From kemmer at RUF.RICE.EDU  Fri Mar  1 18:13:21 1996
From: kemmer at RUF.RICE.EDU (Suzanne E Kemmer)
Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996 12:13:21 -0600
Subject: looking for John
Message-ID: <FRI.1.MAR.1996.121321.0600.KEMMER@RUF.RICE.EDU>

Does anybody have John Myhill's email address?
I'd like to contact him.  Thanks,  Suzanne


From tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU  Wed Mar  6 20:14:30 1996
From: tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Thomas E Payne)
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 12:14:30 -0800
Subject: Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals
Message-ID: <WED.6.MAR.1996.121430.0800.TPAYNE@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>

The following extract from a message from Barbara Zurer Pearson that
appeared on Linguist intrigued me and I was wondering if anyone on Funknet
would be interested in discussing it:

> My second question concerned what makes monolinguals' Spanish "more
> Spanish" than bilinguals'.  This must be too self-evident to provoke
> reaction.  I got only two responses.  Robert Port <port at hip.atr.co.jp>
> or <port at indiana.edu> wrote to warn me to avoid bilinguals if I were
> doing cross- linguistic study.  At least in phonology, he said,
> there's plenty of research to show that bilinguals are different from
> monolinguals.

What intrigues me about this idea is that the language of monolinguals
may be significantly different from that of bilinguals. This "rings true"
to me, and I wonder what impications this might have for those of us who
do descriptive linguistics, much of which is done with bilinguals. Has
there been any research specifically in this area? Has anyone out there
thought about this?

Thanks for any responses.

Tom Payne


From tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU  Thu Mar  7 17:09:20 1996
From: tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Thomas E Payne)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 09:09:20 -0800
Subject: Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals
In-Reply-To: <v01510100ad64424d3e6f@[132.74.19.230]>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.090920.0800.TPAYNE@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>

Here is a message from John Myhill that apparently didn't go out to the
whole list. I'll quote it here then give my response.

> Obviously the speech of bilinguals' is different from that of monolinguals.
> To give just one of an endless list of examples, I have observed native
> speakers of English who did not set foot in Israel until their 20's saying
> things like 'The printer sits on the 18th floor', a loan translation from
> Hebrew. This is what linguistic convergence is all about. Gumperz'
study of
> Kupwar village is I guess the classic sociolinguistic study of this. This
> problem is exactly why I have avoided informant work in my own research and
> focused on using texts wherever possible.  John Myhill
>

John,

  Thanks for your reply to my query. I wonder whether working with texts
"solves" the problem though. What if the text was composed by bilinguals?
Then, one might ask, so what if the speech of monolinguals is different
from that of bilinguals? So they use different speech varieties, but we
linguists usually pride ourselves on not passing judgement on one speech
variety over another. Is the speech of monolinguals necessarily "better"?
If so, how so? This is a serious question. I too have the sense that we
"ought" to study the speech of monolinguals. It seems intuitively to be
"purer", closer to what a grammar claims to describe if it is called "A
Grammar of X". But are we really justified in this intuition?

Tom Payne


From darnell at CSD.UWM.EDU  Thu Mar  7 17:24:53 1996
From: darnell at CSD.UWM.EDU (Michael Earl Darnell)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 11:24:53 -0600
Subject: conference abstracts
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.112453.0600.DARNELL@CSD.UWM.EDU>

Hello to all,
We've received several requests for the meeting handbook for
the upcoming Formalism/Functionalism Symposium at the University
of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

We thought we would let everyone who is interested know that
we can and will mail out the handbook to those not attending the
conference.  The handbook will include all of the invited speakers'
abstracts, the talks, and the abstracts for the poster session.
The price will be 10 dollars (US) including postage.

If you are interested please let me know via email and we'll
make arrangements.

Mike Darnell
darnell at csd.uwm.edu

P.S.  Remember if you ARE attending, you can pick up your handbook at
the symposium, and the price is included in the registration fee.


From mdavies at RS6000.CMP.ILSTU.EDU  Thu Mar  7 21:41:20 1996
From: mdavies at RS6000.CMP.ILSTU.EDU (Mark Davies)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 15:41:20 -0600
Subject: Functional explanations for Subject to Subject Raising
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.154120.0600.MDAVIES@RS6000.CMP.ILSTU.EDU>

I'm looking for a functional account of why Subject to Subject Raising (SSR)
is more common in the written register of a certain language than it is in
the spoken register.

In a 7,000,000+ computer-based corpus of Modern Spanish that I've put
together (about half spoken, half written Spanish), the data shows is that
SSR is much more common in Written Spanish than in Spoken Spanish.  For
example, 66% (1177 / 1778) of all cases of <parecer> "to seem" in Written
Spanish take the infinitive (1a) as opposed to a finite clause (1b), but
this figure is only about 10% (190 / 1895) in Spoken Spanish:

        1a) Juan _parecia oir_ su voz (_John seemed_ to hear her voice)
        1b) _parecia que_ Juan oia su voz (it _seemed that_ John heard her
voice)

Furthermore, the figure for the +SSR type of sentence in (1a) is only about
2% (34 / 1895) in Spoken Spanish if you ignore all cases of <parecer> plus
semantically "bland" embedded verbs like <estar, ser, haber> "seem to be",
as opposed to 53% (950 / 1778) in Written Spanish.

Along with this is the fact that only in Written Spanish is it common to
have SSR with all types of subjects - 1/2/3 person.  Whereas there are a
fair number of cases of 1/2 person like (2a) in the written corpus, there
are no cases in the spoken corpus:

        2a) no pareces entender la pregunta (you don't seem to understand
the question)
        2b) no parece que entiendas la pregunta (it doesn't seem that you
understand the q.)

So even though there are a few cases like (1a) in the spoken corpus, they
are pretty much limited to 3sg subjects, with a few 3pl, but no 1/2 person.

An equally as intriguing phenomena I've found are some "pseudo-raising"
constructions in spoken Spanish, where the embedded subject is raised, but
is never "deleted" downstairs (as indicated by the 2sg conjugation for both
verbs, as opposed to a downstairs infinitive (3).  This occurs a fair amount
of times in the spoken corpus, but only once in the written corpus.  It's as
though there is an aborted attempt in spoken Spanish to have a SSR
construction, but it never makes the entire way.

        3) _pareces que no _entiendes_ (you seem that you don't understand)

In looking over the literature for functional explanations for SSR, a few
researchers (eg. Givon _Syntax_, Vol 2, pp.767-778) suggest that SSR is a
function of topicality -- i.e. raised NPs (1a) are more topical than
non-raised NPs (1b).

I guess what has me stumped is why there should be such a big difference
between the spoken and written registers.  One would presume that the same
functional tendencies are at play in both types of speech, and yet this
won't account for the difference.  I've looked at about every article on
Spanish SSR that I can get my hands on, as well as a few selected general
functional approaches to SSR, but no luck.  Any ideas?

==================================================================
Mark Davies, Assistant Professor, Spanish Linguistics
Dept. of Foreign Languages, Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61790-4300

Voice:309/438-7975       email:mdavies at ilstu.edu
Fax:309/438-8038          http://www.ilstu.edu/~mdavies/welcome.htm
==================================================================


From cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Thu Mar  7 22:49:45 1996
From: cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Susanna Cumming)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 14:49:45 -0800
Subject: Bilingual grammars
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.144945.0800.CUMMING@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

Folks,

Perhaps as an Indonesianist and English speaker I have a distorted view,
but it seems to me that since there are no languages that aren't in
contact with other languages, it is misguided to take monolingualism as
the "real" or "natural" case: even a monolingual individual in a speech
community that contains multilinguals is "under the influence" of other
languages. In fact the idea that multilingualism at either the individual
or the societal level is normal rather than deviant is one of the
arguments that linguists have to make against English-only proponents.

I would be interested to know if anyone has an estimate of the porportion
of monolingual to multilingual individuals worldwide: is it even true that
most people in the world are monolingual?

It is true that as functional and historical linguists we have to try to
figure out the role of language contact in the development of the
varieties we study, in order to determine its role relative to other
sources of explanation for linguistic form. And to do that properly, we
have to know an awful lot about all the other languages the one we are
interested in is in contact with. Which places a heavy burden on our
expertise! I wonder if this isn't the real reason we prefer monolinguals.

Susanna Cumming


From cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Fri Mar  8 02:54:33 1996
From: cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Susanna Cumming)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 18:54:33 -0800
Subject: Cumming on monolinguals (fwd)
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.185433.0800.CUMMING@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

In response to Bill Stokoe's message (below), I certainly didn't mean to
imply that there isn't any fuzziness! Not only on the question of what it
means to be multilingual as opposed to multidialectal, but also on the
question of how competent in another language one has to be to be really
multilingual.

Nonetheless neither of these points weakens the argument about the rarity
or nonexsistence of "pure" varieties, since we know that dialects in
contact influence each other (as Trudgill among others has convincingly
demonstrated), and that you don't need true multilingualism for language
contact to result in language change (as Thomason & Kaufman among others
have convincingly demonstrated).

Tom's original point had to do with the elicitation language influencing
the grammar of elicited sentences. I'm sure that this is a very real
phenomenon; I've seen grammars of Indonesian languages where the word
order of all the sentence examples matched the word order of the eliciting
language (Indonesian), but was different from the vast majority of
sentences in the accompanying texts. I agree that this particular problem
can be minimized by focusing on natural discourse (preferably recorded by
a community member with the linguist absent) as a data source. But this of
course does not eliminate the more general issue of language and dialect
contact.

 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 07 Mar 1996 19:37:43 -0500 (EST)
From: WCSTOKOE at gallua.gallaudet.edu
To: cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Cumming on monolinguals

What Susanna Cumming says about language contact strikes me as provocative and
reminds me that I haven't seen a watertight definition of the boundary between
languages that distinguishes languages from dialects. Everybody we encounter
talks a little differently, but when does the difference amount to a language
difference and when is it difference between very different dialects of one
language? I frequently encounter speakers who are they think speaking English
but whom I can't understand even with two or three repetitions of an utterance.
And in the end, are monolingual and bilingual formally separate categories
or is there some fuzzy logic in there somewhere?
Bill Stokoe
P.S. I meant to send this to funknet but copied your address instead; you are
welcome to send it on if you see fit. Regards,


----------


From kemmer at RUF.RICE.EDU  Fri Mar  8 03:56:09 1996
From: kemmer at RUF.RICE.EDU (Suzanne E Kemmer)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 21:56:09 -0600
Subject: most people in the world
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.215609.0600.KEMMER@RUF.RICE.EDU>

Susanna Cumming writes:
>is it even true that most people in the world are monolingual?

I found the presupposition there quite suprising--which made me
question my own supposed knowledge.

In a TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE ABOUT LANGUAGE questionnaire I give to intro
ling students, and to students who wander by the Linguistics table at
'Major's Day' fairs, one of the "True or False?" statements is: "Most
people in the world are monolingual".  The answer, according to the
sheet, is "FALSE! Most people in the world speak more than one
language."  [at this point comes nervous laughter by monolingual
American student]

I borrowed the idea of the questionnaire from Michael Barlow, but
this particular question I adapted from a "Myths about
Language" section in a little handbook that Leonard Newmark put
together for the undergraduates at UCSD. That means it's probably 25
or 30 years old, at least. Maybe it dates back to HIS early years in
the profession. I never thought to question it, I'm embarrassed to
admit; I don't know what his source was.

Does anybody know the real (and current) answer to Susanna's question:
what percentage of people in the world are monolingual vs.
bi/multilingual--and, I would add, how reliable is the figure (given
that it requires certain decisions about what counts as
bi/multilingual, how it's reported, etc.). If I were counting, I'd
include people who use more than one language in oral interaction in
their daily lives.  Beyond that, thinking about criteria for
"lingualism" starts to get a bit hairy. But surely some linguist
has tried to work it out, ballpark-wise...or have they?

--Suzanne


From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL  Fri Mar  8 06:52:25 1996
From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill)
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 08:52:25 +0200
Subject: No subject
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAR.1996.085225.0200.JOHN@RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL>

I don't think that using texts necessarily solves the problems. Some texts
are better than others in this respect. For example, in studying Indonesian
texts it is obvious that academic Indonesian is much more influenced by
European languages than is the language of short stories. And some short
stories are better than others, depending upon the background of the
speaker. So I do not think that using texts is necessarily going to produce
a better result. But I DO know that using bilingual informants and feeding
them questions in, e.g. Spanish or Indonesian or Arabic because I cannot
myself speak e.g. Tzotzil or Balinese or Nubian is going to result in a
pretty peculiar description of these languages.
In terms of what 'better' is, I do not regard the Tzotzil of someone who
knows Spanish well to be generally 'worse' than someone who does not, but
as a typologically oriented linguist I'm interested in diversity, so I
think it's more interesting, and more revealing in terms of linguistic
universals, to study
languages with less interference from others. And I agree with Susanna's point
that there aren't so many people with no influence from other languages,
but there still are degrees.   John Myhill


From W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK  Fri Mar  8 10:50:22 1996
From: W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK (Bill Croft)
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 10:50:22 +0000
Subject: The monolingual myth
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAR.1996.105022.0000.W.CROFT@MANCHESTER.AC.UK>

    I have read in a number of places that multilinguals far
outnumber monolinguals in the world, at least in traditional
societies before the European conquests in the Americas
and Oceania. I haven't seen any firm figures (or even estimates)
though.

    But the concept that even monolinguals speak a "pure" variety
is one that functionalists should treat with suspicion at best.
Language variation within the speech community, and language
change, can arise "internally", that is, not attributable to
contact. In fact, it is functional factors (in the sense of "external"
function that I describe in the Sept '95 issue of Language) that
give rise to innovations---or so we functionalists should be trying
to demonstrate. Variation is an essential property of language,
even that of "monolinguals". And accepting the notion of a "pure",
invariant speech variety will make it difficult, if not impossible, for
functionalists to argue against the autonomy (that is, the self-
containedness) of grammar.

   Of course, there is the empirical "problem" that elicitation will lead to
"impure" results. But any linguistic situation involves interaction
and accommodation (and innovations) on the part of the interlocutors.
It's just that the accommodation between linguist and
native consultant is fairly predictable and theoretically less interesting
compared to that found in the texts which result from native speakers
interacting with each other in ordinary social situations. But the difference
is one of degree, not kind.

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 r.hudson at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK  Fri Mar  8 17:31:23 1996
From: r.hudson at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK (Richard Hudson)
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 11:31:23 -0600
Subject: Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAR.1996.113123.0600.>

In message Thu, 7 Mar 1996 09:09:20 -0800,
  Thomas E Payne <tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>  writes:

> ... we
> linguists usually pride ourselves on not passing judgement on one speech
> variety over another. Is the speech of monolinguals necessarily "better"?
> If so, how so? This is a serious question. I too have the sense that we
> "ought" to study the speech of monolinguals. It seems intuitively to be
> "purer", closer to what a grammar claims to describe if it is called "A
> Grammar of X".


dh: Isn't this an example of passing judgement? Can we assume that there's
some pure form of each language `out there', to which some speakers
approximate more closely than others? That's not what my `intuitions' tell
me.

