HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: gankw@iscs.nus.sg
Subject: case grammar for Chinese
Reply-To: GANKW@NUSDISCS.BITNET
Organization: Dept. of Information Systems and Computer Science, National University of Singapore
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 02:13:47 GMT

I'm looking for literatures about case grammar for Chinese.
I'm aware of Prof. Shou-hsin Teng's book on "A semantic study
of transitivity relations in Chinese", and I would like to
find out if there are others.

From Cook's book "case grammar theory", two Ph.D. dissertations
that describe Chinese using case grammar are:
(Washburn 1975, Astor 1977), and Persian (Aghbar 1981).
Sorry, I think there should be three. However, details about
these three references are not given in the reference section
of Cook's book. 

Can anyone pls. help? Thanks.

Kok-Wee Gan
Dept. of Information Systems & Comp. Science
National University of Singapore
Internet: gankw@iscs.nus.sg
Bitnet: gankw@nusdiscs.bitnet
From: schiller@whorf (Eric Schiller)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: cyclical grammars
Date: 28 Sep 92 16:48:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: midway.1992Sep28.164827.21677
Reply-To: schiller@sapir.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations

In article <1992Sep28.144746.15600@midway.uchicago.edu>  
goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes:
> Often I read of this or that linguist who believes in cyclical  
subsystems
> within the grammar.  Sometimes the "loops" are big enough that  
post-lexical
> rules can actually feed lexical ones.  How seriously do you phonologists
> take such grammars these days?
> 
> I'm not fishing for an answer here.  Once again, I'm just interested in  
the
> majority view.  I have some data that could be analyzed in this way.  I
> could also claim morphologization of a certain process and in this way
> avoid the cycle.
> 
> Any opinions?
> 
> -- 
Well, Richard, did you attend last year's CLS meetings, with a Parasession  
on the Cycle in Linguistic Theory? If so, you would have heard many  
discussions of these points. If not, you will have to wait another 6  
months or more until the printed proceedings come out!
--
***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** **** ***** ** *** ****
Eric Schiller                              schiller@sapir.uchicago.edu
Dept of Linguistics, Univ. of Chicago      schiller@whorf.uchicago.edu
                                  
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Subject: Re: cyclical grammars
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 06:00:40 GMT

schiller@sapir.uchicago.edu writes that his note to me
 
>was meant as a gentle wrist-slap, for skipping CLS, which obviously had
>some papers that would interest you. Hope you won't make the same
>mistake this year!

(It's hard to keep abreast of all that is going on in my own field, and
to keep up with theoretical linguistics as well!)

>As for the relationship between phonology and morphology, we have
>been agonizing about it here for a while, and still aren't sure how
>to fit it into our modular scheme. Speaking only for myself, it
>seems that what are called post-lexical rules in derivational theories
>would probably be handled by a direct phonology-syntax interface.

To what extent would you have postlexical rules be permitted access to
information such as syntactic category and word-internal morphological
structure?

-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters)
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Organization: University of Tasmania, Australia.
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 00:09:13 GMT

schiller@whorf(Eric Schiller) writes:

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

>> 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. 

>Well, not really anglo-centric. After all, Jim McCawley tried to argue for  
>English as a VSO language a couple of decades ago, sparking a big debate,  
>which resulted in some very convincing counterarguments being published.

Hypothesis: if the generative paradigm had gained ascendancy while working
from a VSO perspective, and if Jim McCawley had then argued that English
is basically a VSO language as well, would he have provoked the debate he
did provoke? There is every reason to believe that everybody would have
sighted a sigh of relief at this great discovery.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Bert Peeters                         Tel: +61 02 202344
Department of Modern Languages               002 202344
University of Tasmania at Hobart        Fax: 002 207813
GPO Box 252C                            Bert.Peeters@modlang.utas.edu.au
Hobart TAS 7001
Australia
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: question for budding linguists of ALL age groups.
Date: 28 Sep 92 10:50:57 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Sep28.035222.18366@athena.cs.uga.edu> mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington) writes:
<In article <92269.192342RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu> RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu writes:
<>my question is this: which is correct, "a (evangelical) sermon" or
<>"an (evangelical) sermon" ?
<
<I vaguely prefer your
<second example (with "an") because on first pass, I can't avoid reading
<"evangelical" immediately after "an".

