site hasn't updated the newsgroup for a week now.
-----
Disclaimer:  Opinions expressed above are not those of my employer.

    Rick Wojcik   (rwojcik@atc.boeing.com)   Seattle, WA
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: pluere again + ad aliquem dicere
From: bthurman@uncavx.unca.edu
Date: 13 Oct 92 11:18:39 -0500
Organization: University of North Carolina at Asheville
Nntp-Posting-User: bthurman

Did you not do well to find that the Lord (dominus) may also be the source of
the rain as subject of pluere?  Does this not parallel the usage Zeus brechei?
Had this analogous usage of pluere not been suggested by the personal subject
with brechein (e.g. Matthew 5,45)?  Could one not generalize that all sorts of
(even demotic) Greek syntactical features will have been incorporated into
Latin by the time of Eusebius Hieronymus?  What's this about verbs of saying
with de+object?  Wasn't that a slip for ad+object?  Wasn't that almost uniform
for pros (or even eis)+object in Greek?  Isn't Roman new comedy (and even other
standard authors than Cicero, e.g. Caesar and Sallust) replete with expressions
like nuntiari ad aliquem, dare ad aliquem (instead of alicui) and doesn't even
Cicero have scribere ad aliquem?  What's this about how low Latin has sunk on
such a basis?
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: kkr42091@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (QUEEN ZENOBIA!)
Subject: Re: Subjectless verbs
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 06:45:47 GMT


The finnish verb conjugation is such:

sanoa - to talk

sanon 
sanot 
sanoo 
sanomme
sanotte
sanovat

for the verb to be is it :
er it is

olla - to be

olen 
olet
on
olemme
olette
ovat


-kimberli roan
From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Chomsky's last paper
Date: 15 Oct 92 07:29:28 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <41769@imag.imag.fr>, amblard@imag.fr (Paul Amblard) writes:
> In article <920907.101027.slie@pchf20> slie@ulrik.uio.no (Svein Lie) writes:
>>Some time ago somebody told where to buy Chomsky's new minimalistic paper.
>                                                         ............
> This recalls me a famous "french" book, published 3_4 years ago :
> Title : Tout ce que les hommes savent a propos des femmes.
> The book was completely white...
> -- 
> Paul AMBLARD      L.G.I. I.M.A.G.     BP 53X	F 38041 GRENOBLE Cedex  
>      Tel (33) 76514600 ext 5144                       amblard@imag.fr

Titled, but contentless, books became a fad for a while in the U.S.
One of my favorites was _Irish Erotic Art_...
-- 
-Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> {Sometimes you have to look reality straight
 OPINIONS ARE MY OWN            {in the eye, and deny it. - G. Keillor
From: amblard@imag.fr (Paul Amblard)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Chomsky's last paper
Date: 15 Oct 92 09:41:55 GMT
Organization: IMAG Institute, University of Grenoble, France

In article <920907.101027.slie@pchf20> slie@ulrik.uio.no (Svein Lie) writes:
>Some time ago somebody told where to buy Chomsky's new minimalistic paper.
                                                        ............
This recalls me a famous "french" book, published 3_4 years ago :
Title : Tout ce que les hommes savent a propos des femmes.
The book was completely white...
-- 
Paul AMBLARD      L.G.I. I.M.A.G.     BP 53X	F 38041 GRENOBLE Cedex  
     Tel (33) 76514600 ext 5144                       amblard@imag.fr
From: harold@ccl.umist.ac.uk (Harold Somers)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Prolog for NLP; was: Re: Marcus parser - basic question
Date: 15 Oct 92 13:40:51 GMT
Organization: Manchester Computing Centre

In <1992Sep23.182856.5062@athena.cs.uga.edu> mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington) writes:

>In article <1992Sep23.055357.14440@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@midway.uchicago.edu writes:

>You might enjoy my book, _Natural Language Processing for Prolog
>Programmers_, which will be published by Prentice-Hall in the spring.
>It has a chapter on morphology (with an algorithm from KIMMO
>implemented in Prolog, as well as some discussion of Kimmo's
>limitations).  And mentions Tomita (briefly) as well as a bunch of
>other parsing algorithms.  And uses Earley's Algorithm (which is of
>course a classic parser) to make a loop-proof inference engine for
>logic programming.

If self-advertising is allowed, can I plug the following book: it was
written expressly for arts type students beginning Prolog, but some of
the later chapters offer skeleton solutions to quite complex NLP
problems:

Prolog for Natural language Processing, John Wiley, 1991.
Annie Gal, Guy Laspalme, Patrick Saint-Dizier and Harold Somers
There are lots of programs listed in the appendix, and there's a dsikette
you can order.

Contents include: the usual introductory stuff, DCGs, a (fairly weird)
implementation of ELIZA ('doctor') using a DCG, morphology, a parser
handling relative clauses and wh-movement, LFG-like feature unification,
3BQs, a mini-QA system, text generation from data, Scank-type
paraphrasing, two toy MT systems, something on dialogue, and finally a
fairly heavy chapter on cooperative responses a la Grice

>In the meantime, there are two other Prolog-and-NLP books to look at:
>one by Pereira & Shieber, and one by Gal, Lapalme, et al.  Both are
>rather short.  