> But are we really justified in this intuition?

dh: I don't think so.
 ===========================================================================
Prof Richard Hudson                           Tel: +44 171 387 7050 ext 3152
                                             E-mail: r.hudson at ling.ucl.ac.uk
Dept. of Phonetics and Linguistics                     Tel: +44 171 380 7172
                                                       Fax: +44 171 383 4108
UCL
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
UK


From Carl.Mills at UC.EDU  Fri Mar  8 13:17:49 1996
From: Carl.Mills at UC.EDU (Carl Mills)
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 08:17:49 -0500
Subject: Variation?
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAR.1996.081749.0500.>

As Bill Croft points out "Variation is an essential property of
language, even that of 'monolinguals'."

As we sociolinguists have been pointing out for nearly 4 decades, most
linguists, including functionalists, have been so steeped in what
Chambers has called "the tradition of categoricity" that they never
truly internalize the principle Bill has reminded us of.  As Sapir put
it, "All grammars leak."


Carl


From TGIVON at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU  Fri Mar  8 18:03:08 1996
From: TGIVON at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon)
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 10:03:08 -0800
Subject: "monolingualism"
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAR.1996.100308.0800.TGIVON@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>

It seems to me that in the protracted discussion on the subject
the morst basic, pervasive and universal case of biligualism
(or indeed multi-lingualism) seems to have been largely ignored.
I refer here to the multilingualism (or "di-glossia") arisig
through the process of child "first-labguage" acuisition, and
later extended by the acquisition of literacy. If anything is
apparent from the data presented to us (by fellow functiobnalist)
over the last 30 years, it is that children learn, in succession,
many communicative systems -- sensory-motor communication (first
year; Dore 1976), the one-word stage (early second year; Bloom 1970),
the pidgin stage (also called the two-word stage; late second year;
Bloom. Slobin, Bowerman etc.), and "the" spoken grammaticalize
language (starting around age 2.0). Thus, by the time the child
comes to school s/he is already an experienced communicator in
FOUR languages (or "varieties" of their native language). Add
literate grammar to that (profoundly different from the spoken),
and the littl;e shavers are up to FIVE in their "mono" language.
If this is not profound multui-lingualism -- and those "varieties"
do not decay but can be brough back upon the appropriatge occasion,
such as pidginization, Broca's aphasia, high stress ("telegraphic")
etc -- I can't imagine what it.
Y'all relax, you're not as disadvantaged as you imagined. TG


From languagesoftware at ACCESS.CH  Tue Mar 12 00:15:17 1996
From: languagesoftware at ACCESS.CH (Good Language Software)
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 16:15:17 -800
Subject: English language learning software
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAR.1996.161517.800.LANGUAGESOFTWARE@ACCESS.CH>

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From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Mon Mar 11 18:04:31 1996
From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea)
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 12:04:31 -0600
Subject: elicitation versus discourse as data source
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAR.1996.120431.0600.SPIKEG@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

I agree with John that one would produce a very strange, skewed grammar if
one based it solely on utterances elicited via requesting translations of
sentences in a contact language.  In fact, I go a bit further in that I
suspect a "context-free" sentence grammar will be wierd no matter WHAT
language  sentences are elicited in.  Recorded text data (ideally with the
linguist out of the picture and the microphones as unobtrusive as possible)
is clearly a methodological priority in order to get a sample of how
speakers really speak to each other.  But I have been using two methods of
elicitation which I have found to be more-or-less reliable in producing
sentences that all speakers seem to be happy with (as opposed to those
context-free sentences at the margins of the grammar, the things that
"nobody would really say", which leave a substantial proportion of the
speakers in disagreement, or just scratching their heads and saying they
don't know... y'know, the kind that separate speakers into dialect groups
with no other real correlates (cf. Labov's 1985 presidential address to the
LSA).

The first method I learned from Scott DeLancey and Colette Craig (although
I assume it goes way back), which is to collect a text and then mine it for
all the information possible by eliciting all sorts of variations on each
sentence: "what if *I* had done this", "what if it had been *YESTERDAY*",
what if you *couldn't see* it happen", etc.

The other is to record a session in which you get one speaker who is fluent
in your contact language, and one or more speakers who DO NOT UNDERSTAND
your contact language, and then conduct "interviews" designed with both
content and linguistic structure in mind -- here, the CONTENT is critical
as a means to distract speakers away from a focus on the formal structures.
 e.g., I ask a series of personal information questions, kinship relations
to other people I know, background in whichever languages, future questions
(like what hopes the speaker might have for the future of the language
community), counter-factual (like what the speaker would do if ...<fill in
the blank>), etc.  In a second phase, I ask some more language-oriented
questions, focused usually on issues I'm working with at the moment (e.g.
"what's the difference between X and Z?", where X and Z are minimally
different sentences, involving only some change in word order or the
presence versus absence of some elusive particle).  The recording of such a
session yields quite rich data, not only in (a) a range of examples of
grammatical sentence types, and (b) some direct answers to the linguistics
questions themselves, but also in (c) what appears to be relatively
unmonitored conversational data, as people argue over what REALLY is the
difference between two sentences, etc.

Then this recorded text itself becomes an object of sentence-by-sentence
study after it is transcribed and translated, and each sentence in it is
available for permutation, leading to more questions which can be asked in
the next recording session, ...

So while I think you always need a coherent context to ground it in, I
think there IS a place for elicitation in field work.

Spike


From IBS4RWA at MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU  Tue Mar 12 03:55:00 1996
From: IBS4RWA at MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU (Roger Andersen)
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 19:55:00 PST
Subject: One size fits all!
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAR.1996.195500.PST.IBS4RWA@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU>

On the discussion of monolinguals vs bilinguals: One size fits all. ... Not!

(Since I am switching from one email system (ibs4rwa at mvs.oac.ucla.edu) to
another (rogerand at humnet.ucla.edu) but subscribed with the old one, I am
forwarding this message so I can get it on the FUNKNET. Sorry about the
roundabout way.)

I have two very different commentaries on this discussion, one as someone
who has researched one particular multilingual society for two decades and
the other as someone who has been functionally multilingual for these two
decades and, since the age of about 21, bilingual, but monolingual the first
two decades of my life.  Both are anecdotal.

I think most of the discussion is trying to come up with one answer for all
potential questions when, in reality, we really do not have even one
explicit question that needs to be answered. The original question
introduced vicariously by Payne is, "What makes monolinguals' Spanish "more
Spanish" than bilinguals'?"  This presupposes an affirmative answer to the
question, "Is a monolingual Spanish speaker's Spanish "more Spanish" than a
bilingual speaker?" and also assumes all monolinguals are identical and all
bilinguals are identical.  The original asker of the question qualified her
inquiry with "at least in phonology", but the discussion seems to deal with
"grammar" as an autonomous entity.  What is lacking is a *real* question for
which the choice of speakers is important.

COMMENTARY ONE
When I was preparing for my dissertation field work in 1972 -- a study of
sociolinguistic variation in the use of spoken Papiamentu in natural
discourse in Curacao, Netherlands Antilles, with a focus on hispanization of
the creole language -- I was aided considerably by Dell Hymes' notion that
we should study (to paraphrase) who says what to whom, when, where, for what
purposes, with what people present, and under what circumstances and **what
this means to the participants**.  (Hymes' insight came via Joel Sherzer,
Gillian Sankoff, David DeCamp, and others whose contribution I've probably
forgotten.)

        I found the pursuit of an answer to this question, for Curacao, an
incredibly difficult undertaking, but fortunately one that has kept drawing
me back to Curacao for the past two decades with very satisfying results: I
am now much closer to understanding the original question than I was in
1972!  (The answer? ... Well, can you check back in six to nine months?)

        The current (and prior) native inhabitants of Curacao (and sister islands
of Aruba and Bonaire, where Papiamentu is also the native language) had the
good fortune (value judgement!) of being taken over in the mid 1600 by the
Dutch (from the Spanish) and the possibly equally good fortune of   having
Spanish priests from the mainland visit the island regularly to teach
literacy in Papiamentu to the least fortunate residents (primarily slaves
and their descendants). Dutch and Spanish have both had a strong presence
and high prestige on the islands ever since. Social and economical
embetterment is associated with one or the other or both languages. And
since Dutch is hardly a language of wider communication (LWC), the
language-rich (English, Spanish, French) curriculum of the Dutch educational
system, carried intact to the Netherlands Antilles, has benefited at least
the most fortunate of residents of these three islands (and similarly has
had powerful consequences for the large number of less fortunate residents,
who leave school at an early age because of, among other reasons, lack of
adequate knowledge of Dutch to perform well in school).  The most fortunate
speak and read (and many write) Dutch, Spanish, English (and less commonly
French, German, Latin and Greek).  Nevertheless Papiamentu is clearly
**the** language spoken and needed in daily life and many native speakers
have inadequate knowledge of Dutch (or any other language).  Many Dutch
residents who work in Curacao find it necessary to learn Papiamentu.

        In a place like Curacao, to limit linguistic research to "pure"
monolinguals, IF they can be found (!) accomplishes very little, unless the
purpose is to study the linguistic repertoire of the most isolated, the
least educated, and the least fortunate residents of the island. So we are
back to asking, "What is the question for which we need an answer?"

        As I write this, I am worrying about getting behind on writing a long and
supposedly comprehensive 'state of the art' paper I was asked to write on
Papiamentu.  In Spanish, which is not my native language, but a language I
have published (three, now on the fourth) articles in and have lectured in.
As I suffer through this task, I work with my large database on natural
spoken Papiamentu discourse, read and reread works published in Papiamentu,
English, Spanish, and French, worry about the many studies published in
Dutch that I can work with only with great effort, and write in Spanish
worrying whether I have succeeded in communicating what I really intended.

        And I have  a feeling that *I* am not the kind of multilingual that the
original asker of the question had in mind. No one has asked me to be a
native English informant yet, but probably not because I am claiming to be
multilingual.  And no one in their right mind would *ever* want to use me as
an informant for French, Portuguese, Spanish, Papiamentu, or any other
language.  I am "individually" multilingual, whereas I assume that the
question about whether we can trust bilinguals has to do with "socially"
bilingual individuals in their "native" habitat or "conveniency sample
informants" who happen to live in the U.S. and speak English (all discussion
has been so far, I believe, by native speakers of English).

        In my research on Papiamentu I *must* keep track of the  notion of "who is
saying what to whom, when, where, with what purpose, etc. ..."  Even
monolingual Papiamentu speakers live and function within an intricate
bilingual/multilingual context.  One person's "good" Papiamentu is another
person's "bad" Papiamentu.  ("Good" is typically associated with being able
to replace Dutch vocabulary, pervasive in educated speakers from a Dutch
education, with Spanish equivalents. But in certain contexts, speaking
*this* kind of "good" Papiamentu is definitely "bad".  And most Papiamentu
speakers know this and behave accordingly.

        Nevertheless, there are a good number of "native" speakers of Papiamentu
whose Papiamentu is easily recognized by all other native Papiamentu
speakers as being the Papiamentu of "yu'i Korsou" (native Curacaons) who
have lived many years in Holland.  They do *not* really speak "pure" native
Papiamentu, yet they were born and raised initially in Curacao.  For someone
who studies grammar by eliciting sentences from native speakers, such
speakers are clearly the wrong ones!  But I don't elicit sentences; I try to
study the way people naturally use language in their daily lives in a
varietyof different situations and settings.

        So we are back to "What's the question?"

        Probably the most complete and comprehensive "grammars" of Papiamentu (with
the title "El Papiamento") was published in Spanish in 1928 by Rodolfo Lenz
, a German linguist living in Chile. It is based on elicitation from *one*
informant, a cook, on a ship from Chile to Germany.  It has its flaws
(pointed out by a native Papiamentu writer, Antoine Maduro), but is
otherwise an excellent example of what a good researcher can do with the
"right" native speaker informant. But this is not 1928. and Lenz asked a
very different set of questions (to generate his grammar) than I am asking.(
Lenz' informant was probably to some extent "bilingual". Many Papiamentu
speakers from these islands made a living on the sea and learned whatever
mode of communication was necessary for the situation. )


COMMENTARY TWO
I lived the first 18 years of my life as a monolingual English speaker in a
multiethnic and multilingual neighborhood where languages other than English
were restricted to family. My father understood some Danish but was
otherwise a monolingual English speaker. My grandparents, who lived next
door, spoke Danish frequently among themselves and with visitors. I know no
Danish. I began learning Spanish around the age of 20, in college classes
and a summer in Mexico. From the age of 22 until the age of 37 I lived in
Puerto Rico and used only Spanish in my daily life except when speaking to
native speakers of English (and even sometimes using Spanish with such soul
brothers/sisters).  For certain periods of time I left Puerto Rico to study
in the U.S. Even in the U.S. most of my friends were Spanish speakers (or
Portuguese speakers) and I again only used English when appropriate.  I met
my  wife, who is Puerto Rican after living several years in Puerto Rico and
calling it "home". (I never really expected to become an immigrant to Los
Angeles!)  We have lived in Los Angeles for a long time and visit Puerto
Rico at least once a year (with two daughters who are 'bilingual' but simply
don't *look* Hispanic, so are not regarded as "really" bilingual!).
Although I still call Puerto Rico my "home", from my wife's perspective I am
and always will be an outsider who took her away from her "home".  When I
talk about Puerto Rico as "MY" Puerto Rico, she quickly points out that I
wasn't born in Puerto Rico, my parents were not Puerto Rican, and I don't
have the 'mancha del platano" and am simply an American who happened to live
in Puerto Rico a long time. Puerto Rico is hers; the U.S. is mine.  My
daughters (in their early 20s) have the same attitude, except they can call
themselves Puerto Rican and I can't!  For Spanish, my wife would be the
problematic bilingual Spanish informant. My daughters would be more
problematic, having been educated primarily in the U.S.

        This is my answer to one question I posed earlier: Are all monolinguals
alike? Are all bilinguals identical?  Clearly not. My two daughters are very
different from each other as bilnguals. And my wife and I are very different
sorts of "bilinguals".  In fact, while my wife might be accepted as
'bilingual', most people would treat me as an American who happens to know
Spanish well. Clearly not 'bilingual'. That is, not born into a bilingual
social environment.

        But "bilingual" vs "monolingual" is just the tip of the iceberg.  Just to
bring in one other variable, what about differences in metalinguistic and
metacognitive awareness?  I think any one who has done field work and who
speaks well the language they study know how widely "native" speakers vary
in the degree to which you can trust their intuitions.  What about language
directed to the outsider-linguist-anthropologist vs language directed to
insiders? Whether the speakers are monolingual or bilingual, they may use
very different linguistic repertoires in the two situations. (Again, who is
speaking to whom for what purpose ....) And this certainly does not exhaust
the important variables.

        And for the question that involves extensive crosslinguistic comparison,
check out Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994!  The role of bilinguals and
multilinguals in my research on one population is very different from the
role of bilinguals used by people who write grammars, which many of us
depend on to address important questions.

