From traugott at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Nov 1 03:08:28 1995 From: traugott at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Elizabeth Traugott) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 19:08:28 PST Subject: grammaticalization Message-ID: Dear all, This is in response to Spike's boundary-challenging questions for grammaticalization (hereafter GR). Susanna Cumming rightly asked what theory of grammar was being presupposed in the discussions. My view of grammar arises out of the task I have set myself--to develop a theory of historical discourse analysis. GR plays a role, but not an exclusive one, in this task. I see grammar as structuring cognitive and communicative aspects of language; it encompasses not only phonology, morphosyntax and semantics but also inferences that arise out of linguistic form (i.e. linguistic pragmatics such as topicalization, deixis; other kinds of pragmatics including encyclopedic knowledge are not part of grammar, but of course are important in the speaker-addressee negotiation that gives rise to GR). In my view, GR is concerned fundamentally with gradient diachronic processes. Early GR is the result of the interactions of morphosyntax with pragmatics. In particular, conversational implicatures arising from the principle of say no more than you mean and imply more thereby may become salient over time, leading addressees to interpret certain strings as expressions of those implicatures. What is important for GR is that a change can be said to occur when a new construction (morphosyntax- semantics pairing) has arisen. The classic be going to example is prototypical because i) the original string was syntactically constrained (be going to V, not *be going to N), ii) the invited inference of future and purpose arising from to in the environment of the non-completive came to be semanticized as the prime meaning of be going to, iii) a new construction came into being. In addition, there was bonding and later phonological reduction became possible. But I do not regard bonding or attrition as criterial. Nominal clines (nominal adposition > case) and verbal clines (main verb > TAM marker) were the staples of GR theory in the eighties. But there are other clines which are of interest as well, such as PP/serial V > Connective (e.g. because) and Manner Adverb > Sentence Adverb > Discourse Marker (e.g. in fact, indeed). These all show decategorialization and generalization. They also show subjectification in the sense that they become pragmatically more situated in the Speaker-Addressee situation. My current definition of early GR is that it is the process whereby lexical material in highly constrained pragmatic and morphosyntactic contexts becomes grammatical. More specifically, lexical material in a syntactic string comes to participate in the structural texture of the language, especially its morphosyntactic constructions. Later GR involves already grammatical material being generalized. In most cases of GR, extant lexical items in extant syntactic strings undergo changes as a result of discourse practices. So GR does not involve discourse > syntax > morphology (pace Givon 1979), but morphosyntax via pragmatic inferencing in discourse > more general morphosyntax. What does this suggest for Spike's questions? Whereas most of the cases we have studied to date fall into cross-linguistic construction types (auxiliaries, cases, connectives, etc.), each instance is unique, but the changes it undergoes occur within the broad-scale constraints of decategorialization and generalization. So I would not exclude any of Spike's exs. on grounds of uniqueness. Go-went involves decategorialization of the parts of the verb that became suppletive, but there is no generalization; therefore I think that go-went suppletion is lexicalization not GR. On the other hand, dem > copula involves change in function (and in the example given) generalization. The same holds for the third case, reanalysis of V > Pro. Much of what I have said above is to be found in more detail and with data in Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Closs Traugott, 1993, Grammaticalization (CUP), especially Chaps. 3-5, and in a version of my ICHL paper the final draft of which is still in progress ("The role of the development of discourse markers in a theory of GR", ICHL XII, Manchester, August 1995). See also Joan Bybee, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca, 1994, The Evolution of Grammar, U of Chicago Press, for some similar but by no means same views. Elizabeth C. Traugott From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Wed Nov 1 14:19:23 1995 From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 08:19:23 -0600 Subject: Process-morpheme stems Message-ID: One possible process-moprpheme stem: one of the allomorphs of the root _to_ 'go' in Carib of Surinam is either a velar frixative or simple vowel length on the vowel of the prefix (data from Berend Hoff's 1968 _The Carib Language_, p. 168 for the form w/ [x], p. 66 for discussion of the general alternation between the sequence $x and $$ before [s]). /w$-to-ya/ --> [w$xsa] ~ [w$$sa] 'I go' ($ = unrounded high central vowel) /m$-to-ya/ --> [m$xsa] ~ [m$$sa] 'you go' etc. While SYLLABLE reduction is a regular process in Carib of Surinam (Gildea 1995, IJAL article on the phenomenon in the Cariban family), this particular root is idiosyncratic in that it is one of only two monosyllabic roots that reduce, and also in that most syllables with mid-vowels are not subject to reduction. Anyway, while there are reasons to believe that the underlying form of the root is not simply a process, in at least one allomorph, the process of lengthening in the prefix vowel is sometimes all that identifies the root. Spike From Osten.Dahl at TELE.SU.SE Wed Nov 1 16:47:48 1995 From: Osten.Dahl at TELE.SU.SE (Oesten Dahl) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 17:47:48 +0100 Subject: Why suppletion may be seen as grammaticalization Message-ID: Elizabeth Traugott says that she thinks that "go-went" is lexicalization, not grammaticalization. However: Suppletion may play a role in processes that also involve what is undoubtedly grammaticalization on anyone's definition of the term and together with the latter contribute to the creation of new grammatical distinction. Consider for instance the rise of perfective-imperfective distinctions. In the well-known case of Russian, verbs come in imperfective-perfective pairs, where the relation between the two members may be of a rather different character: 1. unprefixed imperfective vs. prefixed perfective, e.g. fotografirovat' - sfotografirovat' 'photograph' 2 suffixed imperfective vs. plain perfective, e.g. davat' - dat' 'give' 3. different suffixal formations from the same root, e.g. zamykat' - zamknut' 'close' 4. imperfective and perfective from totally different stems, e.g. brat' - vzjat' 'take' and various other more complex cases The general process that seems to be going on is that erstwhile lexical distinctions - whether derivational or of a more idiosyncratic character - have come to be exploited in grammar to create aspectual paradigms. In Russian this process has not been completed: the members of the pairs are usually seen as separate lexemes. A closer look at the tense-aspect systems of IE languages such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit shows, however, that the distinctions between different stems (present, aorist, perfect) in the verb paradigms have similar origins and that suppletion plays a role there too. In my opinion, there is motivation for using the term "grammaticalization" in such a way that it covers all processes that contribute to the rise of grammatical constructions or grammatical paradigms. Elizabeth's view is of course also motivated if it is assumed that the fusion of two earlier lexemes into one should be called lexicalization. But then not only suppletion but also the inflectionalization of derivational morphemes falls under this definition of lexicalization. So the conclusion would probably be that grammaticalization and lexicalization are not necessarily distinct processes. Oesten Dahl From nrude at FISICA.USON.MX Wed Nov 1 21:51:42 1995 From: nrude at FISICA.USON.MX (Noel E. Rude) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 14:51:42 -0700 Subject: irregular developments Message-ID: Saludos, We might also think about the historic development and generalization of ablaut patterns in, e.g., Semitic. There perhaps the most development has been in Arabic. Noun pluralization was much more regular (and generally suffixal) earlier on, but now there are many patterns, kitaab-, kutub- `book(s)', kalb-, kilaab- `dog(s)', etc. `bank' (the financial variety), I believe, has been borrowed as bank-, bunuuk-. We have here the evolution of a rather irregular system (plurals are pretty irregular in a lot of lgs.), and along with suppletive verb paradigms, Slavic aspectual contrasts, we can see that development/change/grammatical- ization can absorb irregularities as it progresses. I'm not so much worried about the terminology as how you guys help me to understand this. Noel From wilcox at MAIL.UNM.EDU Wed Nov 1 21:58:57 1995 From: wilcox at MAIL.UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 14:58:57 -0700 Subject: ASL position announcement Message-ID: Announcement Position Available: ASL Lecturer University of New Mexico The Department of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico announces an opening for the position of Lecturer to commence in August 1996, pending budget capability. The main responsibility for this full-time, permanent position is to teach undergraduate courses in American Sign Language (ASL). Minimum Qualifications: Master's Degree; native or near-native ASL skills; bicultural with experience in interacting comfortably in both the Deaf and hearing communities; and experience in teaching ASL. Desirable Qualifications: Significant graduate-level education in Linguistics, ASL Instruction, Deaf Studies, or related fields; ability to teach other courses in the Interpreter Education Program, such as Deaf Culture; ability to work effectively with students and colleagues; ability and desire to work with program faculty in developing a state-of-the-art program in Interpreter Education and ASL instruction. Deadline for receipt of applications is January 15, 1996. Send letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and names of three references to: Bill Isham, Chair ASL Search Committee Dept. of Linguistics University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-1196. This position includes a full benefits package. Salary is commensurate with qualifications. The University of New Mexico is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. From colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Thu Nov 2 19:37:37 1995 From: colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Colin Harrison) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 1995 14:37:37 -0500 Subject: Linguistic Relativism Message-ID: Hey Funknetters! At the risk of unleashing a torrent of violent invective, I want to say a few things about linguistic relativism... I am genuinely interested in receiving constructive comment on the following assertions. If different linguistic systems pay attention to different categories/principles, then speakers of those languages will have more established neural linkages amongst whatever conceptual (etc.) elements are necessary for the categories in question. Those stronger linkages amount to greater conceptual salience (greater ease of activation) and will hence exert greater influence on related conceptualizations... This is a kind of mild linguistic relativism. People who have a bad reaction to such ideas seem to me to be falling into a simple logical fallacy, i.e. that the absence of a category from linguistic structure equals its necessary absence from the conceptual system of speakers of that language. This is ridiculous. The absence, either complete or relative, of an observable structure in a language system does not entail that the speakers of that language are *incapable* of conceptualising such a category. Many Asian languages do not mark tense, and yet wristwatches still sell quite well in such countries; trains run on time at least as much as they do here, etc... The presence or absence of a structure does however give us hints about what kinds of categories might be *important* in the world view of the speakers. It's a question of relative importance. It is not a question of variant conceptual ability (and hence by extension, intelligence - the notion upon which the common knee-jerk resistance seems to be based). So why bother even talking about it? Because it's interesting! The fact that broad socio-cultural characteristcs may find reflection in linguistic structure is one that should not be rejected a priori on spuriously motivated concerns over political correctness. If the evidence provided by linguistic structure can be correlated with other social and perhaps psychological observations, then we might be able not only to say something about variant cultures for the noble cause of posterity, but perhaps also about some of the root causes of cross-cultural misunderstanding, and perhaps go on to make some intelligent suggestions for the facilitation of cross-cultural communication. Another common misconception which seems to emerge in arguments about relativity is the presumed mono-directionality of influence from language to thought, or vice-versa. All humans have access to essentially the same range of conceptual potential. How that potential is developed in the individual is a result of the unique life experience of that individual. The language system(s) that an individual grows up with will obviously have a notable influence on that process, whereby repeated employment of categories common in the system will reinforce certain conceptual associations, while others will remain less reinforced. But by the same token, the individual is not constrained by the linguistic system such that they become unable to say things for which the language lacks forms (remeniscent of Orwell's notion of political control via 'Newspeke'). A language is a system within which creativity is certainly possible to some degree. And there are many aspects of conceptualisation which are not directly dependant upon language-related systems. So "which influences which" is similarly a narrowly conceived question. Language and thought are intimately related; aspects, in fact, of the same phenomenon. There is no chicken and egg paradox, unless the two are reified as separable objects. They are not separable objects, they are facets of single phenomenon, and when regarding a single phenomenon, the question "which came first" doesn't really make much sense... Whaddya think? Colin J.Harrison Linguistics Department Rice University 6100 South Main ph. +1 (713) 630 9312 HOUSTON TX 77005 e-mail: colinh at owlnet.rice.edu USA Have a nice day! From dennis at LING.GU.SE Fri Nov 3 14:40:16 1995 From: dennis at LING.GU.SE (Day, D.) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 15:40:16 +0100 Subject: Re. lingusitic relativism Message-ID: In response to Colin J.Harrison, my comments are marked off with an ">" (lousy mailer). Hey Funknetters! At the risk of unleashing a torrent of violent invective, I want to say a few things about linguistic relativism... I am genuinely interested in receiving constructive comment on the following assertions. If different linguistic systems pay attention to different categories/principles, then speakers of those languages will have more established neural linkages amongst whatever conceptual (etc.) elements are necessary for the categories in question. > one problem here as I see it is that lingusitic systems don't pay attention to anything, >people do. If you mean that people pay attention to categories then you're overstating. >People pay attention to things which interest them or somehow force themselves upon >them, lingusitic and other categories are one type of thing. That they may then find cause >to express these multifarious things in some language is another matter. Those stronger linkages amountto greater conceptual salience (greater ease of activation) and will hence exert greater influence on related conceptualizations... This is a kind of mild linguistic relativism. People who have a bad reaction to such ideas seem to me to be falling into a simple logical fallacy, i.e. that the absence of a category from linguistic structure equals its necessary absence from the conceptual system of speakers of that language. This is ridiculous. > I agree, these people must 1) always know ahead of time what it is they're going to say >and 2) know exactly how to express it. The absence, either complete or relative, of an observable structure in a language system does not entail that the speakers of that language are *incapable* of conceptualising such a category. Many Asian languages do not mark tense, and yet wristwatches still sell quite well in such countries; trains run on time at least as much as they do here, etc... The presence or absence of a structure does however give us hints about what kinds of categories might be *important* in the world view of the speakers. It's a question of relative importance. It is not a question of variant conceptual ability (and hence by extension, intelligence - the notion upon which the common knee-jerk resistance seems to be based). So why bother even talking about it? Because it's interesting! The fact that broad socio-cultural characteristcs may find reflection in linguistic structure is one that should not be rejected a priori on spuriously motivated concerns over political correctness. > how can we say that socio-cultural characteristics are reflected in something, e.g. >language, which can not be observed outside of some socio-cultural context. Further, >most so-called socio-cultural characteristics are in fact glosses for lingusitic practices. If the evidence provided by linguistic structure can be correlated with other social and perhaps psychological observations, then we might be able not only to say something about variant cultures for the noble cause of posterity, but perhaps also about some of the root causes of cross-cultural misunderstanding, and perhaps go on to make some intelligent suggestions for the facilitation of cross-cultural communication. Another common misconception which seems to emerge in arguments about relativity is the presumed mono-directionality of influence from language to thought, or vice-versa. All humans have access to essentially the same range of conceptual potential. How