Corpora: a particular type of sloppiness

[Lluís Padró]

      I am also a native Spanish speaker, and I think that some
  precisions are required on what one understand by "diacritic"

      I think that the examples that Rene provided about "termino" and "terminó"
   (which can be extended to almost any regular verb to distinguish
    present and past tenses:  canto/cantó, miro/miró, hablo/habló, etc.)
    can not be considered diacritics, since they indicate where the stress
    is in the word, that is, "termino" is pronounced with the stress on
    the "i", while "terminó" is stressed on the "o". There is a phonetic
    difference that *must* be written to provide the reader with the
    same information that a hearer would have.

       On the other hand, the example on "sé" (I know) and "se" (reflexive mark)
     is a real diacritic, because it provides a distinction between two words
     that sound the same although mean different things.

       My feeling is that if a hearer can disambiguate "sé" and "se" by context,
     a reader should be able to do the same without diacritics.  Although the diacritic
      *does* provide information (I am no expert, but I dare say that it is some
      kind of prosodic information, since sé-verb and se-reflexive have different
      roles in the sentence, so the diacritic helps the reader in finding the right
      prosody), it is a rather weak information (I mean, not imprescindible
      to understand).

      Obviously this is not true when the accent indicates a real phonetic difference as
      in "termino/terminó".


            best

            Lluis



Bruce Lambert wrote:

> I'm a pretty strong believer in context as a disambiguator, and human
> beings are amazingly talented at correctly going beyond the information
> given. So my hunch is that a great deal of text without diacritics can
> still be unambiguously understood by the majority of readers. In fact, if
> Spanish or Czech (or whatever language that uses diacritics) email messages
> are often sent without diacritics, then I take this as an existence proof
> that, to some extent, they are not needed for satisfactory comprehension.
>

         (...)

>
> At 11:50 AM 4/19/01 -0700, Rene.Valdes at lhsl.com wrote:
>
> >In support of Monika's argument, I'll offer the following two sentences:
> >
> >      Ya termino.        (I'm finishing soon.)
> >      Ya terminó.        (It's already finished.)
> >
> >Without the diacritic, you would not be able to tell which one of these two
> >meanings to assign to this sentence.  I use diacritics whenever possible,
> >even at the risk of having my text become garbage when it travels through
> >cyberspace.



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 Lluís Padró i Cirera        UNIVERSITAT POLITÈCNICA DE CATALUNYA
                             Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics
 Tel: XX-34-934 015 652
 Fax: XX-34-934 017 014      Mòdul C6 - Campus Nord
 padro at lsi.upc.es            Jordi Girona Salgado 1-3
 http://www.lsi.upc.es/~padro08034 Barcelona
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