How would you read "an (evangelical) sermon" aloud?

I think I would substitute a brief pause for each bracket, and read
the text between them in a lower tone.  This makes "an" the preferred choice.

-- 
 `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: aa596@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Peter Haller)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Help!
Date: 5 Oct 1992 22:37:42 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Reply-To: ae302@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Peter Haller)
NNTP-Posting-Host: slc12.ins.cwru.edu


I am looking for a kind person to translate a small amount - 30 lines
of text - of French to English. I am desperate. e-mail me if you feel
in a kind and giving mood.

PCH
From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 29 Sep 92 03:16:44 GMT
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In article <peeters.717724343@tasman> peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters) writes:
>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.
>
>Anglocentrism once again. If Chomsky had been a Welshman with no knowledge
>of English (I admit the very possibility of being Welsh without speaking
>English is extremely remote), would he have concluded that in Welsh the
>verb moves, whereas (later discovery during a fieldtrip to London) it
>doesn't in English? It is not impossible he would have concluded that
>the Welsh facts are the norm and all the rest is deviation. I do know
>that SVO and SOV are both more frequent on world scale than VSO, but I
>don't think that is necessarily a factor in favor of seeing SVO as "the
>standard" from which VSO derives.

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.

Maybe, had Chomsky been Chamorro, the history of linguistics would have
been different.  If Jakobson were Yakut, Bloomfield Bengali or Sapir
Sesotho, likewise.  What of it?  If no one knew languages with an intact
VP, sure we might view Welsh differently, but that view would be founded
on an error, just as the non-configurational approach of the late 1970s
seems to have been founded on an error.

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

By whom?  What are some of the arguments?

-David Pesetsky
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Subject: Re: deep structure features
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 14:44:46 GMT

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

>}   ...  But natural phonologists (and others, too) tend to talk about
>}   phonemes at the systematic level as morphophonemes, and seem to talk
>}   about them in Sapirian (and also Chomskian) terms as perceptual
>}   units and not feature bundles.  Does this mean that it's never valid
>}   to talk about, say, "nasals" as participating in a rule (in the NP
>}   sense = lexical phonological rule)? ...
>
>Yes, it does mean that.  (Don't take that answer as authoritative, though,
>because I am not a 100% pure natural phonologist.)

Down with philosophical purity.

F. Householder (who I've mentioned here before) used to take Chomsky and
Halle to task because, as he noted, some rules are more elegantly understood
in terms of feature bundles, while others are best understood in terms of
unitary phonemes.  I wonder if this distinction might ultimately come down
to a difference between Stampean morphophonology and his natural phonological
processes.  Householder, in his diffident way, really said some important
things.

But of course this is both a philosophical and an empirical question.  Is
there any example of a morphophonological rule that has to assume features?
As I recall, Mr. Householder (again) suggested that it might at times be
just as facile to talk about sets of phonemes as to talk about common fea-
tures.  Part of his proof was in the necessity of disjunct sets.  He offers
some interesting examples of how Halleans had to bend and shake in order to
get groups of phonemes into natural classes.

It seems you can indeed have the appearance of natural classes in the morpo-
phonology.  This, however, might be a consequence of morphologization (where
certain surface distributions are retained, but "bumped up").  The point is
that there is no *necessity* to posit natural classes for morphophonological
rules, while for phonetic processes there is indeed such a necessity -
at least according to the Stampean line (as I perceive it).

There are some interesting empirical claims here.  I, for my part, wonder
whether Jacobson's original work on the fundamentals of human perception is
really correct.  Categories, he argued, were optimally binary in nature.
I might agree that they are generally binary.  There is no necessity, though,
of their being uniformly binary.  And Jabsonian/Hallean feature notation im-
plies multiple values for features, anyway (you can have alphas, logical nots,
maybes, yes/nos, as well as implicational hierarchies...).


-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
From: simon@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de (Julia Simon)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Yes/No
Date: 28 Sep 92 15:07:57 GMT
Organization: Fachschaft Computerlinguistik, U of Saarland, FRG

turkel@unixg.ubc.ca (Bill Turkel) writes:
> >Are there any languages where 'yes' and 'no' start with the same letter,
> >so that this scheme cannot be used?