that potential is developed in the individual is a result of the unique life experience of that individual. > I take exception to the unique individual. I believe other people, and particularly the >things they do together, have a lot to do with our concepts. Also note that the most basic >thing we "do together" is talk to each other. The language system(s) that an individual grows up with will obviously have a notable influence on that process, whereby repeated employment of categories common in the system will reinforce certain conceptual associations, while others will remain less reinforced. But by the same token, the individual is not constrained by the linguistic system such that they become unable to say things for which the language lacks forms (remeniscent of Orwell's notion of political control via 'Newspeke'). A language is a system within which creativity is certainly possible to some degree. > Again this is a stange sense of agency attributed to such an abstraction as a linguistic >system And there are many aspects of conceptualisation which are not directly dependant upon language-related systems. So "which influences which" is similarly a narrowly conceived question. Language and thought are intimately related; aspects, in fact, of the same phenomenon. There is no chicken and egg paradox, unless the two are reified as separable objects. They are not separable objects, they are facets of single phenomenon, and when regarding a single phenomenon, the question "which came first" doesn't really make much sense... > what single "phenomena" do you have in mind? Whaddya think? Colin J.Harrison Linguistics Department Rice University 6100 South Main ph. +1 (713) 630 9312 HOUSTON TX 77005 e-mail: colinh at owlnet.rice.edu USA Have a nice day! //--------------------------------------------------------\\ // Dennis Day dennis at ling.gu.se // Dept. of Linguistics tel/fax +47 (0) 31 969631 // Univ. of Goteborg // 412 98 Goteborg // Sweden From jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU Fri Nov 3 22:45:48 1995 From: jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 14:45:48 -0800 Subject: Grammar book query Message-ID: Hello all, I'm writing to ask for some impromptu book reviews. I'm hung up trying to decide between two texts to use for a course called 'Modern English Grammar' (a structure-of-American-English type course for, mainly, undergraduate English majors; it's a ten-week course). The books in question are Mary Sedley's 'Anatomy of English' and Jeff Kaplan's 'English Grammar: Principles & Facts'. If anyone uses or has used these books and has comments, I'd be very appreciative. I can post a summary to the list, if people ask for that. I'm interested in knowing how successful either book is, and any problems that might arise with it (especially in such a short term of instruction). Thanks! = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics = English Department, California Polytechnic State University = San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 = Tel. (805)-756-0117 E-mail: jrubba at oboe.aix.calpoly.edu = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = From AAHNY at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU Mon Nov 6 18:44:47 1995 From: AAHNY at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Alan Huffman) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 1995 13:44:47 -0500 Subject: In Memoriam: William Diver Message-ID: William Diver, 74, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Columbia University, perished on August 31 while sailing in Nantucket Harbor. Diver was a major intellect who founded and developed a unique school of linguistics. Through his teaching and mentoring, he formed a strong, active circle of students and scholars who were intensely devoted to him because of his ideas, the excel- lence of his teaching, and his personal qualities. Although his fame was limited largely to this circle, he will surely be seen by history as one of the great linguists of the twentieth century. Diver began his career as an Indo-Europeanist, with a specialization in Italic dialects and Homeric Greek. He studied under Andre Martinet at Colum- bia, receiving his Ph.D. in 1953 and appointment to the Columbia faculty in 1955. He served as the editor of Word, the Journal of the Linguistic Circle of NY, from 1956-1965, and was a member of the Societe de Linguistique de Paris. In the mid-1960's, Diver developed an interest in general linguistics and began turning his attention to synchronic grammar and to phonology. His ideas were radically at odds with the contemporary mainstream ideas which were also developing at that time. The essentials of Diver's thought can be briefly summarized as follows. 1) Diver demonstrated the inappropriateness of traditional categories of grammar to analysis of language. The Sentence and its parts--subject, predi- cate, direct / indirect object, clause, phrase, etc.--as well as the parts of speech stem from the classical interest in logic, and represent an analysis of the structure and content of thought. Traditional grammar, Diver realized, began as an attempt to correlate linguistic structure with this logical struc- ture. For example, in the traditional account of the Greek and Latin nomina- tive, accusative, and dative cases, there was an attempt to explain the occur- rence of these morphologies in terms of categories of the structure of thought: the nominative is the case of the subject, the accusative is the case of the direct object, and the dative is the case of the indirect object. When, as frequently happens, direct objects turn up in the dative, and predicates in the nominative, this attempt to correlate the two structures has failed empirically. However, rather than abandon the enterprise, traditional grammars set up what Diver regarded as mere escape clauses: "government of the dative", "predicate nominative". Through such maneuvers, the theoretically unmotivated part of traditional grammars came to dwarf the theoretically moti- vated part, leading ultimately to a picture of language as a collection of ar- bitrary devices, a type of human behavior not comparable to other, more readi- ly understandable types of behavior. Thus, Diver regarded the categories of syntax simply as artifacts of an unsuccessful attempt to explain linguistic phenomena in terms of the logic- derived parts of the sentence and parts of speech, not as a revelation of some unique human cognitive process. He took issue with generative grammar on the grounds that, rather than recognizing these categories as a consequence of analytical failure, generative grammar bought heavily into the traditional scheme and went on to build up a school of analysis which took it for granted, thereby developing a view of language as having an important component of ar- bitrary relations of the "government" type. This was an unjustified conclu- sion, Diver said, because the assumptions about linguistic categories lying at its very base were faulty. 2) In Diver's view, the task of grammatical analysis is not to seek man- ifestations of universal categories in languages, but to discover the unique categories articulated by each language. Here, his position was similar to the anti-nomenclaturist view propounded by Saussure. Diver wanted to explain the outward face of language, what we actually observe, ultimately, the shape of the sound waves of speech. Diverian grammatical analyses focus on occur- rences of forms in texts and discourse, the distribution of forms being re- garded as the best overt clues to underlying categories of language. Morphs and morphemes are examined as potential bearers of linguistic meaning, so that grammatical hypotheses very often take the form of signal-meaning pairs. 3) Diver articulated an innovative view of grammatical meaning, which has come to be called an 'instrumental' view of meaning, in contrast to the traditional compositional view. In the compositional view, everything in a linguistically communicated message is attributed to some element of linguis- tic input, and a direct mapping between input and output is required. Diver recognized that communicative output can often be traced not to the form with which compositional analysis associates it, but rather to some other element of linguistic or extralinguistic context. A compositional analysis may build into the meaning of a form all sorts of communicative effects for which that form is actually not responsible at all. The instrumental view, in contrast, recognizes that not everything commu- nicated with language is encoded linguistically; that people use their infer- ential powers to jump to conclusions on the basis of a relatively small amount of actually encoded linguistic information. Diver thus saw the effects of hu- man intelligence as pervasive in the functioning of language, and speakers' use of linguistic meanings as comparable to other kinds of human tool use. This led to the distinguishing of two different kinds or levels of function: the _meaning_ of a form--that sparse element which the form encodes and con- sistently contributes to the communicative process, and the _message_--the totality of communicative effects which may at one time or another be asso- ciated with the occurrence of a form, but which is actually the resultant of human inference operating with many different kinds of input, both linguistic and non-linguistic. Grammatical analysis thus becomes a search for that which languages ac- tually encode, these sparse, hint-like meanings. In this enterprise, then, meaning is not something studied in the abstract, without reference to a par- ticular language; meaning is rather a device of explanation, invoked to ac- count for facts of morphemic distribution in individual languages. In Diver's own words: "The general picture of human language is that of a particular kind of instrument of communication, an imprecise code by means of which precise messages can be transmitted through the exercise of human ingenuity. The code and the ingenuity must be kept clearly separate; most of the diffi- culties encountered in the various schools of linguistic analysis result, simply, from the attempt to build the ingenuity into the structure of language itself." Diver liked to give his own twist to the well-known analogy of Sapir, saying: "Language is only powerful enough to run a light bulb; but we use it to run an elevator." By pursuing this view of language as being driven by meaning and by ordi- nary human behavioral and perceptual characteristics, Diver and his students were able to develop explanations not only for those parts of language which have traditionally been regarded as basically semantic--verb tenses, demon- stratives, aspect, etc.-- but also for those that have always been seen as lying within the central core of syntax, such as government, concord, and or- dering phenomena. He took particular issue with the attempts of descriptivism and generativism to see language as having an autonomous structure that can be described algorithmically. Analyses of a great variety of languages have been carried out in the framework Diver innovated. Thus, for Latin and Greek, discarding notions of sentence structure and syntactic government, and taking occurrences of case morphology themselves as the data to be explained, Diver found that these cases, for one thing, have to do with communicating the degree of control exercised by participants over events. Similarly, he analyzed subjunctive morphologies in these languages as indicating particular levels of the probability of occurrence of the event de- noted by their attached lexical item; other forms turned out to have to do with attracting greater or lesser degrees of attention to an associated item. He posited that word order in English can function as the signal of a meaning, like the morphological signals of Latin and Greek. Moreover, he and his stud- ents discovered that the meanings attached to these signals often organize themselves into closed systems in which the meanings exhaustively divide up a semantic substance. So, for instance, the Latin cases denote _relative_ de- grees of control over an event, in the order (from highest to lowest) nomina- tive, ablative, dative, accusative. 4) In phonology, Diver was concerned with explaining the shape of the sound wave of speech below the level of the signal, that is, the nonrandom distribution of distinctive units of sound within a language's lexical and grammatical morphemes. He accounted for these skewings in part by appealing to facts of articulatory and acoustic phonetics, some of which had gone neg- lected in previous phonological research, which, indeed has minimized the role of phonetics to begin with. But the theoretical significance of Diverian pho- nology is more profound, for complete explanation of this non-randomness has required an appeal to the same principles of communication and human behavior which underlie grammar, two external orientations that had not previously played so explicit a role in phonological theory. Diver, then, proposed a non-autonomous phonology, just as he proposed a non-autonomous, non-modular grammar. The communicative factor requires speakers to maintain distinctions among sounds; yet speakers show a tendency, here as in other aspects of human behav- ior, to economize effort. Diverian phonology, as it studies both the frequen- cies of phonological units and the ways in which they combine, gives evidence of the dynamic interplay of these competing pressures. The following is one of Diver's examples. It is well known that in many languages, such as German and Russian, final stops are voiceless. In English, although the skewing is not absolute, voiceless stops in word-final position heavily outweigh voiced stops. English is thus merely a less extreme example of what is found in German and Russian; the difference of a few percentage points is not important since one explanation covers both situations. Diver proposed that it is the task of coordinating two active articulators (the tongue or lips which create the stop, and the vocal folds which provide voic- ing) that accounts for the lower frequency of voiced stops as compared to voiceless, where only one of these articulators has to be controlled. Howev- er, the beginning of the word, where the hearer does not yet know the identity of the word, bears a greater communicative burden than the end of the word, which the speaker will likely be able to figure out for himself once it is reached (cf. people's tendency to chime in at the ends of words). This exam- ple shows the interplay of factors: the communicative factor motivates the greater distinctiveness afforded by having both voiced and unvoiced stops; but the human factor--ordinary laziness--carries the day when one can get away with less distinctiveness. 5) In following this route, Diver developed an epistemology intended to bring the practice of linguistics into line with that of other attempts to un- derstand natural phenomena in the scientific era. For Diver, explanation was not a matter of simply demonstrating that a particular item is a member of a more general class; he wanted to get at the "Why" of things. This meant seek- ing motivations for observations one does not understand in terms of areas of knowledge one does understand, not embarking on a speculative program. It meant adhering to highly demanding standards of validation and fit between hy- pothesis and data. Diverian analyses are heavily textually oriented; large quantities of data from actual texts and extensive use of counts are their hallmarks. Diver was very skeptical of a-prioristic schemes, such as univer- sal grammar. He insisted that theory be always guided by analysis, not the other way around, no matter how unfamiliar the resulting theory might appear. These ideas evolved into a comprehensive framework for linguistic analy- sis that was sometimes called "Form-Content" in the '60's and '70's and ma- tured into the "Columbia School of Linguistics" in the '80's and '90's. This approach is of course quite the opposite of contemporary mainstream linguistic thought, and thus did not get much press. Diver was a man far ahead of his time; in a world obsessed with modularity and syntax, it is a rare voice which asserts that language is an instance of ordinary human behavior, and that lin- guistic structure can and must be understood without reference to syntax. Nonetheless, a great many in-depth analyses of a wide range of languages by Diver and his students have borne him out, and the scholarly mechanism he es- tablished has quietly pursued its work, with little public fanfare. From 1975, Diver edited the Columbia University Working Papers in Linguistics, in which many of his own writings appeared. He gave invited lecture series in numerous countries of Europe and Asia, in addition to speaking at conferences in the USA and Canada. The Columbia School has held biennial international conferences since 1989 at Columbia, the University of Virginia and Rutgers, and a Summer Institute of the Columbia School will be held in NYC in 1996. Even after his retirement to Emeritus status in 1989, Diver remained an active participant in an ongoing Linguistics Seminar at Columbia and in the Conferen- ces, giving generously of his time, and continuing to attract new adherents through his writings and lectures. Linguists who received the Ph.D. at Columbia under Diver's advisorship include Erica Garcia, Robert Kirsner, Flora Klein, David Zubin, Wallis Reid, Abdul Azim, John Penhallurick, Robert Leonard, Ellen Contini-Morava, Anita de la Garza, Alan Huffman, Bonny Gildin, Radmila Gorup, Barbara Goldberg, and Joseph Davis. A dissertation written under Diver's sponsorship received the Edward Sapir Award in Linguistics from the New York Academy of Sciences in 1985. Books presenting Columbia School analyses or discussing Columbia School ideas have been written by Garcia, Kirsner, Reid, Contini-Morava, Gorup, Huffman, Zubin, and Yishai Tobin; an extensive bibliography of published Col- umbia School works has been assembled (available from the e-mail address indi- cated below). Early publications of Diver's dealing with Indo-European include the fol- lowing: "The problem of Old Bulgarian s't", Word 11 (1955). "On the prehistory of Greek consonantism", Word 14 (1958). "On the diachronic role of the morphological system", Miscelanea Homenaje a Andre Martinet (1958). Publications reflecting the emerging Columbia School position include numerous articles on topics in the grammars of Latin, Greek, and English in the Colum- bia University Working Papers in Linguistics series, as well as the following: "The system of relevance of the Homeric verb," Acta Linguistica Haf- niensia 12, 45-68 (1969). "Substance and value in linguistic analysis," in Semiotext(e) 1, 13-30 (1974). "Phonology as human behavior," in D. Aaronson and R. Rieber (eds.) Psycholinguistic research: implications and applications. Hillsdale, N.Y.