        And I will *not* get into the complexity of speaking 'Quechua' in areas
throughout the Andes where the invaders' language, Spanish, has a very
different status depending on many different variables.  To know Quechua
involves Spanish even if you are monolingual in Quechua, just as to know
Papiamentu involves Spanish and Dutch, even if you are monolingual in
Papiamentu.  But this is just the beginning.

No. One size does *not* fit all!


And now I know I will regret having given up my spectator status in this
debate!  At least I have an excuse for procrastinating further as I write a
couple of more paragraphs in Spanish, using exerpts in Papiamentu with
Spanish glosses, to discuss an issue involving a book written in French, an
article in English, and others in Papiamentu and Dutch.  I certainly don't
trust bilinguals and multilinguals. I know better. Give me a good
monolingual any day. (Field note 265a: writer has tongue in cheek!)

Roger W. Andersen, Applied Linguistics, 3300 Rolfe, UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1531
Tel: (310) 206-1325 Fax (310) 206-4118
email address: rogerand at humnet.ucla.edu

"Do few things and do them well." St. Francis of Assisi


From BLSIMON at MACC.WISC.EDU  Tue Mar 12 12:46:00 1996
From: BLSIMON at MACC.WISC.EDU (Beth Lee Simon)
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 07:46:00 CDT
Subject: Call For Proposals/Abstracts, ADS sessio, M/MLA
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAR.1996.074600.CDT.BLSIMON@MACC.WISC.EDU>

Apologies to those who have seen this on other lists

                    SECOND ANNOUNCMENT

          Please submit an ABSTRACT OR BRIEF PROPOSAL

          MIDWEST MEETING OF THE AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

          at the M/MLA, Nov. 7-9, 1996, at the Minneapolis Marriot
          City Center, Minneapolis MN

Email and faxed materials are welcome.


Submit by March 25, 1996 to

     Professor Beth Simon
     Dept. of English and Linguistics
     Indiana University - Purdue University
     Fort Wayne, IN 46805

email:    simon at cvax.ipfw.indiana.edu

fax:      219-481-6985



thanks,
beth simon


From RICE at NOVA.LING.UALBERTA.CA  Tue Mar 12 16:43:23 1996
From: RICE at NOVA.LING.UALBERTA.CA (Rice, S.)
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 09:43:23 -0700
Subject: Call for Abstracts for 1996 Athapaskan Language Conference
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAR.1996.094323.0700.>

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
1996 Athapaskan Language Conference

The 1996 Athapaskan Language Conference will be held on Saturday and
Sunday, 15-16 June 1996, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada.

Abstracts for 20-30 minute presentations should be received by *30
April 1996* and may be submitted by e-mail, fax, or regular mail.
Please indicate with your abstract, in addition to name, address, e-
mail address, telephone & fax numbers, if you require audio-visual
support such as an overhead projector, liquid-crystal display, tape
recorder, VCR & TV monitor, etc.

The registration fee is $15 (Cdn or U.S. funds) for students, $20
(Cdn or U.S.) for non-students.  This fee covers xeroxing, and light
refreshments during the conference.  On-campus housing (with common
washroom) is available (single - $24.64 Cdn, double - $33.60 Cdn) as
well as suite-style accommodations at a residential hotel adjacent to
campus (single bedroom with kitchenette - $62 Cdn, double bedroom -
$85; these rooms also feature pull-out sofa-beds in the living room).
These accomodations must be confirmed by 15 May 1996.

In addition to Air Canada and Canadian Airlines, the following U.S.
carriers fly into Edmonton:  Delta, American, and NW.  This could
change between now and mid-June with the new Open Skies Agreement so
check with your travel agent.  Cab fare between Edmonton
International Airport and the University of Alberta campus averages
$25 each way.  An airport shuttle to the university costs $11 ($18
roundtrip).

For further information about the conference or to submit an
abstract, please contact:

Sally Rice
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Alberta
4-60 Assiniboia Hall
Edmonton, Alberta
T6G 2E7 CANADA

tel: 403-492-0809
fax: 403-492-0806
e-mail:  rice at nova.ling.ualberta.ca


From jarek at FIL.LU.SE  Fri Mar 15 13:51:36 1996
From: jarek at FIL.LU.SE (Jaroslaw Pluciennik)
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 14:51:36 +0100
Subject: Kantian adjectives
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAR.1996.145136.0100.JAREK@FIL.LU.SE>

Dear colleages,

On 20 February, 1996 we posted a query asking for translations of English
"Kantian adjectives" and for information about possible negative
morphological elements present in their non-English correspondents.
We are grateful for all responses. It helped us much in our goal to get some
cross-linguistic background for our main contextual analysis of English
Kantian adjectives.

The negative elements inside lexical items as well as separated words are as
follows:

Basque: -gabe
Brazilian  Portuguese: in-,  il-, des-, sem
Czech: ne-, bez
Danish: -loes, u-, in- (from latin), ikke
Dutch: -loos, on-, niet
=46innish: -ton, -t=F6n
=46rench: in-, sans
German: -los, un-, ohne
Hungarian: -tlen, -tlan
Mandarin: wu-
Polish: bez-, bez, nie-, nie
Slovene: brez-, ne-, utan
Spanish: sin, in-, im-, il-, a-
Swedish: o-, -loes, inte, utan
Thai: may,  rai

We are listing only formaly negative elements and excluding all doubtful
cases. It should be noticed that some, although rare, translations of primar=
y
negative words in English are not negative at all in other languges. It
applies also to some synonimes of English Kantian adjectives. The
non-negative translations are as follows:

bottomless: Thai: sut ca? yaN dai (beyond to measure can)
boundless: German: kolossal
ceaseless: Czech: ustavicn=E9y, German: staendig, Thai: mai  yO:thO: (not
give in)
countless: Thai: lu'a khana (beyond reckoning), nap mai thuan and kE:n ca?
nap (count not thorough beyond to count)
dateless: Polish: zawsze aktualny, Swedish: urminnes
endless: Czech: ustavicn=E9y, Polish: ustawiczny, Swedish: evig
fathomless: Thai: kE:n  ca?  yaN  dai (beyond to measure can)
immeasurable: Polish: ogromny, Thai: kE:n ca? nap dai (beyond to count can)
incalculable: Thai: kE:n khamnuan (beyond calculate)
incessant: Sloven: stalen, Czech: ustavicn=E9y, Finnish: alituinen, German:
staendig, Polish: ustawiczny, Thai: r'uayru'ay (continually (reduplicated
for emphasis))
indefinite: German: verschwommen, vage
Swedish: svaevande, vag
infinite: Slovene: ogromen, Polish: ogromny, Swedish: maengd
innumerable: Thai: lamdap mai wai (sequence not can)  or sut ca? nap dai
(beyond to count can)
interminable: Sloven: ve=FCen, Swedish: laangtraakig
measureless: German: maSlos, Thai: lu=E9a khana (beyond reckoning) kE:n wat
(beyond measure)
numberless: Thai: kE:n nap (beyond count)
quenchless: Thai: kE:n dap (beyond quench extinguish)
timeless:  Slovene: ve=FCen, French: eternel, German: ewig, Polish: wieczny,
ponadczasowy, Spanish: eterno, Swedish: evig
unending: German: ewig, Polish: wieczny, Swedish: evig
unfathomable: Thai: kEn ca? yaN dai (beyond to measure can)
unlimited: Czech: ohromn=E9y, Polish: ogromny, w wielkiej ilosci
unmeasured: Danish: rigelig, German: maSlos, Hungarian: meg nem mert

A note on transcription in Thai translations:
 /O/ =3D low back open o, /E/ =3D mid central vowel, equal to a schwa, /X/ =
=3D
unrounded high back vowel, /N/ =3D velar nasal, /c/ =3D unaspirated voiceles=
s
alveolar stop. The tones are omitted.

We should underline that some experts have excluded non-negative
translations from their sets because of our interest in just negative
morphological elements in the considered items.

We will be grateful for all your comments. All additional translations are
welcome.

Best regards



Jaroslaw Pluciennik
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Dept. of Cognitive Science
Lund University
Kungshuset, Lundagaard
S-222 22 Lund, Sweden

Phone: +46 (0) 46 222 97 58
fax: +46 (0) 46 222 48 17
e-mail: jarek at fil.lu.se,  or  jarrek at krysia.uni.lodz.pl
www: http://lucs.fil.lu.se/
-------------------------------------------------------------------


From HAIMAN at MACALSTR.EDU  Fri Mar 15 22:43:53 1996
From: HAIMAN at MACALSTR.EDU (Haiman, J.)
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 16:43:53 -0600
Subject: self-repetition
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAR.1996.164353.0600.>

Does anyone have some information on literature (or personal experiences) on
metalinguistic self-repetition?  My younger daughter went through a phase at
about age 10 when everything she said, she repeated in an undertone to herself
immediately after.  I've since heard of other children having been observed to
do this.

John Haiman


From smlamb at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Fri Mar 15 23:56:31 1996
From: smlamb at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Sydney M Lamb)
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 17:56:31 -0600
Subject: self-repetition
In-Reply-To: <01I2DHU7SZGU001PNF@macalstr.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAR.1996.175631.0600.SMLAMB@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

On Fri, 15 Mar 1996, Haiman, J. wrote:

> Does anyone have some information on literature (or personal experiences) on
> metalinguistic self-repetition?  My younger daughter went through a phase at
> about age 10 when everything she said, she repeated in an undertone to herself
> immediately after.  I've since heard of other children having been observed to
> do this.
>
> John Haiman
>

John --
        I used to do this myself, at about age 5 or 6 I think.  I didn't even
my know I was doing it until my older sister noticed it and laughed at me
for doing it.  Then I think I paid attention, realized I had been doing it
habitually,  and suppressed it.  I can still clearly remember doing it.
I think I was just reviewing what I had said, sort of checking.
My impression is that it is unusual --- not very many kids do it.
But I think many people --- including adults --- do it internally
(silently), sometimes.

Regards,
        Syd .


From BLSIMON at MACC.WISC.EDU  Sat Mar 16 11:33:00 1996
From: BLSIMON at MACC.WISC.EDU (Beth Lee Simon)
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 06:33:00 CDT
Subject: 2nd ADS call
Message-ID: <SAT.16.MAR.1996.063300.CDT.BLSIMON@MACC.WISC.EDU>

From:    WIRCS2::BLSIMON      "Beth Lee Simon"
To:      IN%"funknet at ricevm1.rice.edu",BLSIMON
Subject: Call For Proposals/Abstracts, ADS sessio, M/MLA

Apologies to those who have seen this on other lists

                    SECOND ANNOUNCMENT

          Please submit an ABSTRACT OR BRIEF PROPOSAL

          MIDWEST MEETING OF THE AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

          at the M/MLA, Nov. 7-9, 1996, at the Minneapolis Marriot
          City Center, Minneapolis MN

Email and faxed materials are welcome.


Submit by March 25, 1996 to

     Professor Beth Simon
     Dept. of English and Linguistics
     Indiana University - Purdue University
     Fort Wayne, IN 46805

email:    simon at cvax.ipfw.indiana.edu

fax:      219-481-6985



thanks,
beth simon


From rmontes at UDLAPVMS.PUE.UDLAP.MX  Sun Mar 17 00:58:45 1996
From: rmontes at UDLAPVMS.PUE.UDLAP.MX (Rosa Graciela Montes)
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 18:58:45 -0600
Subject: self-repetition (fwd)
Message-ID: <SAT.16.MAR.1996.185845.0600.RMONTES@UDLAPVMS.PUE.UDLAP.MX>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 18:22:26 -0600 (CST)
From: Rosa Graciela Montes <rmontes at cca.pue.udlap.mx>
To: "Haiman, J." <HAIMAN at MACALSTR.EDU>
Cc: Multiple recipients of list FUNKNET <FUNKNET at ricevm1.rice.edu>
Subject: Re: self-repetition

In my tapes of my daughter (age 1;8-3;0) I have a few examples of the
opposite process: whispering or what seems to be speaking to self
followed by the same utterance said out loud. The child seems to practice
or try out what she is going to say before going "on record". Rosa
Montes, ICSyH, U.Puebla (MEXICO)


From russo at INRETE.IT  Sun Mar 17 19:24:14 1996
From: russo at INRETE.IT (No Name)
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 14:24:14 -0500
Subject: AGI 1995 special issue
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAR.1996.142414.0500.RUSSO@INRETE.IT>

This is to inform that the 1995 monographic issue of "Archivio
Glottologico Italiano", which is devoted to grammaticalization
problems, is now available.

ARCHIVIO GLOTTOLOGICO ITALIANO - vol. LXXX (1995), No. 1 & 2

CONTENTS

Marco Mancini
Dalle "origini della grammatica" alla "grammaticalizzazione": un
capitolo di storia delle idee
linguistiche nel Settecento
Gianguido Manzelli
La concettualizzazione di 'fuori' nelle lingue baltofinniche, baltiche
e slave
Romano Lazzeroni
Il futuro perifrastico sanscrito fra autonomia e sincretismo
Sonia Cristofaro
Lo sviluppo dei complementatori come modello di grammaticalizzazione:
il caso del greco antico
Pierluigi Cuzzolin
A proposito di 'sub vos placo' e della grammaticalizzazione delle
adposizioni
Michele Loporcaro
Grammaticalizzazione delle perifrasi verbali perfettive romanze e
accordo del participio passato
Anna Giacalone Ramat
Sulla grammaticalizzazione di verbi di movimento: 'andare' e 'venire'
+ gerundio
Mario Sala Gallini
Lo statuto del clitico nella grammaticalizzazione a destra: pronome
vero o marca flessionale?
Stefania Giannini
Riferimenti deittici nel sistema dei pronomi personali. Appunti per
una grammatica del lucchese


Reviews
Grazia Crocco Galeas: Bernd Heine, Auxiliaries
Paolo Ramat: W. Pagliuca (ed.), Perspectives on Grammaticalization

Copies may be ordered directly from the publisher by writing to
Periodici Le Monnier
Casella postale 202
50100 Firenze
Italy

Subscription price is L. 75000 for Italy, L. 100000 ($ 77) for abroad.


From jan at LING.SU.SE  Mon Mar 18 13:24:59 1996
From: jan at LING.SU.SE (Jan Anward)
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 12:24:59 -0100
Subject: self-repetition
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAR.1996.122459.0100.JAN@LING.SU.SE>

>Does anyone have some information on literature (or personal experiences) on
>metalinguistic self-repetition?  My younger daughter went through a phase at
>about age 10 when everything she said, she repeated in an undertone to herself
>immediately after.  I've since heard of other children having been observed to
>do this.
>
>John Haiman

I am reminded of Weir's classical 'Language in the crib', which focuses on
self-repetition as a means of practising at a very early age.
Around 10 or around 5-6, as Lamb reports, could be interpreted as a
strategy for moving from dialogue to monologue. I.e. before you master
monologue, you may go through a phase where you model monologues on
dialogues. Something along these lines appears to go on in children's
spoken and written narratives, which may go through an early phase of
dramatized action, letting protagonists speak instead of describing what
they are doing.
For Swedish, there are some examples of such written narratives in Birgitta
Garme's 'Text och tanke' (in Swedish, unfortunately).