In the dialect of the Germans who used to live in Czechoslovakia no is "nein"
(or something similar, as in all the other German dialects) and yes is "no"
(derived from Czech "ano" = yes).

There are languages that have no 'yes' or 'no' at all. In Gaelic, for example,
you have to answer a question like "a bheil thu sgith?" ("are you tired?")
with either "tha" ("am" = "yes") or "chan eil" ("aren't" = "no").

			Julia 8-)

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
				Julia Simon

 Fachschaftsrat Computerlinguistik	DIaLOGIKa GmbH
 Fachbereich 8.7, Bau 17, Zi. 201
 Universita"t des Saarlandes		Albertstr., Pascalschacht
 D-W-6600 Saarbru"cken, Germany		D-W-6602 Dudweiler, Germany

			email: simon@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de
			       sileas@coli.uni-sb.de
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: i6bk@odin.cc.pdx.edu (Brian Korver)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Public domain language dictionaries?
Date: 2 Oct 92 23:49:12 GMT
Article-I.D.: pdxgate.6167
Distribution: na
Organization: Portland State University, Computing Services


Could someone tell me what public domain dictionaries, thesauri, or language
dictionaries there are available on the net?  Or perhaps there's a list of
sites where these would be available?

All help appreciated.
-Brian Korver
i6bk@odin.cc.pdx.edu
.
From: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Looking for someone at McGill University
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 7 Oct 92 01:08:09 GMT
Distribution: na 

If anyone out there knows the e-mail address for Heather Goad (she has
the most amazing vowels), could you mail it to me?  I need to get
references for something I'm doing, and she knows where they are.
Likely  she is in the Linguistics Department at McGill University. 

If you don't know her address, but know who I can write to at McGill to
find out, I'd appreciate you letting me know that, as well.

Thanks,
Janis C.

Janis Cortese             ||   "The United States is the only country to 
U. C. Irvine              ||    have gone from barbarism to decadence 
cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu   ||    without passing through civilization." 
cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu ||                 -- H. L. Mencken 
========================================================================
From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: cyclical grammars
Date: 28 Sep 92 17:45:47 GMT
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations

schiller@sapir.uchicago.edu writes (regarding my question about cycles):
> 
>Well, Richard, did you attend last year's CLS meetings, with a Parasession  
>on the Cycle in Linguistic Theory? If so, you would have heard many  
>discussions of these points. If not, you will have to wait another 6  
>months or more until the printed proceedings come out!

Is this meant to be a helpful suggestion, a recrimination, or both?
Thanks, though, for the pointer.  I most certainly will take a look
at the proceedings.

If given a choice between an analysis where the postlexical component
of a grammar feeds lexical phonological rules, and one in which the
supposed postlexical rules are moved back into the lexicon, which would
you prefer?

-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Organization: Telecom Research Labs, Melbourne, Australia
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 21:42:01 GMT

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".  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?

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.
From: mcovingt@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Subjectless verbs; was: Re: SVO / VSO
Summary: De generibus verborum latinorum
Date: 3 Oct 92 03:26:14 GMT
Organization: AI Program, University of Georgia, Athens

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.

>3b. verbs permitting various non-nominative subjects in various languages;
>many instances are cited in Givon -- most clearly dative subjects ("me thinks").
>This supposes that case distinctions are properly matters of subcategorization.

Latin "impersonal verbs" are the classic case: _paenitet me huius_
"I (acc.) am sorry about this (gen.)".

The question of course is whether you consider these non-nominative 
arguments to be subjects.  Traditionally they are described as verbs
that have _no_ subject (and can never take a subject), but have various
other arguments in various cases.