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., pp. 161-182 (1979). "Theory," in E. Contini-Morava and B. Goldberg (eds.) Meaning as explana- tion: Advances in sign-based linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (1995). A collection of Diver's papers, essays, and talks in the Columbia School framework is being prepared for publication by a committee of his former stud- ents and associates. Diver's relations with his students, colleagues and associates were char- acterized by unlimited generosity, tolerance, and gentlemanliness. The role model he exemplified made as profound and lasting an impression on people as did his ideas. A memorial service for William Diver is currently in planning. Written by Alan Huffman Deepest thanks to all my colleagues for their contributions and suggestions, especially to Joseph, Ellen, and Ricardo From jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU Wed Nov 8 02:10:52 1995 From: jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 1995 18:10:52 -0800 Subject: 'Use' and the Supreme Court Message-ID: Hello everyone, Did anyone else catch the interesting NY Times article within the past week or so on the word 'use'? I found myself wondering how I would advise the court if I were consulted as a linguist. (Although I dug and dug through all my Times's of this past week, I can't relocate the article, so the following is from memory.) The question at issue was, what does it mean to 'use' a gun? Apparently, someone had had their penalty increased in severity because of the claim that they had 'used' a gun in committing a crime (a drug deal, I think). The gun was in the trunk of the car; it was never taken out or pointed at anyone; only the owner of the gun knew it was there, not anyone s/he was interacting with. The argument was along the lines that the perpetrator had gotten comfort and reassurance from the presence of the gun, and therefore was more confident in going ahead with the crime. Analogies were drawn to people who might say things like 'I keep a gun in my nighttable drawer. I use it for protection' when, in fact, the person may never have shot or brandished the gun at anyone. The Supreme Court justices seemed to really struggle with this one. So, what does it mean to 'use' a gun? Do we go with the prototype, and try to defend that with some kind of empirical method of demonstrating what the prototypical meaning is; do we allow the extended uses like the gun in the drawer or in the trunk? And if so, where does 'use of a gun' end? I'd be interested in knowing how other linguists would respond if asked for expert help with this question .... = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics = English Department, California Polytechnic State University = San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 = Tel. (805)-756-0117 E-mail: jrubba at oboe.aix.calpoly.edu = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = From jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU Wed Nov 8 04:08:59 1995 From: jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU (Jon Aske) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 1995 23:08:59 -0500 Subject: 'Use' and the Supreme Court In-Reply-To: from "Johanna Rubba" at Nov 7, 95 06:10:52 pm Message-ID: Hi Jo, I saw the article too and cut it out to use it someday in class. It was great. Here is the reference: NY Times, Tuesday, October 31, 1995, by Linda Greenhouse, p. A19 "Justices explore elusive meaning of a word that seems so simple" I seem to remember seeing an announcement about a talk by Chuck Fillmore on the same topic not too long ago, if my memory serves me well. Probably a talk at Berkeley announced on the linguists' net there. Best, Jon =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Jon Aske / jaske at bates.edu (Bates) / jonaske at garnet.berkeley.edu (UCB) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From LINDRYER at UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Wed Nov 8 06:43:58 1995 From: LINDRYER at UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew Dryer) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 01:43:58 -0500 Subject: Conf: Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Message-ID: LAST ANNOUNCEMENT CALL FOR PAPERS: Abstracts deadline: November 15, 1995. CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE and LANGUAGE II APRIL 12-14, 1996 State University of New York at Buffalo Sponsors: Linguistics Department Center for Cognitive Science Conference in the Disciplines Invited Speakers: Melissa BOWERMAN, Max-Planck Institute (Netherlands) Jack DUBOIS, University of California at Santa Barbara Dedre GENTNER, Northwestern University Evening speakers: Gilles FAUCONNIER, University of California at San Diego George LAKOFF, University of California at Berkeley Ronald LANGACKER, University of California at San Diego Leonard TALMY, State University of New York at Buffalo We will be hosting the second meeting of the Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language conference here at SUNY-BUFFALO April 12-14, 1996. A major purpose of this meeting is to create an opportunity for discussion and exchange of ideas between the Cognitive, Semantic and Discourse Pragmatic communities. The Organizing Committee thus welcomes abstracts for papers on conceptual structure, discourse, metaphor, lexical semantics, pragmatics, theoretical foundations, grammaticalization, constructions, psycholinguistics, computation, and acquisition. Abstract submissions should include: Seven (7) copies of a ONE-page abstract of the paper, in 12 point font or type, with a title. OMIT name and affiliation. A 3" by 5" card with the title of the paper and the name(s) of the author(s), address and e-mail address. Specify one or two primary topics (from the list in the paragraph above). If none of the topics applies, please specify "other subject area". Send abstracts by NOVEMBER 15, 1995 to: CSDL Department of Linguistics 684 Baldy Hall State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY, 14260-1030 From W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK Wed Nov 8 10:51:53 1995 From: W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK (Bill Croft) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 10:51:53 +0000 Subject: NYT article on 'use'? Message-ID: Is the NYT online? Could someone with access to it post the article to me? (or to Funknet, if there's enough interest) Thanks, Bill Croft Dept of Linguistics, U Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester M13 9PL, UK w.croft at manchester.ac.uk FAX: +44-161-275 3187 Phone: 275 3188 From druuskan at CC.HELSINKI.FI Wed Nov 8 14:07:49 1995 From: druuskan at CC.HELSINKI.FI (Deborah D K Ruuskanen) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 16:07:49 +0200 Subject: NYT (New York Times?) article on 'use' Message-ID: Could someone out there enlighten me as to this (nespaper?) article? NYT on 'use'. The library here gets the Times. Cheers, dkr -- Deborah D. Kela Ruuskanen \ You cannot teach a Man anything, Leankuja 1, FIN-01420 Vantaa \ you can only help him find it druuskan at cc.helsinki.fi \ within himself. Galileo From druuskan at CC.HELSINKI.FI Wed Nov 8 14:12:51 1995 From: druuskan at CC.HELSINKI.FI (Deborah D K Ruuskanen) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 16:12:51 +0200 Subject: NYT reference Message-ID: Sorry, the new mail reference just came in! Seems to be no logic as to when things arrive in my mail box. Cheers, kela -- Deborah D. Kela Ruuskanen \ You cannot teach a Man anything, Leankuja 1, FIN-01420 Vantaa \ you can only help him find it druuskan at cc.helsinki.fi \ within himself. Galileo From LINDRYER at UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Fri Nov 10 19:59:31 1995 From: LINDRYER at UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew Dryer) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 14:59:31 -0500 Subject: Last week for submitting abstracts Message-ID: Just a reminder that this coming week is the deadline for the 'Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language II' conference. If you want more information about the conference, please contact: jpkoenig at acsu.buffalo.edu From jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU Fri Nov 10 22:27:31 1995 From: jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 14:27:31 -0800 Subject: forensic "use a gun" (fwd) Message-ID: For those of you interested in this issue, I think the exact reference for the article was posted to the list (Tuesday, 10/31, page A13, I think). And Chuck Fillmore was kind enough to send along a reference to an article he co-authored on this precise topic. Here is the reference: Clark D. Cunningham and Charles J. Fillmore, "Using common sense: a linguistic perspective on judicial interpretations of 'use a firearm'", in Washington University Law Quarterly, Volume 73, Number 3, 1995, pp. 1163-1214. Jo Rubba From edith at CSD.UWM.EDU Fri Nov 10 22:58:40 1995 From: edith at CSD.UWM.EDU (Edith A Moravcsik) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 16:58:40 -0600 Subject: Functionalism/Formalism Message-ID: REMINDER: The deadline for abstracts for the Conference on Functionalism and Formalism, to be held April 18-20 1996 at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, is FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17. For further information, send e-mail to Mickey Noonan at noonan at csd.uwm.edu or to Edith Moravcsik at edith at csd.uwm.edu From DUMASB at UTKVX.UTK.EDU Sat Nov 11 02:48:04 1995 From: DUMASB at UTKVX.UTK.EDU (Bethany Dumas, UTK) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 21:48:04 -0500 Subject: U.S. v. Bailey Message-ID: For more information on the U.S. v. Bailey case, including how to order the Washington University Law Quarterly issue in which the article by Clark D. Cunningham and Charles J. Fillmore appears, see the electronic newsletter Language in the Judicial Process at http://hamlet.la.utk.edu Bethany Dumas Bethany K. Dumas, J.D., Ph.D. | Applied Linguistics, Language & Law Dep't of English, UT, Knoxville | EMAIL: dumasb at utk.edu 415 McClung Tower | 423/974-6965 | FAX 423/974-6926 Knoxville, TN 37996-0430 | See Webpage at http://hamlet.la.utk.edu From beaumont_brush at SIL.ORG Mon Nov 13 00:26:00 1995 From: beaumont_brush at SIL.ORG (Brush, B.) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 1995 19:26:00 -0500 Subject: Q: _The Anthropology of Space_ Message-ID: Dear Funknetters - I am writing to ask for opinions on a book: Rik Pinxten et al.'s _The Anthropology of Space_ (1981), in which the authors propose and utilize a device they call the Universal Frame of Reference (UFOR) to discover the spatial conceptualizations of their Navajo subjects. Question: have any of you ever used this? My primary interest is spatial semantics, and so I'd like to hear from people who have either used this device or who know of the book and have an opinion on it. All manner of comments are invited, and I'll post a summary if there is enough interest. Thanks, Beau Beaumont Brush UT Arlington From colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Mon Nov 13 17:51:00 1995 From: colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Colin Harrison) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 1995 12:51:00 -0500 Subject: Status of Polysemy Network Analyses Message-ID: Polysemy networks... What do image-schematic analyses of polysemy networks, such as that for the English word "over" in Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things", actually represent? It strikes me that although quite plausible arguments can be presented for relatedness of meaning at some abstract level, it is not at all clear what is actually being shown. Do we really have an idealized representation of part of the "average English speaker's" cognitive system, or are we in danger of recreating diachronic change, and collapsing it into apparently synchronic systems? Taking a case like "over", it strikes me that a connectionist view of cognition allows that the results of experimentation such as that recently described by Rice and Sandra [in Cognition 6-1 (1995), 89 ff.] can be explained in terms of feedback activation from the simple (diachronically explicable) existence of a like phonological form, requiring no essential connection at the conceptual level. Of course, that's not to say that such conceptual connections are necessarily absent, but the mere possibility of interactive activation of non-conceptual elements of the cognitive system seems to raise serious questions about the status of polysemy network analyses. I would be interested to get any feedback on this (preferably at the conceptual level....) Cheers! Colin J.Harrison Linguistics Department Rice University 6100 South Main ph. +1 (713) 630 9312 HOUSTON TX 77005 e-mail: colinh at owlnet.rice.edu USA Have a nice day! From colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Mon Nov 13 22:04:41 1995 From: colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Colin Harrison) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 1995 17:04:41 -0500 Subject: Polysemy networks//P.S. Message-ID: RE: My earlier posting on "The status of polysemy network analyses" Sorry, I got the reference wrong on the Rice and Sandra article. It's from "Cognitive Linguistics", not "Cognition" (the rest of the ref. is O.K.)! Colin J.Harrison Linguistics Department Rice University 6100 South Main ph. +1 (713) 630 9312 HOUSTON TX 77005 e-mail: colinh at owlnet.rice.edu USA Have a nice day! From beaumont_brush at SIL.ORG Tue Nov 14 23:00:00 1995 From: beaumont_brush at SIL.ORG (Brush, B.) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 18:00:00 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Dear Funknetters-- I am writing to ask for opinions on a book: Rik Pinxten et al.'s _The Anthropology of Space_ (1981), in which the authors propose and utilize a device they call the Universal Frame of Reference (UFOR) to discover the spatial conceptualizations of their Navajo subjects. Question: have any of you ever used this? My primary interest is spatial semantics, and so I'd like to hear from people who have either used this device or who know of the book and have an opinion on it. All manner of comments are invited, and I'll post a summary if there is enough interest. Thanks, Beau Beaumont Brush UT Arlington From styler at RUF.RICE.EDU Mon Nov 20 20:36:39 1995 From: styler at RUF.RICE.EDU (Stephen A Tyler) Date: Mon, 20 Nov 1995 14:36:39 -0600 Subject: Q: _The Anthropology of Space_ In-Reply-To: <01HXKG5XCSAI00MB3Y@SIL.ORG> Message-ID: never heard of it, but its a universal that anything that has universal in it probably isn't From soeren at CPHLING.DK Wed Nov 22 09:41:24 1995 From: soeren at CPHLING.DK (Soeren Wichmann) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 1995 10:41:24 +0100 Subject: agreement (FUNK) Message-ID: Dear folks, in a recent query on the Linguist List I launched a hypothesis concerning how to distinguish between pronouns and agreement in languages that lean toward the head-marking type. The test I proposed was sentences of the type I brought the beans and John the rice. My feeling was that a language might not allow the verb _brought_ to be left out in any of the two clauses if the language had pronouns attached to the verb--as opposed to just agreement markers. The reasoning was common-sense: if a paraphrase of the clause with the missing element can be constructed by supplying material from the corresponding slot in the other clause, a typical head-marking language would disallow sentences as the one above for the same reason that _John I brought the rice_ is disallowed. By consulting the Linguist List, native speakers, and the literature I found out that my hypothesis was probably wrong. Gapping appears to be possible in all of the following languages: Telugu, W. Greenlandic, Tundra Nenets, Japanese, Filipino (Tagalog), Hungarian, Basque, Russian, French, West(erlauwer) Frisian, Dutch, German, Finnish, French, Pitjantjatjara, Punjabi. In some languages it is marginal: English, Spanish. Actually the strongest reaction I got against constructions of this kind was from an English speaker. For a non-linguist Mexican it was fine, two Mexican linguists has different opinions (good vs. not so good), and a Nicaraguan and a Puerto Rican speaker both didn't like it much. I am well aware of the inherent danger in building arguments from such isolated sentences. Nevertheless, if a strong correlation between head- vs. dependent-marking and possibility of gapping would come out of the data, this would seem to be not just an accident of judgments. Although my hypothesis has been shaken I would still like to ask you out there for more data. So please translate I brought the beans and Peter brought the rice into whatever language is not on the list above and note explicitly whether any of the two verbs can be left out. I have still to see a language (other than perhaps English) that is completely unable to do this. If for no other purpose you might want to check this because of the claim in Ross (1970) that gapping is universal. I welcome very much opinions on the issue of agreement vs. pronouns. A few functionalists (Lehmann 1982:240 in one of the Apprehension volumes, Van Valin 1987 in IJAL) have addressed the problem, but it is probably fair to say that it hasn't been solved. Nichols, in her article in head- vs. dependent marking, speaks of zero pronouns in languages that have pronominal affixes on the predicate, and this, although unacceptable to many (including myself) still seems to be the received opinion. You may address your responses to me directly (2020sw at ucsbuxa.edu or soeren at cphling.dk) or to the entire Funknet. In either case I will consider your comments in the summary that I'll post on the Linguist List, which will also be sent to the Funknet. Soeren Wichmann Visiting Scholar, U. C. Santa Barbara From BILLY1 at MDX.AC.UK Fri Nov 24 15:40:40 1995 From: BILLY1 at MDX.AC.UK (billy clark) Date: Fri, 24 Nov 1995 15:40:40 GMT Subject: CONFS: LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION OF GREAT BRITAIN Message-ID: LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION OF GREAT BRITAIN Spring Meeting 1996: University of Sussex First Circular and Call for Papers The 1996 Spring Meeting will be held from Thursday 11 April to Saturday 13 April at the University of Sussex, where the Association will be the guests of the Linguistics Subject Group of