Jan Anward


From harder at COCO.IHI.KU.DK  Mon Mar 18 15:03:30 1996
From: harder at COCO.IHI.KU.DK (Peter Harder)
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 15:03:30 MET
Subject: Book notice
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAR.1996.150330.MET.HARDER@COCO.IHI.KU.DK>

  Ahem...I wonder if I might call your attention to:

  Functional Semantics. A Theory of Meaning, Structure and
  Tense in English. By Peter Harder. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
  Gruyter, 1996 (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 87.
  586 pp, DM 200,-. ISBN 3-11-014941-9).

  The book contains an integrated theory of function, cognition and
  linguistic structure - illustrated with an account of tense based on the
  theory.
        Beginning with a discussion of the intellectual history of the
  concept of meaning, it argues that not only meaning but all the central
  concepts of linguistics, including linguistic structure, must be
  understood as based on function. It further analyses the fundamental
  confusion that underlies some basic notions in the accepted picture of
  linguistics, such as the trinity of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and
  suggests a revised view in which the semantic half of syntax has a
  central role - from a structural as well as a functional and cognitive
  point of view.
        In comparing this view of syntax with the mainstream view, it
  shows that the Chomskyan view of syntax is the result of a confusion of
  metalanguage with object language: like others before him, Chomsky
  'discovered' his own descriptive apparatus in the object itself.
        The book proposes a general theory of the relation between
  functional and cognitive aspects of language, relates the theory to the
  evolution of language as well as clause structure, and shows how tense
  fits into this picture.

        Thank you for allowing your attention to be called! (Peter Harder)


From ATILA at SUPER.FURG.BR  Mon Mar 18 11:22:46 1996
From: ATILA at SUPER.FURG.BR (Atila Louzada)
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 11:22:46 BSC
Subject: Future reference
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAR.1996.112246.BSC.ATILA@SUPER.FURG.BR>

Dear funknetters, four colleagues and I are presently engaged in a function-
based study of the verb in Brazilian Portuguese aiming at answering the general
question HOW IS FUNCTION X CODED? My indiv idual project deals with future
reference in a broader sense. That means I will consider a reference
standpoint and treat as future reference not only from-this-moment-on events,
but also from-moment-x-on ones. I welcome suggestions on readings and
approaches to the problem. Thank you for your attention. AL


From RICE at NOVA.LING.UALBERTA.CA  Sun Mar 24 22:38:37 1996
From: RICE at NOVA.LING.UALBERTA.CA (Rice, S.)
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 1996 15:38:37 -0700
Subject: Forwarded: Jobs: Visiting Assistant Professors
Message-ID: <SUN.24.MAR.1996.153837.0700.>

Department of Linguistics
University of Alberta

POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT


The Department of Linguistics invites applications for 3 positions
as eight-month Visiting Assistant Professors in Linguistics.  The
ideal candidates would have specializations in one or more core
areas of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics),
active research programs and previous teaching experience.
Outstanding applicants with specializations in other areas (such as
psycholinguistics and child language acquisition) will also be
considered.  These 8-month positions will involve teaching at both
the graduate and undergraduate levels and may be re-newable for
1997-98 pending budget approval.  The current eight-month salary at
the University of Alberta is $25,000 Cdn plus travel expenses.

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta has a
strong commitment to empirical and experimental approaches to
linguistic research.  Department members are engaged in ongoing
SSHRC-funded research projects in the study of the phonological,
morphological, and semantic aspects of the mental lexicon as well as
projects focusing on discourse processing and speech perception.
The successful candidates would therefore have the opportunity to
pursue their own scholarly activities within a collegial and
supportive research environment as well as to participate in
collaborative research projects.

In accordance with Canadian Immigration requirements, this
advertisement is directed to Canadian citizens and permanent
residents.

The University of Alberta is committed to the principle of equity in
employment.  As an employer we welcome diversity in the workplace
and encourage applications from all qualified women and men,
including Aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities, and members
of visible minorities.

A letter of application, curriculum vitae, and the names and
addresses of three referees should be sent by May 20 to:

Gary Libben, Chair
Department of Linguistics
4-36 Assiniboia Hall
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
T6G 2E7

e-mail: glibben at gpu.srv.ualberta.ca
Tel:    (403) 492-3459
Fax:    (403) 492-0806


From jan at LING.SU.SE  Mon Mar 25 13:25:18 1996
From: jan at LING.SU.SE (Jan Anward)
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 12:25:18 -0100
Subject: Functional explanations for Subject to Subject Raising
Message-ID: <MON.25.MAR.1996.122518.0100.JAN@LING.SU.SE>

The figures for S-to-S raising in Spansih make sense if we assume, as
several people have,
e.g. Pawley, A. & Syder, F.H. 1983: Natural selection in syntax: notes on
   adaptive variation and change in vernacular and literary grammar,
   Journal of Pragmatics 7: 551-579,
that spoken language is essentially dialogic, even when produced by a
single speaker, and is subject to a one-clause-at-a-time constraint, which
I think may be grounded in the dialogic system for turn-taking (Sacks,
Schegloff, Jefferson's classical account in Lg 1974).
If spoken language obeys such a constraint, constructions which necessarily
span two clauses would tend to be avoided and alternatives - in case there
are alternatives - which span only one clause at a time would be preferred.
This also predicts that pseudo-raising, which preserves the integrity of
the second clause, should be preferred to regular raising.
A further prediction is that spoken language would not tend to avoid
constructions with simple predicatives after 'seem': He seems sad, and
similar examples. If Spanish has that kind of construction, it would be
interesting to test this prediction.

Jan Anward


From kuzar at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL  Thu Mar 28 10:33:03 1996
From: kuzar at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (Ron Kuzar)
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 12:33:03 +0200
Subject: Unidirectional developments?
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAR.1996.123303.0200.KUZAR@RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL>

Dear FunkNetters,
It is well known that certain processes in the history of language are
bidirectional: Affixes may degenerate into non-morphology or pronouns may
be cliticized and eventually morphologized. But are there processes that
are only unidirectional? I have in mind two issues:
1. Periodic style: languages with a narrative style that chains short
sentences into a linear sequence often develop a periodic style at a
later phase of their development. Does anybody know of a language that
had had periodic style and developed a chaining style?
2. Expression of feelings: some languages which express feelings by
placing the feeler in the dative (or another oblique) case <angers
me/freezes me/hurts to-me the head/burns to-me the soul/etc> develop later
into feeler as subject <I am angry/I am freezing/ I have a headache/I am
desperate/etc>. Does anybody know of languages that developed the other way?
Processes that seemed unidirectional to philologists in the nineteenth
century motivated a discourse that viewed language development as
teleological, resulting in the 'best language'. Today this kind of
writing would be simply ridiculed. However, if some processes are in fact
unidirectional, what sort of terms could account for this phenomenon,
other than 'betterment', 'refinement' etc. along some (what kind of) axis?
Can you think of other unidirectional processes?
Any bibliography?
Ron Kuzar
kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il


From mccay at JET.ES  Thu Mar 28 14:22:22 1996
From: mccay at JET.ES (Alan R. King)
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 14:22:22 GMT
Subject: Unidirectionality?
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAR.1996.142222.GMT.MCCAY@JET.ES>

Ron Kuzar asks about unidirectional diachronic developments such as "angers
me" > "I am angry", and the larger implications of such facts.  Concerning
such expressions of feeling, I have two comments to make:

(a) One way of viewing the development that RK mentions might be in terms of
its implications about the concept "subject": perhaps we may say that in a
language that uses "I am angry" the idea (read perhaps: range of semantic
roles) associated with the grammatical notion "subject" is ever so slightly
(or even not so slightly?) different from the idea in one that uses "angers
me".  So the diachronic development involves a partial redefinition of
"subject" in the language.  This hypothesis would suggest the likelihood
that in languages where the change mentioned takes place, this will not be
an isolated phenomenon but part of some larger process.

(b) Subject status can also have certain pragmatic implications.  Thus there
is a widespread strategy of what Brown & Levinson called "negative
politeness" consisting of avoiding giving the real protagonist (semantic
subject) the formal status of subject.  This can be achieved by complete
impersonalization, e.g. in French (and similarly in Hebrew, I think) saying

        Il faut regarder le livre.
        "It is necessary to look at the book."

when one actually means

        Tu dois regarder le livre.
        "You must look at the book."

or by an intermediate solution such as:

        Il faut que tu regardes le livre.
        "It is necessary that you look at the book."

where we have at least avoided "Tu dois...", which, with the semantic
subject as grammatical subject of the modal verb, is felt to be more direct
(and so, in certain communicative contexts, potentially less polite).  In
some languages, another alternative is to express the semantic subject as a
grammatical dative:

        Il te faut regarder le livre.
        "It is necessary to you to look at the book."

The flip side of this is that, since speakers *know* what is going on here,
there is a sense in which all the above constructions are merely different
grammatical expressions of a single pragmatic structure in which "you" is in
a single pragmatic relationship to the modalized predicate "must look",
corresponding to what I have called semantic subject.

Now, can we think of pragmatic reasons why it might be desirable to express
the semantic subject of "expressions of feeling" in a less direct manner?
Of course we can.  Such expressions can easily constitute what have been
called "face-threatening acts" in politeness theory, thus motivating
compensating politeness strategies.  On the other hand, if a language recurs
to a strategy such as dativizing a certain type of semantic subject
constantly, this can become conventionalized to the point where the original
politeness strategy is no longer clearly perceived by speakers.  At this
point, a plausible next step is the language's evolution is to "regularize"
the system by encoding the perceived semantic subject as grammatical subject....

The way in which I think the scenario just described is possibly relevant to
RK's (broader) question is as follows.  In cases where a change is found (or
thought) to be unidirectional, meaning that we find A>B but not *B>A, there
may nevertheless occur B>C and C>A, and therefore B>C>A, which is an
indirect form of B>A.  The problems are to identify C and to understand the
nature of the processes leading (a) to, and (b) from C.  What I have just
tried to do is suggest a possible identification and explanation for the
case of "expressions of feeling".  Since I have posed it in speculative and
non-empirical terms, others might be interested in providing illustrative
diachronic examples, if there are any to be found.


Alan R. King          |  EMAIL: mccay at jet.es
Indamendi 13, 7C      |  [or if all else fails] 70244.1674 at compuserve.com
20800 Zarautz         |  FAX: +34-43-130396
Gipuzkoa
Euskal Herria / Basque Country (Spain)


From geoffn at SIU.EDU  Thu Mar 28 14:26:31 1996
From: geoffn at SIU.EDU (Geoffrey S. Nathan)
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 08:26:31 CST
Subject: Unidirectional developments?
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAR.1996.082631.CST.GEOFFN@SIU.EDU>

        Further to the note from Ron Kuzar on unidirectionality,
there is a long tradition in phonology whereby all changes are
LOCAL improvements.  The exact terminology is Theo
Vennemann's (see, for example, his _Preference Laws for
Syllable Structure_ (Mouton, 1988).  It is perfectly possible to
make all changes teleological, as long as one recognizes that
there are multiple teleologies.  This has been known in
phonology since the nineteenth century, and is a cornerstone of,
for example, Natural Phonology.  Therein language strives for
'improvement' both for the speaker (loosely, 'ease of
articulation') and for the hearer (loosely, 'distinctiveness,
clarity').  Any change in one direction is likely to result in a
'degeneration' in another, conflicting tendency.  Thus,
functionalist phonologists have no problem with unidirectionality,
since things go in both directions at once, and the tension
between tendencies leads to a dynamic (in)stability, and hence
to change.
        Analogs in syntax (such as a development from parataxis
to true embedding, perhaps) are easy to think of superficially,
but I suspect require a much deeper theory of functional
syntactic principles that I possess.  Perhaps others are already
aware of the analogs to fortitions (speaker-oriented phonological
processes) and lenitions (hearer-oriented ones) in morphology
and syntax.
        As I write, I can think of some suggestions.  Presumably
gluing pronouns onto the ends of verbs as they become
proto-inflections is the analog of 'ease of articulation', and the
addition of emphatic pronouns in PRO-drop languages as real
person inflections get 'worn off' would be the equivalent of a
syntactic fortition.  Just a thought...

best,
Geoff


Geoffrey S. Nathan
Department of Linguistics
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Carbondale, IL, 62901-4517

Home phone:  (618) 549-0106  Office:  (618) 453-3421

GEOFFN at SIU.EDU


From jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU  Thu Mar 28 20:52:36 1996
From: jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba)
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 12:52:36 -0800
Subject: Unidirectionality
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAR.1996.125236.0800.JRUBBA@HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU>

On the general subject of teleology in language change, I'd like to pick
up Geoff Nathan's thread and weave it a bit into Ron Kuzar's and Alan
King's remarks.

Elizabeth Traugott and Ekkehardt Koenig have done fascinating work on
processes like 'pragmatic strengthening' in grammaticalization, whereby a
meaning once available only as an inference becomes built in to the
semantics of an expression, such that it is no longer only implied by the
expression, but must necessarily be understood when the expression is
used. I think an example is the extension of 'since' from purely temporal
to temporal AND causal.

I believe that Geoff's remarks about local improvement and competing
motivations from different 'locales' in language can inform the kinds of
changes that Ron and Alan talk about, such as movement from dative-marked
experiencers to nominative-marked ones, or movement from coding
experiencers as obliques to coding them as subjects.

I'd suggest that there are competing motivations for choice of what to
mark as subject; that among these are things like the 'me-first'
principle, bias towards agentive construal in clauses, topicality of a
referent in the particular discourse, face considerations, and information
structure (given/new), among who knows what other parameters (this is
something I've been thinking about only informally). This idea sets up a
tradeoff in syntax similar to the phonological tradeoffs Geoff talks about
 -- you may give up face considerations in order to accommodate
topicality, for example. Of course, how these tradeoffs become
conventionalized to the point of a nominative-marked experiencer-subject
construction displacing a dative-marked oblique experiencer construction
in a language is another question.

jo
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
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 susan at UTAFLL.UTA.EDU  Sun Mar 31 00:13:26 1996
From: susan at UTAFLL.UTA.EDU (Susan Herring)
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 1996 18:13:26 CST
Subject: Discussant needed for panel on computer-mediated conversation
Message-ID: <SAT.30.MAR.1996.181326.CST.SUSAN@UTAFLL.UTA.EDU>

I would very much appreciate recommendations (including self-recommendations)
for a qualified person to be a discussant for a panel I am chairing on
"Computer-Mediated Conversation" for the 5th International Pragmatics
Conference in Mexico City this July. The ideal discussant would be an
established scholar with interests in both discourse analysis and
computer-mediated communication, and who is already planning to attend the
Pragmatics Conference.

The original proposal for the panel included Helen Dry in this role, but
unfortunately Helen is unable to attend the conference.

If you have a suggestion for someone you think would be appropriate, please
e-mail me at susan at utafll.uta.edu.

Many thanks,
Susan Herring



From kemmer at RUF.RICE.EDU  Fri Mar  1 18:13:21 1996
From: kemmer at RUF.RICE.EDU (Suzanne E Kemmer)
Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996 12:13:21 -0600
Subject: looking for John
Message-ID: <FRI.1.MAR.1996.121321.0600.KEMMER@RUF.RICE.EDU>

Does anybody have John Myhill's email address?
I'd like to contact him.  Thanks,  Suzanne


From tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU  Wed Mar  6 20:14:30 1996
From: tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Thomas E Payne)
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 12:14:30 -0800
Subject: Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals
Message-ID: <WED.6.MAR.1996.121430.0800.TPAYNE@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>

The following extract from a message from Barbara Zurer Pearson that
appeared on Linguist intrigued me and I was wondering if anyone on Funknet
would be interested in discussing it:

> My second question concerned what makes monolinguals' Spanish "more
> Spanish" than bilinguals'.  This must be too self-evident to provoke
> reaction.  I got only two responses.  Robert Port <port at hip.atr.co.jp>
> or <port at indiana.edu> wrote to warn me to avoid bilinguals if I were
> doing cross- linguistic study.  At least in phonology, he said,
> there's plenty of research to show that bilinguals are different from
> monolinguals.

What intrigues me about this idea is that the language of monolinguals
may be significantly different from that of bilinguals. This "rings true"
to me, and I wonder what impications this might have for those of us who
do descriptive linguistics, much of which is done with bilinguals. Has
there been any research specifically in this area? Has anyone out there
thought about this?

Thanks for any responses.

Tom Payne


From tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU  Thu Mar  7 17:09:20 1996
From: tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Thomas E Payne)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 09:09:20 -0800
Subject: Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals
In-Reply-To: <v01510100ad64424d3e6f@[132.74.19.230]>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.090920.0800.TPAYNE@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>

Here is a message from John Myhill that apparently didn't go out to the
whole list. I'll quote it here then give my response.

> Obviously the speech of bilinguals' is different from that of monolinguals.
> To give just one of an endless list of examples, I have observed native
> speakers of English who did not set foot in Israel until their 20's saying
> things like 'The printer sits on the 18th floor', a loan translation from
> Hebrew. This is what linguistic convergence is all about. Gumperz'
study of
> Kupwar village is I guess the classic sociolinguistic study of this. This
> problem is exactly why I have avoided informant work in my own research and
> focused on using texts wherever possible.  John Myhill
>

John,

  Thanks for your reply to my query. I wonder whether working with texts
"solves" the problem though. What if the text was composed by bilinguals?
Then, one might ask, so what if the speech of monolinguals is different
from that of bilinguals? So they use different speech varieties, but we
linguists usually pride ourselves on not passing judgement on one speech
variety over another. Is the speech of monolinguals necessarily "better"?
If so, how so? This is a serious question. I too have the sense that we
"ought" to study the speech of monolinguals. It seems intuitively to be
"purer", closer to what a grammar claims to describe if it is called "A
Grammar of X". But are we really justified in this intuition?

Tom Payne


From darnell at CSD.UWM.EDU  Thu Mar  7 17:24:53 1996
From: darnell at CSD.UWM.EDU (Michael Earl Darnell)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 11:24:53 -0600
Subject: conference abstracts
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.112453.0600.DARNELL@CSD.UWM.EDU>

Hello to all,
We've received several requests for the meeting handbook for
the upcoming Formalism/Functionalism Symposium at the University
of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

We thought we would let everyone who is interested know that
we can and will mail out the handbook to those not attending the
conference.  The handbook will include all of the invited speakers'
abstracts, the talks, and the abstracts for the poster session.
The price will be 10 dollars (US) including postage.

If you are interested please let me know via email and we'll
make arrangements.

Mike Darnell
darnell at csd.uwm.edu

P.S.  Remember if you ARE attending, you can pick up your handbook at
the symposium, and the price is included in the registration fee.


From mdavies at RS6000.CMP.ILSTU.EDU  Thu Mar  7 21:41:20 1996
From: mdavies at RS6000.CMP.ILSTU.EDU (Mark Davies)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 15:41:20 -0600
Subject: Functional explanations for Subject to Subject Raising
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.154120.0600.MDAVIES@RS6000.CMP.ILSTU.EDU>

I'm looking for a functional account of why Subject to Subject Raising (SSR)
is more common in the written register of a certain language than it is in
the spoken register.

In a 7,000,000+ computer-based corpus of Modern Spanish that I've put
together (about half spoken, half written Spanish), the data shows is that
SSR is much more common in Written Spanish than in Spoken Spanish.  For
example, 66% (1177 / 1778) of all cases of <parecer> "to seem" in Written
Spanish take the infinitive (1a) as opposed to a finite clause (1b), but
this figure is only about 10% (190 / 1895) in Spoken Spanish:

        1a) Juan _parecia oir_ su voz (_John seemed_ to hear her voice)
        1b) _parecia que_ Juan oia su voz (it _seemed that_ John heard her
voice)

Furthermore, the figure for the +SSR type of sentence in (1a) is only about
2% (34 / 1895) in Spoken Spanish if you ignore all cases of <parecer> plus
semantically "bland" embedded verbs like <estar, ser, haber> "seem to be",
as opposed to 53% (950 / 1778) in Written Spanish.

Along with this is the fact that only in Written Spanish is it common to
have SSR with all types of subjects - 1/2/3 person.  Whereas there are a
fair number of cases of 1/2 person like (2a) in the written corpus, there
are no cases in the spoken corpus:

        2a) no pareces entender la pregunta (you don't seem to understand
the question)
        2b) no parece que entiendas la pregunta (it doesn't seem that you
understand the q.)

So even though there are a few cases like (1a) in the spoken corpus, they
are pretty much limited to 3sg subjects, with a few 3pl, but no 1/2 person.

An equally as intriguing phenomena I've found are some "pseudo-raising"
constructions in spoken Spanish, where the embedded subject is raised, but
is never "deleted" downstairs (as indicated by the 2sg conjugation for both
verbs, as opposed to a downstairs infinitive (3).  This occurs a fair amount
of times in the spoken corpus, but only once in the written corpus.  It's as
though there is an aborted attempt in spoken Spanish to have a SSR
construction, but it never makes the entire way.

        3) _pareces que no _entiendes_ (you seem that you don't understand)

In looking over the literature for functional explanations for SSR, a few
researchers (eg. Givon _Syntax_, Vol 2, pp.767-778) suggest that SSR is a
function of topicality -- i.e. raised NPs (1a) are more topical than
non-raised NPs (1b).

I guess what has me stumped is why there should be such a big difference
between the spoken and written registers.  One would presume that the same
functional tendencies are at play in both types of speech, and yet this
won't account for the difference.  I've looked at about every article on
Spanish SSR that I can get my hands on, as well as a few selected general
functional approaches to SSR, but no luck.  Any ideas?

==================================================================
Mark Davies, Assistant Professor, Spanish Linguistics
Dept. of Foreign Languages, Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61790-4300

Voice:309/438-7975       email:mdavies at ilstu.edu
Fax:309/438-8038          http://www.ilstu.edu/~mdavies/welcome.htm
==================================================================


From cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Thu Mar  7 22:49:45 1996
From: cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Susanna Cumming)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 14:49:45 -0800
Subject: Bilingual grammars
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.144945.0800.CUMMING@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

Folks,

Perhaps as an Indonesianist and English speaker I have a distorted view,
but it seems to me that since there are no languages that aren't in
contact with other languages, it is misguided to take monolingualism as
the "real" or "natural" case: even a monolingual individual in a speech
community that contains multilinguals is "under the influence" of other
languages. In fact the idea that multilingualism at either the individual
or the societal level is normal rather than deviant is one of the
arguments that linguists have to make against English-only proponents.

I would be interested to know if anyone has an estimate of the porportion
of monolingual to multilingual individuals worldwide: is it even true that
most people in the world are monolingual?

It is true that as functional and historical linguists we have to try to
figure out the role of language contact in the development of the
varieties we study, in order to determine its role relative to other
sources of explanation for linguistic form. And to do that properly, we
have to know an awful lot about all the other languages the one we are
interested in is in contact with. Which places a heavy burden on our
expertise! I wonder if this isn't the real reason we prefer monolinguals.

Susanna Cumming


From cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Fri Mar  8 02:54:33 1996
From: cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Susanna Cumming)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 18:54:33 -0800
Subject: Cumming on monolinguals (fwd)
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.185433.0800.CUMMING@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

In response to Bill Stokoe's message (below), I certainly didn't mean to
imply that there isn't any fuzziness! Not only on the question of what it
means to be multilingual as opposed to multidialectal, but also on the
question of how competent in another language one has to be to be really
multilingual.

Nonetheless neither of these points weakens the argument about the rarity
or nonexsistence of "pure" varieties, since we know that dialects in
contact influence each other (as Trudgill among others has convincingly
demonstrated), and that you don't need true multilingualism for language
contact to result in language change (as Thomason & Kaufman among others
have convincingly demonstrated).

Tom's original point had to do with the elicitation language influencing
the grammar of elicited sentences. I'm sure that this is a very real
phenomenon; I've seen grammars of Indonesian languages where the word
order of all the sentence examples matched the word order of the eliciting
language (Indonesian), but was different from the vast majority of
sentences in the accompanying texts. I agree that this particular problem
can be minimized by focusing on natural discourse (preferably recorded by
a community member with the linguist absent) as a data source. But this of
course does not eliminate the more general issue of language and dialect
contact.

 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 07 Mar 1996 19:37:43 -0500 (EST)
From: WCSTOKOE at gallua.gallaudet.edu
To: cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Cumming on monolinguals

What Susanna Cumming says about language contact strikes me as provocative and
reminds me that I haven't seen a watertight definition of the boundary between
languages that distinguishes languages from dialects. Everybody we encounter
talks a little differently, but when does the difference amount to a language
difference and when is it difference between very different dialects of one
language? I frequently encounter speakers who are they think speaking English
but whom I can't understand even with two or three repetitions of an utterance.
And in the end, are monolingual and bilingual formally separate categories
or is there some fuzzy logic in there somewhere?
Bill Stokoe
P.S. I meant to send this to funknet but copied your address instead; you are
welcome to send it on if you see fit. Regards,


----------


From kemmer at RUF.RICE.EDU  Fri Mar  8 03:56:09 1996
From: kemmer at RUF.RICE.EDU (Suzanne E Kemmer)
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 21:56:09 -0600
Subject: most people in the world
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAR.1996.215609.0600.KEMMER@RUF.RICE.EDU>

Susanna Cumming writes:
>is it even true that most people in the world are monolingual?

I found the presupposition there quite suprising--which made me
question my own supposed knowledge.

In a TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE ABOUT LANGUAGE questionnaire I give to intro
ling students, and to students who wander by the Linguistics table at
'Major's Day' fairs, one of the "True or False?" statements is: "Most
people in the world are monolingual".  The answer, according to the
sheet, is "FALSE! Most people in the world speak more than one
language."  [at this point comes nervous laughter by monolingual
American student]

I borrowed the idea of the questionnaire from Michael Barlow, but
this particular question I adapted from a "Myths about
Language" section in a little handbook that Leonard Newmark put
together for the undergraduates at UCSD. That means it's probably 25
or 30 years old, at least. Maybe it dates back to HIS early years in
the profession. I never thought to question it, I'm embarrassed to
admit; I don't know what his source was.

Does anybody know the real (and current) answer to Susanna's question:
what percentage of people in the world are monolingual vs.
bi/multilingual--and, I would add, how reliable is the figure (given
that it requires certain decisions about what counts as
bi/multilingual, how it's reported, etc.). If I were counting, I'd
include people who use more than one language in oral interaction in
their daily lives.  Beyond that, thinking about criteria for
"lingualism" starts to get a bit hairy. But surely some linguist
has tried to work it out, ballpark-wise...or have they?

--Suzanne


From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL  Fri Mar  8 06:52:25 1996
From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill)
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 08:52:25 +0200
Subject: No subject
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAR.1996.085225.0200.JOHN@RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL>

I don't think that using texts necessarily solves the problems. Some texts
are better than others in this respect. For example, in studying Indonesian
texts it is obvious that academic Indonesian is much more influenced by
European languages than is the language of short stories. And some short
stories are better than others, depending upon the background of the
speaker. So I do not think that using texts is necessarily going to produce
a better result. But I DO know that using bilingual informants and feeding
them questions in, e.g. Spanish or Indonesian or Arabic because I cannot
myself speak e.g. Tzotzil or Balinese or Nubian is going to result in a
pretty peculiar description of these languages.
In terms of what 'better' is, I do not regard the Tzotzil of someone who
knows Spanish well to be generally 'worse' than someone who does not, but
as a typologically oriented linguist I'm interested in diversity, so I
think it's more interesting, and more revealing in terms of linguistic
universals, to study
languages with less interference from others. And I agree with Susanna's point
that there aren't so many people with no influence from other languages,
but there still are degrees.   John Myhill


From W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK  Fri Mar  8 10:50:22 1996
From: W.Croft at MANCHESTER.AC.UK (Bill Croft)
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 10:50:22 +0000
Subject: The monolingual myth
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAR.1996.105022.0000.W.CROFT@MANCHESTER.AC.UK>

    I have read in a number of places that multilinguals far
outnumber monolinguals in the world, at least in traditional
societies before the European conquests in the Americas
and Oceania. I haven't seen any firm figures (or even estimates)
though.

    But the concept that even monolinguals speak a "pure" variety
is one that functionalists should treat with suspicion at best.
Language variation within the speech community, and language
change, can arise "internally", that is, not attributable to
contact. In fact, it is functional factors (in the sense of "external"
function that I describe in the Sept '95 issue of Language) that
give rise to innovations---or so we functionalists should be trying
to demonstrate. Variation is an essential property of language,
even that of "monolinguals". And accepting the notion of a "pure",
invariant speech variety will make it difficult, if not impossible, for
functionalists to argue against the autonomy (that is, the self-
containedness) of grammar.

   Of course, there is the empirical "problem" that elicitation will lead to
"impure" results. But any linguistic situation involves interaction
and accommodation (and innovations) on the part of the interlocutors.
It's just that the accommodation between linguist and
native consultant is fairly predictable and theoretically less interesting
compared to that found in the texts which result from native speakers
interacting with each other in ordinary social situations. But the difference
is one of degree, not kind.

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 r.hudson at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK  Fri Mar  8 17:31:23 1996
From: r.hudson at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK (Richard Hudson)
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 11:31:23 -0600
Subject: Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAR.1996.113123.0600.>

In message Thu, 7 Mar 1996 09:09:20 -0800,
  Thomas E Payne <tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>  writes:

> ... we
> linguists usually pride ourselves on not passing judgement on one speech
> variety over another. Is the speech of monolinguals necessarily "better"?
> If so, how so? This is a serious question. I too have the sense that we
> "ought" to study the speech of monolinguals. It seems intuitively to be
> "purer", closer to what a grammar claims to describe if it is called "A
> Grammar of X".


dh: Isn't this an example of passing judgement? Can we assume that there's
some pure form of each language `out there', to which some speakers
approximate more closely than others? That's not what my `intuitions' tell
me.

> But are we really justified in this intuition?

dh: I don't think so.
 ===========================================================================
Prof Richard Hudson                           Tel: +44 171 387 7050 ext 3152
                                             E-mail: r.hudson at ling.ucl.ac.uk
Dept. of Phonetics and Linguistics                     Tel: +44 171 380 7172
                                                       Fax: +44 171 383 4108
UCL
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
UK


From Carl.Mills at UC.EDU  Fri Mar  8 13:17:49 1996
From: Carl.Mills at UC.EDU (Carl Mills)
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 08:17:49 -0500
Subject: Variation?
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAR.1996.081749.0500.>

As Bill Croft points out "Variation is an essential property of
language, even that of 'monolinguals'."

As we sociolinguists have been pointing out for nearly 4 decades, most
linguists, including functionalists, have been so steeped in what
Chambers has called "the tradition of categoricity" that they never
truly internalize the principle Bill has reminded us of.  As Sapir put
it, "All grammars leak."


Carl


From TGIVON at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU  Fri Mar  8 18:03:08 1996
From: TGIVON at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon)
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 10:03:08 -0800
Subject: "monolingualism"
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAR.1996.100308.0800.TGIVON@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>

It seems to me that in the protracted discussion on the subject
the morst basic, pervasive and universal case of biligualism
(or indeed multi-lingualism) seems to have been largely ignored.
I refer here to the multilingualism (or "di-glossia") arisig
through the process of child "first-labguage" acuisition, and
later extended by the acquisition of literacy. If anything is
apparent from the data presented to us (by fellow functiobnalist)
over the last 30 years, it is that children learn, in succession,
many communicative systems -- sensory-motor communication (first
year; Dore 1976), the one-word stage (early second year; Bloom 1970),
the pidgin stage (also called the two-word stage; late second year;
Bloom. Slobin, Bowerman etc.), and "the" spoken grammaticalize
language (starting around age 2.0). Thus, by the time the child
comes to school s/he is already an experienced communicator in
FOUR languages (or "varieties" of their native language). Add
literate grammar to that (profoundly different from the spoken),
and the littl;e shavers are up to FIVE in their "mono" language.
If this is not profound multui-lingualism -- and those "varieties"
do not decay but can be brough back upon the appropriatge occasion,
such as pidginization, Broca's aphasia, high stress ("telegraphic")
etc -- I can't imagine what it.
Y'all relax, you're not as disadvantaged as you imagined. TG


From languagesoftware at ACCESS.CH  Tue Mar 12 00:15:17 1996
From: languagesoftware at ACCESS.CH (Good Language Software)
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 16:15:17 -800
Subject: English language learning software
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAR.1996.161517.800.LANGUAGESOFTWARE@ACCESS.CH>

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From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Mon Mar 11 18:04:31 1996
From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea)
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 12:04:31 -0600
Subject: elicitation versus discourse as data source
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAR.1996.120431.0600.SPIKEG@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

I agree with John that one would produce a very strange, skewed grammar if
one based it solely on utterances elicited via requesting translations of
sentences in a contact language.  In fact, I go a bit further in that I
suspect a "context-free" sentence grammar will be wierd no matter WHAT
language  sentences are elicited in.  Recorded text data (ideally with the
linguist out of the picture and the microphones as unobtrusive as possible)
is clearly a methodological priority in order to get a sample of how
speakers really speak to each other.  But I have been using two methods of
elicitation which I have found to be more-or-less reliable in producing
sentences that all speakers seem to be happy with (as opposed to those
context-free sentences at the margins of the grammar, the things that
"nobody would really say", which leave a substantial proportion of the
speakers in disagreement, or just scratching their heads and saying they
don't know... y'know, the kind that separate speakers into dialect groups
with no other real correlates (cf. Labov's 1985 presidential address to the
LSA).

The first method I learned from Scott DeLancey and Colette Craig (although
I assume it goes way back), which is to collect a text and then mine it for
all the information possible by eliciting all sorts of variations on each
sentence: "what if *I* had done this", "what if it had been *YESTERDAY*",
what if you *couldn't see* it happen", etc.

The other is to record a session in which you get one speaker who is fluent
in your contact language, and one or more speakers who DO NOT UNDERSTAND
your contact language, and then conduct "interviews" designed with both
content and linguistic structure in mind -- here, the CONTENT is critical
as a means to distract speakers away from a focus on the formal structures.
 e.g., I ask a series of personal information questions, kinship relations
to other people I know, background in whichever languages, future questions
(like what hopes the speaker might have for the future of the language
community), counter-factual (like what the speaker would do if ...<fill in
the blank>), etc.  In a second phase, I ask some more language-oriented
questions, focused usually on issues I'm working with at the moment (e.g.
"what's the difference between X and Z?", where X and Z are minimally
different sentences, involving only some change in word order or the
presence versus absence of some elusive particle).  The recording of such a
session yields quite rich data, not only in (a) a range of examples of
grammatical sentence types, and (b) some direct answers to the linguistics
questions themselves, but also in (c) what appears to be relatively
unmonitored conversational data, as people argue over what REALLY is the
difference between two sentences, etc.

Then this recorded text itself becomes an object of sentence-by-sentence
study after it is transcribed and translated, and each sentence in it is
available for permutation, leading to more questions which can be asked in
the next recording session, ...

So while I think you always need a coherent context to ground it in, I
think there IS a place for elicitation in field work.

Spike


From IBS4RWA at MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU  Tue Mar 12 03:55:00 1996
From: IBS4RWA at MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU (Roger Andersen)
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 19:55:00 PST
Subject: One size fits all!
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAR.1996.195500.PST.IBS4RWA@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU>

On the discussion of monolinguals vs bilinguals: One size fits all. ... Not!

(Since I am switching from one email system (ibs4rwa at mvs.oac.ucla.edu) to
another (rogerand at humnet.ucla.edu) but subscribed with the old one, I am
forwarding this message so I can get it on the FUNKNET. Sorry about the
roundabout way.)

I have two very different commentaries on this discussion, one as someone
who has researched one particular multilingual society for two decades and
the other as someone who has been functionally multilingual for these two
decades and, since the age of about 21, bilingual, but monolingual the first
two decades of my life.  Both are anecdotal.

I think most of the discussion is trying to come up with one answer for all
potential questions when, in reality, we really do not have even one
explicit question that needs to be answered. The original question
introduced vicariously by Payne is, "What makes monolinguals' Spanish "more
Spanish" than bilinguals'?"  This presupposes an affirmative answer to the
question, "Is a monolingual Spanish speaker's Spanish "more Spanish" than a
bilingual speaker?" and also assumes all monolinguals are identical and all
bilinguals are identical.  The original asker of the question qualified her
inquiry with "at least in phonology", but the discussion seems to deal with
"grammar" as an autonomous entity.  What is lacking is a *real* question for
which the choice of speakers is important.

COMMENTARY ONE
When I was preparing for my dissertation field work in 1972 -- a study of
sociolinguistic variation in the use of spoken Papiamentu in natural
discourse in Curacao, Netherlands Antilles, with a focus on hispanization of
the creole language -- I was aided considerably by Dell Hymes' notion that
we should study (to paraphrase) who says what to whom, when, where, for what
purposes, with what people present, and under what circumstances and **what
this means to the participants**.  (Hymes' insight came via Joel Sherzer,
Gillian Sankoff, David DeCamp, and others whose contribution I've probably
forgotten.)

        I found the pursuit of an answer to this question, for Curacao, an
incredibly difficult undertaking, but fortunately one that has kept drawing
me back to Curacao for the past two decades with very satisfying results: I
am now much closer to understanding the original question than I was in
1972!  (The answer? ... Well, can you check back in six to nine months?)

        The current (and prior) native inhabitants of Curacao (and sister islands
of Aruba and Bonaire, where Papiamentu is also the native language) had the
good fortune (value judgement!) of being taken over in the mid 1600 by the
Dutch (from the Spanish) and the possibly equally good fortune of   having
Spanish priests from the mainland visit the island regularly to teach
literacy in Papiamentu to the least fortunate residents (primarily slaves
and their descendants). Dutch and Spanish have both had a strong presence
and high prestige on the islands ever since. Social and economical
embetterment is associated with one or the other or both languages. And
since Dutch is hardly a language of wider communication (LWC), the
language-rich (English, Spanish, French) curriculum of the Dutch educational
system, carried intact to the Netherlands Antilles, has benefited at least
the most fortunate of residents of these three islands (and similarly has
had powerful consequences for the large number of less fortunate residents,
who leave school at an early age because of, among other reasons, lack of
adequate knowledge of Dutch to perform well in school).  The most fortunate
speak and read (and many write) Dutch, Spanish, English (and less commonly
French, German, Latin and Greek).  Nevertheless Papiamentu is clearly
**the** language spoken and needed in daily life and many native speakers
have inadequate knowledge of Dutch (or any other language).  Many Dutch
residents who work in Curacao find it necessary to learn Papiamentu.

        In a place like Curacao, to limit linguistic research to "pure"
monolinguals, IF they can be found (!) accomplishes very little, unless the
purpose is to study the linguistic repertoire of the most isolated, the
least educated, and the least fortunate residents of the island. So we are
back to asking, "What is the question for which we need an answer?"

        As I write this, I am worrying about getting behind on writing a long and
supposedly comprehensive 'state of the art' paper I was asked to write on
Papiamentu.  In Spanish, which is not my native language, but a language I
have published (three, now on the fourth) articles in and have lectured in.
As I suffer through this task, I work with my large database on natural
spoken Papiamentu discourse, read and reread works published in Papiamentu,
English, Spanish, and French, worry about the many studies published in
Dutch that I can work with only with great effort, and write in Spanish
worrying whether I have succeeded in communicating what I really intended.

        And I have  a feeling that *I* am not the kind of multilingual that the
original asker of the question had in mind. No one has asked me to be a
native English informant yet, but probably not because I am claiming to be
multilingual.  And no one in their right mind would *ever* want to use me as
an informant for French, Portuguese, Spanish, Papiamentu, or any other
language.  I am "individually" multilingual, whereas I assume that the
question about whether we can trust bilinguals has to do with "socially"
bilingual individuals in their "native" habitat or "conveniency sample
informants" who happen to live in the U.S. and speak English (all discussion
has been so far, I believe, by native speakers of English).

        In my research on Papiamentu I *must* keep track of the  notion of "who is
saying what to whom, when, where, with what purpose, etc. ..."  Even
monolingual Papiamentu speakers live and function within an intricate
bilingual/multilingual context.  One person's "good" Papiamentu is another
person's "bad" Papiamentu.  ("Good" is typically associated with being able
to replace Dutch vocabulary, pervasive in educated speakers from a Dutch
education, with Spanish equivalents. But in certain contexts, speaking
*this* kind of "good" Papiamentu is definitely "bad".  And most Papiamentu
speakers know this and behave accordingly.

        Nevertheless, there are a good number of "native" speakers of Papiamentu
whose Papiamentu is easily recognized by all other native Papiamentu
speakers as being the Papiamentu of "yu'i Korsou" (native Curacaons) who
have lived many years in Holland.  They do *not* really speak "pure" native
Papiamentu, yet they were born and raised initially in Curacao.  For someone
who studies grammar by eliciting sentences from native speakers, such
speakers are clearly the wrong ones!  But I don't elicit sentences; I try to
study the way people naturally use language in their daily lives in a
varietyof different situations and settings.

        So we are back to "What's the question?"

        Probably the most complete and comprehensive "grammars" of Papiamentu (with
the title "El Papiamento") was published in Spanish in 1928 by Rodolfo Lenz
, a German linguist living in Chile. It is based on elicitation from *one*
informant, a cook, on a ship from Chile to Germany.  It has its flaws
(pointed out by a native Papiamentu writer, Antoine Maduro), but is
otherwise an excellent example of what a good researcher can do with the
"right" native speaker informant. But this is not 1928. and Lenz asked a
very different set of questions (to generate his grammar) than I am asking.(
Lenz' informant was probably to some extent "bilingual". Many Papiamentu
speakers from these islands made a living on the sea and learned whatever
mode of communication was necessary for the situation. )


COMMENTARY TWO
I lived the first 18 years of my life as a monolingual English speaker in a
multiethnic and multilingual neighborhood where languages other than English
were restricted to family. My father understood some Danish but was
otherwise a monolingual English speaker. My grandparents, who lived next
door, spoke Danish frequently among themselves and with visitors. I know no
Danish. I began learning Spanish around the age of 20, in college classes
and a summer in Mexico. From the age of 22 until the age of 37 I lived in
Puerto Rico and used only Spanish in my daily life except when speaking to
native speakers of English (and even sometimes using Spanish with such soul
brothers/sisters).  For certain periods of time I left Puerto Rico to study
in the U.S. Even in the U.S. most of my friends were Spanish speakers (or
Portuguese speakers) and I again only used English when appropriate.  I met
my  wife, who is Puerto Rican after living several years in Puerto Rico and
calling it "home". (I never really expected to become an immigrant to Los
Angeles!)  We have lived in Los Angeles for a long time and visit Puerto
Rico at least once a year (with two daughters who are 'bilingual' but simply
don't *look* Hispanic, so are not regarded as "really" bilingual!).
Although I still call Puerto Rico my "home", from my wife's perspective I am
and always will be an outsider who took her away from her "home".  When I
talk about Puerto Rico as "MY" Puerto Rico, she quickly points out that I
wasn't born in Puerto Rico, my parents were not Puerto Rican, and I don't
have the 'mancha del platano" and am simply an American who happened to live
in Puerto Rico a long time. Puerto Rico is hers; the U.S. is mine.  My
daughters (in their early 20s) have the same attitude, except they can call
themselves Puerto Rican and I can't!  For Spanish, my wife would be the
problematic bilingual Spanish informant. My daughters would be more
problematic, having been educated primarily in the U.S.

        This is my answer to one question I posed earlier: Are all monolinguals
alike? Are all bilinguals identical?  Clearly not. My two daughters are very
different from each other as bilnguals. And my wife and I are very different
sorts of "bilinguals".  In fact, while my wife might be accepted as
'bilingual', most people would treat me as an American who happens to know
Spanish well. Clearly not 'bilingual'. That is, not born into a bilingual
social environment.

        But "bilingual" vs "monolingual" is just the tip of the iceberg.  Just to
bring in one other variable, what about differences in metalinguistic and
metacognitive awareness?  I think any one who has done field work and who
speaks well the language they study know how widely "native" speakers vary
in the degree to which you can trust their intuitions.  What about language
directed to the outsider-linguist-anthropologist vs language directed to
insiders? Whether the speakers are monolingual or bilingual, they may use
very different linguistic repertoires in the two situations. (Again, who is
speaking to whom for what purpose ....) And this certainly does not exhaust
the important variables.

        And for the question that involves extensive crosslinguistic comparison,
check out Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994!  The role of bilinguals and
multilinguals in my research on one population is very different from the
role of bilinguals used by people who write grammars, which many of us
depend on to address important questions.

        And I will *not* get into the complexity of speaking 'Quechua' in areas
throughout the Andes where the invaders' language, Spanish, has a very
different status depending on many different variables.  To know Quechua
involves Spanish even if you are monolingual in Quechua, just as to know
Papiamentu involves Spanish and Dutch, even if you are monolingual in
Papiamentu.  But this is just the beginning.

No. One size does *not* fit all!


And now I know I will regret having given up my spectator status in this
debate!  At least I have an excuse for procrastinating further as I write a
couple of more paragraphs in Spanish, using exerpts in Papiamentu with
Spanish glosses, to discuss an issue involving a book written in French, an
article in English, and others in Papiamentu and Dutch.  I certainly don't
trust bilinguals and multilinguals. I know better. Give me a good
monolingual any day. (Field note 265a: writer has tongue in cheek!)

Roger W. Andersen, Applied Linguistics, 3300 Rolfe, UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1531
Tel: (310) 206-1325 Fax (310) 206-4118
email address: rogerand at humnet.ucla.edu

"Do few things and do them well." St. Francis of Assisi


From BLSIMON at MACC.WISC.EDU  Tue Mar 12 12:46:00 1996
From: BLSIMON at MACC.WISC.EDU (Beth Lee Simon)
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 07:46:00 CDT
Subject: Call For Proposals/Abstracts, ADS sessio, M/MLA
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAR.1996.074600.CDT.BLSIMON@MACC.WISC.EDU>

Apologies to those who have seen this on other lists

                    SECOND ANNOUNCMENT

          Please submit an ABSTRACT OR BRIEF PROPOSAL

          MIDWEST MEETING OF THE AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

          at the M/MLA, Nov. 7-9, 1996, at the Minneapolis Marriot
          City Center, Minneapolis MN

Email and faxed materials are welcome.


Submit by March 25, 1996 to

     Professor Beth Simon
     Dept. of English and Linguistics
     Indiana University - Purdue University
     Fort Wayne, IN 46805

email:    simon at cvax.ipfw.indiana.edu

fax:      219-481-6985



thanks,
beth simon


From RICE at NOVA.LING.UALBERTA.CA  Tue Mar 12 16:43:23 1996
From: RICE at NOVA.LING.UALBERTA.CA (Rice, S.)
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 09:43:23 -0700
Subject: Call for Abstracts for 1996 Athapaskan Language Conference
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAR.1996.094323.0700.>

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
1996 Athapaskan Language Conference

The 1996 Athapaskan Language Conference will be held on Saturday and
Sunday, 15-16 June 1996, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada.

Abstracts for 20-30 minute presentations should be received by *30
April 1996* and may be submitted by e-mail, fax, or regular mail.
Please indicate with your abstract, in addition to name, address, e-
mail address, telephone & fax numbers, if you require audio-visual
support such as an overhead projector, liquid-crystal display, tape
recorder, VCR & TV monitor, etc.

The registration fee is $15 (Cdn or U.S. funds) for students, $20
(Cdn or U.S.) for non-students.  This fee covers xeroxing, and light
refreshments during the conference.  On-campus housing (with common
washroom) is available (single - $24.64 Cdn, double - $33.60 Cdn) as
well as suite-style accommodations at a residential hotel adjacent to
campus (single bedroom with kitchenette - $62 Cdn, double bedroom -
$85; these rooms also feature pull-out sofa-beds in the living room).
These accomodations must be confirmed by 15 May 1996.

In addition to Air Canada and Canadian Airlines, the following U.S.
carriers fly into Edmonton:  Delta, American, and NW.  This could
change between now and mid-June with the new Open Skies Agreement so
check with your travel agent.  Cab fare between Edmonton
International Airport and the University of Alberta campus averages
$25 each way.  An airport shuttle to the university costs $11 ($18
roundtrip).

For further information about the conference or to submit an
abstract, please contact:

Sally Rice
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Alberta
4-60 Assiniboia Hall
Edmonton, Alberta
T6G 2E7 CANADA

tel: 403-492-0809
fax: 403-492-0806
e-mail:  rice at nova.ling.ualberta.ca


From jarek at FIL.LU.SE  Fri Mar 15 13:51:36 1996
From: jarek at FIL.LU.SE (Jaroslaw Pluciennik)
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 14:51:36 +0100
Subject: Kantian adjectives
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAR.1996.145136.0100.JAREK@FIL.LU.SE>

Dear colleages,

On 20 February, 1996 we posted a query asking for translations of English
"Kantian adjectives" and for information about possible negative
morphological elements present in their non-English correspondents.
We are grateful for all responses. It helped us much in our goal to get some
cross-linguistic background for our main contextual analysis of English
Kantian adjectives.

The negative elements inside lexical items as well as separated words are as
follows:

Basque: -gabe
Brazilian  Portuguese: in-,  il-, des-, sem
Czech: ne-, bez
Danish: -loes, u-, in- (from latin), ikke
Dutch: -loos, on-, niet
=46innish: -ton, -t=F6n
=46rench: in-, sans
German: -los, un-, ohne
Hungarian: -tlen, -tlan
Mandarin: wu-
Polish: bez-, bez, nie-, nie
Slovene: brez-, ne-, utan
Spanish: sin, in-, im-, il-, a-
Swedish: o-, -loes, inte, utan
Thai: may,  rai

We are listing only formaly negative elements and excluding all doubtful
cases. It should be noticed that some, although rare, translations of primar=
y
negative words in English are not negative at all in other languges. It
applies also to some synonimes of English Kantian adjectives. The
non-negative translations are as follows:

bottomless: Thai: sut ca? yaN dai (beyond to measure can)
boundless: German: kolossal
ceaseless: Czech: ustavicn=E9y, German: staendig, Thai: mai  yO:thO: (not
give in)
countless: Thai: lu'a khana (beyond reckoning), nap mai thuan and kE:n ca?
nap (count not thorough beyond to count)
dateless: Polish: zawsze aktualny, Swedish: urminnes
endless: Czech: ustavicn=E9y, Polish: ustawiczny, Swedish: evig
fathomless: Thai: kE:n  ca?  yaN  dai (beyond to measure can)
immeasurable: Polish: ogromny, Thai: kE:n ca? nap dai (beyond to count can)
incalculable: Thai: kE:n khamnuan (beyond calculate)
incessant: Sloven: stalen, Czech: ustavicn=E9y, Finnish: alituinen, German:
staendig, Polish: ustawiczny, Thai: r'uayru'ay (continually (reduplicated
for emphasis))
indefinite: German: verschwommen, vage
Swedish: svaevande, vag
infinite: Slovene: ogromen, Polish: ogromny, Swedish: maengd
innumerable: Thai: lamdap mai wai (sequence not can)  or sut ca? nap dai
(beyond to count can)
interminable: Sloven: ve=FCen, Swedish: laangtraakig
measureless: German: maSlos, Thai: lu=E9a khana (beyond reckoning) kE:n wat
(beyond measure)
numberless: Thai: kE:n nap (beyond count)
quenchless: Thai: kE:n dap (beyond quench extinguish)
timeless:  Slovene: ve=FCen, French: eternel, German: ewig, Polish: wieczny,
ponadczasowy, Spanish: eterno, Swedish: evig
unending: German: ewig, Polish: wieczny, Swedish: evig
unfathomable: Thai: kEn ca? yaN dai (beyond to measure can)
unlimited: Czech: ohromn=E9y, Polish: ogromny, w wielkiej ilosci
unmeasured: Danish: rigelig, German: maSlos, Hungarian: meg nem mert

A note on transcription in Thai translations:
 /O/ =3D low back open o, /E/ =3D mid central vowel, equal to a schwa, /X/ =
=3D
unrounded high back vowel, /N/ =3D velar nasal, /c/ =3D unaspirated voiceles=
s
alveolar stop. The tones are omitted.

We should underline that some experts have excluded non-negative
translations from their sets because of our interest in just negative
morphological elements in the considered items.

We will be grateful for all your comments. All additional translations are
welcome.

Best regards



Jaroslaw Pluciennik
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Dept. of Cognitive Science
Lund University
Kungshuset, Lundagaard
S-222 22 Lund, Sweden

Phone: +46 (0) 46 222 97 58
fax: +46 (0) 46 222 48 17
e-mail: jarek at fil.lu.se,  or  jarrek at krysia.uni.lodz.pl
www: http://lucs.fil.lu.se/
-------------------------------------------------------------------


From HAIMAN at MACALSTR.EDU  Fri Mar 15 22:43:53 1996
From: HAIMAN at MACALSTR.EDU (Haiman, J.)
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 16:43:53 -0600
Subject: self-repetition
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAR.1996.164353.0600.>

Does anyone have some information on literature (or personal experiences) on
metalinguistic self-repetition?  My younger daughter went through a phase at
about age 10 when everything she said, she repeated in an undertone to herself
immediately after.  I've since heard of other children having been observed to
do this.

John Haiman


From smlamb at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Fri Mar 15 23:56:31 1996
From: smlamb at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Sydney M Lamb)
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 17:56:31 -0600
Subject: self-repetition
In-Reply-To: <01I2DHU7SZGU001PNF@macalstr.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAR.1996.175631.0600.SMLAMB@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

On Fri, 15 Mar 1996, Haiman, J. wrote:

> Does anyone have some information on literature (or personal experiences) on
> metalinguistic self-repetition?  My younger daughter went through a phase at
> about age 10 when everything she said, she repeated in an undertone to herself
> immediately after.  I've since heard of other children having been observed to
> do this.
>
> John Haiman
>

John --
        I used to do this myself, at about age 5 or 6 I think.  I didn't even
my know I was doing it until my older sister noticed it and laughed at me
for doing it.  Then I think I paid attention, realized I had been doing it
habitually,  and suppressed it.  I can still clearly remember doing it.
I think I was just reviewing what I had said, sort of checking.
My impression is that it is unusual --- not very many kids do it.
But I think many people --- including adults --- do it internally
(silently), sometimes.

Regards,
        Syd .


From BLSIMON at MACC.WISC.EDU  Sat Mar 16 11:33:00 1996
From: BLSIMON at MACC.WISC.EDU (Beth Lee Simon)
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 06:33:00 CDT
Subject: 2nd ADS call
Message-ID: <SAT.16.MAR.1996.063300.CDT.BLSIMON@MACC.WISC.EDU>

From:    WIRCS2::BLSIMON      "Beth Lee Simon"
To:      IN%"funknet at ricevm1.rice.edu",BLSIMON
Subject: Call For Proposals/Abstracts, ADS sessio, M/MLA

Apologies to those who have seen this on other lists

                    SECOND ANNOUNCMENT

          Please submit an ABSTRACT OR BRIEF PROPOSAL

          MIDWEST MEETING OF THE AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

          at the M/MLA, Nov. 7-9, 1996, at the Minneapolis Marriot
          City Center, Minneapolis MN

Email and faxed materials are welcome.


Submit by March 25, 1996 to

     Professor Beth Simon
     Dept. of English and Linguistics
     Indiana University - Purdue University
     Fort Wayne, IN 46805

email:    simon at cvax.ipfw.indiana.edu

fax:      219-481-6985



thanks,
beth simon


From rmontes at UDLAPVMS.PUE.UDLAP.MX  Sun Mar 17 00:58:45 1996
From: rmontes at UDLAPVMS.PUE.UDLAP.MX (Rosa Graciela Montes)
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 18:58:45 -0600
Subject: self-repetition (fwd)
Message-ID: <SAT.16.MAR.1996.185845.0600.RMONTES@UDLAPVMS.PUE.UDLAP.MX>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 18:22:26 -0600 (CST)
From: Rosa Graciela Montes <rmontes at cca.pue.udlap.mx>
To: "Haiman, J." <HAIMAN at MACALSTR.EDU>
Cc: Multiple recipients of list FUNKNET <FUNKNET at ricevm1.rice.edu>
Subject: Re: self-repetition

In my tapes of my daughter (age 1;8-3;0) I have a few examples of the
opposite process: whispering or what seems to be speaking to self
followed by the same utterance said out loud. The child seems to practice
or try out what she is going to say before going "on record". Rosa
Montes, ICSyH, U.Puebla (MEXICO)


From russo at INRETE.IT  Sun Mar 17 19:24:14 1996
From: russo at INRETE.IT (No Name)
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 14:24:14 -0500
Subject: AGI 1995 special issue
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAR.1996.142414.0500.RUSSO@INRETE.IT>

This is to inform that the 1995 monographic issue of "Archivio
Glottologico Italiano", which is devoted to grammaticalization
problems, is now available.

ARCHIVIO GLOTTOLOGICO ITALIANO - vol. LXXX (1995), No. 1 & 2

CONTENTS

Marco Mancini
Dalle "origini della grammatica" alla "grammaticalizzazione": un
capitolo di storia delle idee
linguistiche nel Settecento
Gianguido Manzelli
La concettualizzazione di 'fuori' nelle lingue baltofinniche, baltiche
e slave
Romano Lazzeroni
Il futuro perifrastico sanscrito fra autonomia e sincretismo
Sonia Cristofaro
Lo sviluppo dei complementatori come modello di grammaticalizzazione:
il caso del greco antico
Pierluigi Cuzzolin
A proposito di 'sub vos placo' e della grammaticalizzazione delle
adposizioni
Michele Loporcaro
Grammaticalizzazione delle perifrasi verbali perfettive romanze e
accordo del participio passato
Anna Giacalone Ramat
Sulla grammaticalizzazione di verbi di movimento: 'andare' e 'venire'
+ gerundio
Mario Sala Gallini
Lo statuto del clitico nella grammaticalizzazione a destra: pronome
vero o marca flessionale?
Stefania Giannini
Riferimenti deittici nel sistema dei pronomi personali. Appunti per
una grammatica del lucchese


Reviews
Grazia Crocco Galeas: Bernd Heine, Auxiliaries
Paolo Ramat: W. Pagliuca (ed.), Perspectives on Grammaticalization

Copies may be ordered directly from the publisher by writing to
Periodici Le Monnier
Casella postale 202
50100 Firenze
Italy

Subscription price is L. 75000 for Italy, L. 100000 ($ 77) for abroad.


From jan at LING.SU.SE  Mon Mar 18 13:24:59 1996
From: jan at LING.SU.SE (Jan Anward)
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 12:24:59 -0100
Subject: self-repetition
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAR.1996.122459.0100.JAN@LING.SU.SE>

>Does anyone have some information on literature (or personal experiences) on
>metalinguistic self-repetition?  My younger daughter went through a phase at
>about age 10 when everything she said, she repeated in an undertone to herself
>immediately after.  I've since heard of other children having been observed to
>do this.
>
>John Haiman

I am reminded of Weir's classical 'Language in the crib', which focuses on
self-repetition as a means of practising at a very early age.
Around 10 or around 5-6, as Lamb reports, could be interpreted as a
strategy for moving from dialogue to monologue. I.e. before you master
monologue, you may go through a phase where you model monologues on
dialogues. Something along these lines appears to go on in children's
spoken and written narratives, which may go through an early phase of
dramatized action, letting protagonists speak instead of describing what
they are doing.
For Swedish, there are some examples of such written narratives in Birgitta
Garme's 'Text och tanke' (in Swedish, unfortunately).