-- 
:- Michael A. Covington     internet mcovingt@uga.cc.uga.edu 
:- Artificial Intelligence Programs       phone 706 542-0359
:- The University of Georgia                fax 706 542-0349
:- Athens, Georgia 30602 U.S.A.          amateur radio N4TMI
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Subject: Re: question for budding linguists of ALL age groups.
Organization: Telecom Research Labs, Melbourne, Australia
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 00:29:01 GMT

<RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu> writes:


>my question is this: which is correct, "a (evangelical) sermon" or
>"an (evangelical) sermon" ?

an (evangelical) sermon

One's tendency seems to be to process first the parenthesized
word, then only to interpret the parentheses.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 12:07:43 GMT

In article <1992Oct4.111643.10659@news.Hawaii.Edu> lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee) writes:
>In article <1992Oct2.160744.24814@athena.mit.edu> pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>
>}...  Then you claim
>}that whay you have "replaces" a VP.  On the contrary, as far as I can
>}tell, you've built a VP.  ...
>
>True.  But there's no longer a VP in the grammar.  I thought that was
>progress.

No, it's not.  You have progress if you figure out *why* there's a VP
and therefore construct a theory in which nothing about subject/object
asymmetries is stipulated.  But that's not your system: you stipulate a
VP -- even for VSO languages.  Lying behind your remarks, I suspect, is
the assumption that the VP has to be a purely structural notion with no
semantic underpinnings or consequences.  But that's certainly not my
assumption.

-David Pesetsky
From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: question for budding linguists of ALL age groups.
Date: 26 Sep 92 11:48:41 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <92269.192342RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu>, <RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu> writes:
> we all know that "a sermon" is correct, while "an sermon" is not.
> we all know that "an evangelical sermon" is correct, while "a evangelical
> sermon" is not.
> 
> my question is this: which is correct, "a (evangelical) sermon" or
> "an (evangelical) sermon" ?

I assume you cross-posted this to alt.usage.english and will be
interested to see what responses you got.

On two grounds I would advocate writing "an (evangelical) sermon" --

a) that's how one would have to read it, replacing the parentheses
with pauses;

b) we all agree to write, e.g., "one (or more/or two) sermons" rather
than "one (or more/or two) sermon" or even "one (or more/or two)
sermon(s)" so we have a precedent for letting the form with the
parenthetical insertion be determining.

A somewhat related question that comes up often these days is whether
to write "an NSF grant" (assuming the letters will be read as letters)
or "a NSF grant" (assuming the reader will read what the letters stand
for).
-- 
********************************** +.............................+
*- Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>* :All opinions expressed herein:
*There is no privileged position.* :are my own and are not to be :
*	-God, Derrida, others    * : attributed to my employer   :
********************************** +.............................+

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 16:07:44 GMT

In article <1992Oct1.140756.27042@news.Hawaii.Edu> lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee) writes:
>In article <1992Sep29.103937.4744@athena.mit.edu> pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>}...  If you have an
>}alternative idea concerning VSO syntax, let's hear it.
>}
>}That's it for me for now (unless some substance is injected in to the
>}discussion by someone),
>
>I have no substance to offer, but I doubt there are any substantial
>questions involved.  

No, there are substantial questions.  Substantial questions arise here,
as everywhere, from the question of converging evidence.  Does the
command asymmetry between subject and object converge with other
evidence (e.g. AUX S V O order) for a VP constituent?  That is why, for
example, R.Wojcik's questions about Breton are relevant.

>The attached handout shows how to group verb
>and object and (schematically) how to describe "command" constraints
>on anaphoric constructions with no VP.  There are no VSO examples
>given, but you will see that it works just as well for VSO as SVO.
>It's all smoke and mirrors.
[...]
>3.14 The constituent of functional structure which groups together the verb
>     and direct object does truly replace a VP, since it allows us to
>     formulate appropriately certain constraints on anaphoric constructions.
>     In fact, the constraints on anaphoric constructions even make a certain
>     amount of sense in functional structures, while the constraints formulated
>     in terms of VPs and C-command seem quite arbitrary.

That's the heart of the matter.  Your system entails constituency of the
verb with one argument but not with another.  You impose a constraint
that the first argument applied be the direct object.  Then you claim
that whay you have "replaces" a VP.  On the contrary, as far as I can
tell, you've built a VP.  Why one proposal is arbitrary while the other
"make[s] a certain amount of sense" is quite unclear.  After all, VPs
have a natural interpretation in terms of function-argument application
as well (for informal discussion, see Marantz's book; for more formal
discussion, there is a good deal of literature, as you know.  I don't
have specific references).

-David Pesetsky