the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. The Local Organiser is Nicola Woods (nicolajw at cogs.susx.ac.uk). Travel: The University of Sussex is easily accessible by British Rail; local busses provide easy access to the campus. Brighton itself is an hour from London by train or 30 minutes from Gatwick by car. Events: The Linguistics Association 1996 Lecture on the Thursday evening will be delivered by Professor Johanna Nichols (Berkeley) and is entitled "Where on earth is Indo-European?" Professor Nichols will also present a Language Tutorial on the Chechen and Ingush languages. This will cover: basic structure, typologically and theoretically interesting features, historical comparison, lexicon, transcription and orthography. Some cultural and geographical information on the people. Slides; tape recordings of the languages and Chechen and Ingush music. Practicum giving the audience active command of some basic phrases. Some basic grammatical and lexical material and a bibliography will be distributed. There will also be a Workshop, organised by April McMahon (Cambridge) and Kersti Borjars (Manchester), entitled "New cognates for historical linguistics".One of the most promising developments in current historical linguistics involves attempts to connect results from this domain with cognate disciplines. Participants will address potential connections of historical linguistics with typology, experimental phonetics/laboratory phonology, and genetics. Wine Party: Thursday evening, following Professor Nichols's lecture. Enquiries about the LAGB meeting should be sent to the Meetings Secretary (address below). Full details of the programme and a booking form will be included in the Second Circular (in January). Call for Papers: Members and potential guests are invited to offer papers for the Meeting; abstracts are also accepted from non-members. The LAGB welcomes submissions on any linguistics or linguistics-related topic. Abstracts must arrive by 9 January 1996 and should be sent in the format outlined below to the following address: Professor G. Corbett, Linguistic and International Studies, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 5XH. Papers for the programme are selected anonymously - only the President knows the name of the authors. Abstracts must be presented as follows: submit SEVEN anonymous copies of the abstract, plus ONE with name and affiliation, i.e. CAMERA-READY. The complete abstract containing your title and your name must be no longer than ONE A4 page (8.27" x 11.69") with margins of at least 1" on all sides. You may use single spacing (not more than six lines to the inch) and type must be no smaller than 12 characters per inch. Type uniformly in black (near-letter quality on a word processor) and make any additions in black. It is preferable to print out the abstracts using a laser printer, since if the paper is accepted the abstract will be photocopied and inserted directly into the collection of abstracts sent out to participants. WRITE NAME AND ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE ON THE BACK OF THE ABSTRACT WHICH HAS YOUR NAME ON. The following layout should be considered as standard: (title) Optimality and the Klingon vowel shift (speaker) Clark Kent (institution) Department of Astrology, Eastern Mars University The following guidelines may be useful: 1. Briefly state the topic of your paper. 2. If your paper is to involve an analysis of linguistic material, give critical examples, along with a brief indication of their critical nature. 3. State the relevance of your ideas to past work or to the future development of the field. If you are taking a stand on a controversial issue, summarise the arguments which lead you to take up this position. Normal length for papers delivered at LAGB meetings is 25 minutes (plus 15 minutes discussion). Offers of squibs (10 minutes) or longer papers (40 minutes) will also be considered: please explain why your paper requires less or more time than usual. Conference Bursaries: There will be a maximum of 10 bursaries available to unsalaried members of the Association with preference given to those presenting a paper. Applications should be sent to the President by 9 January 1996. Please state on your application: (a) date of joining the LAGB; (b) whether or not you are an undergraduate or postgraduate student; if a student, whether you receive a normal grant; (d) if not a student, your employment situation. STUDENTS WHO ARE SUBMITTING AN ABSTRACT and wish to apply for funding should include all the above details WITH THEIR ABSTRACT. Guests: Members may invite any number of guests to meetings of the association, upon payment of a guest invitation fee of 5 pounds. Annual General Meeting: will be held on the afternoon of Friday 12 April. Items for the agenda should be sent to the Honorary Secretary. Election of Assistant Secretary: Nominations, proposed and seconded, should be sent to the Hon. Sec. by 23 January 1996; proposers should ascertain that their nominee is willing to stand for election. LAGB Employment Exchange: volunteers to take over from Siew-Yue Killingley, please contact the Hon. Sec. by 9 January 1996. Committee members: President: Professor Grev Corbett, University of Surrey. e-mail: g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk Honorary Secretary: Dr. David Adger, University of York. e-mail: da4 at tower.york.ac.uk. Membership Secretary: Dr. Kersti Borjars, University of Manchester. e-mail: k.e.borjars at manchester.ac.uk Meetings Secretary: Dr. Billy Clark, Middlesex University. e-mail: billy1 at mdx.ac.uk Treasurer: Paul Rowlett, University of Salford. e-mail: p.a.rowlett at mod-lang.salford.ac.uk Assistant Secretary: Dr. April McMahon, University of Cambridge. e-mail: AMM11 at hermes.cam.ac.uk BLN Editor: Dr. Siew-Yue Killingley, Grevatt and Grevatt, 9 Rectory Drive, NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE NE13 1XT. Employment exchange: also run by Dr. Killingley. Tel: 191-285- 8083 10.00-12.45 and 14.00-16.00 weekdays (or 20.00-21.00 weekdays if unavailable during the day). British Linguistic Newsletter (ISBN 0964-65674): to subscribe, contact the Editor, Dr. S-Y. Killingley. Please do not send subscriptions for BLN to the LAGB Treasurer. LAGB internet home page: http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/LAGB. LAGB electronic network: used for disseminating LAGB information and for consulting members quickly. To subscribe, send the message "add lagb" to: listserv at postman.essex.ac.uk. From AlysseR at AOL.COM Sun Nov 26 23:45:25 1995 From: AlysseR at AOL.COM (Alysse Rasmussen) Date: Sun, 26 Nov 1995 18:45:25 -0500 Subject: Hello ... ASL, Spanish, etc Message-ID: Hi, I got the impression I was to introduce myself. My name is Alysse Rasmussen and I've a BA in Linguistics from the UW-Madison. I teach Spanish and ASL (American Sign Language) at a small community college (non-credit side) and am hoping to go back and get my MA/PhD soon. I've a particular interest in teaching foreign languages and would appreciate any suggestions for future study in that area ... and especially some suggestions of how I might best combine TEACHING FL degree programs with LINGUISTICS degree programs. My other languages (that I try and keep up) Danish and Chinese. After that it's down-hill all the way. Guess I've forgotten more than I remember of the others. From tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Tue Nov 28 03:49:32 1995 From: tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Thomas E Payne) Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 19:49:32 -0800 Subject: Kalanga Message-ID: Dear Funknetters I am passing along the following request from Kweku Osam in Zimbabwe: I need some help. One of my students is planning to a master thesis on Kalanga. It's one of the languages spoken in Zimbabwe. It has always been said that very little work has been done on it. What I would like you to do is to post a message on Funknet and Linguist asking if anybody knows of any work done or being done on it. You should indicate that responses be sent to me directly: osam at zimbix.uz.zw Also, could someone please send Dr. Osam the e-mail addresses of Larry Hyman and Scot Myers. Thanks for your help. Tom Payne From lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Tue Nov 28 18:53:38 1995 From: lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (George Lakoff) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 10:53:38 -0800 Subject: summer seminar Message-ID: General announcement: Please post to any lists you think would be relevant. University of California The Berkeley Summer Research Seminars presents Mind Body Brain July 1-August 2, 1996 Join two of UC Berkeley's most distinguished faculty for seminars, discussions, and lectures in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and the philosophy of mind. GEORGE LAKOFF Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley Philosophy and the Embodiment of Mind JOHN SEARLE Professor of Philosophy, UC Berkeley Mind and Brain Application deadline: February 1, 1996. For information, contact: Berkeley Summer Research Seminars UC Extension: AL&S 1995 University Avenue, Dept. GL Berkeley, CA 94720-7002 Telephone: (510) 643-1639, ext.GL E-mail: bsrs37 at unx.berkeley.edu From nrude at FISICA.USON.MX Tue Nov 28 21:58:29 1995 From: nrude at FISICA.USON.MX (Noel E. Rude) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 14:58:29 -0700 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Hi folks, Since the network isn't exactly overflowing right now, I'll take this opportunity to send a message my son has been pestering me about for a long time. He wants me to suggest that somebody out there start putting together a multimedia CD (compact disc) on the languages of the world. He happens to think that we linguists cannot afford to have the general public remain so blithely ignorant of us and of what we do, and that such a CD would contribute toward alleviating that ignorance. He tells me, for example, that NASA has been putting out many CDs. Strapped for funds and facing deep public apathy, NASA apparently intends to stimulate interest and soften the hearts of taxpayers. They, of course, require vast funds. We linguists can live off the crumbs. But my son thinks that even the crumbs can dry up. He thinks it would be to our benefit to produce things which school children would find in their libraries. And he maintains that young folks do look at these things, that they would boot up a computer and have a look at something on the languages of the world. What would this have to be like? Maybe video recordings with accompanying written text, voice printouts, short grammatical descriptions, paradigms with explanation, an analyzed text, maps, maybe some music ... I think it would need to be sophisticated enough to really teach some linguistics, yet at the same time not so much so that it would dissuade the casually interested. That's a tall order, I know. But things like this are being done in other fields, so I'm told. It would aim for a representative sampling of the world's languages, Russian, Navajo, Chinese, Modern Hebrew, Zulu, whatever could be collected. It could start small and grow with succeeding editions. Perhaps something like this is already in the works and somebody will set me straight here. At any rate, I think it's a good idea, if among us there is the technical knowhow, energy, and interest. Now next time my son asks whether I've sent that Funknet message, I can say, YES. Noel From oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU Wed Nov 29 00:16:33 1995 From: oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU (Olga Yokoyama) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 19:16:33 -0500 Subject: your mail In-Reply-To: <199511282158.OAA00886@guarijio.fisica.uson.mx> Message-ID: Noel Rude's (or rather, his son's) idea about multilanguage CD is fascinating. It's one of those outreach ideas we linguists can all benefit from. If anyone wants to include Slavic lgs, I'll be more than happy to contribute. Olga Yokoyama From oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU Wed Nov 29 00:19:08 1995 From: oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU (Olga Yokoyama) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 19:19:08 -0500 Subject: change of address Message-ID: Please help me to record a change of address with Funknet. I have tired to send an "unsubscribe" and a "ubscribe" command to Listserve, but it keeps bouncing back. Sorry for putting this on the network. Olga Yokoyama From johnh at REED.EDU Wed Nov 29 06:49:56 1995 From: johnh at REED.EDU (John B. Haviland) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 22:49:56 -0800 Subject: your mail In-Reply-To: <199511282158.OAA00886@guarijio.fisica.uson.mx> Message-ID: Let me second Noel's suggestion, or at least add to it a suggestion that those of us who don't know it might look at Brenda Farnell's CD about Assiniboine sign talk, recently published by Texas. This has a particular axe to grind (about a particular style of transcription), but it nicely combines video, text, and other sorts of commentary. If I am not mistaken, Brenda and her colleagues at Iowa are also proposing some sort of a workshop for people who would like to learn more about CD production technology etc.--correct me if anyone knows more details--sometime next summer. Cheers, JOhn Haviland From Carl.Mills at UC.EDU Wed Nov 29 13:17:58 1995 From: Carl.Mills at UC.EDU (Carl Mills) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 08:17:58 -0500 Subject: Noel Rude CD Message-ID: I'm still learning Estonian, and my Sami is rusty, so there are probably folks out there who can do better on Finno-Ugric languages than I can, but I'm willing to help. My T.A. is Bulgarian, if we need Bulgarian input. If, as I am assuming, this is to be a CD ROM, it should include both still photos and video. Carl From wilcox at MAIL.UNM.EDU Wed Nov 29 15:21:54 1995 From: wilcox at MAIL.UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 08:21:54 -0700 Subject: Farnell CD/book Message-ID: For those who might be interested, I am writing a review of the Farnell book ("Do You See What I Mean? Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action") for the Journal of Anthropological Research. It should appear sometime early 1996. For anyone thinking of buying the book for serious study, I would highly recommend also getting the CD. It's one thing to read about her examples (I find most movement transcriptions quite opaque), and yet another to actually see and hear the stories being told. While we are on the topic, let me mention two other projects associated with video and language. One is the Multimedia Dictionary of American Sign Language (MM-DASL). Although the MM-DASL has not yet appeared as a commercial product, it is a novel use of video and Mac interface technologies to implement a bilingual (ASL-English) dictionary. Signs are represented as video, of course. The most unique aspect of the application is that it allows users to search for signs directly, but supplying phonological parameters. This is done through a fully graphic (both static pictures and movies, for dynamic parameters such as movement) interface. The second is a project that is still under development but I think has great potential. With a colleague in Lyon France, I and others are developing a World Wide Web database that will serve as a corpus of sign languages. The database can be searched (we intend to have different "front ends" for the search -- English, French, etc.) by multiple searchable fields (gloss, phonological parameters, etc.). The items found are displayed through your web browser. Right now we are only doing pictures (GIFs) but the next step is to include video. We hope that eventually this might serve as a netwide resource for researchers in typology of sign language, for example. Does anyone know if there is a similar resource for spoken languages? It would be pretty easy to implement on the web. -- Sherman Wilcox ========================================================= Sherman Wilcox wilcox at mail.unm.edu Associate Professor Dept. of Linguistics (505) 277-6353 v/tty University of New Mexico (505) 277-6355 fax Albuquerque, NM 87131 ========================================================= From edwards at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Wed Nov 29 19:32:15 1995 From: edwards at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (Jane A. Edwards) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 11:32:15 -0800 Subject: CD of World Englishes Message-ID: The following may be of interest on this thread of language CDs: [from LINGUIST] >Subject: request for survey participants >September 25, 1995 > >Macmillan Publishers Ltd. (London)/Stockton Press (New York) is considering >publishing, in both book and CD ROM formats, a comprehensive reference work >that will examine the different varieties of English as they are spoken >throughout the world. We would like to conduct a survey to help us assess >the linguistic community's views of such a work, and would be interested in >hearing from individuals with an interest in this subject area, who would >be willing to complete a survey. If you would like to take part in this >survey please contact Charles Regan at cregan at grovestocktn.com. Thank you. Sidney Greenbaum is apparently one of the consultants. I don't know who else is involved, but I can hardly wait for this one to come out. What a great era. -Jane Edwards From jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU Thu Nov 30 23:11:05 1995 From: jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 1995 15:11:05 -0800 Subject: CDs and language Message-ID: More on CDs....I am in the process of preparing a grant proposal for linguistic field work and am very interested in CD ROM applications for both storage and display of linguistic data, including audio and video as well as text. Unfortunately, I don't know much about CD ROM technology. Can anyone connect me with Brenda Farnell to ask about her workshop? And is anyone else exploring this method of preserving and organizing field data? I have been exploring ways to computerize field data, and haven't come up with much -- a Hypercard program called Rook is available, but won't do tabs; and SIL has a lot of stuff, but it's all for DOS, and I do Mac. So if anyone has leads in that area, I'd really appreciate hearing about it. Jo Rubba = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics = English Department, California Polytechnic State University = San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 = Tel. (805)-756-0117 E-mail: jrubba at oboe.aix.calpoly.edu = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = From traugott at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Nov 1 03:08:28 1995 From: traugott at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Elizabeth Traugott) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 19:08:28 PST Subject: grammaticalization Message-ID: Dear all, This is in response to Spike's boundary-challenging questions for grammaticalization (hereafter GR). Susanna Cumming rightly asked what theory of grammar was being presupposed in the discussions. My view of grammar arises out of the task I have set myself--to develop a theory of historical discourse analysis. GR plays a role, but not an exclusive one, in this task. I see grammar as structuring cognitive and communicative aspects of language; it encompasses not only phonology, morphosyntax and semantics but also inferences that arise out of linguistic form (i.e. linguistic pragmatics such as topicalization, deixis; other kinds of pragmatics including encyclopedic knowledge are not part of grammar, but of course are important in the speaker-addressee negotiation that gives rise to GR). In my view, GR is concerned fundamentally with gradient diachronic processes. Early GR is the result of the interactions of morphosyntax with pragmatics. In particular, conversational implicatures arising from the principle of say no more than you mean and imply more thereby may become salient over time, leading addressees to interpret certain strings as expressions of those implicatures. What is important for GR is that a change can be said to occur when a new construction (morphosyntax- semantics pairing) has arisen. The classic be going to example is prototypical because i) the original string was syntactically constrained (be going to V, not *be going to N), ii) the invited inference of future and purpose arising from to in the environment of the non-completive came to be semanticized as the prime meaning of be going to, iii) a new construction came into being. In addition, there was bonding and later phonological reduction became possible. But I do not regard bonding or attrition as criterial. Nominal clines (nominal adposition > case) and verbal clines (main verb > TAM marker) were the staples of GR theory in the eighties. But there are other clines which are of interest as well, such as PP/serial V > Connective (e.g. because) and Manner Adverb > Sentence Adverb > Discourse Marker (e.g. in fact, indeed). These all show decategorialization and generalization. They also show subjectification in the sense that they become pragmatically more situated in the Speaker-Addressee situation. My current definition of early GR is that it is the process whereby lexical material in highly constrained pragmatic and morphosyntactic contexts becomes grammatical. More specifically, lexical material in a syntactic string comes to participate in the structural texture of the language, especially its morphosyntactic constructions. Later GR involves already grammatical material being generalized. In most cases of GR, extant lexical items in extant syntactic strings undergo changes as a result of discourse practices. So GR does not involve discourse > syntax > morphology (pace Givon 1979), but morphosyntax via pragmatic inferencing in discourse > more general morphosyntax. What does this suggest for Spike's questions? Whereas most of the cases we have studied to date fall into cross-linguistic construction types (auxiliaries, cases, connectives, etc.), each instance is unique, but the changes it undergoes occur within the broad-scale constraints of decategorialization and generalization. So I would not exclude any of Spike's exs. on grounds of uniqueness. Go-went involves decategorialization of the parts of the verb that became suppletive, but there is no generalization; therefore I think that go-went suppletion is lexicalization not GR. On the other hand, dem > copula involves change in function (and in the example given) generalization. The same holds for the third case, reanalysis of V > Pro. Much of what I have said above is to be found in more detail and with data in Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Closs Traugott, 1993, Grammaticalization (CUP), especially Chaps. 3-5, and in a version of my ICHL paper the final draft of which is still in progress ("The role of the development of discourse markers in a theory of GR", ICHL XII, Manchester, August 1995). See also Joan Bybee, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca, 1994, The Evolution of Grammar, U of Chicago Press, for some similar but by no means same views. Elizabeth C. Traugott From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Wed Nov 1 14:19:23 1995 From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 08:19:23 -0600 Subject: Process-morpheme stems Message-ID: One possible process-moprpheme stem: one of the allomorphs of the root _to_ 'go' in Carib of Surinam is either a velar frixative or simple vowel length on the vowel of the prefix (data from Berend Hoff's 1968 _The Carib Language_, p. 168 for the form w/ [x], p. 66 for discussion of the general alternation between the sequence $x and $$ before [s]). /w$-to-ya/ --> [w$xsa] ~ [w$$sa] 'I go' ($ = unrounded high central vowel) /m$-to-ya/ --> [m$xsa] ~ [m$$sa] 'you go' etc. While SYLLABLE reduction is a regular process in Carib of Surinam (Gildea 1995, IJAL article on the phenomenon in the Cariban family), this particular root is idiosyncratic in that it is one of only two monosyllabic roots that reduce, and also in that most syllables with mid-vowels are not subject to reduction. Anyway, while there are reasons to believe that the underlying form of the root is not simply a process, in at least one allomorph, the process of lengthening in the prefix vowel is sometimes all that identifies the root. Spike From Osten.Dahl at TELE.SU.SE Wed Nov 1 16:47:48 1995 From: Osten.Dahl at TELE.SU.SE (Oesten Dahl) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 17:47:48 +0100 Subject: Why suppletion may be seen as grammaticalization Message-ID: Elizabeth Traugott says that she thinks that "go-went" is lexicalization, not grammaticalization. However: Suppletion may play a role in processes that also involve what is undoubtedly grammaticalization on anyone's definition of the term and together with the latter contribute to the creation of new grammatical distinction. Consider for instance the rise of perfective-imperfective distinctions. In the well-known case of Russian, verbs come in imperfective-perfective pairs, where the relation between the two members may be of a rather different character: 1. unprefixed imperfective vs. prefixed perfective, e.g. fotografirovat' - sfotografirovat' 'photograph' 2 suffixed imperfective vs. plain perfective, e.g. davat' - dat' 'give' 3. different suffixal formations from the same root, e.g. zamykat' - zamknut' 'close' 4. imperfective and perfective from totally different stems, e.g. brat' - vzjat' 'take' and various other more complex cases The general process that seems to be going on is that erstwhile lexical distinctions - whether derivational or of a more idiosyncratic character - have come to be exploited in grammar to create aspectual paradigms. In Russian this process has not been completed: the members of the pairs are usually seen as separate lexemes. A closer look at the tense-aspect systems of IE languages such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit shows, however, that the distinctions between different stems (present, aorist, perfect) in the verb paradigms have similar origins and that suppletion plays a role there too. In my opinion, there is motivation for using the term "grammaticalization" in such a way that it covers all processes that contribute to the rise of grammatical constructions or grammatical paradigms. Elizabeth's view is of course also motivated if it is assumed that the fusion of two earlier lexemes into one should be called lexicalization. But then not only suppletion but also the inflectionalization of derivational morphemes falls under this definition of lexicalization. So the conclusion would probably be that grammaticalization and lexicalization are not necessarily distinct processes. Oesten Dahl From nrude at FISICA.USON.MX Wed Nov 1 21:51:42 1995 From: nrude at FISICA.USON.MX (Noel E. Rude) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 14:51:42 -0700 Subject: irregular developments Message-ID: Saludos, We might also think about the historic development and generalization of ablaut patterns in, e.g., Semitic. There perhaps the most development has been in Arabic. Noun pluralization was much more regular (and generally suffixal) earlier on, but now there are many patterns, kitaab-, kutub- `book(s)', kalb-, kilaab- `dog(s)', etc. `bank' (the financial variety), I believe, has been borrowed as bank-, bunuuk-. We have here the evolution of a rather irregular system (plurals are pretty irregular in a lot of lgs.), and along with suppletive verb paradigms, Slavic aspectual contrasts, we can see that development/change/grammatical- ization can absorb irregularities as it progresses. I'm not so much worried about the terminology as how you guys help me to understand this. Noel From wilcox at MAIL.UNM.EDU Wed Nov 1 21:58:57 1995 From: wilcox at MAIL.UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 14:58:57 -0700 Subject: ASL position announcement Message-ID: Announcement Position Available: ASL Lecturer University of New Mexico The Department of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico announces an opening for the position of Lecturer to commence in August 1996, pending budget capability. The main responsibility for this full-time, permanent position is to teach undergraduate courses in American Sign Language (ASL). Minimum Qualifications: Master's Degree; native or near-native ASL skills; bicultural with experience in interacting comfortably in both the Deaf and hearing communities; and experience in teaching ASL. Desirable Qualifications: Significant graduate-level education in Linguistics, ASL Instruction, Deaf Studies, or related fields; ability to teach other courses in the Interpreter Education Program, such as Deaf Culture; ability to work effectively with students and colleagues; ability and desire to work with program faculty in developing a state-of-the-art program in Interpreter Education and ASL instruction. Deadline for receipt of applications is January 15, 1996. Send letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and names of three references to: Bill Isham, Chair ASL Search Committee Dept. of Linguistics University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-1196. This position includes a full benefits package. Salary is commensurate with qualifications. The University of New Mexico is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. From colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Thu Nov 2 19:37:37 1995 From: colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Colin Harrison) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 1995 14:37:37 -0500 Subject: Linguistic Relativism Message-ID: Hey Funknetters! At the risk of unleashing a torrent of violent invective, I want to say a few things about linguistic relativism... I am genuinely interested in receiving constructive comment on the following assertions. If different linguistic systems pay attention to different categories/principles, then speakers of those languages will have more established neural linkages amongst whatever conceptual (etc.) elements are necessary for the categories in question. Those stronger linkages amount to greater conceptual salience (greater ease of activation) and will hence exert greater influence on related conceptualizations... This is a kind of mild linguistic relativism. People who have a bad reaction to such ideas seem to me to be falling into a simple logical fallacy, i.e. that the absence of a category from linguistic structure equals its necessary absence from the conceptual system of speakers of that language. This is ridiculous. The absence, either complete or relative, of an observable structure in a language system does not entail that the speakers of that language are *incapable* of conceptualising such a category. Many Asian languages do not mark tense, and yet wristwatches still sell quite well in such countries; trains run on time at least as much as they do here, etc... The presence or absence of a structure does however give us hints about what kinds of categories might be *important* in the world view of the speakers. It's a question of relative importance. It is not a question of variant conceptual ability (and hence by extension, intelligence - the notion upon which the common knee-jerk resistance seems to be based). So why bother even talking about it? Because it's interesting! The fact that broad socio-cultural characteristcs may find reflection in linguistic structure is one that should not be rejected a priori on spuriously motivated concerns over political correctness. If the evidence provided by linguistic structure can be correlated with other social and perhaps psychological observations, then we might be able not only to say something about variant cultures for the noble cause of posterity, but perhaps also about some of the root causes of cross-cultural misunderstanding, and perhaps go on to make some intelligent suggestions for the facilitation of cross-cultural communication. Another common misconception which seems to emerge in arguments about relativity is the presumed mono-directionality of influence from language to thought, or vice-versa. All humans have access to essentially the same range of conceptual potential. How that potential is developed in the individual is a result of the unique life experience of that individual. The language system(s) that an individual grows up with will obviously have a notable influence on that process, whereby repeated employment of categories common in the system will reinforce certain conceptual associations, while others will remain less reinforced. But by the same token, the individual is not constrained by the linguistic system such that they become unable to say things for which the language lacks forms (remeniscent of Orwell's notion of political control via 'Newspeke'). A language is a system within which creativity is certainly possible to some degree. And there are many aspects of conceptualisation which are not directly dependant upon language-related systems. So "which influences which" is similarly a narrowly conceived question. Language and thought are intimately related; aspects, in fact, of the same phenomenon. There is no chicken and egg paradox, unless the two are reified as separable objects. They are not separable objects, they are facets of single phenomenon, and when regarding a single phenomenon, the question "which came first" doesn't really make much sense... Whaddya think? Colin J.Harrison Linguistics Department Rice University 6100 South Main ph. +1 (713) 630 9312 HOUSTON TX 77005 e-mail: colinh at owlnet.rice.edu USA Have a nice day! From dennis at LING.GU.SE Fri Nov 3 14:40:16 1995 From: dennis at LING.GU.SE (Day, D.) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 15:40:16 +0100 Subject: Re. lingusitic relativism Message-ID: In response to Colin J.Harrison, my comments are marked off with an ">" (lousy mailer). Hey Funknetters! At the risk of unleashing a torrent of violent invective, I want to say a few things about linguistic relativism... I am genuinely interested in receiving constructive comment on the following assertions. If different linguistic systems pay attention to different categories/principles, then speakers of those languages will have more established neural linkages amongst whatever conceptual (etc.) elements are necessary for the categories in question. > one problem here as I see it is that lingusitic systems don't pay attention to anything, >people do. If you mean that people pay attention to categories then you're overstating. >People pay attention to things which interest them or somehow force themselves upon >them, lingusitic and other categories are one type of thing. That they may then find cause >to express these multifarious things in some language is another matter. Those stronger linkages amountto greater conceptual salience (greater ease of activation) and will hence exert greater influence on related conceptualizations... This is a kind of mild linguistic relativism. People who have a bad reaction to such ideas seem to me to be falling into a simple logical fallacy, i.e. that the absence of a category from linguistic structure equals its necessary absence from the conceptual system of speakers of that language. This is ridiculous. > I agree, these people must 1) always know ahead of time what it is they're going to say >and 2) know exactly how to express it. The absence, either complete or relative, of an observable structure in a language system does not entail that the speakers of that language are *incapable* of conceptualising such a category. Many Asian languages do not mark tense, and yet wristwatches still sell quite well in such countries; trains run on time at least as much as they do here, etc... The presence or absence of a structure does however give us hints about what kinds of categories might be *important* in the world view of the speakers. It's a question of relative importance. It is not a question of variant conceptual ability (and hence by extension, intelligence - the notion upon which the common knee-jerk resistance seems to be based). So why bother even talking about it? Because it's interesting! The fact that broad socio-cultural characteristcs may find reflection in linguistic structure is one that should not be rejected a priori on spuriously motivated concerns over political correctness. > how can we say that socio-cultural characteristics are reflected in something, e.g. >language, which can not be observed outside of some socio-cultural context. Further, >most so-called socio-cultural characteristics are in fact glosses for lingusitic practices. If the evidence provided by linguistic structure can be correlated with other social and perhaps psychological observations, then we might be able not only to say something about variant cultures for the noble cause of posterity, but perhaps also about some of the root causes of cross-cultural misunderstanding, and perhaps go on to make some intelligent suggestions for the facilitation of cross-cultural communication. Another common misconception which seems to emerge in arguments about relativity is the presumed mono-directionality of influence from language to thought, or vice-versa. All humans have access to essentially the same range of conceptual