I guess the latter is the book I just mentioned. Short but meaty I would
say!

I found - as a teacher of Prolog - Pereira & Shieber too demanding for
1st-year students with an arts mod langs background: they couldnt handle
all the formal proofs (neither could I); and Gazdar & Mellish is too big,
expensive, and assumes lots of linguistic and computing background: I
recommend it as a follow-up book once you've learnt the rudiments of
Prolog.  The Gal book is based on a French textbook, but in translating
it I added a whole lot of material, as well as redoing all the examples
which were based on French.
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO --> NP-movement
Date: 7 Oct 92 20:56:33 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <andaling.718442713@durras>, andaling@durras.anu.edu.au (Avery Andrews) writes:
> Re: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky),
>     <1992Oct2.151844.22435@athena.mit.edu>
> 
>>The problem is not a lack of imagination that can develop "accounts",
>>but a lack of any real understanding concerning the cross-language and
>>language-internal asymmetries found.  I, for one, have yet to see a
>>discussion of these matters that looked insightful, ...
> 
> Hmm.  It seems to me that Sigurdsson's 1991 NLLT article shows that
> case-marking of a position may be necessary for an NP to appear in
> it, but *can't* be sufficient.  So maybe the difference between
> Icelandic and English is that Icelandic has case-marking rules
> that can get at more positions than in English, so Icelandic
> (and presumably various other Western European languages) illustrate
> the non-case theoretic aspect of NP-licensing.  In particular, one
> thing that Sigurdsson shows is that there is a visible case-transmission
> effect from `subject-raised-to-object' to `original object' position:
> 
> (a)  thad var kosinn  einhver leikari  til forsetaembaettis
>      it   was elected some    actor(N) to  Presidency
> 
> (b)  their segja hafa    verid kosinn einhvern leikara til forsetaembaettis
>      they  say   to-have been elected some     actor(A)
> 
> So the post-verbal nominative in (a) could well be getting its case
> via transmission from the subject, by a rule/effect that Lasnik argues
> doesn't exist in English, but in (b) we can really see that it is
> happening.
> 
> On the other hand, postverbal nominatives coocurring with dative
> subjects do keep their nominative case in `SOR' constructions,
> so these might involve nominative assigned by the (lower) verb:
> 
> (c)  their segja str'akunum  hafa   verid gefnir hestarnir
>      they  say   the-boys(D) to-have been given  the-horses
> 
> (some people do accept accusative here, however, suggesting that
> case-transmission & assignment by the verb are both possible).

In terms of what I posted the other day: the nominative of (a) is both
(morphological) subject and (after passivization) the HRNP.  But in (c),
_hestarnir_ is morphological subject but not HRNP, while _stra'kunum_
is (new) HRNP but not subject.  All speakers agree that the HRNP or an
expletive must precede the infinitive in this construction.  All speakers
also agree that a nominative HRNP becomes accusative in this construction.
(c), where some accept the accusative while most do not, demonstrates
that two versions of the rule exist: some (can) mark *all* nominatives
accusative, while others do so only if it is also the HRNP.

Note that this accounts for the data without the necessity of invoking
"case transmission" or "assignment by the verb" -- or, in other words,
without the whole GB framework.  Note that I *not* saying that the GB
framework *cannot* be applied, only that it is not helpful in this
situation, whatever merits it may have for others.

--Leo Connolly
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Barbatus Rugienti S.P.D.
Date: 15 Oct 92 12:21:17 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1992Oct14.102047.1@uncavx.unca.edu>, bthurman@uncavx.unca.edu writes:
> Et scribere verbum intellegere nescis.

Mea culpa, non vero maxima.  Scripsi etiam "quod" cum (vel "quum")
scribendum esset "quid".

--Leo Rugiens
From: djohns@elm.circa.ufl.edu (David A. Johns)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO --> NP-Movement
Date: 10 Oct 92 10:53:24 GMT
Organization: University of Florida, Gainesville

In article <1992Oct2.151844.22435@athena.mit.edu> pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:

# There seem to have been shot several bank robbers.

What language is this?

A few days ago you made a remark to the effect that your confidence in
your theory is based on decades of solid data (sorry for the fuzzy
quote, but the message has scrolled off my system).

But what we see is exactly the opposite.  You (I believe) brought up a
Russian construction that was immediately shot down by native
speakers.  Avery Andrews brought up an Icelandic construction which
was immediately discredited by people who know the language.  Michael
Hand introduced some "data" -- "I know it's going to rain, don't you?
Yes, I know it" which no one I've talked to will accept, even though
the reason has nothing to do with anaphora (it's OK in the past).

I might be more interested in following arguments on the structure
of linguistic theory if I knew what it was a theory of.

David Johns


Newsgroups: sci.lang