Jan Anward


From harder at COCO.IHI.KU.DK  Mon Mar 18 15:03:30 1996
From: harder at COCO.IHI.KU.DK (Peter Harder)
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 15:03:30 MET
Subject: Book notice
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAR.1996.150330.MET.HARDER@COCO.IHI.KU.DK>

  Ahem...I wonder if I might call your attention to:

  Functional Semantics. A Theory of Meaning, Structure and
  Tense in English. By Peter Harder. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
  Gruyter, 1996 (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 87.
  586 pp, DM 200,-. ISBN 3-11-014941-9).

  The book contains an integrated theory of function, cognition and
  linguistic structure - illustrated with an account of tense based on the
  theory.
        Beginning with a discussion of the intellectual history of the
  concept of meaning, it argues that not only meaning but all the central
  concepts of linguistics, including linguistic structure, must be
  understood as based on function. It further analyses the fundamental
  confusion that underlies some basic notions in the accepted picture of
  linguistics, such as the trinity of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and
  suggests a revised view in which the semantic half of syntax has a
  central role - from a structural as well as a functional and cognitive
  point of view.
        In comparing this view of syntax with the mainstream view, it
  shows that the Chomskyan view of syntax is the result of a confusion of
  metalanguage with object language: like others before him, Chomsky
  'discovered' his own descriptive apparatus in the object itself.
        The book proposes a general theory of the relation between
  functional and cognitive aspects of language, relates the theory to the
  evolution of language as well as clause structure, and shows how tense
  fits into this picture.

        Thank you for allowing your attention to be called! (Peter Harder)


From ATILA at SUPER.FURG.BR  Mon Mar 18 11:22:46 1996
From: ATILA at SUPER.FURG.BR (Atila Louzada)
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 11:22:46 BSC
Subject: Future reference
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAR.1996.112246.BSC.ATILA@SUPER.FURG.BR>

Dear funknetters, four colleagues and I are presently engaged in a function-
based study of the verb in Brazilian Portuguese aiming at answering the general
question HOW IS FUNCTION X CODED? My indiv idual project deals with future
reference in a broader sense. That means I will consider a reference
standpoint and treat as future reference not only from-this-moment-on events,
but also from-moment-x-on ones. I welcome suggestions on readings and
approaches to the problem. Thank you for your attention. AL


From RICE at NOVA.LING.UALBERTA.CA  Sun Mar 24 22:38:37 1996
From: RICE at NOVA.LING.UALBERTA.CA (Rice, S.)
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 1996 15:38:37 -0700
Subject: Forwarded: Jobs: Visiting Assistant Professors
Message-ID: <SUN.24.MAR.1996.153837.0700.>

Department of Linguistics
University of Alberta

POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT


The Department of Linguistics invites applications for 3 positions
as eight-month Visiting Assistant Professors in Linguistics.  The
ideal candidates would have specializations in one or more core
areas of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics),
active research programs and previous teaching experience.
Outstanding applicants with specializations in other areas (such as
psycholinguistics and child language acquisition) will also be
considered.  These 8-month positions will involve teaching at both
the graduate and undergraduate levels and may be re-newable for
1997-98 pending budget approval.  The current eight-month salary at
the University of Alberta is $25,000 Cdn plus travel expenses.

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta has a
strong commitment to empirical and experimental approaches to
linguistic research.  Department members are engaged in ongoing
SSHRC-funded research projects in the study of the phonological,
morphological, and semantic aspects of the mental lexicon as well as
projects focusing on discourse processing and speech perception.
The successful candidates would therefore have the opportunity to
pursue their own scholarly activities within a collegial and
supportive research environment as well as to participate in
collaborative research projects.

In accordance with Canadian Immigration requirements, this
advertisement is directed to Canadian citizens and permanent
residents.

The University of Alberta is committed to the principle of equity in
employment.  As an employer we welcome diversity in the workplace
and encourage applications from all qualified women and men,
including Aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities, and members
of visible minorities.

A letter of application, curriculum vitae, and the names and
addresses of three referees should be sent by May 20 to:

Gary Libben, Chair
Department of Linguistics
4-36 Assiniboia Hall
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
T6G 2E7

e-mail: glibben at gpu.srv.ualberta.ca
Tel:    (403) 492-3459
Fax:    (403) 492-0806


From jan at LING.SU.SE  Mon Mar 25 13:25:18 1996
From: jan at LING.SU.SE (Jan Anward)
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 12:25:18 -0100
Subject: Functional explanations for Subject to Subject Raising
Message-ID: <MON.25.MAR.1996.122518.0100.JAN@LING.SU.SE>

The figures for S-to-S raising in Spansih make sense if we assume, as
several people have,
e.g. Pawley, A. & Syder, F.H. 1983: Natural selection in syntax: notes on
   adaptive variation and change in vernacular and literary grammar,
   Journal of Pragmatics 7: 551-579,
that spoken language is essentially dialogic, even when produced by a
single speaker, and is subject to a one-clause-at-a-time constraint, which
I think may be grounded in the dialogic system for turn-taking (Sacks,
Schegloff, Jefferson's classical account in Lg 1974).
If spoken language obeys such a constraint, constructions which necessarily
span two clauses would tend to be avoided and alternatives - in case there
are alternatives - which span only one clause at a time would be preferred.
This also predicts that pseudo-raising, which preserves the integrity of
the second clause, should be preferred to regular raising.
A further prediction is that spoken language would not tend to avoid
constructions with simple predicatives after 'seem': He seems sad, and
similar examples. If Spanish has that kind of construction, it would be
interesting to test this prediction.

Jan Anward


From kuzar at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL  Thu Mar 28 10:33:03 1996
From: kuzar at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (Ron Kuzar)
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 12:33:03 +0200
Subject: Unidirectional developments?
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAR.1996.123303.0200.KUZAR@RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL>

Dear FunkNetters,
It is well known that certain processes in the history of language are
bidirectional: Affixes may degenerate into non-morphology or pronouns may
be cliticized and eventually morphologized. But are there processes that
are only unidirectional? I have in mind two issues:
1. Periodic style: languages with a narrative style that chains short
sentences into a linear sequence often develop a periodic style at a
later phase of their development. Does anybody know of a language that
had had periodic style and developed a chaining style?
2. Expression of feelings: some languages which express feelings by
placing the feeler in the dative (or another oblique) case <angers
me/freezes me/hurts to-me the head/burns to-me the soul/etc> develop later
into feeler as subject <I am angry/I am freezing/ I have a headache/I am
desperate/etc>. Does anybody know of languages that developed the other way?
Processes that seemed unidirectional to philologists in the nineteenth
century motivated a discourse that viewed language development as
teleological, resulting in the 'best language'. Today this kind of
writing would be simply ridiculed. However, if some processes are in fact
unidirectional, what sort of terms could account for this phenomenon,
other than 'betterment', 'refinement' etc. along some (what kind of) axis?
Can you think of other unidirectional processes?
Any bibliography?
Ron Kuzar
kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il


From mccay at JET.ES  Thu Mar 28 14:22:22 1996
From: mccay at JET.ES (Alan R. King)
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 14:22:22 GMT
Subject: Unidirectionality?
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAR.1996.142222.GMT.MCCAY@JET.ES>

Ron Kuzar asks about unidirectional diachronic developments such as "angers
me" > "I am angry", and the larger implications of such facts.  Concerning
such expressions of feeling, I have two comments to make:

(a) One way of viewing the development that RK mentions might be in terms of
its implications about the concept "subject": perhaps we may say that in a
language that uses "I am angry" the idea (read perhaps: range of semantic
roles) associated with the grammatical notion "subject" is ever so slightly
(or even not so slightly?) different from the idea in one that uses "angers
me".  So the diachronic development involves a partial redefinition of
"subject" in the language.  This hypothesis would suggest the likelihood
that in languages where the change mentioned takes place, this will not be
an isolated phenomenon but part of some larger process.

(b) Subject status can also have certain pragmatic implications.  Thus there
is a widespread strategy of what Brown & Levinson called "negative
politeness" consisting of avoiding giving the real protagonist (semantic
subject) the formal status of subject.  This can be achieved by complete
impersonalization, e.g. in French (and similarly in Hebrew, I think) saying

        Il faut regarder le livre.
        "It is necessary to look at the book."

when one actually means

        Tu dois regarder le livre.
        "You must look at the book."

or by an intermediate solution such as:

        Il faut que tu regardes le livre.
        "It is necessary that you look at the book."

where we have at least avoided "Tu dois...", which, with the semantic
subject as grammatical subject of the modal verb, is felt to be more direct
(and so, in certain communicative contexts, potentially less polite).  In
some languages, another alternative is to express the semantic subject as a
grammatical dative:

        Il te faut regarder le livre.
        "It is necessary to you to look at the book."

The flip side of this is that, since speakers *know* what is going on here,
there is a sense in which all the above constructions are merely different
grammatical expressions of a single pragmatic structure in which "you" is in
a single pragmatic relationship to the modalized predicate "must look",
corresponding to what I have called semantic subject.

Now, can we think of pragmatic reasons why it might be desirable to express
the semantic subject of "expressions of feeling" in a less direct manner?
Of course we can.  Such expressions can easily constitute what have been
called "face-threatening acts" in politeness theory, thus motivating
compensating politeness strategies.  On the other hand, if a language recurs
to a strategy such as dativizing a certain type of semantic subject
constantly, this can become conventionalized to the point where the original
politeness strategy is no longer clearly perceived by speakers.  At this
point, a plausible next step is the language's evolution is to "regularize"
the system by encoding the perceived semantic subject as grammatical subject....

The way in which I think the scenario just described is possibly relevant to
RK's (broader) question is as follows.  In cases where a change is found (or
thought) to be unidirectional, meaning that we find A>B but not *B>A, there
may nevertheless occur B>C and C>A, and therefore B>C>A, which is an
indirect form of B>A.  The problems are to identify C and to understand the
nature of the processes leading (a) to, and (b) from C.  What I have just
tried to do is suggest a possible identification and explanation for the
case of "expressions of feeling".  Since I have posed it in speculative and
non-empirical terms, others might be interested in providing illustrative
diachronic examples, if there are any to be found.


Alan R. King          |  EMAIL: mccay at jet.es
Indamendi 13, 7C      |  [or if all else fails] 70244.1674 at compuserve.com
20800 Zarautz         |  FAX: +34-43-130396
Gipuzkoa
Euskal Herria / Basque Country (Spain)


From geoffn at SIU.EDU  Thu Mar 28 14:26:31 1996
From: geoffn at SIU.EDU (Geoffrey S. Nathan)
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 08:26:31 CST
Subject: Unidirectional developments?
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAR.1996.082631.CST.GEOFFN@SIU.EDU>

        Further to the note from Ron Kuzar on unidirectionality,
there is a long tradition in phonology whereby all changes are
LOCAL improvements.  The exact terminology is Theo
Vennemann's (see, for example, his _Preference Laws for
Syllable Structure_ (Mouton, 1988).  It is perfectly possible to
make all changes teleological, as long as one recognizes that
there are multiple teleologies.  This has been known in
phonology since the nineteenth century, and is a cornerstone of,
for example, Natural Phonology.  Therein language strives for
'improvement' both for the speaker (loosely, 'ease of
articulation') and for the hearer (loosely, 'distinctiveness,
clarity').  Any change in one direction is likely to result in a
'degeneration' in another, conflicting tendency.  Thus,
functionalist phonologists have no problem with unidirectionality,
since things go in both directions at once, and the tension
between tendencies leads to a dynamic (in)stability, and hence
to change.
        Analogs in syntax (such as a development from parataxis
to true embedding, perhaps) are easy to think of superficially,
but I suspect require a much deeper theory of functional
syntactic principles that I possess.  Perhaps others are already
aware of the analogs to fortitions (speaker-oriented phonological
processes) and lenitions (hearer-oriented ones) in morphology
and syntax.
        As I write, I can think of some suggestions.  Presumably
gluing pronouns onto the ends of verbs as they become
proto-inflections is the analog of 'ease of articulation', and the
addition of emphatic pronouns in PRO-drop languages as real
person inflections get 'worn off' would be the equivalent of a
syntactic fortition.  Just a thought...

best,
Geoff


Geoffrey S. Nathan
Department of Linguistics
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Carbondale, IL, 62901-4517

Home phone:  (618) 549-0106  Office:  (618) 453-3421

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From jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU  Thu Mar 28 20:52:36 1996
From: jrubba at HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba)
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 12:52:36 -0800
Subject: Unidirectionality
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAR.1996.125236.0800.JRUBBA@HARP.AIX.CALPOLY.EDU>

On the general subject of teleology in language change, I'd like to pick
up Geoff Nathan's thread and weave it a bit into Ron Kuzar's and Alan
King's remarks.

Elizabeth Traugott and Ekkehardt Koenig have done fascinating work on
processes like 'pragmatic strengthening' in grammaticalization, whereby a
meaning once available only as an inference becomes built in to the
semantics of an expression, such that it is no longer only implied by the
expression, but must necessarily be understood when the expression is
used. I think an example is the extension of 'since' from purely temporal
to temporal AND causal.

I believe that Geoff's remarks about local improvement and competing
motivations from different 'locales' in language can inform the kinds of
changes that Ron and Alan talk about, such as movement from dative-marked
experiencers to nominative-marked ones, or movement from coding
experiencers as obliques to coding them as subjects.

I'd suggest that there are competing motivations for choice of what to
mark as subject; that among these are things like the 'me-first'
principle, bias towards agentive construal in clauses, topicality of a
referent in the particular discourse, face considerations, and information
structure (given/new), among who knows what other parameters (this is
something I've been thinking about only informally). This idea sets up a
tradeoff in syntax similar to the phonological tradeoffs Geoff talks about
 -- you may give up face considerations in order to accommodate
topicality, for example. Of course, how these tradeoffs become
conventionalized to the point of a nominative-marked experiencer-subject
construction displacing a dative-marked oblique experiencer construction
in a language is another question.

jo
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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      =
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From susan at UTAFLL.UTA.EDU  Sun Mar 31 00:13:26 1996
From: susan at UTAFLL.UTA.EDU (Susan Herring)
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 1996 18:13:26 CST
Subject: Discussant needed for panel on computer-mediated conversation
Message-ID: <SAT.30.MAR.1996.181326.CST.SUSAN@UTAFLL.UTA.EDU>

I would very much appreciate recommendations (including self-recommendations)
for a qualified person to be a discussant for a panel I am chairing on
"Computer-Mediated Conversation" for the 5th International Pragmatics
Conference in Mexico City this July. The ideal discussant would be an
established scholar with interests in both discourse analysis and
computer-mediated communication, and who is already planning to attend the
Pragmatics Conference.

The original proposal for the panel included Helen Dry in this role, but
unfortunately Helen is unable to attend the conference.

If you have a suggestion for someone you think would be appropriate, please
e-mail me at susan at utafll.uta.edu.

Many thanks,
Susan Herring