potential. How that potential is developed in the individual is a result of the unique life experience of that individual. > I take exception to the unique individual. I believe other people, and particularly the >things they do together, have a lot to do with our concepts. Also note that the most basic >thing we "do together" is talk to each other. The language system(s) that an individual grows up with will obviously have a notable influence on that process, whereby repeated employment of categories common in the system will reinforce certain conceptual associations, while others will remain less reinforced. But by the same token, the individual is not constrained by the linguistic system such that they become unable to say things for which the language lacks forms (remeniscent of Orwell's notion of political control via 'Newspeke'). A language is a system within which creativity is certainly possible to some degree. > Again this is a stange sense of agency attributed to such an abstraction as a linguistic >system And there are many aspects of conceptualisation which are not directly dependant upon language-related systems. So "which influences which" is similarly a narrowly conceived question. Language and thought are intimately related; aspects, in fact, of the same phenomenon. There is no chicken and egg paradox, unless the two are reified as separable objects. They are not separable objects, they are facets of single phenomenon, and when regarding a single phenomenon, the question "which came first" doesn't really make much sense... > what single "phenomena" do you have in mind? Whaddya think? Colin J.Harrison Linguistics Department Rice University 6100 South Main ph. +1 (713) 630 9312 HOUSTON TX 77005 e-mail: colinh at owlnet.rice.edu USA Have a nice day! //--------------------------------------------------------\\ // Dennis Day dennis at ling.gu.se // Dept. of Linguistics tel/fax +47 (0) 31 969631 // Univ. of Goteborg // 412 98 Goteborg // Sweden From jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU Fri Nov 3 22:45:48 1995 From: jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 14:45:48 -0800 Subject: Grammar book query Message-ID: Hello all, I'm writing to ask for some impromptu book reviews. I'm hung up trying to decide between two texts to use for a course called 'Modern English Grammar' (a structure-of-American-English type course for, mainly, undergraduate English majors; it's a ten-week course). The books in question are Mary Sedley's 'Anatomy of English' and Jeff Kaplan's 'English Grammar: Principles & Facts'. If anyone uses or has used these books and has comments, I'd be very appreciative. I can post a summary to the list, if people ask for that. I'm interested in knowing how successful either book is, and any problems that might arise with it (especially in such a short term of instruction). Thanks! = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics = English Department, California Polytechnic State University = San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 = Tel. (805)-756-0117 E-mail: jrubba at oboe.aix.calpoly.edu = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = From AAHNY at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU Mon Nov 6 18:44:47 1995 From: AAHNY at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Alan Huffman) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 1995 13:44:47 -0500 Subject: In Memoriam: William Diver Message-ID: William Diver, 74, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Columbia University, perished on August 31 while sailing in Nantucket Harbor. Diver was a major intellect who founded and developed a unique school of linguistics. Through his teaching and mentoring, he formed a strong, active circle of students and scholars who were intensely devoted to him because of his ideas, the excel- lence of his teaching, and his personal qualities. Although his fame was limited largely to this circle, he will surely be seen by history as one of the great linguists of the twentieth century. Diver began his career as an Indo-Europeanist, with a specialization in Italic dialects and Homeric Greek. He studied under Andre Martinet at Colum- bia, receiving his Ph.D. in 1953 and appointment to the Columbia faculty in 1955. He served as the editor of Word, the Journal of the Linguistic Circle of NY, from 1956-1965, and was a member of the Societe de Linguistique de Paris. In the mid-1960's, Diver developed an interest in general linguistics and began turning his attention to synchronic grammar and to phonology. His ideas were radically at odds with the contemporary mainstream ideas which were also developing at that time. The essentials of Diver's thought can be briefly summarized as follows. 1) Diver demonstrated the inappropriateness of traditional categories of grammar to analysis of language. The Sentence and its parts--subject, predi- cate, direct / indirect object, clause, phrase, etc.--as well as the parts of speech stem from the classical interest in logic, and represent an analysis of the structure and content of thought. Traditional grammar, Diver realized, began as an attempt to correlate linguistic structure with this logical struc- ture. For example, in the traditional account of the Greek and Latin nomina- tive, accusative, and dative cases, there was an attempt to explain the occur- rence of these morphologies in terms of categories of the structure of thought: the nominative is the case of the subject, the accusative is the case of the direct object, and the dative is the case of the indirect object. When, as frequently happens, direct objects turn up in the dative, and predicates in the nominative, this attempt to correlate the two structures has failed empirically. However, rather than abandon the enterprise, traditional grammars set up what Diver regarded as mere escape clauses: "government of the dative", "predicate nominative". Through such maneuvers, the theoretically unmotivated part of traditional grammars came to dwarf the theoretically moti- vated part, leading ultimately to a picture of language as a collection of ar- bitrary devices, a type of human behavior not comparable to other, more readi- ly understandable types of behavior. Thus, Diver regarded the categories of syntax simply as artifacts of an unsuccessful attempt to explain linguistic phenomena in terms of the logic- derived parts of the sentence and parts of speech, not as a revelation of some unique human cognitive process. He took issue with generative grammar on the grounds that, rather than recognizing these categories as a consequence of analytical failure, generative grammar bought heavily into the traditional scheme and went on to build up a school of analysis which took it for granted, thereby developing a view of language as having an important component of ar- bitrary relations of the "government" type. This was an unjustified conclu- sion, Diver said, because the assumptions about linguistic categories lying at its very base were faulty. 2) In Diver's view, the task of grammatical analysis is not to seek man- ifestations of universal categories in languages, but to discover the unique categories articulated by each language. Here, his position was similar to the anti-nomenclaturist view propounded by Saussure. Diver wanted to explain the outward face of language, what we actually observe, ultimately, the shape of the sound waves of speech. Diverian grammatical analyses focus on occur- rences of forms in texts and discourse, the distribution of forms being re- garded as the best overt clues to underlying categories of language. Morphs and morphemes are examined as potential bearers of linguistic meaning, so that grammatical hypotheses very often take the form of signal-meaning pairs. 3) Diver articulated an innovative view of grammatical meaning, which has come to be called an 'instrumental' view of meaning, in contrast to the traditional compositional view. In the compositional view, everything in a linguistically communicated message is attributed to some element of linguis- tic input, and a direct mapping between input and output is required. Diver recognized that communicative output can often be traced not to the form with which compositional analysis associates it, but rather to some other element of linguistic or extralinguistic context. A compositional analysis may build into the meaning of a form all sorts of communicative effects for which that form is actually not responsible at all. The instrumental view, in contrast, recognizes that not everything commu- nicated with language is encoded linguistically; that people use their infer- ential powers to jump to conclusions on the basis of a relatively small amount of actually encoded linguistic information. Diver thus saw the effects of hu- man intelligence as pervasive in the functioning of language, and speakers' use of linguistic meanings as comparable to other kinds of human tool use. This led to the distinguishing of two different kinds or levels of function: the _meaning_ of a form--that sparse element which the form encodes and con- sistently contributes to the communicative process, and the _message_--the totality of communicative effects which may at one time or another be asso- ciated with the occurrence of a form, but which is actually the resultant of human inference operating with many different kinds of input, both linguistic and non-linguistic. Grammatical analysis thus becomes a search for that which languages ac- tually encode, these sparse, hint-like meanings. In this enterprise, then, meaning is not something studied in the abstract, without reference to a par- ticular language; meaning is rather a device of explanation, invoked to ac- count for facts of morphemic distribution in individual languages. In Diver's own words: "The general picture of human language is that of a particular kind of instrument of communication, an imprecise code by means of which precise messages can be transmitted through the exercise of human ingenuity. The code and the ingenuity must be kept clearly separate; most of the diffi- culties encountered in the various schools of linguistic analysis result, simply, from the attempt to build the ingenuity into the structure of language itself." Diver liked to give his own twist to the well-known analogy of Sapir, saying: "Language is only powerful enough to run a light bulb; but we use it to run an elevator." By pursuing this view of language as being driven by meaning and by ordi- nary human behavioral and perceptual characteristics, Diver and his students were able to develop explanations not only for those parts of language which have traditionally been regarded as basically semantic--verb tenses, demon- stratives, aspect, etc.-- but also for those that have always been seen as lying within the central core of syntax, such as government, concord, and or- dering phenomena. He took particular issue with the attempts of descriptivism and generativism to see language as having an autonomous structure that can be described algorithmically. Analyses of a great variety of languages have been carried out in the framework Diver innovated. Thus, for Latin and Greek, discarding notions of sentence structure and syntactic government, and taking occurrences of case morphology themselves as the data to be explained, Diver found that these cases, for one thing, have to do with communicating the degree of control exercised by participants over events. Similarly, he analyzed subjunctive morphologies in these languages as indicating particular levels of the probability of occurrence of the event de- noted by their attached lexical item; other forms turned out to have to do with attracting greater or lesser degrees of attention to an associated item. He posited that word order in English can function as the signal of a meaning, like the morphological signals of Latin and Greek. Moreover, he and his stud- ents discovered that the meanings attached to these signals often organize themselves into closed systems in which the meanings exhaustively divide up a semantic substance. So, for instance, the Latin cases denote _relative_ de- grees of control over an event, in the order (from highest to lowest) nomina- tive, ablative, dative, accusative. 4) In phonology, Diver was concerned with explaining the shape of the sound wave of speech below the level of the signal, that is, the nonrandom distribution of distinctive units of sound within a language's lexical and grammatical morphemes. He accounted for these skewings in part by appealing to facts of articulatory and acoustic phonetics, some of which had gone neg- lected in previous phonological research, which, indeed has minimized the role of phonetics to begin with. But the theoretical significance of Diverian pho- nology is more profound, for complete explanation of this non-randomness has required an appeal to the same principles of communication and human behavior which underlie grammar, two external orientations that had not previously played so explicit a role in phonological theory. Diver, then, proposed a non-autonomous phonology, just as he proposed a non-autonomous, non-modular grammar. The communicative factor requires speakers to maintain distinctions among sounds; yet speakers show a tendency, here as in other aspects of human behav- ior, to economize effort. Diverian phonology, as it studies both the frequen- cies of phonological units and the ways in which they combine, gives evidence of the dynamic interplay of these competing pressures. The following is one of Diver's examples. It is well known that in many languages, such as German and Russian, final stops are voiceless. In English, although the skewing is not absolute, voiceless stops in word-final position heavily outweigh voiced stops. English is thus merely a less extreme example of what is found in German and Russian; the difference of a few percentage points is not important since one explanation covers both situations. Diver proposed that it is the task of coordinating two active articulators (the tongue or lips which create the stop, and the vocal folds which provide voic- ing) that accounts for the lower frequency of voiced stops as compared to voiceless, where only one of these articulators has to be controlled. Howev- er, the beginning of the word, where the hearer does not yet know the identity of the word, bears a greater communicative burden than the end of the word, which the speaker will likely be able to figure out for himself once it is reached (cf. people's tendency to chime in at the ends of words). This exam- ple shows the interplay of factors: the communicative factor motivates the greater distinctiveness afforded by having both voiced and unvoiced stops; but the human factor--ordinary laziness--carries the day when one can get away with less distinctiveness. 5) In following this route, Diver developed an epistemology intended to bring the practice of linguistics into line with that of other attempts to un- derstand natural phenomena in the scientific era. For Diver, explanation was not a matter of simply demonstrating that a particular item is a member of a more general class; he wanted to get at the "Why" of things. This meant seek- ing motivations for observations one does not understand in terms of areas of knowledge one does understand, not embarking on a speculative program. It meant adhering to highly demanding standards of validation and fit between hy- pothesis and data. Diverian analyses are heavily textually oriented; large quantities of data from actual texts and extensive use of counts are their hallmarks. Diver was very skeptical of a-prioristic schemes, such as univer- sal grammar. He insisted that theory be always guided by analysis, not the other way around, no matter how unfamiliar the resulting theory might appear. These ideas evolved into a comprehensive framework for linguistic analy- sis that was sometimes called "Form-Content" in the '60's and '70's and ma- tured into the "Columbia School of Linguistics" in the '80's and '90's. This approach is of course quite the opposite of contemporary mainstream linguistic thought, and thus did not get much press. Diver was a man far ahead of his time; in a world obsessed with modularity and syntax, it is a rare voice which asserts that language is an instance of ordinary human behavior, and that lin- guistic structure can and must be understood without reference to syntax. Nonetheless, a great many in-depth analyses of a wide range of languages by Diver and his students have borne him out, and the scholarly mechanism he es- tablished has quietly pursued its work, with little public fanfare. From 1975, Diver edited the Columbia University Working Papers in Linguistics, in which many of his own writings appeared. He gave invited lecture series in numerous countries of Europe and Asia, in addition to speaking at conferences in the USA and Canada. The Columbia School has held biennial international conferences since 1989 at Columbia, the University of Virginia and Rutgers, and a Summer Institute of the Columbia School will be held in NYC in 1996. Even after his retirement to Emeritus status in 1989, Diver remained an active participant in an ongoing Linguistics Seminar at Columbia and in the Conferen- ces, giving generously of his time, and continuing to attract new adherents through his writings and lectures. Linguists who received the Ph.D. at Columbia under Diver's advisorship include Erica Garcia, Robert Kirsner, Flora Klein, David Zubin, Wallis Reid, Abdul Azim, John Penhallurick, Robert Leonard, Ellen Contini-Morava, Anita de la Garza, Alan Huffman, Bonny Gildin, Radmila Gorup, Barbara Goldberg, and Joseph Davis. A dissertation written under Diver's sponsorship received the Edward Sapir Award in Linguistics from the New York Academy of Sciences in 1985. Books presenting Columbia School analyses or discussing Columbia School ideas have been written by Garcia, Kirsner, Reid, Contini-Morava, Gorup, Huffman, Zubin, and Yishai Tobin; an extensive bibliography of published Col- umbia School works has been assembled (available from the e-mail address indi- cated below). Early publications of Diver's dealing with Indo-European include the fol- lowing: "The problem of Old Bulgarian s't", Word 11 (1955). "On the prehistory of Greek consonantism", Word 14 (1958). "On the diachronic role of the morphological system", Miscelanea Homenaje a Andre Martinet (1958). Publications reflecting the emerging Columbia School position include numerous articles on topics in the grammars of Latin, Greek, and English in the Colum- bia University Working Papers in Linguistics series, as well as the following: "The system of relevance of the Homeric verb," Acta Linguistica Haf- niensia 12, 45-68 (1969). "Substance and value in linguistic analysis," in Semiotext(e) 1, 13-30 (1974). "Phonology as human behavior," in D. Aaronson and R. Rieber (eds.) Psycholinguistic research: implications and applications. Hillsdale, N.Y.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., pp. 161-182 (1979). "Theory," in E. Contini-Morava and B. Goldberg (eds.) Meaning as explana- tion: Advances in sign-based linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (1995). A collection of Diver's papers, essays, and talks in the Columbia School framework is being prepared for publication by a committee of his former stud- ents and associates. Diver's relations with his students, colleagues and associates were char- acterized by unlimited generosity, tolerance, and gentlemanliness. The role model he exemplified made as profound and lasting an impression on people as did his ideas. A memorial service for William Diver is currently in planning. Written by Alan Huffman Deepest thanks to all my colleagues for their contributions and suggestions, especially to Joseph, Ellen, and Ricardo From jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU Wed Nov 8 02:10:52 1995 From: jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 1995 18:10:52 -0800 Subject: 'Use' and the Supreme Court Message-ID: Hello everyone, Did anyone else catch the interesting NY Times article within the past week or so on the word 'use'? I found myself wondering how I would advise the court if I were consulted as a linguist. (Although I dug and dug through all my Times's of this past week, I can't relocate the article, so the following is from memory.) The question at issue was, what does it mean to 'use' a gun? Apparently, someone had had their penalty increased in severity because of the claim that they had 'used' a gun in committing a crime (a drug deal, I think). The gun was in the trunk of the car; it was never taken out or pointed at anyone; only the owner of the gun knew it was there, not anyone s/he was interacting with. The argument was along the lines that the perpetrator had gotten comfort and reassurance from the presence of the gun, and therefore was more confident in going ahead with the crime. Analogies were drawn to people who might say things like 'I keep a gun in my nighttable drawer. I use it for protection' when, in fact, the person may never have shot or brandished the gun at anyone. The Supreme Court justices seemed to really struggle with this one. So, what does it mean to 'use' a gun? Do we go with the prototype, and try to defend that with some kind of empirical method of demonstrating what the prototypical meaning is; do we allow the extended uses like the gun in the drawer or in the trunk? And if so, where does 'use of a gun' end? I'd be interested in knowing how other linguists would respond if asked for expert help with this question .... = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics = English Department, California Polytechnic State University = San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 = Tel. (805)-756-0117 E-mail: jrubba at oboe.aix.calpoly.edu = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = From jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU Wed Nov 8 04:08:59 1995 From: jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU (Jon Aske) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 1995 23:08:59 -0500 Subject: 'Use' and the Supreme Court In-Reply-To: from "Johanna Rubba" at Nov 7, 95 06:10:52 pm Message-ID: Hi Jo, I saw the article too and cut it out to use it someday in class. It was great. Here is the reference: NY Times, Tuesday, October 31, 1995, by Linda Greenhouse, p. A19 "Justices explore elusive meaning of a word that seems so simple" I seem to remember seeing an announcement about a talk by Chuck Fillmore on the same topic not too long ago, if my memory serves me well. Probably a talk at Berkeley announced on the linguists' net there. Best, Jon =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Jon Aske / jaske at bates.edu (Bates) / jonaske at garnet.berkeley.edu (UCB) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From LINDRYER at UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Wed Nov 8 06:43:58 1995 From: LINDRYER at UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew Dryer) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 01:43:58 -0500 Subject: Conf: Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Message-ID: LAST ANNOUNCEMENT CALL FOR PAPERS: Abstracts deadline: November 15, 1995. CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE and LANGUAGE II APRIL 12-14, 1996 State University of New York at Buffalo Sponsors: Linguistics Department Center for Cognitive Science Conference in the Disciplines Invited Speakers: Melissa BOWERMAN, Max-Planck Institute (Netherlands) Jack DUBOIS, University of California at Santa Barbara Dedre GENTNER, Northwestern University Evening speakers: Gilles FAUCONNIER, University of California at San Diego George LAKOFF, University of California at Berkeley Ronald LANGACKER, University of California at San Diego Leonard TALMY, State University of New York at Buffalo We will be hosting the second meeting of the Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language conference here at SUNY-BUFFALO April 12-14, 1996. A major purpose of this meeting is to create an opportunity for discussion and exchange of ideas between the Cognitive, Semantic and Discourse Pragmatic communities. The Organizing Committee thus welcomes abstracts for papers on conceptual structure, discourse, metaphor, lexical semantics, pragmatics, theoretical foundations, grammaticalization, constructions, psycholinguistics, computation, and acquisition. Abstract submissions should include: Seven (7) copies of a ONE-page abstract of the paper, in 12 point font or type, with a title. OMIT name and affiliation. A 3" by 5" card with the title of the paper and the name(s) of the author(s), address and e-mail address. Specify one or two primary topics (from the list in the paragraph above). If none of the topics applies, please specify "other subject area". Send abstracts by NOVEMBER 15, 1995 to: CSDL Department of Linguistics 684 Baldy Hall State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY, 14260-1030 From W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK Wed Nov 8 10:51:53 1995 From: W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK (Bill Croft) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 10:51:53 +0000 Subject: NYT article on 'use'? Message-ID: Is the NYT online? Could someone with access to it post the article to me? (or to Funknet, if there's enough interest) Thanks, Bill Croft Dept of Linguistics, U Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester M13 9PL, UK w.croft at manchester.ac.uk FAX: +44-161-275 3187 Phone: 275 3188 From druuskan at CC.HELSINKI.FI Wed Nov 8 14:07:49 1995 From: druuskan at CC.HELSINKI.FI (Deborah D K Ruuskanen) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 16:07:49 +0200 Subject: NYT (New York Times?) article on 'use' Message-ID: Could someone out there enlighten me as to this (nespaper?) article? NYT on 'use'. The library here gets the Times. Cheers, dkr -- Deborah D. Kela Ruuskanen \ You cannot teach a Man anything, Leankuja 1, FIN-01420 Vantaa \ you can only help him find it druuskan at cc.helsinki.fi \ within himself. Galileo From druuskan at CC.HELSINKI.FI Wed Nov 8 14:12:51 1995 From: druuskan at CC.HELSINKI.FI (Deborah D K Ruuskanen) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 16:12:51 +0200 Subject: NYT reference Message-ID: Sorry, the new mail reference just came in! Seems to be no logic as to when things arrive in my mail box. Cheers, kela -- Deborah D. Kela Ruuskanen \ You cannot teach a Man anything, Leankuja 1, FIN-01420 Vantaa \ you can only help him find it druuskan at cc.helsinki.fi \ within himself. Galileo From LINDRYER at UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Fri Nov 10 19:59:31 1995 From: LINDRYER at UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew Dryer) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 14:59:31 -0500 Subject: Last week for submitting abstracts Message-ID: Just a reminder that this coming week is the deadline for the 'Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language II' conference. If you want more information about the conference, please contact: jpkoenig at acsu.buffalo.edu From jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU Fri Nov 10 22:27:31 1995 From: jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 14:27:31 -0800 Subject: forensic "use a gun" (fwd) Message-ID: For those of you interested in this issue, I think the exact reference for the article was posted to the list (Tuesday, 10/31, page A13, I think). And Chuck Fillmore was kind enough to send along a reference to an article he co-authored on this precise topic. Here is the reference: Clark D. Cunningham and Charles J. Fillmore, "Using common sense: a linguistic perspective on judicial interpretations of 'use a firearm'", in Washington University Law Quarterly, Volume 73, Number 3, 1995, pp. 1163-1214. Jo Rubba From edith at CSD.UWM.EDU Fri Nov 10 22:58:40 1995 From: edith at CSD.UWM.EDU (Edith A Moravcsik) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 16:58:40 -0600 Subject: Functionalism/Formalism Message-ID: REMINDER: The deadline for abstracts for the Conference on Functionalism and Formalism, to be held April 18-20 1996 at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, is FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17. For further information, send e-mail to Mickey Noonan at noonan at csd.uwm.edu or to Edith Moravcsik at edith at csd.uwm.edu From DUMASB at UTKVX.UTK.EDU Sat Nov 11 02:48:04 1995 From: DUMASB at UTKVX.UTK.EDU (Bethany Dumas, UTK) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 21:48:04 -0500 Subject: U.S. v. Bailey Message-ID: For more information on the U.S. v. Bailey case, including how to order the Washington University Law Quarterly issue in which the article by Clark D. Cunningham and Charles J. Fillmore appears, see the electronic newsletter Language in the Judicial Process at http://hamlet.la.utk.edu Bethany Dumas Bethany K. Dumas, J.D., Ph.D. | Applied Linguistics, Language & Law Dep't of English, UT, Knoxville | EMAIL: dumasb at utk.edu 415 McClung Tower | 423/974-6965 | FAX 423/974-6926 Knoxville, TN 37996-0430 | See Webpage at http://hamlet.la.utk.edu From beaumont_brush at SIL.ORG Mon Nov 13 00:26:00 1995 From: beaumont_brush at SIL.ORG (Brush, B.) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 1995 19:26:00 -0500 Subject: Q: _The Anthropology of Space_ Message-ID: Dear Funknetters - I am writing to ask for opinions on a book: Rik Pinxten et al.'s _The Anthropology of Space_ (1981), in which the authors propose and utilize a device they call the Universal Frame of Reference (UFOR) to discover the spatial conceptualizations of their Navajo subjects. Question: have any of you ever used this? My primary interest is spatial semantics, and so I'd like to hear from people who have either used this device or who know of the book and have an opinion on it. All manner of comments are invited, and I'll post a summary if there is enough interest. Thanks, Beau Beaumont Brush UT Arlington From colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Mon Nov 13 17:51:00 1995 From: colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Colin Harrison) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 1995 12:51:00 -0500 Subject: Status of Polysemy Network Analyses Message-ID: Polysemy networks... What do image-schematic analyses of polysemy networks, such as that for the English word "over" in Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things", actually represent? It strikes me that although quite plausible arguments can be presented for relatedness of meaning at some abstract level, it is not at all clear what is actually being shown. Do we really have an idealized representation of part of the "average English speaker's" cognitive system, or are we in danger of recreating diachronic change, and collapsing it into apparently synchronic systems? Taking a case like "over", it strikes me that a connectionist view of cognition allows that the results of experimentation such as that recently described by Rice and Sandra [in Cognition 6-1 (1995), 89 ff.] can be explained in terms of feedback activation from the simple (diachronically explicable) existence of a like phonological form, requiring no essential connection at the conceptual level. Of course, that's not to say that such conceptual connections are necessarily absent, but the mere possibility of interactive activation of non-conceptual elements of the cognitive system seems to raise serious questions about the status of polysemy network analyses. I would be interested to get any feedback on this (preferably at the conceptual level....) Cheers! Colin J.Harrison Linguistics Department Rice University 6100 South Main ph. +1 (713) 630 9312 HOUSTON TX 77005 e-mail: colinh at owlnet.rice.edu USA Have a nice day! From colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Mon Nov 13 22:04:41 1995 From: colinh at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Colin Harrison) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 1995 17:04:41 -0500 Subject: Polysemy networks//P.S. Message-ID: RE: My earlier posting on "The status of polysemy network analyses" Sorry, I got the reference wrong on the Rice and Sandra article. It's from "Cognitive Linguistics", not "Cognition" (the rest of the ref. is O.K.)! Colin J.Harrison Linguistics Department Rice University 6100 South Main ph. +1 (713) 630 9312 HOUSTON TX 77005 e-mail: colinh at owlnet.rice.edu USA Have a nice day! From beaumont_brush at SIL.ORG Tue Nov 14 23:00:00 1995 From: beaumont_brush at SIL.ORG (Brush, B.) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 18:00:00 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Dear Funknetters-- I am writing to ask for opinions on a book: Rik Pinxten et al.'s _The Anthropology of Space_ (1981), in which the authors propose and utilize a device they call the Universal Frame of Reference (UFOR) to discover the spatial conceptualizations of their Navajo subjects. Question: have any of you ever used this? My primary interest is spatial semantics, and so I'd like to hear from people who have either used this device or who know of the book and have an opinion on it. All manner of comments are invited, and I'll post a summary if there is enough interest. Thanks, Beau Beaumont Brush UT Arlington From styler at RUF.RICE.EDU Mon Nov 20 20:36:39 1995 From: styler at RUF.RICE.EDU (Stephen A Tyler) Date: Mon, 20 Nov 1995 14:36:39 -0600 Subject: Q: _The Anthropology of Space_ In-Reply-To: <01HXKG5XCSAI00MB3Y@SIL.ORG> Message-ID: never heard of it, but its a universal that anything that has universal in it probably isn't From soeren at CPHLING.DK Wed Nov 22 09:41:24 1995 From: soeren at CPHLING.DK (Soeren Wichmann) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 1995 10:41:24 +0100 Subject: agreement (FUNK) Message-ID: Dear folks, in a recent query on the Linguist List I launched a hypothesis concerning how to distinguish between pronouns and agreement in languages that lean toward the head-marking type. The test I proposed was sentences of the type I brought the beans and John the rice. My feeling was that a language might not allow the verb _brought_ to be left out in any of the two clauses if the language had pronouns attached to the verb--as opposed to just agreement markers. The reasoning was common-sense: if a paraphrase of the clause with the missing element can be constructed by supplying material from the corresponding slot in the other clause, a typical head-marking language would disallow sentences as the one above for the same reason that _John I brought the rice_ is disallowed. By consulting the Linguist List, native speakers, and the literature I found out that my hypothesis was probably wrong. Gapping appears to be possible in all of the following languages: Telugu, W. Greenlandic, Tundra Nenets, Japanese, Filipino (Tagalog), Hungarian, Basque, Russian, French, West(erlauwer) Frisian, Dutch, German, Finnish, French, Pitjantjatjara, Punjabi. In some languages it is marginal: English, Spanish. Actually the strongest reaction I got against constructions of this kind was from an English speaker. For a non-linguist Mexican it was fine, two Mexican linguists has different opinions (good vs. not so good), and a Nicaraguan and a Puerto Rican speaker both didn't like it much. I am well aware of the inherent danger in building arguments from such isolated sentences. Nevertheless, if a strong correlation between head- vs. dependent-marking and possibility of gapping would come out of the data, this would seem to be not just an accident of judgments. Although my hypothesis has been shaken I would still like to ask you out there for more data. So please translate I brought the beans and Peter brought the rice into whatever language is not on the list above and note explicitly whether any of the two verbs can be left out. I have still to see a language (other than perhaps English) that is completely unable to do this. If for no other purpose you might want to check this because of the claim in Ross (1970) that gapping is universal. I welcome very much opinions on the issue of agreement vs. pronouns. A few functionalists (Lehmann 1982:240 in one of the Apprehension volumes, Van Valin 1987 in IJAL) have addressed the problem, but it is probably fair to say that it hasn't been solved. Nichols, in her article in head- vs. dependent marking, speaks of zero pronouns in languages that have pronominal affixes on the predicate, and this, although unacceptable to many (including myself) still seems to be the received opinion. You may address your responses to me directly (2020sw at ucsbuxa.edu or soeren at cphling.dk) or to the entire Funknet. In either case I will consider your comments in the summary that I'll post on the Linguist List, which will also be sent to the Funknet. Soeren Wichmann Visiting Scholar, U. C. Santa Barbara From BILLY1 at MDX.AC.UK Fri Nov 24 15:40:40 1995 From: BILLY1 at MDX.AC.UK (billy clark) Date: Fri, 24 Nov 1995 15:40:40 GMT Subject: CONFS: LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION OF GREAT BRITAIN Message-ID: LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION OF GREAT BRITAIN Spring Meeting 1996: University of Sussex First Circular and Call for Papers The 1996 Spring Meeting will be held from Thursday 11 April to Saturday 13 April at the University of Sussex, where the Association will be the guests of the Linguistics Subject Group of the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. The Local Organiser is Nicola Woods (nicolajw at cogs.susx.ac.uk). Travel: The University of Sussex is easily accessible by British Rail; local busses provide easy access to the campus. Brighton itself is an hour from London by train or 30 minutes from Gatwick by car. Events: The Linguistics Association 1996 Lecture on the Thursday evening will be delivered by Professor Johanna Nichols (Berkeley) and is entitled "Where on earth is Indo-European?" Professor Nichols will also present a Language Tutorial on the Chechen and Ingush languages. This will cover: basic structure, typologically and theoretically interesting features, historical comparison, lexicon, transcription and orthography. Some cultural and geographical information on the people. Slides; tape recordings of the languages and Chechen and Ingush music. Practicum giving the audience active command of some basic phrases. Some basic grammatical and lexical material and a bibliography will be distributed. There will also be a Workshop, organised by April McMahon (Cambridge) and Kersti Borjars (Manchester), entitled "New cognates for historical linguistics".One of the most promising developments in current historical linguistics involves attempts to connect results from this domain with cognate disciplines. Participants will address potential connections of historical linguistics with typology, experimental phonetics/laboratory phonology, and genetics. Wine Party: Thursday evening, following Professor Nichols's lecture. Enquiries about the LAGB meeting should be sent to the Meetings Secretary (address below). Full details of the programme and a booking form will be included in the Second Circular (in January). Call for Papers: Members and potential guests are invited to offer papers for the Meeting; abstracts are also accepted from non-members. The LAGB welcomes submissions on any linguistics or linguistics-related topic. Abstracts must arrive by 9 January 1996 and should be sent in the format outlined below to the following address: Professor G. Corbett, Linguistic and International Studies, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 5XH. Papers for the programme are selected anonymously - only the President knows the name of the authors. Abstracts must be presented as follows: submit SEVEN anonymous copies of the abstract, plus ONE with name and affiliation, i.e. CAMERA-READY. The complete abstract containing your title and your name must be no longer than ONE A4 page (8.27" x 11.69") with margins of at least 1" on all sides. You may use single spacing (not more than six lines to the inch) and type must be no smaller than 12 characters per inch. Type uniformly in black (near-letter quality on a word processor) and make any additions in black. It is preferable to print out the abstracts using a laser printer, since if the paper is accepted the abstract will be photocopied and inserted directly into the collection of abstracts sent out to participants. WRITE NAME AND ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE ON THE BACK OF THE ABSTRACT WHICH HAS YOUR NAME ON. The following layout should be considered as standard: (title) Optimality and the Klingon vowel shift (speaker) Clark Kent (institution) Department of Astrology, Eastern Mars University The following guidelines may be useful: 1. Briefly state the topic of your paper. 2. If your paper is to involve an analysis of linguistic material, give critical examples, along with a brief indication of their critical nature. 3. State the relevance of your ideas to past work or to the future development of the field. If you are taking a stand on a controversial issue, summarise the arguments which lead you to take up this position. Normal length for papers delivered at LAGB meetings is 25 minutes (plus 15 minutes discussion). Offers of squibs (10 minutes) or longer papers (40 minutes) will also be considered: please explain why your paper requires less or more time than usual. Conference Bursaries: There will be a maximum of 10 bursaries available to unsalaried members of the Association with preference given to those presenting a paper. Applications should be sent to the President by 9 January 1996. Please state on your application: (a) date of joining the LAGB; (b) whether or not you are an undergraduate or postgraduate student; if a student, whether you receive a normal grant; (d) if not a student, your employment situation. STUDENTS WHO ARE SUBMITTING AN ABSTRACT and wish to apply for funding should include all the above details WITH THEIR ABSTRACT. Guests: Members may invite any number of guests to meetings of the association, upon payment of a guest invitation fee of 5 pounds. Annual General Meeting: will be held on the afternoon of Friday 12 April. Items for the agenda should be sent to the Honorary Secretary. Election of Assistant Secretary: Nominations, proposed and seconded, should be sent to the Hon. Sec. by 23 January 1996; proposers should ascertain that their nominee is willing to stand for election. LAGB Employment Exchange: volunteers to take over from Siew-Yue Killingley, please contact the Hon. Sec. by 9 January 1996. Committee members: President: Professor Grev Corbett, University of Surrey. e-mail: g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk Honorary Secretary: Dr. David Adger, University of York. e-mail: da4 at tower.york.ac.uk. Membership Secretary: Dr. Kersti Borjars, University of Manchester. e-mail: k.e.borjars at manchester.ac.uk Meetings Secretary: Dr. Billy Clark, Middlesex University. e-mail: billy1 at mdx.ac.uk Treasurer: Paul Rowlett, University of Salford. e-mail: p.a.rowlett at mod-lang.salford.ac.uk Assistant Secretary: Dr. April McMahon, University of Cambridge. e-mail: AMM11 at hermes.cam.ac.uk BLN Editor: Dr. Siew-Yue Killingley, Grevatt and Grevatt, 9 Rectory Drive, NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE NE13 1XT. Employment exchange: also run by Dr. Killingley. Tel: 191-285- 8083 10.00-12.45 and 14.00-16.00 weekdays (or 20.00-21.00 weekdays if unavailable during the day). British Linguistic Newsletter (ISBN 0964-65674): to subscribe, contact the Editor, Dr. S-Y. Killingley. Please do not send subscriptions for BLN to the LAGB Treasurer. LAGB internet home page: http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/LAGB. LAGB electronic network: used for disseminating LAGB information and for consulting members quickly. To subscribe, send the message "add lagb" to: listserv at postman.essex.ac.uk. From AlysseR at AOL.COM Sun Nov 26 23:45:25 1995 From: AlysseR at AOL.COM (Alysse Rasmussen) Date: Sun, 26 Nov 1995 18:45:25 -0500 Subject: Hello ... ASL, Spanish, etc Message-ID: Hi, I got the impression I was to introduce myself. My name is Alysse Rasmussen and I've a BA in Linguistics from the UW-Madison. I teach Spanish and ASL (American Sign Language) at a small community college (non-credit side) and am hoping to go back and get my MA/PhD soon. I've a particular interest in teaching foreign languages and would appreciate any suggestions for future study in that area ... and especially some suggestions of how I might best combine TEACHING FL degree programs with LINGUISTICS degree programs. My other languages (that I try and keep up) Danish and Chinese. After that it's down-hill all the way. Guess I've forgotten more than I remember of the others. From tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Tue Nov 28 03:49:32 1995 From: tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Thomas E Payne) Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 19:49:32 -0800 Subject: Kalanga Message-ID: Dear Funknetters I am passing along the following request from Kweku Osam in Zimbabwe: I need some help. One of my students is planning to a master thesis on Kalanga. It's one of the languages spoken in Zimbabwe. It has always been said that very little work has been done on it. What I would like you to do is to post a message on Funknet and Linguist asking if anybody knows of any work done or being done on it. You should indicate that responses be sent to me directly: osam at zimbix.uz.zw Also, could someone please send Dr. Osam the e-mail addresses of Larry Hyman and Scot Myers. Thanks for your help. Tom Payne From lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Tue Nov 28 18:53:38 1995 From: lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (George Lakoff) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 10:53:38 -0800 Subject: summer seminar Message-ID: General announcement: Please post to any lists you think would be relevant. University of California The Berkeley Summer Research Seminars presents Mind Body Brain July 1-August 2, 1996 Join two of UC Berkeley's most distinguished faculty for seminars, discussions, and lectures in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and the philosophy of mind. GEORGE LAKOFF Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley Philosophy and the Embodiment of Mind JOHN SEARLE Professor of Philosophy, UC Berkeley Mind and Brain Application deadline: February 1, 1996. For information, contact: Berkeley Summer Research Seminars UC Extension: AL&S 1995 University Avenue, Dept. GL Berkeley, CA 94720-7002 Telephone: (510) 643-1639, ext.GL E-mail: bsrs37 at unx.berkeley.edu From nrude at FISICA.USON.MX Tue Nov 28 21:58:29 1995 From: nrude at FISICA.USON.MX (Noel E. Rude) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 14:58:29 -0700 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Hi folks, Since the network isn't exactly overflowing right now, I'll take this opportunity to send a message my son has been pestering me about for a long time. He wants me to suggest that somebody out there start putting together a multimedia CD (compact disc) on the languages of the world. He happens to think that we linguists cannot afford to have the general public remain so blithely ignorant of us and of what we do, and that such a CD would contribute toward alleviating that ignorance. He tells me, for example, that NASA has been putting out many CDs. Strapped for funds and facing deep public apathy, NASA apparently intends to stimulate interest and soften the hearts of taxpayers. They, of course, require vast funds. We linguists can live off the crumbs. But my son thinks that even the crumbs can dry up. He thinks it would be to our benefit to produce things which school children would find in their libraries. And he maintains that young folks do look at these things, that they would boot up a computer and have a look at something on the languages of the world. What would this have to be like? Maybe video recordings with accompanying written text, voice printouts, short grammatical descriptions, paradigms with explanation, an analyzed text, maps, maybe some music ... I think it would need to be sophisticated enough to really teach some linguistics, yet at the same time not so much so that it would dissuade the casually interested. That's a tall order, I know. But things like this are being done in other fields, so I'm told. It would aim for a representative sampling of the world's languages, Russian, Navajo, Chinese, Modern Hebrew, Zulu, whatever could be collected. It could start small and grow with succeeding editions. Perhaps something like this is already in the works and somebody will set me straight here. At any rate, I think it's a good idea, if among us there is the technical knowhow, energy, and interest. Now next time my son asks whether I've sent that Funknet message, I can say, YES. Noel From oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU Wed Nov 29 00:16:33 1995 From: oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU (Olga Yokoyama) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 19:16:33 -0500 Subject: your mail In-Reply-To: <199511282158.OAA00886@guarijio.fisica.uson.mx> Message-ID: Noel Rude's (or rather, his son's) idea about multilanguage CD is fascinating. It's one of those outreach ideas we linguists can all benefit from. If anyone wants to include Slavic lgs, I'll be more than happy to contribute. Olga Yokoyama From oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU Wed Nov 29 00:19:08 1995 From: oyokoyam at HUSC.HARVARD.EDU (Olga Yokoyama) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 19:19:08 -0500 Subject: change of address Message-ID: Please help me to record a change of address with Funknet. I have tired to send an "unsubscribe" and a "ubscribe" command to Listserve, but it keeps bouncing back. Sorry for putting this on the network. Olga Yokoyama From johnh at REED.EDU Wed Nov 29 06:49:56 1995 From: johnh at REED.EDU (John B. Haviland) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 22:49:56 -0800 Subject: your mail In-Reply-To: <199511282158.OAA00886@guarijio.fisica.uson.mx> Message-ID: Let me second Noel's suggestion, or at least add to it a suggestion that those of us who don't know it might look at Brenda Farnell's CD about Assiniboine sign talk, recently published by Texas. This has a particular axe to grind (about a particular style of transcription), but it nicely combines video, text, and other sorts of commentary. If I am not mistaken, Brenda and her colleagues at Iowa are also proposing some sort of a workshop for people who would like to learn more about CD production technology etc.--correct me if anyone knows more details--sometime next summer. Cheers, JOhn Haviland From Carl.Mills at UC.EDU Wed Nov 29 13:17:58 1995 From: Carl.Mills at UC.EDU (Carl Mills) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 08:17:58 -0500 Subject: Noel Rude CD Message-ID: I'm still learning Estonian, and my Sami is rusty, so there are probably folks out there who can do better on Finno-Ugric languages than I can, but I'm willing to help. My T.A. is Bulgarian, if we need Bulgarian input. If, as I am assuming, this is to be a CD ROM, it should include both still photos and video. Carl From wilcox at MAIL.UNM.EDU Wed Nov 29 15:21:54 1995 From: wilcox at MAIL.UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 08:21:54 -0700 Subject: Farnell CD/book Message-ID: For those who might be interested, I am writing a review of the Farnell book ("Do You See What I Mean? Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action") for the Journal of Anthropological Research. It should appear sometime early 1996. For anyone thinking of buying the book for serious study, I would highly recommend also getting the CD. It's one thing to read about her examples (I find most movement transcriptions quite opaque), and yet another to actually see and hear the stories being told. While we are on the topic, let me mention two other projects associated with video and language. One is the Multimedia Dictionary of American Sign Language (MM-DASL). Although the MM-DASL has not yet appeared as a commercial product, it is a novel use of video and Mac interface technologies to implement a bilingual (ASL-English) dictionary. Signs are represented as video, of course. The most unique aspect of the application is that it allows users to search for signs directly, but supplying phonological parameters. This is done through a fully graphic (both static pictures and movies, for dynamic parameters such as movement) interface. The second is a project that is still under development but I think has great potential. With a colleague in Lyon France, I and others are developing a World Wide Web database that will serve as a corpus of sign languages. The database can be searched (we intend to have different "front ends" for the search -- English, French, etc.) by multiple searchable fields (gloss, phonological parameters, etc.). The items found are displayed through your web browser. Right now we are only doing pictures (GIFs) but the next step is to include video. We hope that eventually this might serve as a netwide resource for researchers in typology of sign language, for example. Does anyone know if there is a similar resource for spoken languages? It would be pretty easy to implement on the web. -- Sherman Wilcox ========================================================= Sherman Wilcox wilcox at mail.unm.edu Associate Professor Dept. of Linguistics (505) 277-6353 v/tty University of New Mexico (505) 277-6355 fax Albuquerque, NM 87131 ========================================================= From edwards at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Wed Nov 29 19:32:15 1995 From: edwards at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (Jane A. Edwards) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 11:32:15 -0800 Subject: CD of World Englishes Message-ID: The following may be of interest on this thread of language CDs: [from LINGUIST] >Subject: request for survey participants >September 25, 1995 > >Macmillan Publishers Ltd. (London)/Stockton Press (New York) is considering >publishing, in both book and CD ROM formats, a comprehensive reference work >that will examine the different varieties of English as they are spoken >throughout the world. We would like to conduct a survey to help us assess >the linguistic community's views of such a work, and would be interested in >hearing from individuals with an interest in this subject area, who would >be willing to complete a survey. If you would like to take part in this >survey please contact Charles Regan at cregan at grovestocktn.com. Thank you. Sidney Greenbaum is apparently one of the consultants. I don't know who else is involved, but I can hardly wait for this one to come out. What a great era. -Jane Edwards From jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU Thu Nov 30 23:11:05 1995 From: jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 1995 15:11:05 -0800 Subject: CDs and language Message-ID: More on CDs....I am in the process of preparing a grant proposal for linguistic field work and am very interested in CD ROM applications for both storage and display of linguistic data, including audio and video as well as text. Unfortunately, I don't know much about CD ROM technology. Can anyone connect me with Brenda Farnell to ask about her workshop? And is anyone else exploring this method of preserving and organizing field data? I have been exploring ways to computerize field data, and haven't come up with much -- a Hypercard program called Rook is available, but won't do tabs; and SIL has a lot of stuff, but it's all for DOS, and I do Mac. So if anyone has leads in that area, I'd really appreciate hearing about it. Jo Rubba = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics = English Department, California Polytechnic State University = San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 = Tel. (805)-756-0117 E-mail: jrubba at oboe.aix.calpoly.edu = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =