From bingfu at USC.EDU  Sat May  2 16:03:33 1998
From: bingfu at USC.EDU (bingfu)
Date: Sat, 2 May 1998 09:03:33 -0700
Subject: Query: double object and dative structures
Message-ID: <SAT.2.MAY.1998.090333.0700.BINGFU@USC.EDU>

Query: double object and dative structures

        It seems all double object structures can shift to dative
structures, but the reverse does not always hold, as shown in examples
below.

         (1)    a.      I give it to John.
                b.      *I give John it.

         (2)    a.      I give it to him.
                b.      *I give him it.

        Now, I would like to know:

1. Are there any counterexamples that only double object holds?
(in zero context, i.e. '?Mary threw John the ball. But he wasn't
looking' does not count).

2. As I know, this asymmetric shift relation holds true of Chinese
corresponding opposition.
    I would like to know to what extent this asymmetry is universal.
Specifically, how does your native language behave in this aspect?

If responses are sufficient to draw a conclusion, I will make a
summary.

Thanks!
Bingfu LU
USC


From ljuba at LING.SU.SE  Wed May  6 14:11:38 1998
From: ljuba at LING.SU.SE (Ljuba Veselinova)
Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 16:11:38 +0200
Subject: ICLC'99 Call for papers
Message-ID: <WED.6.MAY.1998.161138.0200.LJUBA@LING.SU.SE>

The 1999 ICLA conference will take place on the campus of Stockholm
University (SU) in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, July 10-16,
1999. We invite presentations of all current unpublished research
which considers the relationship between language and
cognition. Specific areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to
the following: function and form; lexical and grammatical meaning;
metaphor and metonymy as cultural and cognitive phenomena; literature
and cognition; language change and grammaticalization; typology;
polysemy and semantic fields; discourse analysis; language
acquisition; conceptual structure; language processing; reference
theory; relationship between language and thought;
connectionism. Contributions from the fields of neuro- and
psycholinguistics, sign language research, bilingualism,
ethnolinguistics, and cognitive science are also encouraged.

Presentation formats at ICLC99 will include invited plenary talks and
20 minutes paper presentations, as well as theme and poster
sessions. Instructions for submission of theme session proposals and
abstracts for papers and posters are posted on our web site. A list of
accepted theme sessions will be published in Cognitive Linguistics, at
the ICLC99 web site, and on e-mail lists around September 15, 1998.

Registration forms and hotel reservation forms will be available at
the web site and via ftp from February 15, 1999.

                            DATES TO NOTE
June 15,  1998  Proposals for theme sessions due
Sept. 15, 1998  Notification of acceptance of theme session proposals
Nov. 16,  1998  Abstracts for papers and posters due
Feb. 15,  1999  Notification of acceptance of abstracts and posters
Feb. 15,  1999  Early registration starts

Continuously updated information about this conference can be found at

                   http://www.iclc99.su.se./iclc99


Send queries about the conference to the organizers at

                   humfak at iclc99.su.se

                   ICLC99 Surface Mail Address
                   ICLC99 (Erling Wande)
                   Faculty of Humanities, Stockholm University
                   S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
                   Fax: +46-8-15 88 71
                   Phone +46-8-16 29 12


From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Wed May  6 15:25:49 1998
From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike L Gildea)
Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 10:25:49 -0500
Subject: Symposium on Grammaticalization (fwd)
Message-ID: <WED.6.MAY.1998.102549.0500.SPIKEG@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 4 May 1998 15:18:02 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Ilse Wischer <wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de>

UNIVERSITÄT POTSDAM
Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam


PD Dr.  Ilse Wischer								Tel. : (+49)0331-977-2533
Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik							Fax  : (+49)0331-977-2069
Universität Potsdam, Postfach 601553, 14415 Potsdam					Sekr.:
(+49)0331-977-2524
									e-mail: wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de


	Call for Papers
	April 1998

	New Reflections on Grammaticalization

	An International Symposium at Potsdam University
	17-19 June 1999

Since Meillet’s first mentioning of the term grammaticalization in 1912
several generations of scholars have contributed to a better understanding
of this process of linguistic change. Recent studies are closely connected
with the names of Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott. Further major impulses
came from a number of works in Cologne, from an International Symposium at
the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1988, or from empirical research based
on computer corpora edited in a collective volume by Matti Rissanen et al.

Numerous publications and conference contributions in the last ten years
have revealed a growing interest in the theory of grammaticalization. People
have worked on several topics reaching from theoretical investigations on
its status with respect to various theories of grammar up to its practical
application to linguistic phenomena in many languages of the world. This has
led, on the one hand, to new insights and a deeper understanding, it has
also revealed, however, new questions that call for an answer and require
further research.

The aim of this symposium is to bring together scholars who are working in
this area to present their findings and discuss such topics as e.g. whether
there are two different types of grammaticalization, one on the
propositional level and another one on the discourse level, whether there
are convincing examples of the reversability of grammaticalization, what
kind of relationship holds between grammaticalization and lexicalization, or
which internal and external factors can accelerate or retard grammaticalization.

Papers are invited on all aspects related to grammaticalization in its
synchronic or diachronic perspective, with respect to theoretical
reflections or practical findings. Studies based on linguistic phenomena in
English are particularly welcome.







Academic programme:

Opening lecture:		Christian Lehmann, University of Bielefeld, Germany

Plenary lectures (so far):	Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico, United States
				T. Givón, University of Oregon, United States
				Bernd Heine, University of Cologne, Germany
				Ekkehard König, Free University Berlin, Germany


Social Programme:
There will be a conference dinner, a guided tour through the city of Potsdam
including a visit of one of its famous castles, a visit of the Potsdam Film
Studios or a boat tour on the Havel. Details about the social programme will
be given in the 2nd circular.


Accomodation:
Accomodation will be in hotels in town at conference rates. A limited number
of moderately priced rooms will be available in the guest house of the
University. You will have to book the rooms on your own, mentioning your
participation in the symposium. Addresses will be given in the 2nd circular.


About the city of Potsdam and Potsdam University:
In 1993 Brandenburg’s capital celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its
founding. Potsdam's distinctive appearance began to emerge when the town
became the residence of Prussian royalty. To this day the capital attracts
many visitors. The grounds of the three royal parks, the palace of Sans
Souci and the New Palace, Schinkel's Charlottenhof, an architectural gem,
the Cecilienhof Palace as well as numerous churches and Italianate villas
continue to charm visitors today. Cafés, restaurants, museums and galeries
are an integral part of the capital's unique cityscape.
	Among 140,000 Potsdamers, there are 11,000 university students, most of
whom live in halls of residence on the outskirts of town. Potsdam's location
could not be more ideal for leisure time activities: it is surrounded by
forests, lakes and rivers and a short commuter train ride takes you to the
nation's nearby capital, Berlin.
	Since the last century, Potsdam has been a centre for research in the
natural sciences. Today Potsdam is again the home of respected research
institutes. For a few years now it has also been a university town. 
	The University of Potsdam was founded on 15 July 1991. Located on three
campuses - Am Neuen Palais, Golm and Potsdam-Babelsberg - the university
absorbed most of the staff of Brandenburg State College (previously the
Potsdam College of Education) and a few members of the staff of the College
of Law and Administration (previously the Academy of Government and Law of
the GDR, dissolved in 1990).
	The Institute of English and American Studies is situated on the campus in
Golm. It is divided into Linguistics, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies,
Didactics and Practical Language Acquisition.  Research Projects in the
Linguistics Department include such topics as Principles of Linguistic
Change, Celtic Englishes, Second Language Acquisition, English in Australia.
	For further information on Potsdam and the University see the university's
homepage at http://www.uni-potsdam.de.





Submission of papers
E-mail your abstract (approximately 250 words) by 15 January 1999 to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de 
or send it on paper together with disc (in Word or Word Perfect) to: 
Ilse Wischer, Universität Potsdam, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik,
Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam. Germany.
Acceptance notifications will be sent to the authors by 1 March 1999. I plan
to publish the proceedings.


Deadlines
I ask for your preliminary registration (to get on our mailing list) as soon
as possible. The Second Circular with details about accomodation and other
costs will reach you by mid- November 1998. An early registration at reduced
rate is possible by 15 December 1998, registration at normal rate by 15
April 1999.

For further information contact:	 wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de


PD Dr. Ilse Wischer
Potsdam, 22 April 1998


Preliminary registration form

To receive the next circular, please fill in and send this form (by e-mail
or ordinary mail) to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de, or on paper together with disc to: Ilse Wischer,
Universität Potsdam, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Postfach
601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany.



Name:


Affiliation:


Mailing address:





E-mail:


Phone:


Fax:


I would like / would not like to present a paper.
Title of paper, if any:
-------------- next part --------------


UNIVERSITŽT POTSDAM
Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam


PD Dr.  Ilse Wischer                                                            Tel. : (+49)0331-977-2533
Institut fr Anglistik/Amerikanistik                                                  Fax  : (+49)0331-977-2069
Universit„t Potsdam, Postfach 601553, 14415 Potsdam                                   Sekr.: (+49)0331-977-2524
                                                                        e-mail: wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de


        Call for Papers
        April 1998

        New Reflections on Grammaticalization

        An International Symposium at Potsdam University
        17-19 June 1999

Since Meillet s first mentioning of the term grammaticalization in 1912 several generations of scholars have contributed to a better understanding of this process of linguistic change. Recent studies are closely connected with the names of Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott. Further major impulses came from a number of works in Cologne, from an International Symposium at the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1988, or from empirical research based on computer corpora edited in a collective volume by Matti Rissanen et al.

Numerous publications and conference contributions in the last ten years have revealed a growing interest in the theory of grammaticalization. People have worked on several topics reaching from theoretical investigations on its status with respect to various theories of grammar up to its practical application to linguistic phenomena in many languages of the world. This has led, on the one hand, to new insights and a deeper understanding, it has also revealed, however, new questions that call for an answer and require further research.

The aim of this symposium is to bring together scholars who are working in this area to present their findings and discuss such topics as e.g. whether there are two different types of grammaticalization, one on the propositional level and another one on the discourse level, whether there are convincing examples of the reversability of grammaticalization, what kind of relationship holds between grammaticalization and lexicalization, or which internal and external factors can accelerate or retard grammaticalization.

Papers are invited on all aspects related to grammaticalization in its synchronic or diachronic perspective, with respect to theoretical reflections or practical findings. Studies based on linguistic phenomena in English are particularly welcome.







Academic programme:

Opening lecture:                Christian Lehmann, University of Bielefeld, Germany

Plenary lectures (so far):      Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico, United States
                                T. Giv¢n, University of Oregon, United States
                                Bernd Heine, University of Cologne, Germany
                                Ekkehard K”nig, Free University Berlin, Germany


Social Programme:
There will be a conference dinner, a guided tour through the city of Potsdam including a visit of one of its famous castles, a visit of the Potsdam Film Studios or a boat tour on the Havel. Details about the social programme will be given in the 2nd circular.


Accomodation:
Accomodation will be in hotels in town at conference rates. A limited number of moderately priced rooms will be available in the guest house of the University. You will have to book the rooms on your own, mentioning your participation in the symposium. Addresses will be given in the 2nd circular.


About the city of Potsdam and Potsdam University:
In 1993 Brandenburg s capital celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its founding. Potsdam's distinctive appearance began to emerge when the town became the residence of Prussian royalty. To this day the capital attracts many visitors. The grounds of the three royal parks, the palace of Sans Souci and the New Palace, Schinkel's Charlottenhof, an architectural gem, the Cecilienhof Palace as well as numerous churches and Italianate villas continue to charm visitors today. Caf‚s, restaurants, museums and galeries are an integral part of the capital's unique cityscape.
        Among 140,000 Potsdamers, there are 11,000 university students, most of whom live in halls of residence on the outskirts of town. Potsdam's location could not be more ideal for leisure time activities: it is surrounded by forests, lakes and rivers and a short commuter train ride takes you to the nation's nearby capital, Berlin.
        Since the last century, Potsdam has been a centre for research in the natural sciences. Today Potsdam is again the home of respected research institutes. For a few years now it has also been a university town. 
        The University of Potsdam was founded on 15 July 1991. Located on three campuses - Am Neuen Palais, Golm and Potsdam-Babelsberg - the university absorbed most of the staff of Brandenburg State College (previously the Potsdam College of Education) and a few members of the staff of the College of Law and Administration (previously the Academy of Government and Law of the GDR, dissolved in 1990).
        The Institute of English and American Studies is situated on the campus in Golm. It is divided into Linguistics, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Didactics and Practical Language Acquisition.  Research Projects in the Linguistics Department include such topics as Principles of Linguistic Change, Celtic Englishes, Second Language Acquisition, English in Australia.
        For further information on Potsdam and the University see the university's homepage at http://www.uni-potsdam.de.





Submission of papers
E-mail your abstract (approximately 250 words) by 15 January 1999 to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de 
or send it on paper together with disc (in Word or Word Perfect) to: 
Ilse Wischer, Universit„t Potsdam, Institut fr Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam. Germany.
Acceptance notifications will be sent to the authors by 1 March 1999. I plan to publish the proceedings.


Deadlines
I ask for your preliminary registration (to get on our mailing list) as soon as possible. The Second Circular with details about accomodation and other costs will reach you by mid- November 1998. An early registration at reduced rate is possible by 15 December 1998, registration at normal rate by 15 April 1999.

For further information contact:         wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de


PD Dr. Ilse Wischer
Potsdam, 22 April 1998


Preliminary registration form

To receive the next circular, please fill in and send this form (by e-mail or ordinary mail) to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de, or on paper together with disc to: Ilse Wischer, Universit„t Potsdam, Institut fr Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany.



Name:


Affiliation:


Mailing address:





E-mail:


Phone:


Fax:


I would like / would not like to present a paper.
Title of paper, if any:

From Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU  Thu May  7 05:39:38 1998
From: Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU (Carl Rubino)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 15:39:38 +1000
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.153938.1000.CARL.RUBINO@ANU.EDU.AU>

Dear Colleagues,
        Greetings from Australia.  I am writing to the list to ask
questions about mirativity, a category which is often neglected in
linguistic description.  Mirativity (from the label admirative) can be
defined as a grammatical category responsible for encoding SURPRISE or
anything CONTRARY to EXPECTATION.  Languages in the world that encode such
a concept morphologically do so in various ways (conjunctions, clitics,
particles, etc.)
        I would like to ask you if you know of any language that has
mirative morphemes for me to look up (references and/or texts).
        I am also posting some sample data on mirativity following this
message.
        All the best from Australia and I thank you all for your time,

        Carl Rubino


SAMPLE DATA:


        In Achenese, the mirative morpheme is a proclitic meu(ng)=  which
immediately precedes predicates it marks as surprising.  It is related to
the subordinating conjunction meu(ng) (Durie 1985:269).

MIRATIVE USE

        meu=i=kap=keuh
        surprise=3=bite=2
        'If it didn't go and bite you!'

        ka=eu   meung=meuleuhöp=kuh
        2=see   surprise=muddy=1
        'You see I'm muddy!'

CONDITIONAL USE

        meu=ji=jak      lôn=seutöt
        if=3=go 1=follow
        'If he goes, I'll follow.'


        In Chrau, the particle  dÐ_e is placed before unexpected clauses;
when placed before the subject, it refers to the whole clause, not just the
subject (Thomas 1971:88).

        anh     vlam    d_e     co^     sipai
        'I met (surprise) the rabbit.'

        ne&h    de&h    d_e@    la at -u.
        'She gave birth to a coconut!'

        In Philippine languages, various adverbials (non-deriving
particles) encode things that are surprising or contrary to expectation:
(Ilk, Knk. gayam, Tag. pala).  Certain morphemes may also be used for a
similiar purpose:  (Ilk nag- -en, Bontoc -et).

i.e.  Tag:    Ikaw pala.      So it's you!
        Iloc:   Nagbassiten!    How small!  (admirative)

      Tukang Besi (data from Mark Donohue 1995:425-6), a language from
South Sulawesi, has two conjunctions used to connote surprise or
exceptional information: padahal, a loan from Indonesian, and io.

        Io      te      karna           te      anu,    o-koruo na      amai
        in.fact CORE    because CORE    whatsit 3R-many NOM     they

        Rupu,   s{um}ikola,     wila    [m]-o-daga,     wila    [m]a-langke
        Rupu    school{SI}      go      REC.SI-trade    go      OCC.SI-sail

        i       Ambo,   i       Singapura, Malahau.
        OBL     Ambon   OBL     Singapore       Malahau

        'In fact it's because it's, what's that, ,all of those Rupu go to
school, go trading, go sailing in Ambon, to Singapore, to Malahau.'

        Io              te      i-manga i-helo'a-no             iso
        whereas CORE    OP-eat          OP-cook-3POSS   yon

        mbea-'e a       hebuntu,        te      watu    na      ni-helo'a-n(o)
        not.exist       NOM     state           CORE    stone   NOM
OP-cook-3POSS

        Kilivila (Senft, p.c.) has a pre-nominal interjectional particle
commonly used with kinterms and nouns to express mild shock.

        ake inagu.
        'oh my, it's my mother.'

        Some languages express surprise in their tense/aspect systems
(Georgian), or by hearsay evidentials (Turkish).  If you can refer me to
similar data along these lines, I would be very interested.



=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=\\=
Dr. Carl Rubino
Centre for Linguistic Typology
F-Block OAA
Australian National University,
Canberra, ACT 0200,  AUSTRALIA
Phone: +61 2 6249 2053 (office)
Fax:  +61 2 6249 0332


From ph1u+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU  Thu May  7 13:44:35 1998
From: ph1u+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Paul J Hopper)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 09:44:35 -0400
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <v01540b09b17784fd406b@[150.203.58.22]>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.094435.0400.PH1U@ANDREW.CMU.EDU>

Mirativity (Carl Rubino's communication) reminds me of the many
languages where the perfect aspect has become a surprise construction
(Chinese -le, Turkish -mis, noted by Carl in his last paragraph, the
English Hot News "have"). I'm in the middle of end-of-semester stuff
right now, and can't dig up the exact references, but Dan Slobin and
Sandy Thompson have written about this, and there's been some recent
stuff about its typical diachronic trajectories.

Paul


From wilcox at UNM.EDU  Thu May  7 14:06:25 1998
From: wilcox at UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 08:06:25 -0600
Subject: Mirativity
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.080625.0600.WILCOX@UNM.EDU>

I send this privately to Carl, but I'll post it to the list also in case
anyone is interested:

One of our doctoral students at the University of New Mexico, Jim
MacFarlane, recently did some research and a paper on mirativity in
American Sign Language, where it seems that a lexical item (the word WRONG)
has acquired grammatical function and now occurs only between phrases, the
second of which expresses some unexpected or surprising event.

-- Sherman

Sherman Wilcox, Ph.D.
Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
phone: 505-277-6353
fax:   505-277-6355

wilcox at unm.edu
http://www.unm.edu/~wilcox


From dp11 at CORNELL.EDU  Thu May  7 15:17:22 1998
From: dp11 at CORNELL.EDU (David Parkinson)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 11:17:22 -0400
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <YpIPf3K00iV0Q10mpK@andrew.cmu.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.111722.0400.DP11@CORNELL.EDU>

Regarding mirativity, I recall that one of the affixes listed by Harper
(1979:55) for Baffin Inuktitut is -pasaaq 'unexpected surprise':

quviasukpasaarama
quviasuk -pasaaq -gama
be.happy -MIRA   -PERF.1sS
'Surprisingly, I'm quite happy', 'I'm pleasantly surprised'

tuqappasaaqtuq
tuqat       -pasaaq -juq
be.startled -MIRA   -PART.3sS
'He is pleasantly startled'

Harper, Kenn. 1979. _Suffixes of the Eskimo dialects of Cumberland
Peninsula and North Baffin Island_. National Museum of Man Mercury Series
Paper no. 54. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.

David Parkinson


From W.Croft at MAN.AC.UK  Thu May  7 15:43:28 1998
From: W.Croft at MAN.AC.UK (Bill Croft)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 16:43:28 +0100
Subject: Jobs at University Manchester
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.164328.0100.W.CROFT@MAN.AC.UK>

The Linguistics Department at Manchester University is currently
advertising three jobs:

A chair in Phonetics and Phonology (from September 1999)

A lectureship in Historical Linguistics (from September 1998, tenure track)

A lectureship in Linguistics (from September 1998, for five years)

For further details of all three jobs and the department, please look at
our web page:

http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/

Brief details for each job follow below.

**********************************************

Chair in Phonetics & Phonology (Ref no 308/98)

The University of Manchester invites applications for a Chair in Phonetics
& Phonology in the Department of Linguistics, which will become available
in September 1999 following the retirement of Alan Cruttenden. Applications
will be considered from those specializing in any area of phonetics and/or
phonology. A strong research and publications record is essential. The
successful candidate will also be expected to provide research leadership
in the whole area of phonetics and phonology and to enhance the
department's research income in this field.
Salary by negotiation c. £35k p.a. Closing date for applications: 30 June 1998.
Applications forms are available from and applications should be submitted
to: Office of the Director of Personnel, The University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Tel: ++44 (0)161 275 2028; Fax: ++44
(0)161 275 2221; Minicom (for the hearing impaired): ++44 (0)161 275 7889.
Email: personnel at man.ac.uk
Website: http://www.man.ac.uk
Applications should quote the above reference number and contain the names
of three referees. It is the responsibility of applicants to ensure that
supporting letters of reference are sent to the same address by the closing
date for applications.
It is expected that interviews for this post will be conducted in early-mid
September 1998 and applicants should indicate any limitations on their
availability in that period.

Person Description
Candidates should have a strong research and publication record in any area
of phonetics and/or phonology. The successful candidate will be expected to
provide research leadership in the whole area of phonetics and phonology,
and to enhance the department's research income in this field.

Job Description
The appointed candidate will be expected to contribute to the research,
teaching and administration of the Department of Linguistics. He/she will
be required to offer courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels
and to supervise doctoral students. Headship of the Department rotates
among the senior members of staff and can be expected to fall to the
Professor of Phonetics and Phonology in due turn.

*******************************************************

Lectureship in Historical Linguistics (Ref. no. 310/98)

Applications will be considered from those specializing in any branch of
historical linguistics. A strong research record is essential, and a
completed PhD is desirable. Applicants must be able to demonstrate an
interest both in the theoretical study of language change and in the
history of one or more languages and language families. Preference may be
given to candidates whose research relates to the history of a language or
languages other than English. The starting date is 1 September 1998 or as
soon as possible thereafter. Salary in the range: £16045 - £21894 p.a.
(under review). Closing date for applications: 9 June 1998.
Applications forms are available from and applications should be submitted
to: Office of the Director of Personnel, The University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Tel: ++44 (0)161 275 2028; Fax: ++44
(0)161 275 2221; Minicom (for the hearing impaired): ++44 (0)161 275 7889.
Email: personnel at man.ac.uk
Website: http://www.man.ac.uk
Applications should quote the above reference number and contain the names
of three referees. It is the responsibility of applicants to ensure that
supporting letters of reference are sent to the same address by the closing
date for applications.
It is expected that interviews for this post will be conducted in the week
beginning 15 June 1998.

Person Description
Candidates should possess a strong research record, including a PhD or
equivalent publications, in the any area of historical linguistics. They
must be able to demonstrate an interest both in the theoretical study of
language change and in the history of one or more languages and language
families. Preference may be given to candidates whose research relates to
the history of a language or languages other than English. Candidates will
need to have or acquire the presentational skills necessary for lectures,
seminars and small group teaching, and the IT and organizational skills
appropriate to departmental teaching and administration.

Job Description
The appointed candidate will be expected to contribute to the research,
teaching (both undergraduate and postgraduate) and administration of the
Department of Linguistics.

*******************************************************************

Lectureship in Linguistics (Ref. no 309/98)

Applications will be considered from those specializing in phonetics and/or
phonology, particularly as these disciplines relate to the study of reading
and writing. A strong research record is essential, and a completed PhD is
desirable. This position is available for a limited tenure of 5 years,
starting on 1 September 1998 or as soon as possible thereafter. Salary in
the range: £16045 - £21894 p.a. (under review). Closing date for
applications: 9 June 1998.
Applications forms are available from and applications should be submitted
to: Office of the Director of Personnel, The University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Tel: ++44 (0)161 275 2028; Fax: ++44
(0)161 275 2221; Minicom (for the hearing impaired): ++44 (0)161 275 7889.
Email: personnel at man.ac.uk
Website: http://www.man.ac.uk
Applications should quote the above reference number and contain the names
of three referees. It is the responsibility of applicants to ensure that
supporting letters of reference are sent to the same address by the closing
date for applications.
It is expected that interviews for this post will be conducted in the week
beginning 15 June 1998.


Person Description
The candidate should possess a strong research record, including a PhD or
equivalent publications, in phonetics and/or phonology, particularly as
these disciplines relate to the study of reading and writing. Candidates
will need to have or acquire the presentational skills necessary for
lectures, seminars and small group teaching, and the IT and organizational
skills appropriate to departmental teaching and administration.

Job Description
The appointed candidate will be expected to contribute to the research,
teaching (both undergraduate and postgraduate) and administration of the
Department of Linguistics.


From chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Thu May  7 16:06:48 1998
From: chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Wallace Chafe)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 09:06:48 -0700
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <v01540b09b17784fd406b@[150.203.58.22]>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.090648.0700.CHAFE@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

Dear Carl,

I've often talked about the "admirative" prefix in Caddo, which is
interesting because it belongs to the irrealis set.  Maybe the only place
I put it in print is in Bybee and Fleischman, Modality in Grammar and
Discourse (Benjamins 1995), pp. 357-58.

See also Victor Friedman's chapter on "Evidentiality in the Balkans:
Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Albanian" in Chafe and Nichols, Evidentiality
(Ablex 1986), especially the discussion of the Albanian admirative on pp.
180-82.

Wally


From dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU  Thu May  7 17:04:38 1998
From: dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew S Dryer)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 13:04:38 -0400
Subject: So-called quantifier floating
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.130438.0400.DRYER@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>

I am looking for PUBLISHED references that mention functional views of the
phenomenon "traditionally" called quantifier-floating in English,
Japanese, and other languages.  I have certainly heard informal discussion
of this over the years, but am looking for published mentions.

Matthew Dryer
dryer at acsu.buffalo.edu


From ceford at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU  Thu May  7 17:01:24 1998
From: ceford at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Cecilia E. Ford)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 12:01:24 -0500
Subject: Nepali surprise
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.120124.0500.CEFORD@FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU>

I recall, in studying Nepali, that there was a verb (I believe "rahecha")
which was used for surprise declaratives (unassimilated information) or for
narratives - especially fairy tales.

An example of the former (from a Nepali pedagogical text):

ko ho?  ko ho?         dhokama euta manche aeko rahecha

I don't have the morpheme-by-morpheme translation, but the gloss is

' Who is it? Who is it? Somebody seems to have come to the door.'

And a note about the utterance is--

        "Note this use of rahecha as alternative to cha.  The speaker has
just noteiced that somebody has come."




Cecilia E. Ford
Department of English
600 N. Park Street
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI  53706

ceford at facstaff.wisc.edu

"May I always be the kind of person my dog thinks I am"


From nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE  Thu May  7 18:05:05 1998
From: nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE (Jan.Nuyts)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 20:05:05 +0200
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980507090213.4897E-100000@humanitas.ucsb.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.200505.0200.NUYTS@UIA.UA.AC.BE>

I may have missed it but I haven't seen Scott DeLancey's recent
'Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information' -
Linguistic Typology 1 (1997), 33-52 - being mentioned yet.

                               *****
Jan Nuyts                                       phone: 32/3/820.27.73
University of Antwerp                           fax: 32/3/820.27.62
Linguistics                                     email: nuyts at uia.ua.ac.be
Universiteitsplein 1
B-2610 Wilrijk - Belgium


From OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU  Thu May  7 19:44:09 1998
From: OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 11:44:09 PST
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.114409.PST.>

russian has at least two particles, both fully stressed lexemes. one
express incredulousness (neuzheli) and the other expresses surprise at
smth contrary to the speaker's expectation (razve). both are added to
interrogatory utterances or can be said independently as a one-word
response. for a detailed analysis cf. valentina zaitseva's 1995 article
and refs therein: 'particles and the subtext' in vol. 3 of harvard
studies in slavic linguistics, ed. o. yokoyama.

russian also uses imperative forms to express a sudden unexpected
action, e.g. Vdrug      prigljanis' mne     eta   devuska
             suddenly   like-imper  to-me   this  girl-nom
                                                                                                        'Unexpectedly i took a liking to this girl.'
note that the lexical support (vdrug ' suddenly') is not obligatory. the
construction is colloquial.

nowadays, this usage of imperative is seen mostly in a complex
construction with two imperative verbs the second of which bears the
lexical meaning and the first (which is always 'voz'mi') seems to be an
aux whose function is to phraseologize mirativity. both, however, must
be in the imperative form, e.g.:

                                                                                        tut    on   voz'mi      (da)  i    skazi [...]
                                                                                        here   he   take/inper  and   and  say-imper
                                                                                        'at this moment he suddenly said [...]'

japanese has a particle that expresses the spekeaker's belief that smth
is unlikely (masaka). it is added to negative sentences that often also
contain a morpheme expressing conjecture; it can also be a one-word
response.

olga yokoyama
_____________________________________________________
Professor Olga T. Yokoyama
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
UCLA
115 Kinsey Hall o Box 951502   tel: (310) 825-6158
405 Hilgard Avenue             fax: (310) 206-5263
Los Angeles, CA 90095          olga at humnet.ucla.edu
USA

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/slavic/slavic.html


From noonan at CSD.UWM.EDU  Thu May  7 19:01:50 1998
From: noonan at CSD.UWM.EDU (Michael Noonan)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 14:01:50 -0500
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <v01540b09b17784fd406b@[150.203.58.22]>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.140150.0500.NOONAN@CSD.UWM.EDU>

There are several ways to express mirativity in Chantyal [Tibeto-Burman:
Bodish:Tamangic].  A nominalized verb used as a main verb has a mirative
sense; this seems to be true for other Tibeto-Burman languages also.  I
discuss this briefly in one published article:  'Versatile
Nominalizations' in the Givon Festschrift [Bybee, Haiman & Thompson:
Essays on Language function and Language Type].  The sense can also be
communicated by verbal particles:  one, la, is homophonous with the
perfective interrogative verbal affix and has a purely mirative sense.
Another such particle is s@~ [nasalized schwa], which carries the
additional sense of disappointment or frustration.  All of this is
detailed at some length in my forthcoming grammar of Chantyal and in my
Chantyal dictionary, which should be out this year [published by Mouton de
Gruyter].

Michael Noonan                  Office:   414-229-4539
Dept. of English                Fax:      414-229-2643
University of Wisconsin         Messages: 414-229-4511
Milwaukee, WI  53201            Webpage:  http://www.uwm.edu/~noonan
USA


From delancey at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU  Thu May  7 21:25:49 1998
From: delancey at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Scott Delancey)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 14:25:49 -0700
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.96.980507200215.2297C-100000@hgins.uia.ac.be>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.142549.0700.DELANCEY@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>

On Thu, 7 May 1998, Jan.Nuyts wrote:

> I may have missed it but I haven't seen Scott DeLancey's recent
> 'Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information' -
> Linguistic Typology 1 (1997), 33-52 - being mentioned yet.

Thanks, Jan -- I was just about to get around to that myself.
Besides original data on a couple of languages, there are references
there to Elena Bashir's work on Khowar/Khalasha, and to work on
Korean, which has a fairly elaborate mirative system.

Elsewhere,  Marja Leinonen <f2male at uta.fi> has a paper on evidentiality
in Komi (Finno-Ugric), which includes a mirative form; she also has
some useful citations to earlier literature on the subject.  I don't
think the paper is out yet; it's destined for a volume "Evidentials:
Turkic, Iranian, and neighbouring languages", ed. by Bo Utas and
Lars Johanson.

Scott DeLancey
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, U.S.A.

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU  Fri May  8 05:40:00 1998
From: Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU (Carl Rubino)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 15:40:00 +1000
Subject: Mirativity + Thanks
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.154000.1000.CARL.RUBINO@ANU.EDU.AU>

Dear Fellow Funknetters,
        Many thanks for all of you who have given me example morphemes in
mirativity in your languages.  I will be preparing a short summary of your
responses to put on the list in the next month since my question seems to
have spawned some interest.
        I'm sorry I forgot to attach the bibliography at the end of my last
message, so many people have referred me to the DeLancey article and Chafe
and Nichols volume which I have read with much interest (I am attaching it
now for all interested parties).
        I also would like to mention that I am most interested in
grammatical morphemes that express surprise/contrary to expectation
phenomena, _not_ interjections and constructions dependent on intonation
(i.e. English, Spanish, French data that has been coming in).  Sorry for
all the confusion about my question.  I will do my best to put together my
summary for you all in the near future and thank you all once again for all
the time you have spent answering my questions.
        Best wishes from Australia,
        Carl Rubino

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS ON MIRATIVE-TYPE MORPHOLOGY

Allen, Janet. 1978.  Kankanaey Adjuncts. Studies in Philippine Linguistics
2:1:82-102.
Chafe, Wallace. 1976.  The Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan Languages. Hague:
Mouton.
Chafe, Wallace, and Johanna Nichols (eds.). 1986.  Evidentiality: The
Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing
Corporation.
Chelliah, Shobhana Lakshmi. 1992. A study of Manipuri Grammar. PhD
Dissertation,  Australian National  University.
Crowley, Terry. 1982. The Paamese Language of Vanuatu. Canberra: Pacific
Linguistics B-87.
DeLancey, Scott. 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected
information. Linguistic Typology 1:33-52.
Donohue, Mark. 1995.  The Tukang Besi Language. PhD Thesis, Australian
National University.
Durie, Mark. 1985.  A Grammar of Acehnese. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris
Publications.
Kimball, Geoffrey. 1991. Koasati Grammar. Univ. of Nebraska Press.
Mosel, Ulrike and Even Hovdhangen. 1992.  Samoan Reference Grammar. Oslo:
Scandinavian University Press.
Porter, Doris. 1979. Northern Kankanay Morphology.  Studies in Philippine
Linguistics 3:2:20-62.
Rubino, Carl. 1997. Reference Grammar of Ilocano. PhD Dissertation,
University of California, Santa Barbara.
Sridhar S. N. 1990.  Kannada. London: Routledge.
Senft, Gunter. 1986. Kilivila. Berlin: Mouton.
Smith, Ian, and Steve Johnson. 1985ms. Kugu Nganhcara. manuscript,
Australian National University.
Thomas, David. 1971. Chrau Grammar. Honolulu:  Oceanic Linguistics Special
Publications no. 7.
Thurgood, Graham. 1986.  The nature and Origins of the Akha Evidentials
System.  In Chafe and Nichols (eds.) 214-222.
Verstraelen, Eugene. 1986. Elementary Analysis of Surigaunun Dialect.
Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 14:232-262.
Walrod, Michael. 1979. Discourse Grammar in Gaddang. Dallas: Summer
Institute of Linguistics.

=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=\\=
Dr. Carl Rubino
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology
F-Block OAA
Australian National University,
Canberra, ACT 0200,  AUSTRALIA
Phone: +61 2 6249 2053 (office)
Fax:  +61 2 6249 0332


From ocls at IPA.NET  Fri May  8 12:43:34 1998
From: ocls at IPA.NET (George Elgin, Suzette Haden Elgin)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 07:43:34 -0500
Subject: mirativity
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.074334.0500.OCLS@IPA.NET>

I've been watching the "mirativity" discussion with great interest. I am
wondering whether there is a specific category that is restricted only to
positive -- pleasant -- surprise. (As I would have expected, from the
"admirative" source.)

While I'm here -- though on the topic of pleasantness rather than surprise
-- I know of languages that have a pejorative morpheme. (Navajo, for
example.) Could anyone tell me whether there's a language that has a
morpheme with the opposite function (whatever the term for
"anti-pejorative" might be)?

Thanks....

Suzette Haden Elgin
ocls at ipa.net


From ocls at IPA.NET  Fri May  8 12:52:52 1998
From: ocls at IPA.NET (George Elgin, Suzette Haden Elgin)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 07:52:52 -0500
Subject: agent/patient
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.075252.0500.OCLS@IPA.NET>

I've had a question out to some other lists for quite a while, and would
like your input before I give up. If I relied on the data I've had so far,
I would have to make a statement something like "There exists no language
in which, if the patient is lexicalized in a sentence, the agent *must* be
lexicalized." I asked about sentences like the English "Mistakes were made"
and "Oil was spilled" variety. So far, everyone says that the language in
their response to my query allows passives with deleted agent, or has the
"Oil-spilling happened" or "Oil spilled (itself)" alternatives, or more
than one of that set. Even in languages where pronominal markers on verbs
carry the information, everyone answering me has had examples of
constructions where the morpheme for the agent could be deleted.

I 'm very uneasy about the idea that this is a "universal" (choose your
term). Does anyone on this list know of a language for which, if the oil
that was spilled is mentioned, you *must* present the spiller, if only as
some sort of indefinite? I'd be grateful for your help. Perhaps there is
some simple and obvious functional explanation that makes my question an
absurd or stupid one, and I'm just not perceiving it; it wouldn't be the
first time.

Suzette Haden Elgin
ocls at ipa.net


From nrude at UCINET.COM  Fri May  8 14:51:57 1998
From: nrude at UCINET.COM (Noel Rude)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 06:51:57 -0800
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.065157.0800.>

Greetings,

        There is in Sahaptian (a family of NW American Indian lgs. that
comprises Nez Perce and Sahaptin) a morpheme whose basic meaning seems
to be ÔsuddenlyÕ.  It is definitely grammaticalized (occupying a
specific morphological slot as verbal prefix) and is very productive.
Yesterday when I described your query to a native Sahaptin speaker, he
immediately came up with examples which contained this prefix, e.g.

1       i-tqA-tiyan-a
        3NOM-suddenly-laugh-PST
        Ôhe/she burst out laughingÕ (Sahaptin)

where tqA- connotes surprise, Ôlaughed out of placeÕ, etc.  In the
following from a recorded text Ôthe boyÕ is unexpectedly left alone by
his grandmother.  In the second clause we see another sense of tqA-,
i.e. nonvolitionality.

2       ku awkU i-tqA-waC-a Aswan p at lk-=sA=s at m=kÕa
        and then 3NOM-suddenly-be-PST boy 3SG.NOM=alone=only=even
        Ôand then the boy was suddenly/surprisingly all aloneÕ

        ku i-tqA-tkÕwanin-Xan-a
        and 3NOM-suddenly-walk.about-HAB-PST
        Ôand he would walk about aimlesslyÕ (Sahaptin)

Verbs in Sahaptin are inherently transitive or intransitive and this
fact can only be altered by valency changing morphology.  Though not the
case in every occurrence, tqA- can reduce valency, e.g. tamAnuun Ôthrow
into waterÕ, tqAtamanuun Ôfall into waterÕ.

        Another instance of mirativity, I believe, is provided by external
possession (possessor ascension).  Whereas EP is (certainly in
Sahaptian) very much a discourse related phenomenon, it also marks
emotional involvement.  This is illustrated by the clauses in (3) which
were provided by one woman for whom emotional involvement was definitely
a factor.  The relevant EP morphology are the 2nd position pronominals
=aS/=S and the applicative suffix -ay.  Without such emotional
involvement the alternative without external possession in (4) would be
perfectly grammatical.

3       wiyAnawi-ta=aS pAp nAXS-pa paCwAywit-pa
        arrive-FUT=1SG daughter one-LOC Sunday-LOC
        Ômy daughter will arrive on a SundayÕ

        ku=S i-nACik-ay-ta tIla
        and=1SG 3NOM-bring-APPL-FUT daughterÕs.child
        Ôand she will bring my grandchildÕ (Sahaptin)

4       i-wiyAnawi-ta pAp nAXS-pa paCwAywit-pa
        3NOM-arrive-FUT daughter one-LOC Sunday-LOC
        Ômy daughter will arrive on a SundayÕ

        ku i-nACik-ta In-tila-an
        and 3NOM-bring-FUT my-daughterÕs.child-ACC
        Ôand she will bring my grandchildÕ (Sahaptin)

Thus you have from Sahaptin two aspects of ÒmirativityÓ: surprise
(related to ÔsuddenlyÕ and ÔuncausedÕ) and emotional involvement (with
connections to a discourse mechanism).

Key to orthography:

A = a with acute accent
I = i with acute accent
U = u with acute accent
C = c-wedge
S = s-wedge
@ = barred i
X = x with dot below

Noel Rude


From chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Fri May  8 17:06:54 1998
From: chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Wallace Chafe)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 10:06:54 -0700
Subject: agent/patient
In-Reply-To: <v02140b02b178ae88f600@[206.27.222.208]>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.100654.0700.CHAFE@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

Dear Suzette,

You wonder about an agent being necessary "as only some sort of
indefinite." I believe there are a number of languages (I am most familiar
with Caddo), where there is no passive as such, but a similar function is
performed by means of a so-called indefinite (I've called it in Caddo a
"defocusing") marker.  So the Caddo equivalent to "the oil was spilled" would
be "one spilled the oil".  The pronominal prefix translated "one" is in
the agent form.  Not at all unusual.  Interestingly, however, if the agent
is specifically identified, as in "the oil was spilled by the mechanic",
"the mechanic" would be added to the above construction as an oblique, in
a prepositional phrase, just as in English.

Wally Chafe


From hilaryy at RUF.RICE.EDU  Fri May  8 19:06:48 1998
From: hilaryy at RUF.RICE.EDU (Hilary Adrienne Young)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 14:06:48 -0500
Subject: Inuktitut spatial terms
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.140648.0500.HILARYY@RUF.RICE.EDU>

Greetings all,

I was hoping someone out there could help me with my research.  I'm
beginning a project on Inuktitut spatial terms and am looking for any
resources that might be useful.  In particular, I'll be exploring the
'in front of'/'behind' relation in a Cognitive Grammar framework.

I have Spalding's Inuktitut grammar, Fortescue's West Greenlandic grammar,
Denny's article on spatial deixis, and I know of Cornillac's 'Systematiqye
des contructions lexicales en inuktitut', Paillet's 'Deixis et
representation de l'espace en Inuktitut' and Lowe's 'De l'espace au temps
en Inuktitut'.

If anyone knows of other resources on spatial terms in eastern arctic
languages (or related), I'd appreciate hearing from you.

Finally, if anyone knows Michael Fortescue's e-mail address, could they
please pass it on to me.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Hilary Young
Rice University
hilaryy at ruf.rice.edu


From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Tue May 12 15:17:19 1998
From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 10:17:19 -0500
Subject: agent/patient
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980508095648.18861B-100000@humanitas.ucsb.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.101719.0500.SPIKEG@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

Wally's example from Caddo calls to mind some languages illustrated in
Givón's (1991, Syntax: A Functional-Typological Introduction, Vol. 2)
chapter on passives.  He shows a number of languages where a transitive
verb inflected for third person plural subject is interpreted as having an
indefinite subject; he calls such a construction a "nonpromotional
passive".  Such a construction is even attested in relatively well-known
languages, such as Colombian Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, where third
person plural forms of the verb are replacing the analytical passive in
informal speech.  (Just because I can't resist, one example: a woman is
writing notes over her data, leaves the room for a few minutes, and a young
man enters, picks up her pen, and begins playing with it while conversing
with me.  She re-enters the room, sees that her pen is missing, spots it in
his hands, and says, in a miffed tone of voice, 'Roubarem a minha caneta!'
-- lit. 'They stole my pen!')

The interesting thing is that in Kimbundu, you can actually see the further
evolution of this construction into a more protoypical passive in that when
the patient is topicalized (etymologically left dislocated, later
re-incorporated into the intonation contour of the main clause), an oblique
agent-phrase (of any person or number) can co-occur with the erstwhile
"indefinite subject" marking on the verb.  Thus, you can see where an
obligatory morphological slot on the verb is filled by a morpheme which
etymologically coded a referential third person plural agent, but which
begins to be used in situations where the agent is not specified (even
though it might be identifiable -- i.e. a passive) and which then continues
evolving semantically until the addition of a new agent phrase confirms
that the morpheme does not (at least in this construction) refer to the
agent at all.  Apparently a similar process happened in the Caddo data
Wally refers to.

To bring this back to Suzette's question: is reference to the agent a part
of such a construction (i.e. is it a counterexample to the apparent
universal she is so uncomfortable with)?  Like many typological questions,
the universality of a generalization depends on your definitions, and how
far you are willing to extend categories.  For this case to violate the
putative universal, the key definition that requires stretching is
'reference': If by 'agent' you mean simply a particular participant which
is inherent in the schema of a particular event, and if by 'reference' you
mean simply alluding to the existence of such a participant, then perhaps
such 'indefinite' morphemes serve as place-holders to indicate that such a
participant does exist semantically (even though it may not be
pragmatically feasible or desirable to refer to it explicitly).  However, I
would hesitate to use the term 'refer' for such an indefinite morpheme,
especially since (in this unique case) the person and number of the agent
does not have to match the person and number indexed by the morpheme (i.e.,
agents might be neither third person nor plural).  By the time such a
morpheme arrives at the passive stage seen in Kimbundu and Caddo, I would
consider 'reference' only to be an etymological function of a passive
morpheme.

This example highlights one of my concerns with typologies based solely on
morphosyntax, especially when they do not explicitly attend to functional
shift and incipient grammaticalization.  Given the constant tension between
the semantic roles schematized with each verb and the pragmatic needs of
each utterance which must refer to a specific event, I would be amazed if
you could find a language in which there was no way to move the agent
"off-stage"; in this sense, I am quite comfortable with the functional
usefulness of the universal you posit.  In some languages the means of
moving the agent off-stage might utilize morphology usually restricted to
transitive sentences, even morphology that elsewhere refers to on-stage
agents of transitive events.  While this would not violate the functional
universal, it might violate the morphosyntactic universal.

Spike


>Dear Suzette,
>
>You wonder about an agent being necessary "as only some sort of
>indefinite." I believe there are a number of languages (I am most familiar
>with Caddo), where there is no passive as such, but a similar function is
>performed by means of a so-called indefinite (I've called it in Caddo a
>"defocusing") marker.  So the Caddo equivalent to "the oil was spilled" would
>be "one spilled the oil".  The pronominal prefix translated "one" is in
>the agent form.  Not at all unusual.  Interestingly, however, if the agent
>is specifically identified, as in "the oil was spilled by the mechanic",
>"the mechanic" would be added to the above construction as an oblique, in
>a prepositional phrase, just as in English.
>
>Wally Chafe


From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Thu May 14 14:26:35 1998
From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 09:26:35 -0500
Subject: (fwd) from VIctor Golla re. Agent/Patient
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.092635.0500.SPIKEG@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

5/13/98

I have a footnote to the recent discussion by Wally Chafe and
Spike Gildea of "indefinite" markers functioning in "nonpromotional
passives".  As Spike says, this is a very common phenomenon, no
less so in North America than elsewhere.  In addition to the Caddo
example Wally cites, most Athabaskan languages similarly whisk the
agent off-stage by means of a bleached-out agent marker.

Athabaskanists (particularly those brought up on Navajo) are in the
habit of referring to this category as "4th person", and it is so
widespread in the family that few doubt that it should be recon-
structed to the protolanguage.  Although Chad Thompson and others
have argued that the Proto-Athabaskan 4th person marker was multi-
functional, if so, marking a nonreferential agent was its central
role, with other functions developing in specific discourse contexts.
The commonest of these secondary functions is the coding of 1st person
plural agents.

However, a much less expectable thing happens to the 4th person
in the California subgroup (Hupa, Mattole, Kato and a few other
dialects).  While Mattole preserves the marker in its general
Athabaskan impersonal role, Hupa and Kato appear to have have
reversed the evolutionary process and have re-coded the prefix
to mark a discourse-salient 3rd person.  The inherited 3rd person
marker, meanwhile, has assumed an obviative function.  Schematically:

General Athabaskan:

 SOMEONE sees you. (= 'you are seen'; 'we see you') [4th person]
 HE/SHE sees me.  [3rd person]

Hupa:

 HE/SHE (whom we're talking about here) sees you.  [4th person]
 HE/SHE/IT (who is not our focus) sees you.   [3rd person]

(It was this pronominal opposition that P. E. Goddard notoriously--and
mistakenly--described as distinguishing adult Hupa men from children,
women, animals, and non-Hupas.)

The formal history of this shift is pretty clear (at least to me),
but the functional motivation is not.  Does anyone know of other
instances of nonreferential "indefinite" agent markers evolving
a salient referential function?

--Victor Golla


From dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU  Thu May 14 16:41:28 1998
From: dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew S Dryer)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 12:41:28 -0400
Subject: indefinite subject constructions
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.124128.0400.DRYER@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>

A few comments on the recent discussion of "indefinite subject"
constructions.

First, the discussion ignores that there are two possible types of such
clauses, ones which are semantically intransitive ("someone was singing")
and ones which are semantically transitive ("someone ate the pie").  While
the latter may resemble agentless passives functionally, the former does
not (ignoring instances of passives of intransitives in languages which
allow such - "it was danced").  Languages differ as to whether they have
a single construction covering both of these.

Second, referring to such clauses as "passive" runs the risk of
Eurocentrism.  Prototypical instances of such clauses in languages which
have them are grammatically active and transitive, with a structure like
English "someone ate the pie", except that the "someone" is expressed by a
pronominal affix on the verb rather than with an independent pronoun: in
prototypical cases, the "patient" is grammatical object, the "agent" is
expressed by the indefinite pronominal affix occurring in a morphological
slot associated with subjects, and the "agent" cannot be expressed by a
independent noun phrase.  As Spike suggests, such constructions may
sometimes get reanalyzed as passive constructions, though my impression is
that more often than not, they behave "schizophrenically", behaving like
indefinite subject constructions in some ways and like passive
constructions in other ways.  It is not clear whether this "schizophrenic"
stage is only an intermediate stage in a reanalysis to a passive
construction, or a state in which languages can happily remain
indefinitely.

Indefinite subject constructions appear to be much more common in North
America than in most areas of the world, though the constructions often
deviate from the prototype and the conditions in which they are used are
rarely discussed.  There is a long history of debate among Algonquianists
as to whether the construction in question in Algonquian languages should
be viewed as a passive or as an indefinite subject construction (see
Hockett's preface to Bloomfield's grammar of Ojibwa, where he takes issue
with Bloomfield's characterization).  Boas points out that the apparent
indefinite subject construction in Tlingit occasionally occurs with an
independent expression of the agent.  And I have been working on a
construction in Kutenai which is clearly a passive morphologically and
syntactically, but which is used in texts in ways that are unusual for a
passive, but which are shared with the intransitive indefinite subject
construction, showing that at the level of text, the passive must be
viewed as being a kind of transitive indefinite subject construction.

Matthew Dryer


From fhirata at LPG.FCLAR.UNESP.BR  Thu May 14 20:44:34 1998
From: fhirata at LPG.FCLAR.UNESP.BR (Flavia B. M. Hirata)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 17:44:34 -0300
Subject: comparative clauses
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.174434.0300.FHIRATA@LPG.FCLAR.UNESP.BR>

Dear colleagues

I would like to receive information about bibliography (references and/or books)
concerning to comparative clauses in general.

Thanks in advance

Flavia Hirata


From norri at IBM.NET  Thu May 14 19:17:31 1998
From: norri at IBM.NET (Noriko Akiho-Toyoda)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 20:17:31 +0100
Subject: Question: semilingualism
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.201731.0100.NORRI@IBM.NET>

Hi, I am a Japanese, studying for MA Applied Linguistics in London.
With the dissertation's deadline is now close at hand, it seems I am looking
for different reference every single day.
Could anybody please help me answering the questions as follow:

1) Child's L1 acquisition or SLA
I have heard and read that a child first states only facts, then they learn
to narrate in temporal sequence.  And after that, around at the age of 5 to
9, he expresses in causal sequence.
If anybody know the actual article(s) or paper please let me know. (Could be
Slobin_DI and I searched for no luck) And your opinion is welcome as well.

2) Semilingualism
My supervisor, Prof.. Larry Selinker, told me that this term is not
politically correct.  What is the most appropriate word, would you think?

3) One of the participants of my dissertation research shows that she could
express herself both in Japanese (L1) and English (L2) fluently.  Seems a
balanced bilingual.  But she does not understand once narrative gets
complicated (not in temporal order, abstract).  I am looking for any related
paper.

4)  To collect data, I used a silence film, giving her questions in both
language.  If anybody knows the articles/paper mentioning a similar method
please let me know!

Thank you.



**********  *****************************
This e-mail address accepts Japanese language
**********  *****************************
Noriko Akiho
MA Applied Linguistics, Birkbeck College, London Univ..
19, 2 Greencroft Gardens, London NW6 3LR, UK
Tel:0171-624-3506 fax:0171-328-4854


From yui at IPIED.TU.AC.TH  Fri May 15 07:35:53 1998
From: yui at IPIED.TU.AC.TH (Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 14:35:53 +0700
Subject: Job at Thammasat University, Bangkok
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.143553.0700.YUI@IPIED.TU.AC.TH>

Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Liberal Arts,
Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand has an opening for a "foreign"
(i.e. non-Thai) Faculty position.

Qualifications: Postgraduate degree in General Linguistics, M.A.
essential, with teaching and research experience.
Ph.D. preferred.  Knowledge of  Thai/Southeast Asian Linguistics desirable.

Duties: - teach  general linguistics and applied
linguistics courses, in undergraduate and graduate levels (minimum 3
courses per semester)
                 - academic consultation
                 - language editor of English articles in the Department
of Linguistics's Journal (Journal of Langauge and Linguistics)

Teaching is expected to start in September 1998.
Initial contract is for one year, renewable.

Document required: CV including recent photograph; names and addresses of
three reference persons.
Apply by  July 31, 1998  to:
   Head of Department of Linguistics
   Faculty of Liberal Arts
   Thammasat University
   Prachan Rd.
 Bangkok 10200, THAILAND

Fax: (66 2)224-1389
Tel: (66 2)221-6111...20 ext. 2656, 2655

For inquiry: contact the above address/fax/phone number or e-mail to:
    waen at ipied.tu.ac.th, yui at ipied.tu.ac.th, yui at alpha.tu.ac.th

For information about the Department and Thammasat University, please
visit our web page at:

http://www.tu.ac.th/org/arts/ling/lingdept.htm

The cost of living in Bangkok in roughly three times less than that in
the US.  Meals for one day is about 100 baht or less.  A condo apt ranges
from 5,000
 baht per month.  the exchange rate is  40  baht for a dollar


From David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG  Fri May 15 11:41:00 1998
From: David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG (David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 06:41:00 -0500
Subject: (fwd) from VIctor Golla re. Agent/Patient
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.064100.0500.>

Victor asked for examples of impersonals becoming specific person subject
markers. Here's one:

In some towns of the Orizaba Nawatl (Nahuatl de la Sierra de Zongolica)
area, the subject prefix se- (or see-) has pretty clearly developed from an
impersonal subject meaning to mean 'we'.  This phenomenon was first, to my
knowledge, reported by Jeff Burnham, who described it in a grammatical
sketch of Rafael Delgado Nahuatl which he distributed in the late 70's at
the Friends of Uto-Aztecan meeting).

se- is transparently related to the numeral se or see (the length is very
slippery) 'one'. In other towns in the dialect area 'impersonal subject' is
its primary meaning. The verbal morphology associated with it is that
appropriate to a singular subject, even when the meaning is clearly 'we'.
The towns that use it to mean 'we' still conserve, at least in that they
understand in their neighbors' speech, the standard Nahuatl ti- 'we' prefix
(which has plural morphology, as you would expect. ti- with singular
morphology means 'you sg.') Even in the towns which do not use it to
clearly mean 'we', there are of course many contexts in which either
meaning would be appropriate, especially in procedural discourses: "that's
the way we do it/it is done".

In most Nahuatl se / see does not function as a subject prefix, but can be
an independent subject preceding the zero 3rd person subject marker. In
other words, the acoustic difference between se 0-kineki 'one wants it' and
sekineki 'impersonal wants it' is somewhere between slight and
non-existent.  In certain tenses an o- other prefixes precede the subject
prefixes, so it is the innovation of words like y-o-sekinek 'impersonal
already wanted it' (as opposed to se yosekinek) that seals se-'s status as
a subject prefix.

--David Tuggy


From nc206 at HERMES.CAM.AC.UK  Fri May 15 13:51:19 1998
From: nc206 at HERMES.CAM.AC.UK (N. Chipere)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 14:51:19 +0100
Subject: Real Language Users
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.145119.0100.NC206@HERMES.CAM.AC.UK>

Apologies to members of Linguists List for the multiple posting.

I have just written up an experiment carried out to investigate the
conventional notion of linguistic competence (the abstract is appended to
this message). I am planning further experiments based on  what I found. It
would be very useful for me to get some feedback on the first experiment
during this planning stage. If you are interested in reading the
experimental report and offering comments on any aspect of it, no
matter how brief, please let me know and I will send you a copy. Please
also specify the format in which you prefer to view the document and
whether or not you would like me to summarise the responses.

Thanks in advance,

Ngoni Chipere

----------------

Abstract : Real Language Users


The idea of a perfectly competent but resource limited language user is the
basis of many psychological models of sentence comprehension. It is widely
assumed that linguistic competence is a) uniform; b) generative; c)
autonomous; d) automatic and e) constant. It is  also believed that  the
free expression of these properties is frustrated by limits in the
availability of computational resources. However, no firm experimental
evidence for the classical language user appears to exist. Negative evidence
for each assumption is reviewed here and the notion of resource limitations
is shown to be suspect. An experiment is reported which tested each of the
five assumptions underlying the conventional idea of linguistic competence.
It was found that native speakers of English a) differed in  grammatical
competence; b) often failed to display syntactic productivity; c) grossly
violated syntax in favour of plausibility; d) expended conscious effort to
comprehend some sentences and e) appeared to adapt to novel structures as
the experiment progressed. In line with previous studies, a relationship was
found between comprehension skill and formal education. A new finding is
that highly educated non-native speakers of English can outperform less
educated native speakers of English in comprehending grammatically
challenging English sentences. The results indicate that the classical
language user is an inaccurate model of real language users, who appear to
vary widely in grammatical skill. A number of specific questions for further
research are raised.


From mithun at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Fri May 15 16:40:18 1998
From: mithun at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Marianne Mithun)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 09:40:18 -0700
Subject: (fwd) from VIctor Golla re. Agent/Patient
In-Reply-To: <l03110702b180af42de94@[128.42.180.126]>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.094018.0700.MITHUN@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

Victor writes about the Proto-Athabaskan impersonal pronoun
developing into a discourse-salient third person pronominal prefix in
California Athabaskan.


> However, a much less expectable thing happens to the 4th person
> in the California subgroup (Hupa, Mattole, Kato and a few other
> dialects).  While Mattole preserves the marker in its general
> Athabaskan impersonal role, Hupa and Kato appear to have have
> reversed the evolutionary process and have re-coded the prefix
> to mark a discourse-salient 3rd person.  The inherited 3rd person
> marker, meanwhile, has assumed an obviative function.  Schematically:
>
> General Athabaskan:
>
>  SOMEONE sees you. (= 'you are seen'; 'we see you') [4th person]
>  HE/SHE sees me.  [3rd person]
>
> Hupa:
>
>  HE/SHE (whom we're talking about here) sees you.  [4th person]
>  HE/SHE/IT (who is not our focus) sees you.   [3rd person]
>
> (It was this pronominal opposition that P. E. Goddard notoriously--and
> mistakenly--described as distinguishing adult Hupa men from children,
> women, animals, and non-Hupas.)
>
> The formal history of this shift is pretty clear (at least to me),
> but the functional motivation is not.  Does anyone know of other
> instances of nonreferential "indefinite" agent markers evolving
> a salient referential function?

                                Victor Golla



Sure.  The very same thing happened in Iroquoian.  The indefinite/
impersonal pronominal prefix ye- (probably cognate with the Caddo, if the
Caddoan-Iroquoian connection turns out to be right, which is likely)
has evolved into a feminine pronominal prefix in most of the Northern
Iroquoian languages.  In all of the languages, the original indefinite
prefix retains its indefinite meaning `someone'.  The Northern languages
have innovated a masculine pronominal prefix (not present in Southern
Iroquoian).  In some of the languages (Tuscarora, Seneca, Cayuga) the
original indefinite (y)e- is now the only pronoun used for women and
girls.  In Huron, it is still only an indefinite, with women and girls
referred to with the same pronoun as neuters (ka-).  In Onondaga, Oneida,
and Mohawk, the descendants of the indefinite (ye-) and the neuter-zoic
(ka-) are both used for female persons.  Circumstances behind the choice
are interesting.


Marianne Mithun


From fianna at GEOCITIES.COM  Sat May 16 03:58:37 1998
From: fianna at GEOCITIES.COM (Angela Conn)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 22:58:37 -0500
Subject: Occupations
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.225837.0500.FIANNA@GEOCITIES.COM>

Hello,
        Currently, I am studying linguistics on my own, but I plan to attend
the University of Oklahoman, then possibly Rice University.  I would also
plan to major in Russian (yes, ack, a double major). I have been reading and
lurking on this mailling list for quite some time, and I graduate high
school next week. I would like to ask those of you who are studying/teaching
linguistics/Russian what jobs are available to someone with a degree in
these fields. What degrees make one eligible for this job. (besides
professor i've seen that a quite a bit).

Thanks
Angela Conn
fianna at geocities.com
student @ Bartlesville High School, Bartlesville Oklahoma


From barlow at RUF.RICE.EDU  Sun May 17 05:15:49 1998
From: barlow at RUF.RICE.EDU (Michael Barlow)
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 00:15:49 -0500
Subject: Spoken Corpus -- Announcement
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.1998.001549.0500.BARLOW@RUF.RICE.EDU>

Announcement

The Corpus of Spoken, Professional American-English (CSPA) is available
from Athelstan. The corpus of 2 million words is based on a variety of
transcripts of (i) faculty meetings and committee meetings (1 million
words) and (ii) White House press conferences (1 million words). To obtain
information about the corpus or to download a 50,000 word sample, visit the
CSPA webpage at http://www.athel.com/cspa.html

A tagged version of the corpus is now available. For info, see
http://www.athel.com/cspatg.html

Michael
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Barlow,      Department of Linguistics,       Rice University
barlow at rice.edu                               www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow
Athelstan barlow at athel.com  www.athel.com (U.S.) www.athelstan.com (UK)


From chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Sun May 17 18:49:08 1998
From: chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Wallace Chafe)
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 11:49:08 -0700
Subject: From VIctor Golla re. Agent/Patient
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.1998.114908.0700.CHAFE@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

As a supplement to Marianne's response regarding the change of Iroquoian
ye- "one" to ye- "feminine", I might also point out that the probably
cognate yi- in Caddo developed into an inclusive first person marker when
it was accompanied by a dual or plural marker.  In other words Caddo yi-
means "one" in the singular, but "we inclusive" in the dual and plural.  I
don't think this extension from "one" to "we" is at all unusual, and
others have remarked on it.  It's even found in French.

Wally Chafe


From Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU  Mon May 18 01:18:05 1998
From: Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU (Carl Rubino)
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 11:18:05 +1000
Subject: Summary of Responses to Mirative question
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.1998.111805.1000.CARL.RUBINO@ANU.EDU.AU>

RE:  Summary of Mirative Responses from the list

Dear Funknetters,
        As promised I am sending mirative data to you (5 pages only, not a
long file), seeing that my question was received with much interest.  First
of all I would like to thank all of you for all your help with my
mirativity question.  I profitted immensely from useful discussions and/or
data from David Wilkins (Aranda), David Beck (Bella Coola), Hyo Sang Lee
(Korean), Sherman Fox (ASL), Scott DeLancey, Michael Noonan, Rob Freeman,
Olga Yokoyama (Russian), Cecilia Ford (Nepali), Wallace Chafe (Caddo),
David Parkinson (Inuktitut), Richard Cameron (Spanish), Enrique Sanchis
(Quechua), Guillermo Lorenzo (Jacaru), John Bowden (Makian Dalam), Sasha
Aikhenvald (Tariana), Noel Rude (Sahaptian), and Paul Hopper.
        I am working hard to put my paper together, so if any of you has
other suggestions for me (or data on exclamatives/ morphemes or systems
encoding information that is unexpected by the speaker), please let me
know.  The data below are partially contributed by FUNKNETters and
Austronesianists, and partially extracted from reference grammars here in
Australia.

SYNTACTIC EXPRESSION - Mirative systems

Andean Spanish (Bolivian highlands)  Use of pluperfect

        Habian sabido fumar.
        (They DO smoke I just found out).

Georgian (Aronson; Tuite)  present perfect = surprise

        Amerik'eli              q'opila!
        American.NOM    be-PERF:3s
        'He has been an American-  so he's an American!'

Rapa Nui (Du Feu 1996:91)  Double negative strategy

        Kai     hini    'o      koe.
        NEG     delay   NEG     2s
        'That didn't take you long!'

Tariana (Aikhenvald, p.c.)  (lexicalized)

        nu-ka-mhe       nu-a-mahka                      na-i~tu-nipe-nuku
        1s-see-ADM      1s-say-REC.P.NON.VIS    3p-steal-NOM-TOP.NON.A/S
        'I was unpleasantly surprised by the theft (I didn't see).'

Surigaunun (Verstraelen 1986:257)

        pagka-gana              sa      pagka'un!
        NOM-delicious   GEN     food
        'How delicious is the food!'

Tagalog

        ang     saráp           ng      pansít
        TOP     delicious       GEN     noodles
        'How delicious the noodles are!'

CLAUSE COMBINING - CONJUNCTIONS

Karo Batak (Woollams 1996)

        ..tapi  temuéna é       dungna          ipelawesna              kang.
          but   guest.his       that    finish.NMS      PASS.CAUS.go.he EMPH
        '... but in the end, he sent his guest away after all.'

        Agrési          pemana  tentara kerajaan        Belanda  reh    ka.
        agression       first           army    kingdom Holland  come EMPH
        'The first Dutch Police Action came after all.'

Koasati- differentiates y- 'but' contrary to expectation, from -tikabut
        statement must be contrary to expectation  (Kimball 1991)

        My grandmother said, their hair used to be braided-Y-, but contrary
to what one might think, they ysed to be able to keep on in such a way.'

        They looked for a doctor-tika  but where unable to find one.

Tukang Besi (Donohue 1995:425)
        io and padahal (loan from Indonesian)


MORPHOLOGICAL EXPRESSION

Jacaru (Peru) (Lorenzo, p.c.)

        tz'iq   ampra-j-ilii
        left    hand-SURP-so
        'so it is his left hand!'

Quechua- (Cuzco, Sanchis p.c.)

        jamu-sqa 'he unexpectedly came'

Washo-

        di      métiwe iti/.a?yi? i     I'm starting to get grey hairs.'
        ? í.yel máma?.á?yi i            He is getting big (in my absence)

Manipuri (Chelliah 1997:296)

        má      ngerang skul    cet-pe-jat-le.
        he      yesterday       school  go-NOM-TYPE(NOM)-INTERROG
        'Could it be that he went to school yesterday?!'

Korean (Lee 1993)

        uchepu          o-ass-kuna
        postman come-ANT-UNASSIM
        'The postman has come.'  (He comes every day)

        uchepu-ka       o-ass-ne
        postman-NOM     come-ANT-FR(factual.realization)
        'The postman has come (surprisingly).'

Korean system -ne vs. -kun vs. declarative -ta (noteworthy, provoking or
intriguing, question, command or proposal) (Lee 1993)

-ne                                                          -kun
more factual info, definitive                    less definitive info.
immediate (just perceived)                      info past /immediate info.
unexpected / unassimilated                     unassimilated
speaker confident about truth of info.     speaker not always confident
about truth

Bella Coola (Nater 1984:126)
        7nts+su.                        Surprise, it's me!
        tic+su  t'ayc   ti+staltmc      You might not have expected it, but
he is a chief.

Kugu Nganchara (Australia, Smith and Johnson, ms)

        thana           nganhca nga'a   kamba   minha   piki-ku
        3pNOM   1pexcNOM        fish    cook    animal  big-EXCL
        'They and we cooked fish in ashes, and even pig too!'

Ilocano- (Rubino 1997)

        Nag-bassit=en
        PF.AF-small=CONTR
        'How small!'

Caddo- Chafe 1995:357  hus- prefix; Chafe 1976:82 was- prefix.

        hús-ba-?a=sa=yi=k'awihsa?
        ADMIR-1ST.BENEF.IRREALS-name-know-PROGRESSIVE
        My goodness he knows my name!

        was-sa-náy-?aw  >  wásánáy?aw
        he is not likely to sing

        was-ba-?a-sa-yik-?awi-hah > wásba:sáyk'awihah
        my goodness, he knows my name!

Paamese (Vanuatu, Crowley 1982:229-232)

        Tahosi=visi                     Ostrelia        mari+aute=visi
        3s.REAL.good.EXTREME    Aus.            big.place.EXTREME
        'It was really good!'           'Australia is a really big place!'

-se  negative expectation, contrast,  event contrary to expectation +
Uniqueness (alone)

        kaiko=se=suk            ko+doo
        2s=neg.exp.SUB  2sREAL.stay
        'Are you staying on your own now?'

        Kove            torongo=s       velah
        2sREAL.COP      drunk.neg.exp   ong
        'You are still drunk (rather than being sober)!'


Aranda (Alice Springs, Aus).  Wilkins 1986:582.

        Lhwerrpe-k-itanye,      unrip-irre-me
        winter-DAT-SURP hot-INCH-NPP
        'Even though it's winter, it's getting hot.'

        Also used where unexpected behavior of speaker is affecting the
speaker in a negative way... Even though there were all those women around,
the man took all his clothes off (how disgusting!)

Acehnese (Durie 1985:259, 268).

        meu=ji=jak      lon=seutot
        if=3=go 1=follow
        'If he goes, I'll follow.'  (p. 259)

        meu=i=kap=keuh
        SURPR=3=bite=2
        'If it didn't go and bite you!'

Kannada (Sridhar 1990:230)

        eraDu   nimiSadalli     eNTu    mayli   o:DibiTTa
        two     minutes.LOC     eight   mile    run.pp.pf.pst.3sm
        'He ran eight miles in two minutes!'

        'The umbrella accidentally poked the girl in her side.'

PARTICLES

Sarangani Manobo-  DuBois 1976:56

        Nekeabat=ka kedi te osa.        Surprisingly you got the pig.

Chrau (Thomas 1971:88)

        Anh vlam de co sipai.           I met (surprise!) the rabbit!
        Neh deh de la-u!                She gave birth to a coconut!

Kankanaey (Allen 1978:86-87)

        Manlalaba       baw     adis    Lola.
        launder         SURP    EMPH    Lola
        'Oh, I see Lola is doing the laundry!'

        Ey,     niliw-ak        gayam   di!
        EXCL    forgot-I        SURP    that
        'Oh no!  I forgot it!'

Kilivila (Senft, p.c.)

        ina sopa!
        mother lie!     what a lie!

Akha (Thurgood 1986:218)-

        nja     'nonpast, nonexpected event'
        njá     'past, nonexpected event'  (high tone)
        nja     'to be able to'

REFERENCES:

Allen, Janet. 1978.  Kankanaey Adjuncts. Studies in Philippine Linguistics
2:1:82-102.
Chafe, Wallace. 1976.  The Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan Languages. Hague:
Mouton.
Chafe, Wallace, and Johanna Nichols (eds.). 1986.  Evidentiality: The
Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing
Corporation.
Chelliah, Shobhana Lakshmi. 1992. A study of Manipuri Grammar. PhD
Dissertation,  Australian National  University.
Crowley, Terry. 1982. The Paamese Language of Vanuatu. Canberra: Pacific
Linguistics B-87.
DeLancey, Scott. 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected
information. Linguistic Typology 1:33-52.
Donohue, Mark. 1995.  The Tukang Besi Language. PhD Thesis, Australian
National University.
Du Bois, Carl. 1976. Sarangani Manobo. Manila: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Du Feu, Veronica. 1996.  Rapa Nui. London: Routledge.
Du Houx, Yves. 1992. Le verbe grec ancien. Louvain, Belgium: Linguistiques
de Louvain.
Durie, Mark. 1985.  A Grammar of Acehnese. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris
Publications.
Jacobsen, William H., Jr. 1964. A grammar of the Washo Language. UC
Berkeley Dissertation.
Kimball, Geoffrey. 1991. Koasati Grammar. Univ. of Nebraska Press.
Lee, Hyo Sang. 1993. Cognitive constraints on expressing newly perceived
information, with reference to epistemic modal suffixes in Korean.
Lipski, John M. 1994.  Latin American Spanish. New York: Longman Publishing.
Mosel, Ulrike and Even Hovdhangen. 1992.  Samoan Reference Grammar. Oslo:
Scandinavian University Press.
Nater, H. F. The Bella Coola Language. Ottawa: Canadian Ethnology Service
Paper no. 92, National Museum of Man, Mercury Series.
Porter, Doris. 1979. Northern Kankanay Morphology.  Studies in Philippine
Linguistics 3:2:20-62.
Rubino, Carl. 1997. Reference Grammar of Ilocano. PhD Dissertation,
University of California, Santa Barbara.
Sridhar S. N. 1990.  Kannada. London: Routledge.
Senft, Gunter. 1986. Kilivila. Berlin: Mouton.
Smith, Ian, and Steve Johnson. 1985ms. Kugu Nganhcara. manuscript,
Australian National University.
Thomas, David. 1971. Chrau Grammar. Honolulu:  Oceanic Linguistics Special
Publications no. 7.
Thurgood, Graham. 1986.  The nature and Origins of the Akha Evidentials
System.  In Chafe and Nichols (eds.) 214-222.
Verstraelen, Eugene. 1986. Elementary Analysis of Surigaunun Dialect.
Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 14:232-262.
Walrod, Michael. 1979. Discourse Grammar in Gaddang. Dallas: Summer
Institute of Linguistics.
Wilkins, David. 1986. Particles/clitics for criticism and complaint in
Mparntwe Arrente (Aranda). Journal of Pragmatics 10:575-596.

=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=\\=
Dr. Carl Rubino
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology
F-Block OAA
Australian National University,
Canberra, ACT 0200,  AUSTRALIA
Phone: +61 2 6249 2053 (office)
Fax:  +61 2 6249 0332


From Zylogy at AOL.COM  Wed May 20 03:24:29 1998
From: Zylogy at AOL.COM (Zylogy)
Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 23:24:29 EDT
Subject: sound symbolism
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.1998.232429.EDT.ZYLOGY@AOL.COM>

Hi. A new organization is being put together for folks interested in sound
symbolism and other forms of nonarbitrariness in human communication. Over 50
people have already signed up. If this sounds like something that you would
like to participate in, please let me know. Thanks.

Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com


From jrubba at POLYMAIL.CPUNIX.CALPOLY.EDU  Sat May 23 00:00:26 1998
From: jrubba at POLYMAIL.CPUNIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba)
Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 17:00:26 -0700
Subject: London housing sought spring 1999
Message-ID: <FRI.22.MAY.1998.170026.0700.JRUBBA@POLYMAIL.CPUNIX.CALPOLY.EDU>

Dear listers,

There is a strong possibility that I will be teaching in London between
late March and early June, 1999. I am already thinking about possibilities
for a place to live. Temporary accommodations seem to be incredibly
expensive, so I am hoping to find one of the following, in the London
area or within a reasonable commute distance (our classes will be held in
the Birkbeck College building in Bloomsbury):
(a) a room in a private home
(b) a temporary flat-share
(c) a housing-exchange deal (I live in yours in London, you in mine in
sunny California!)

Cost to be negotiated.

I am single, no children, female, non-smoker, fastidious and relatively
neat and well-organized. I do not shy away from my share of housecleaning
and also like to cook (and can!) I may have a visitor from America for a
short time at some point during the visit. I cannot live with smokers or
large dogs. I have lived in England before, so I know to expect (and
respect) things like small fridges and hot water heaters (compared to our
huge appliances here). I keep 'normal' hours (that is, I am diurnal).

Also, I may extend my stay in England past the end of the teaching term. I
might want to stay on in the London area for something between 2 weeks and
a month -- into late June, early July.

Please reply directly to me if you know of any possibilities, and please
forward this to anyone you know who might be able to help me out.

Thank you!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics              ~
English Department, California Polytechnic State University   ~
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407                                     ~
Tel. (805)-756-2184  E-mail: jrubba at polymail.calpoly.edu      ~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


From bingfu at USC.EDU  Tue May 26 16:27:19 1998
From: bingfu at USC.EDU (bingfu)
Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 09:27:19 -0700
Subject: drift from OV to VO
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.1998.092719.0700.BINGFU@USC.EDU>

Dear Netters,

 On Sat, 24 Jan 1998, Frederick Newmeyer wrote:

  Matthew Dryer has shown that, once we correct for areal and genetic
  bias,
  the 'preference' for OV order is greater than that for VO order in the
  world's languages. But interestingly, I have seen it claimed in a
  variety
  of places that attested (or uncontroversially reconstructed) word order
  changes from OV to VO are far more common than those from VO to OV.

  My first question is how widely accepted is such a claim among
  historical
  linguists and typologists? Is there much support for such an idea and
  its
  implication of an overall general 'drift' from OV to VO?

  If this claim seems well motivated, the conjunction of the 'preference'
  for OV and the 'drift' to VO is very curious, no? One might even
  conclude
  that the OV preference is a remnant of a 'proto-world' OV (caused by
  what?), which functional forces (but what functional forces?) are
  skewing
  gradually to VO. And, indeed, linguists coming from a variety of
  directions(Venneman, Givon, Bichakjian, and others) have concluded
  something very much along those lines.

  I'm curious what thoughts FUNKNET subscribers might have on this
  question.
  I'll summarize if there is enough interest.

Fritz  <fjn at u.washington.edu>

I regard Newmeyer's query very interesting and theoretically
significant.  It seems to be
a pity that responses to his query have been far from enough so far.
To solicit more discussion on the issue,
I venture to posting my tentative opinions below.

1.
There may be several reasons for proto-languages to tend be OV rather than
VO.

For instance, OV and SV are harmonious.  Both O and S are dependents of
the head V.
Languages prefer OV over VO just like they prefer SV over VS.

2.
Proto-languages are expected to be simple in terms of nominal expressions.
However, along with the developing of NP internal structure and
 the extension of the size of NP, the pressure to move large NP
 to the end of sentence increases too.  Between S and O, O is
more likely to be heavy.  That is why O, but not S, tend to postpone.

Matthew Dryer 1980's  "The Positional Tendencies of
Sentential Noun Phrases in Universal Grammar."
(Canadian Journal of Linguistics 25: 12-195)
argues that postposing of sentential NPs is overall
preferred over preposing.  Languages only resort to preposing when
postposing would violate the rigid V-final order.

3. In addition, a heavy O is normally a piece of new information.
New information tends to appear later
in the sentence. Therefore, everything else being equal, a heavy
O tends postpone rather than prepose.

4. On the other hand, if a language starts with SVO order, there seems
no obvious motivation to drift to SOV, unless O is a pronominal or
clitic.

In short, the drift from OV to VO is motivated by the processing ease.

Based on the above conjectures, I think now the issue is why
some verb-final languages are so stubborn to resist O proposing rather
than why O postpose.
According to Steele's "word order variation" (1978), half of SOV
languages (nonrigid OV pattern) allow SVO orders.
I wonder are there some common typological features shared by
all rigid OV languages?

Bingfu Lu
USC


From meira at RUF.RICE.EDU  Tue May 26 22:40:24 1998
From: meira at RUF.RICE.EDU (Sergio Meira S.C.O.)
Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 17:40:24 -0500
Subject: drift from OV to VO
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SV4.3.94.980526091627.9380A-100000@aludra.usc.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.1998.174024.0500.MEIRA@RUF.RICE.EDU>

Dear Funknetters,

I am interested in purpose constructions and their diachronic sources.
Does anyone know of a general study of purpose constructions, especially a
typology, if possible with information on the etymologies (especially
semantic changes)?

Thank you in advance for any help,

Sergio Meira.
meira at ruf.rice.edu


From bingfu at USC.EDU  Wed May 27 23:46:34 1998
From: bingfu at USC.EDU (bingfu)
Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 16:46:34 -0700
Subject: summary of Italian NP
Message-ID: <WED.27.MAY.1998.164634.0700.BINGFU@USC.EDU>

Dear Netters,

        A while ago, I posted the following query.
Longogbardi 1994 provides the following paradigm.

               a.      Il  mio Giani ha finalmente telefonato
                       the my Gianni    finally    called up

               b.      *Mio Gianni ha finalmente telefonato
                         my Gianni    finally    called up

               c.      Gianni mio ha finalmente telefonato
                       Gianni my     finally    called up
                       Gianni my     finally    called up

               d.      Il  Gianni  mio ha finalmente telefonato
                       the Gianni  my     finally    called up


He accounts for the paradigm in formalist terms and takes them as crucial
evidence
for N movement hypothesis.

My questions are:

1. Is there any functional explanation?

2. Is there any meaning difference among a, c and d,
especially between c and d.

        Bingfu Lu

        I now got eight responses and the following is my summary for
your information.  If somebody needs all these responses, let me know
and I will forward them to the individual.

                        SUMMARY
Most importantly, several netters pointed out that the four sentences
belong to different
Italian dialects.  Specifically, (a) is of standard Italian (Northern
dialect) and
(c) and (d) are of Southern dialects.

The explanation of the pragmatic differences among the four sentences seem
to be
various form person to person.

Francesca Fici points out that both (b) and (d) are bad.

Rick Mc Callister
says that while article + possessive + noun is the norm in standard
Italian for
inanimate objects, the article is dropped for human relationships.

Giampaolo Poletto provides a very detailed explanation of the differences
among the four.
In his, opinions, (b) is not completely bad, but just not complete.

Nigel J. Ross claims:
(b). could more or less be heard in fast speech, the article "il" being
just
about lost. Nevertheless, there would be some slight slurred indication of
the presence of "il".
In addition to regional difference, (c) could also suggest a slightly
stronger
involvement, perhaps indicating a closer affection (than a.) In the
Italian
versions of "Oh my God!": "O mio Dio!" and "O Dio mio!", the second is in
some ways stronger, more tragic, and - of course - more southern (more
histrionic??).


        Thanks for the followin netters who offered their
responses.

Giulia Bencini <bencini at psych.colorado.edu
Pier Marco Bertinetto" <bertiNET at SNS.IT
Rick Mc Callister <rmccalli at MUW.Edu
Francesca Fici <frafici at CESIT1.UNIFI.IT
Seth Jerchower <sejerchower at JTSA.EDU
Gabriele Pallotti <pallotti at dsc.unibo.it
Giampaolo Poletto <brave at chiostro.univr.it>, <dylandog at btk.jpte.hu>
Nigel J. Ross" <njross at iol.it


Bingfu Lu
USC


From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Fri May 29 17:32:25 1998
From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike L Gildea)
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 12:32:25 -0500
Subject: 8th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse (fwd)
Message-ID: <FRI.29.MAY.1998.123225.0500.SPIKEG@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 11:14:48 -0600
From: "Rachel R. W. Robertson" <rrrobert at facstaff.wisc.edu>

Eighth Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse
Madison, WI
July 29 - 31, 1998

For more information about the conference, visit our web site at
http://www.psyc.memphis.edu/ST&D/ST&D.htm, or contact Rachel Robertson at
textdis at macc.wisc.edu or 608-262-6989.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 29

7:00 - 8:00 p.m.  INVITED PRESENTATION
          EVE SWEETSER, Levels and channels in discourse structure
8:00 - 10:00 p.m.  Reception


THURSDAY, JULY 30

9:00 - 10:00 a.m.  INVITED PRESENTATION
          DOUGLAS BIBER, Literacy and linguistic specialization: Synchronic
and diachronic evidence concerning the linguistic correlates of literacy

10:00 - 10:20  Break

Thursday, Paper Session 1

Talk #01, Thursday, July 30, 10:20 - 10:40 a.m.
     Authors: Tony Noice and Helga Noice
     Title: Memory benefits of active experiencing for expository and
narrative material
Talk #02, Thursday, July 30, 10:45 - 11:05 a.m.
     Authors: Danielle McNamara
     Title: Self-explanation: Effects of practice, prior domain knowledge,
and reading skill
Talk #03, Thursday, July 30, 11:10 - 11:30 a.m.
     Authors: Guy Denhière and Cédrick Bellissens
     Title: Retrieval from long-term working memory during reading
Talk #04, Thursday, July 30, 11:35 - 11:55 a.m.
     Authors: Arthur Glenberg and David A. Robertson
     Title: Indexical understanding of instructions

Thursday, Paper Session 2

Talk #05, Thursday, July 30, 10:20 - 10:40 a.m.
     Authors: Michelle Gregory and Laura Michaelis
     Title: Topicalization and left dislocation: A functional opposition
revisited
Talk #06, Thursday, July 30, 10:45 - 11:05 a.m.
     Authors: Pamela Downing
     Title: The use of reference forms to negotiate stance in English
conversation
Talk #07, Thursday, July 30, 11:10 - 11:30 a.m.
     Authors: Tânia Mara Gastão Saliés
     Title: Linguistic attributes and conceptual organization: A
cross-linguistic analysis of discourse in the light of Cognitive Grammar
Talk #08, Thursday, July 30, 11:35 - 11:55 a.m.
     Authors: Hirokuni Masuda
     Title: Narrative representation theory: Universals in Creole discourse

12:00 - 1:30 p.m. Lunch

Symposium, Thursday, July 30, 1:30 - 3:00 p.m.
     Symposium Organizer: Art Graesser
     Title: AutoTutor: A computer tutor that simulates human tutorial dialogue

     The goals and design of AutoTutor, Art Graesser & Stan Franklin

     A Demonstration of AutoTutor, Lee McCauley, Barry Gholson, & Bill Marks

     A curriculum script on the topic of computer literacy, Myles Bogner,
Doug Hacker, Holly Yetman, & Bianca Klettke

     Language modules and speech act classification, Jim Hoeffner, Brent
Olde, & Zhoahua Zhang

     Using Latent Semantic Analysis to represent knowledge about computer
literacy, Peter Wiemer-Hasting

     Tests of Latent Semantic Analysis in the domain of computer literacy,
Katja Wiemer-Hastings & Ashraf Anwar

     Tutor dialogue moves in naturalistic tutoring, Natalie Person,
Victoria Pomeroy, & Matt Weeks

     AutoTutor's generation of dialogue moves, Derek Harter

     Intonation and facial expressions of talking head, Roger Kreuz,
Kristen Link, & Xiangen Hu

Thursday, Paper Session 3

Talk #09, Thursday, July 30, 1:30 - 1:50 p.m.
     Authors: Francisco Ocampo
     Title: The interaction between discourse, cognition, syntax,
pragmatics, and prosody: The case of word order variation in spoken Spanish
in constructions with a verb, a noun phrase argument, and an adverb
Talk #10, Thursday, July 30, 1:55 - 2:15 p.m.
     Authors: Stéphanie Montoya, Thierry Baccino and Guy Denhière
     Title: The effect of referent accessibility on pronoun processing:
Evidence from eye movement recordings
Talk #11, Thursday, July 30, 2:20 - 2:40 p.m.
     Authors: Pierre Thérouanne and Guy Denhière
     Title: Time course of single-word context effects on meaning access
Talk #12, Thursday, July 30, 2:45 - 3:05 p.m.
     Authors: Martine Cornuejols and Jean-Pierre Rossi
     Title: What is associated in the mind of a subject when he reads words
or sees pictures?

3:10 - 3:30  Break

Thursday, Paper Session 4

Talk #13, Thursday, July 30, 3:30 - 3:50 p.m.
     Authors: Paul van den Broek, Yuhtsuen Tzeng and Michael E. Young
     Title: The role of attention allocation during reading in the
construction of mental representation of a text
Talk #14, Thursday, July 30, 3:55 - 4:15 p.m.
     Authors: Franz Schmalhofer and Ludger van Elst
     Title: The comprehension of scandals: Cognitive implications from
descriptions of cheating behavior
Talk #15, Thursday, July 30, 4:20 - 4:40 p.m.
     Authors: Isabelle Tapiero and Nathalie Blanc
     Title: The multidimensional aspects of a situation model constructed
from text: Effects of spatial and non spatial information
Talk #16, Thursday, July 30, 4:45 - 5:05 p.m.
     Authors: Sami Gulgoz, Tarcan Kumkale and M. Emrah Aktunc
     Title: The effects of text coherence, need for cognition, and prior
knowledge on situation models

Thursday, Paper Session 5

Talk #17, Thursday, July 30, 3:30 - 3:50 p.m.
     Authors: Heather Bortfeld
     Title: A cross-linguistic analysis of idiom comprehension by native
and non-native speakers
Talk #18, Thursday, July 30, 3:55 - 4:15 p.m.
     Authors: Rachel Giora and Ofer Fein
     Title: Familiar and less familiar ironies: The graded salience hypothesis
Talk #19, Thursday, July 30, 4:20 - 4:40 p.m.
     Authors: Herbert Colston
     Title: An evaluation of conceptual metaphor via extra-linguistic
paradigms: Evidence from category accessibility and reading inferences
Talk #20, Thursday, July 30, 4:45 - 5:05 p.m.
     Authors: Mark Andrews and Frank Keil
     Title: Conceptual organization and discourse processing

5:15 - 5:45 p.m.  Business Meeting

8:00 - 10:00 p.m. Poster Session
Shape - the elusive property of discourse and the design of digital documents
Andrew Dillon

An intertextual typology for text analysis
Juanita Marinkovich & Ricardo Benitez

Updating a situation model: Evidence for on-line and backward processes
Nathalie Blanc & Isabelle Tapiero

The effects of prior knowledge on the content of a situation model
constructed from a descriptive text
Nathalie Blanc & Isabelle Tapiero

Evolution of subjects' initial knowledge structure on a specific domain:
Effects of relations between concepts and of expertise
Isabelle Tapiero & Gaelle Molinari

Memory for metaphors and similes in meaningful discourse
Richard Harris & Noah Jacob Mosier

Violating orientational metaphors affects text comprehension
William Langston & John

The eventuality of propositions
Max Louwerse

The influence of causal connections on the construction of a coherent
memory text representation: Connection strength versus connectivity strength
Marie-Pilar Quintana, Isabelle & Paul van den Broek

Implicit causality effects in the interpretation of pronouns
Jane Oakhill, Alan Garnham, David Reynolds, & Carolyn Wilshire

The influence of verb bias information on clausal integration: Implicit
causality and implicit consequentiality
Andrew Stewart, Martin J. Pickering & Anthony J. Sanford

Detecting subgoal relations in narrative comprehension
Eric Richards & Murray Singer

Are elaborative task conditions necessary for making on-line inferences
about fictional characters' emotional states?
Tammy Bourg, Lori Bernard, Candise Bockrath , & Peter Tran

The importance of reactions for inferring characters' emotions in narrative
texts
Scott Vincent Masten & Tammy Bourg

Does instrument inference occur on-line during reading?
Sung-il Kim , Jung-Mo Lee , Jae-Ho Lee , & Kun-Hyo Lee

The contribution of associative processes to the generation of predictive
inferences
Nicolas Campion & Jean Pierre Rossi

What inference generation research can learn from cinema studies
Per Persson

Cultural influences on online text elaborations
Darcia Narvaez, Christyan Mitchell & Brian Linzie

Cognitive-cooperative strategies in the writing classroom
Pilar Morán

Reading-writing connections: discourse-oriented research
Giovanni Parodi

Plan implementation in narrative writing
Brian Linzie & Amy R. Briggs

Task and context: Factors that contribute to expressing one's own ideas in
multiple-source writing
Rosalind Horowitz

The effects and sources of effects of questioning timing on comprehension
of stories
Yuhtsuen Tzeng & Paul van den Broek

The effects of causal text revision on more- and less-skilled readers'
comprehension of easy/difficult text
Tracy Linderholm, Michelle Gaddy, Maureen Mischinski, & Paul van den Broek

Individual differences in remediating poor text comprehension
Mina Johnson-Glenberg

The role of working memory capacity in integrating outline material with text
Amber Wells & Peter W. Foltz

Locating information in complex text: Domain expertise or document literacy?
Jean-François Rouet & Laurent Guillon

Effects of literacy and type of TV news on recall
Fatos Goksen, Sami Gulgoz & Cigdem Kagitcibasi

Suppression mechanisms in children: Memory for previously relevant
information in good and poor comprehenders
Alix Seigneuric & Marie-France Ehrlich

Modelisation of sentence comprehension in reading by children
Céline Asmussen


FRIDAY, JULY 31

9:00 - 10:00 a.m.  INVITED PRESENTATION
          JANE OAKHILL, Individual differences in children's comprehension
skill

10:00 - 10:20 Break

Friday, Paper Session 6

Talk #21, Friday, July 31, 10:20 - 10:40 a.m.
     Authors: Wilbert Spooren and Ted Sanders
     Title: What does children's discourse tell us about the nature of
coherence relations?
Talk #22, Friday, July 31, 10:45 - 11:05 a.m.
     Authors: Peter Meyerson, Susan R. Goldman, Nathalie Cote, Cynthia
Mayfield-Stewart, and David M. Bloome
     Title: "Where's Glowbird?": Children's use of multiple dimensions in
story narratives
Talk #23, Friday, July 31, 11:10 - 11:30 a.m.
     Authors: Jean-François Rouet and Caroline Golder
     Title: Why did the protest turn violent? 12 to 14 year-olds'
understanding of controversy accounts
Talk #24, Friday, July 31, 11:35 - 11:55 a.m.
     Authors: Guy Denhière and Patrick Bougé
     Title: Using a corpus of textbooks to predict and to simulate
organization of knowledge concerning biological concepts

Friday, Paper Session 7

Talk #25, Friday, July 31, 10:20 - 10:40 a.m.
     Authors: Mike Rinck and Andrea Haehnel
     Title: The comprehension and retention of temporal information in
situation models
Talk #26, Friday, July 31, 10:45 - 11:05 a.m.
     Authors: Joe Magliano and Michelle Schleich
     Title: Grammatical markers as processing instructions for situation
model construction: A case for verb aspect
Talk #27, Friday, July 31, 11:10 - 11:30 a.m.
     Authors: Keith Millis, Anne King and Shelly Walquist
     Title: Updating situation models across readings of descriptive texts
Talk #28, Friday, July 31, 11:35 - 11:55 a.m.
     Authors: Rolf Zwaan, K. Anders Ericsson, Carolyn E. Lally, and Len Hill
     Title: Translation of text: A new approach to monitoring the
construction of situation models during comprehension

12:00 - 1:30  Lunch Break

1:30 - 2:30  INVITED PRESENTATION
          ELIZABETH BATES, Processing language in real time:
Cross-linguistic evidence

Friday, Paper Session 8

Talk #29, Friday, July 31, 2:35 - 2:55 p.m.
     Authors: Susan Duncan
     Title: Gestures in relation to speech: Clues to discourse processes in
Chinese and English
Talk #30, Friday, July 31, 3:00 - 3:20 p.m.
     Authors: Timothy Koschmann and Curtis D. LeBaron
     Title: The complementarity of speech and gesticulation in learner
articulation
Talk #31, Friday, July 31, 3:25 - 3:45 p.m.
     Authors: Leo Noordman, Ingrid Dassen, Marc Swerts, and Jacques Terken
     Title: Prosodic expressions of text structure

Friday, Paper Session 9

Talk #32, Friday, July 31, 2:35 - 2:55 p.m.
     Authors: Ellen Spertus
     Title: Automatic recognition of hostile electronic messages
Talk #33, Friday, July 31, 3:00 - 3:20 p.m.
     Authors: Peter Foltz
     Title: Human and computer evaluation of student essays
Talk #34, Friday, July 31, 3:25 - 3:45 p.m.
     Authors: Ken Samuel
     Title: Discourse learning: Dialogue act tagging with
transformation-based learning

3:50 - 4:10  Break

Friday, Paper Session 10

Talk #35, Friday, July 31, 4:10 - 4:25 p.m.
     Authors: James Voss, Jennifer Wiley and Rebecca Sandak
     Title: On the use of narrative as argument
Talk #36, Friday, July 31, 4:30 - 4:50 p.m.
     Authors: M. Anne Britt, Rebecca Sandak, Charles Perfetti, and
Jean-Francois Rouet
     Title: Content integration and source separation in learning from
multiple texts
Talk #37, Friday, July 31, 4:55 - 5:15 p.m.
     Authors: Bonnie McLain-Allen and Douglas J. Hacker
     Title: Delayed revisions

Friday, Paper Session 11

Talk #38, Friday, July 31, 4:10 - 4:25 p.m.
     Authors: Per Persson
     Title: Coherence and inference generation in cinematic texts
Talk #39, Friday, July 31, 4:30 - 4:50 p.m.
     Authors: David Mortensen
     Title: Boundary crossing in miscommunication and problematic talk
Talk #40, Friday, July 31, 4:55 - 5:15 p.m.
     Authors: Stanton Wortham
     Title: Denotational and interactional structure in autobiographical
narrative: A dialogic approach


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Rachel R.W. Robertson
Department of Psychology
1202 W. Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6989


From bingfu at USC.EDU  Sun May 31 00:34:38 1998
From: bingfu at USC.EDU (bingfu)
Date: Sat, 30 May 1998 17:34:38 -0700
Subject: the distinction between compound noun and NP
Message-ID: <SAT.30.MAY.1998.173438.0700.BINGFU@USC.EDU>

About the category of 'fun' in 'fun game', which is hotly discussed
in the discussion about recent change of English, in linguist list.

There seems no clear demarcation between compound nouns and
[adjecitve + noun] NPs in English. However, this demarcation appear
formally clear
in Chinese. In Chinese, all [modifier + noun] structures are
compounds while all [modifier + de + noun] structures are
noncompound, either [adjective + noun] NPs or [relative + noun]
NPs.  In fact, in Chinese there is no distinction between the above two
modification, which is clearly distinguished in English.

Thus, there seems to be a typology of modification hierarchy as
the following.

                relative clause   adjectival one     in-compound one,
Chinese:        ________________________________     ________________
English:        _______________   ___________________________________


In other words,
Chinese makes clear distinction between relative clauses/adjectival
modifiers vs. in-compound modifiers; while English makes the distinction
mainly between relative clauses vs. adjectival/in-compound modifiers.

If your native language is not English and Chinese, please tell me which
is is similar to: Chinese or English?

If responses are sufficient, I will make a summary.

Bingfu Lu
USC



From bingfu at USC.EDU  Sat May  2 16:03:33 1998
From: bingfu at USC.EDU (bingfu)
Date: Sat, 2 May 1998 09:03:33 -0700
Subject: Query: double object and dative structures
Message-ID: <SAT.2.MAY.1998.090333.0700.BINGFU@USC.EDU>

Query: double object and dative structures

        It seems all double object structures can shift to dative
structures, but the reverse does not always hold, as shown in examples
below.

         (1)    a.      I give it to John.
                b.      *I give John it.

         (2)    a.      I give it to him.
                b.      *I give him it.

        Now, I would like to know:

1. Are there any counterexamples that only double object holds?
(in zero context, i.e. '?Mary threw John the ball. But he wasn't
looking' does not count).

2. As I know, this asymmetric shift relation holds true of Chinese
corresponding opposition.
    I would like to know to what extent this asymmetry is universal.
Specifically, how does your native language behave in this aspect?

If responses are sufficient to draw a conclusion, I will make a
summary.

Thanks!
Bingfu LU
USC


From ljuba at LING.SU.SE  Wed May  6 14:11:38 1998
From: ljuba at LING.SU.SE (Ljuba Veselinova)
Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 16:11:38 +0200
Subject: ICLC'99 Call for papers
Message-ID: <WED.6.MAY.1998.161138.0200.LJUBA@LING.SU.SE>

The 1999 ICLA conference will take place on the campus of Stockholm
University (SU) in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, July 10-16,
1999. We invite presentations of all current unpublished research
which considers the relationship between language and
cognition. Specific areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to
the following: function and form; lexical and grammatical meaning;
metaphor and metonymy as cultural and cognitive phenomena; literature
and cognition; language change and grammaticalization; typology;
polysemy and semantic fields; discourse analysis; language
acquisition; conceptual structure; language processing; reference
theory; relationship between language and thought;
connectionism. Contributions from the fields of neuro- and
psycholinguistics, sign language research, bilingualism,
ethnolinguistics, and cognitive science are also encouraged.

Presentation formats at ICLC99 will include invited plenary talks and
20 minutes paper presentations, as well as theme and poster
sessions. Instructions for submission of theme session proposals and
abstracts for papers and posters are posted on our web site. A list of
accepted theme sessions will be published in Cognitive Linguistics, at
the ICLC99 web site, and on e-mail lists around September 15, 1998.

Registration forms and hotel reservation forms will be available at
the web site and via ftp from February 15, 1999.

                            DATES TO NOTE
June 15,  1998  Proposals for theme sessions due
Sept. 15, 1998  Notification of acceptance of theme session proposals
Nov. 16,  1998  Abstracts for papers and posters due
Feb. 15,  1999  Notification of acceptance of abstracts and posters
Feb. 15,  1999  Early registration starts

Continuously updated information about this conference can be found at

                   http://www.iclc99.su.se./iclc99


Send queries about the conference to the organizers at

                   humfak at iclc99.su.se

                   ICLC99 Surface Mail Address
                   ICLC99 (Erling Wande)
                   Faculty of Humanities, Stockholm University
                   S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
                   Fax: +46-8-15 88 71
                   Phone +46-8-16 29 12


From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Wed May  6 15:25:49 1998
From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike L Gildea)
Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 10:25:49 -0500
Subject: Symposium on Grammaticalization (fwd)
Message-ID: <WED.6.MAY.1998.102549.0500.SPIKEG@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 4 May 1998 15:18:02 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Ilse Wischer <wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de>

UNIVERSIT?T POTSDAM
Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam


PD Dr.  Ilse Wischer								Tel. : (+49)0331-977-2533
Institut f?r Anglistik/Amerikanistik							Fax  : (+49)0331-977-2069
Universit?t Potsdam, Postfach 601553, 14415 Potsdam					Sekr.:
(+49)0331-977-2524
									e-mail: wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de


	Call for Papers
	April 1998

	New Reflections on Grammaticalization

	An International Symposium at Potsdam University
	17-19 June 1999

Since Meillet?s first mentioning of the term grammaticalization in 1912
several generations of scholars have contributed to a better understanding
of this process of linguistic change. Recent studies are closely connected
with the names of Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott. Further major impulses
came from a number of works in Cologne, from an International Symposium at
the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1988, or from empirical research based
on computer corpora edited in a collective volume by Matti Rissanen et al.

Numerous publications and conference contributions in the last ten years
have revealed a growing interest in the theory of grammaticalization. People
have worked on several topics reaching from theoretical investigations on
its status with respect to various theories of grammar up to its practical
application to linguistic phenomena in many languages of the world. This has
led, on the one hand, to new insights and a deeper understanding, it has
also revealed, however, new questions that call for an answer and require
further research.

The aim of this symposium is to bring together scholars who are working in
this area to present their findings and discuss such topics as e.g. whether
there are two different types of grammaticalization, one on the
propositional level and another one on the discourse level, whether there
are convincing examples of the reversability of grammaticalization, what
kind of relationship holds between grammaticalization and lexicalization, or
which internal and external factors can accelerate or retard grammaticalization.

Papers are invited on all aspects related to grammaticalization in its
synchronic or diachronic perspective, with respect to theoretical
reflections or practical findings. Studies based on linguistic phenomena in
English are particularly welcome.







Academic programme:

Opening lecture:		Christian Lehmann, University of Bielefeld, Germany

Plenary lectures (so far):	Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico, United States
				T. Giv?n, University of Oregon, United States
				Bernd Heine, University of Cologne, Germany
				Ekkehard K?nig, Free University Berlin, Germany


Social Programme:
There will be a conference dinner, a guided tour through the city of Potsdam
including a visit of one of its famous castles, a visit of the Potsdam Film
Studios or a boat tour on the Havel. Details about the social programme will
be given in the 2nd circular.


Accomodation:
Accomodation will be in hotels in town at conference rates. A limited number
of moderately priced rooms will be available in the guest house of the
University. You will have to book the rooms on your own, mentioning your
participation in the symposium. Addresses will be given in the 2nd circular.


About the city of Potsdam and Potsdam University:
In 1993 Brandenburg?s capital celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its
founding. Potsdam's distinctive appearance began to emerge when the town
became the residence of Prussian royalty. To this day the capital attracts
many visitors. The grounds of the three royal parks, the palace of Sans
Souci and the New Palace, Schinkel's Charlottenhof, an architectural gem,
the Cecilienhof Palace as well as numerous churches and Italianate villas
continue to charm visitors today. Caf?s, restaurants, museums and galeries
are an integral part of the capital's unique cityscape.
	Among 140,000 Potsdamers, there are 11,000 university students, most of
whom live in halls of residence on the outskirts of town. Potsdam's location
could not be more ideal for leisure time activities: it is surrounded by
forests, lakes and rivers and a short commuter train ride takes you to the
nation's nearby capital, Berlin.
	Since the last century, Potsdam has been a centre for research in the
natural sciences. Today Potsdam is again the home of respected research
institutes. For a few years now it has also been a university town. 
	The University of Potsdam was founded on 15 July 1991. Located on three
campuses - Am Neuen Palais, Golm and Potsdam-Babelsberg - the university
absorbed most of the staff of Brandenburg State College (previously the
Potsdam College of Education) and a few members of the staff of the College
of Law and Administration (previously the Academy of Government and Law of
the GDR, dissolved in 1990).
	The Institute of English and American Studies is situated on the campus in
Golm. It is divided into Linguistics, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies,
Didactics and Practical Language Acquisition.  Research Projects in the
Linguistics Department include such topics as Principles of Linguistic
Change, Celtic Englishes, Second Language Acquisition, English in Australia.
	For further information on Potsdam and the University see the university's
homepage at http://www.uni-potsdam.de.





Submission of papers
E-mail your abstract (approximately 250 words) by 15 January 1999 to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de 
or send it on paper together with disc (in Word or Word Perfect) to: 
Ilse Wischer, Universit?t Potsdam, Institut f?r Anglistik und Amerikanistik,
Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam. Germany.
Acceptance notifications will be sent to the authors by 1 March 1999. I plan
to publish the proceedings.


Deadlines
I ask for your preliminary registration (to get on our mailing list) as soon
as possible. The Second Circular with details about accomodation and other
costs will reach you by mid- November 1998. An early registration at reduced
rate is possible by 15 December 1998, registration at normal rate by 15
April 1999.

For further information contact:	 wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de


PD Dr. Ilse Wischer
Potsdam, 22 April 1998


Preliminary registration form

To receive the next circular, please fill in and send this form (by e-mail
or ordinary mail) to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de, or on paper together with disc to: Ilse Wischer,
Universit?t Potsdam, Institut f?r Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Postfach
601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany.



Name:


Affiliation:


Mailing address:





E-mail:


Phone:


Fax:


I would like / would not like to present a paper.
Title of paper, if any:
-------------- next part --------------


UNIVERSIT?T POTSDAM
Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam


PD Dr.  Ilse Wischer                                                            Tel. : (+49)0331-977-2533
Institut f?r Anglistik/Amerikanistik                                                  Fax  : (+49)0331-977-2069
Universit?t Potsdam, Postfach 601553, 14415 Potsdam                                   Sekr.: (+49)0331-977-2524
                                                                        e-mail: wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de


        Call for Papers
        April 1998

        New Reflections on Grammaticalization

        An International Symposium at Potsdam University
        17-19 June 1999

Since Meillet s first mentioning of the term grammaticalization in 1912 several generations of scholars have contributed to a better understanding of this process of linguistic change. Recent studies are closely connected with the names of Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott. Further major impulses came from a number of works in Cologne, from an International Symposium at the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1988, or from empirical research based on computer corpora edited in a collective volume by Matti Rissanen et al.

Numerous publications and conference contributions in the last ten years have revealed a growing interest in the theory of grammaticalization. People have worked on several topics reaching from theoretical investigations on its status with respect to various theories of grammar up to its practical application to linguistic phenomena in many languages of the world. This has led, on the one hand, to new insights and a deeper understanding, it has also revealed, however, new questions that call for an answer and require further research.

The aim of this symposium is to bring together scholars who are working in this area to present their findings and discuss such topics as e.g. whether there are two different types of grammaticalization, one on the propositional level and another one on the discourse level, whether there are convincing examples of the reversability of grammaticalization, what kind of relationship holds between grammaticalization and lexicalization, or which internal and external factors can accelerate or retard grammaticalization.

Papers are invited on all aspects related to grammaticalization in its synchronic or diachronic perspective, with respect to theoretical reflections or practical findings. Studies based on linguistic phenomena in English are particularly welcome.







Academic programme:

Opening lecture:                Christian Lehmann, University of Bielefeld, Germany

Plenary lectures (so far):      Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico, United States
                                T. Giv?n, University of Oregon, United States
                                Bernd Heine, University of Cologne, Germany
                                Ekkehard K?nig, Free University Berlin, Germany


Social Programme:
There will be a conference dinner, a guided tour through the city of Potsdam including a visit of one of its famous castles, a visit of the Potsdam Film Studios or a boat tour on the Havel. Details about the social programme will be given in the 2nd circular.


Accomodation:
Accomodation will be in hotels in town at conference rates. A limited number of moderately priced rooms will be available in the guest house of the University. You will have to book the rooms on your own, mentioning your participation in the symposium. Addresses will be given in the 2nd circular.


About the city of Potsdam and Potsdam University:
In 1993 Brandenburg s capital celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its founding. Potsdam's distinctive appearance began to emerge when the town became the residence of Prussian royalty. To this day the capital attracts many visitors. The grounds of the three royal parks, the palace of Sans Souci and the New Palace, Schinkel's Charlottenhof, an architectural gem, the Cecilienhof Palace as well as numerous churches and Italianate villas continue to charm visitors today. Caf?s, restaurants, museums and galeries are an integral part of the capital's unique cityscape.
        Among 140,000 Potsdamers, there are 11,000 university students, most of whom live in halls of residence on the outskirts of town. Potsdam's location could not be more ideal for leisure time activities: it is surrounded by forests, lakes and rivers and a short commuter train ride takes you to the nation's nearby capital, Berlin.
        Since the last century, Potsdam has been a centre for research in the natural sciences. Today Potsdam is again the home of respected research institutes. For a few years now it has also been a university town. 
        The University of Potsdam was founded on 15 July 1991. Located on three campuses - Am Neuen Palais, Golm and Potsdam-Babelsberg - the university absorbed most of the staff of Brandenburg State College (previously the Potsdam College of Education) and a few members of the staff of the College of Law and Administration (previously the Academy of Government and Law of the GDR, dissolved in 1990).
        The Institute of English and American Studies is situated on the campus in Golm. It is divided into Linguistics, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Didactics and Practical Language Acquisition.  Research Projects in the Linguistics Department include such topics as Principles of Linguistic Change, Celtic Englishes, Second Language Acquisition, English in Australia.
        For further information on Potsdam and the University see the university's homepage at http://www.uni-potsdam.de.





Submission of papers
E-mail your abstract (approximately 250 words) by 15 January 1999 to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de 
or send it on paper together with disc (in Word or Word Perfect) to: 
Ilse Wischer, Universit?t Potsdam, Institut f?r Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam. Germany.
Acceptance notifications will be sent to the authors by 1 March 1999. I plan to publish the proceedings.


Deadlines
I ask for your preliminary registration (to get on our mailing list) as soon as possible. The Second Circular with details about accomodation and other costs will reach you by mid- November 1998. An early registration at reduced rate is possible by 15 December 1998, registration at normal rate by 15 April 1999.

For further information contact:         wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de


PD Dr. Ilse Wischer
Potsdam, 22 April 1998


Preliminary registration form

To receive the next circular, please fill in and send this form (by e-mail or ordinary mail) to:
wischer at rz.uni-potsdam.de, or on paper together with disc to: Ilse Wischer, Universit?t Potsdam, Institut f?r Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany.



Name:


Affiliation:


Mailing address:





E-mail:


Phone:


Fax:


I would like / would not like to present a paper.
Title of paper, if any:

From Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU  Thu May  7 05:39:38 1998
From: Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU (Carl Rubino)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 15:39:38 +1000
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.153938.1000.CARL.RUBINO@ANU.EDU.AU>

Dear Colleagues,
        Greetings from Australia.  I am writing to the list to ask
questions about mirativity, a category which is often neglected in
linguistic description.  Mirativity (from the label admirative) can be
defined as a grammatical category responsible for encoding SURPRISE or
anything CONTRARY to EXPECTATION.  Languages in the world that encode such
a concept morphologically do so in various ways (conjunctions, clitics,
particles, etc.)
        I would like to ask you if you know of any language that has
mirative morphemes for me to look up (references and/or texts).
        I am also posting some sample data on mirativity following this
message.
        All the best from Australia and I thank you all for your time,

        Carl Rubino


SAMPLE DATA:


        In Achenese, the mirative morpheme is a proclitic meu(ng)=  which
immediately precedes predicates it marks as surprising.  It is related to
the subordinating conjunction meu(ng) (Durie 1985:269).

MIRATIVE USE

        meu=i=kap=keuh
        surprise=3=bite=2
        'If it didn't go and bite you!'

        ka=eu   meung=meuleuh?p=kuh
        2=see   surprise=muddy=1
        'You see I'm muddy!'

CONDITIONAL USE

        meu=ji=jak      l?n=seut?t
        if=3=go 1=follow
        'If he goes, I'll follow.'


        In Chrau, the particle  d?_e is placed before unexpected clauses;
when placed before the subject, it refers to the whole clause, not just the
subject (Thomas 1971:88).

        anh     vlam    d_e     co^     sipai
        'I met (surprise) the rabbit.'

        ne&h    de&h    d_e@    la at -u.
        'She gave birth to a coconut!'

        In Philippine languages, various adverbials (non-deriving
particles) encode things that are surprising or contrary to expectation:
(Ilk, Knk. gayam, Tag. pala).  Certain morphemes may also be used for a
similiar purpose:  (Ilk nag- -en, Bontoc -et).

i.e.  Tag:    Ikaw pala.      So it's you!
        Iloc:   Nagbassiten!    How small!  (admirative)

      Tukang Besi (data from Mark Donohue 1995:425-6), a language from
South Sulawesi, has two conjunctions used to connote surprise or
exceptional information: padahal, a loan from Indonesian, and io.

        Io      te      karna           te      anu,    o-koruo na      amai
        in.fact CORE    because CORE    whatsit 3R-many NOM     they

        Rupu,   s{um}ikola,     wila    [m]-o-daga,     wila    [m]a-langke
        Rupu    school{SI}      go      REC.SI-trade    go      OCC.SI-sail

        i       Ambo,   i       Singapura, Malahau.
        OBL     Ambon   OBL     Singapore       Malahau

        'In fact it's because it's, what's that, ,all of those Rupu go to
school, go trading, go sailing in Ambon, to Singapore, to Malahau.'

        Io              te      i-manga i-helo'a-no             iso
        whereas CORE    OP-eat          OP-cook-3POSS   yon

        mbea-'e a       hebuntu,        te      watu    na      ni-helo'a-n(o)
        not.exist       NOM     state           CORE    stone   NOM
OP-cook-3POSS

        Kilivila (Senft, p.c.) has a pre-nominal interjectional particle
commonly used with kinterms and nouns to express mild shock.

        ake inagu.
        'oh my, it's my mother.'

        Some languages express surprise in their tense/aspect systems
(Georgian), or by hearsay evidentials (Turkish).  If you can refer me to
similar data along these lines, I would be very interested.



=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=\\=
Dr. Carl Rubino
Centre for Linguistic Typology
F-Block OAA
Australian National University,
Canberra, ACT 0200,  AUSTRALIA
Phone: +61 2 6249 2053 (office)
Fax:  +61 2 6249 0332


From ph1u+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU  Thu May  7 13:44:35 1998
From: ph1u+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Paul J Hopper)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 09:44:35 -0400
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <v01540b09b17784fd406b@[150.203.58.22]>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.094435.0400.PH1U@ANDREW.CMU.EDU>

Mirativity (Carl Rubino's communication) reminds me of the many
languages where the perfect aspect has become a surprise construction
(Chinese -le, Turkish -mis, noted by Carl in his last paragraph, the
English Hot News "have"). I'm in the middle of end-of-semester stuff
right now, and can't dig up the exact references, but Dan Slobin and
Sandy Thompson have written about this, and there's been some recent
stuff about its typical diachronic trajectories.

Paul


From wilcox at UNM.EDU  Thu May  7 14:06:25 1998
From: wilcox at UNM.EDU (Sherman Wilcox)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 08:06:25 -0600
Subject: Mirativity
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.080625.0600.WILCOX@UNM.EDU>

I send this privately to Carl, but I'll post it to the list also in case
anyone is interested:

One of our doctoral students at the University of New Mexico, Jim
MacFarlane, recently did some research and a paper on mirativity in
American Sign Language, where it seems that a lexical item (the word WRONG)
has acquired grammatical function and now occurs only between phrases, the
second of which expresses some unexpected or surprising event.

-- Sherman

Sherman Wilcox, Ph.D.
Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
phone: 505-277-6353
fax:   505-277-6355

wilcox at unm.edu
http://www.unm.edu/~wilcox


From dp11 at CORNELL.EDU  Thu May  7 15:17:22 1998
From: dp11 at CORNELL.EDU (David Parkinson)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 11:17:22 -0400
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <YpIPf3K00iV0Q10mpK@andrew.cmu.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.111722.0400.DP11@CORNELL.EDU>

Regarding mirativity, I recall that one of the affixes listed by Harper
(1979:55) for Baffin Inuktitut is -pasaaq 'unexpected surprise':

quviasukpasaarama
quviasuk -pasaaq -gama
be.happy -MIRA   -PERF.1sS
'Surprisingly, I'm quite happy', 'I'm pleasantly surprised'

tuqappasaaqtuq
tuqat       -pasaaq -juq
be.startled -MIRA   -PART.3sS
'He is pleasantly startled'

Harper, Kenn. 1979. _Suffixes of the Eskimo dialects of Cumberland
Peninsula and North Baffin Island_. National Museum of Man Mercury Series
Paper no. 54. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.

David Parkinson


From W.Croft at MAN.AC.UK  Thu May  7 15:43:28 1998
From: W.Croft at MAN.AC.UK (Bill Croft)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 16:43:28 +0100
Subject: Jobs at University Manchester
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.164328.0100.W.CROFT@MAN.AC.UK>

The Linguistics Department at Manchester University is currently
advertising three jobs:

A chair in Phonetics and Phonology (from September 1999)

A lectureship in Historical Linguistics (from September 1998, tenure track)

A lectureship in Linguistics (from September 1998, for five years)

For further details of all three jobs and the department, please look at
our web page:

http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/

Brief details for each job follow below.

**********************************************

Chair in Phonetics & Phonology (Ref no 308/98)

The University of Manchester invites applications for a Chair in Phonetics
& Phonology in the Department of Linguistics, which will become available
in September 1999 following the retirement of Alan Cruttenden. Applications
will be considered from those specializing in any area of phonetics and/or
phonology. A strong research and publications record is essential. The
successful candidate will also be expected to provide research leadership
in the whole area of phonetics and phonology and to enhance the
department's research income in this field.
Salary by negotiation c. ?35k p.a. Closing date for applications: 30 June 1998.
Applications forms are available from and applications should be submitted
to: Office of the Director of Personnel, The University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Tel: ++44 (0)161 275 2028; Fax: ++44
(0)161 275 2221; Minicom (for the hearing impaired): ++44 (0)161 275 7889.
Email: personnel at man.ac.uk
Website: http://www.man.ac.uk
Applications should quote the above reference number and contain the names
of three referees. It is the responsibility of applicants to ensure that
supporting letters of reference are sent to the same address by the closing
date for applications.
It is expected that interviews for this post will be conducted in early-mid
September 1998 and applicants should indicate any limitations on their
availability in that period.

Person Description
Candidates should have a strong research and publication record in any area
of phonetics and/or phonology. The successful candidate will be expected to
provide research leadership in the whole area of phonetics and phonology,
and to enhance the department's research income in this field.

Job Description
The appointed candidate will be expected to contribute to the research,
teaching and administration of the Department of Linguistics. He/she will
be required to offer courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels
and to supervise doctoral students. Headship of the Department rotates
among the senior members of staff and can be expected to fall to the
Professor of Phonetics and Phonology in due turn.

*******************************************************

Lectureship in Historical Linguistics (Ref. no. 310/98)

Applications will be considered from those specializing in any branch of
historical linguistics. A strong research record is essential, and a
completed PhD is desirable. Applicants must be able to demonstrate an
interest both in the theoretical study of language change and in the
history of one or more languages and language families. Preference may be
given to candidates whose research relates to the history of a language or
languages other than English. The starting date is 1 September 1998 or as
soon as possible thereafter. Salary in the range: ?16045 - ?21894 p.a.
(under review). Closing date for applications: 9 June 1998.
Applications forms are available from and applications should be submitted
to: Office of the Director of Personnel, The University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Tel: ++44 (0)161 275 2028; Fax: ++44
(0)161 275 2221; Minicom (for the hearing impaired): ++44 (0)161 275 7889.
Email: personnel at man.ac.uk
Website: http://www.man.ac.uk
Applications should quote the above reference number and contain the names
of three referees. It is the responsibility of applicants to ensure that
supporting letters of reference are sent to the same address by the closing
date for applications.
It is expected that interviews for this post will be conducted in the week
beginning 15 June 1998.

Person Description
Candidates should possess a strong research record, including a PhD or
equivalent publications, in the any area of historical linguistics. They
must be able to demonstrate an interest both in the theoretical study of
language change and in the history of one or more languages and language
families. Preference may be given to candidates whose research relates to
the history of a language or languages other than English. Candidates will
need to have or acquire the presentational skills necessary for lectures,
seminars and small group teaching, and the IT and organizational skills
appropriate to departmental teaching and administration.

Job Description
The appointed candidate will be expected to contribute to the research,
teaching (both undergraduate and postgraduate) and administration of the
Department of Linguistics.

*******************************************************************

Lectureship in Linguistics (Ref. no 309/98)

Applications will be considered from those specializing in phonetics and/or
phonology, particularly as these disciplines relate to the study of reading
and writing. A strong research record is essential, and a completed PhD is
desirable. This position is available for a limited tenure of 5 years,
starting on 1 September 1998 or as soon as possible thereafter. Salary in
the range: ?16045 - ?21894 p.a. (under review). Closing date for
applications: 9 June 1998.
Applications forms are available from and applications should be submitted
to: Office of the Director of Personnel, The University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Tel: ++44 (0)161 275 2028; Fax: ++44
(0)161 275 2221; Minicom (for the hearing impaired): ++44 (0)161 275 7889.
Email: personnel at man.ac.uk
Website: http://www.man.ac.uk
Applications should quote the above reference number and contain the names
of three referees. It is the responsibility of applicants to ensure that
supporting letters of reference are sent to the same address by the closing
date for applications.
It is expected that interviews for this post will be conducted in the week
beginning 15 June 1998.


Person Description
The candidate should possess a strong research record, including a PhD or
equivalent publications, in phonetics and/or phonology, particularly as
these disciplines relate to the study of reading and writing. Candidates
will need to have or acquire the presentational skills necessary for
lectures, seminars and small group teaching, and the IT and organizational
skills appropriate to departmental teaching and administration.

Job Description
The appointed candidate will be expected to contribute to the research,
teaching (both undergraduate and postgraduate) and administration of the
Department of Linguistics.


From chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Thu May  7 16:06:48 1998
From: chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Wallace Chafe)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 09:06:48 -0700
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <v01540b09b17784fd406b@[150.203.58.22]>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.090648.0700.CHAFE@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

Dear Carl,

I've often talked about the "admirative" prefix in Caddo, which is
interesting because it belongs to the irrealis set.  Maybe the only place
I put it in print is in Bybee and Fleischman, Modality in Grammar and
Discourse (Benjamins 1995), pp. 357-58.

See also Victor Friedman's chapter on "Evidentiality in the Balkans:
Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Albanian" in Chafe and Nichols, Evidentiality
(Ablex 1986), especially the discussion of the Albanian admirative on pp.
180-82.

Wally


From dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU  Thu May  7 17:04:38 1998
From: dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew S Dryer)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 13:04:38 -0400
Subject: So-called quantifier floating
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.130438.0400.DRYER@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>

I am looking for PUBLISHED references that mention functional views of the
phenomenon "traditionally" called quantifier-floating in English,
Japanese, and other languages.  I have certainly heard informal discussion
of this over the years, but am looking for published mentions.

Matthew Dryer
dryer at acsu.buffalo.edu


From ceford at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU  Thu May  7 17:01:24 1998
From: ceford at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Cecilia E. Ford)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 12:01:24 -0500
Subject: Nepali surprise
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.120124.0500.CEFORD@FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU>

I recall, in studying Nepali, that there was a verb (I believe "rahecha")
which was used for surprise declaratives (unassimilated information) or for
narratives - especially fairy tales.

An example of the former (from a Nepali pedagogical text):

ko ho?  ko ho?         dhokama euta manche aeko rahecha

I don't have the morpheme-by-morpheme translation, but the gloss is

' Who is it? Who is it? Somebody seems to have come to the door.'

And a note about the utterance is--

        "Note this use of rahecha as alternative to cha.  The speaker has
just noteiced that somebody has come."




Cecilia E. Ford
Department of English
600 N. Park Street
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI  53706

ceford at facstaff.wisc.edu

"May I always be the kind of person my dog thinks I am"


From nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE  Thu May  7 18:05:05 1998
From: nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE (Jan.Nuyts)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 20:05:05 +0200
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980507090213.4897E-100000@humanitas.ucsb.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.200505.0200.NUYTS@UIA.UA.AC.BE>

I may have missed it but I haven't seen Scott DeLancey's recent
'Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information' -
Linguistic Typology 1 (1997), 33-52 - being mentioned yet.

                               *****
Jan Nuyts                                       phone: 32/3/820.27.73
University of Antwerp                           fax: 32/3/820.27.62
Linguistics                                     email: nuyts at uia.ua.ac.be
Universiteitsplein 1
B-2610 Wilrijk - Belgium


From OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU  Thu May  7 19:44:09 1998
From: OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 11:44:09 PST
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.114409.PST.>

russian has at least two particles, both fully stressed lexemes. one
express incredulousness (neuzheli) and the other expresses surprise at
smth contrary to the speaker's expectation (razve). both are added to
interrogatory utterances or can be said independently as a one-word
response. for a detailed analysis cf. valentina zaitseva's 1995 article
and refs therein: 'particles and the subtext' in vol. 3 of harvard
studies in slavic linguistics, ed. o. yokoyama.

russian also uses imperative forms to express a sudden unexpected
action, e.g. Vdrug      prigljanis' mne     eta   devuska
             suddenly   like-imper  to-me   this  girl-nom
                                                                                                        'Unexpectedly i took a liking to this girl.'
note that the lexical support (vdrug ' suddenly') is not obligatory. the
construction is colloquial.

nowadays, this usage of imperative is seen mostly in a complex
construction with two imperative verbs the second of which bears the
lexical meaning and the first (which is always 'voz'mi') seems to be an
aux whose function is to phraseologize mirativity. both, however, must
be in the imperative form, e.g.:

                                                                                        tut    on   voz'mi      (da)  i    skazi [...]
                                                                                        here   he   take/inper  and   and  say-imper
                                                                                        'at this moment he suddenly said [...]'

japanese has a particle that expresses the spekeaker's belief that smth
is unlikely (masaka). it is added to negative sentences that often also
contain a morpheme expressing conjecture; it can also be a one-word
response.

olga yokoyama
_____________________________________________________
Professor Olga T. Yokoyama
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
UCLA
115 Kinsey Hall o Box 951502   tel: (310) 825-6158
405 Hilgard Avenue             fax: (310) 206-5263
Los Angeles, CA 90095          olga at humnet.ucla.edu
USA

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/slavic/slavic.html


From noonan at CSD.UWM.EDU  Thu May  7 19:01:50 1998
From: noonan at CSD.UWM.EDU (Michael Noonan)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 14:01:50 -0500
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <v01540b09b17784fd406b@[150.203.58.22]>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.140150.0500.NOONAN@CSD.UWM.EDU>

There are several ways to express mirativity in Chantyal [Tibeto-Burman:
Bodish:Tamangic].  A nominalized verb used as a main verb has a mirative
sense; this seems to be true for other Tibeto-Burman languages also.  I
discuss this briefly in one published article:  'Versatile
Nominalizations' in the Givon Festschrift [Bybee, Haiman & Thompson:
Essays on Language function and Language Type].  The sense can also be
communicated by verbal particles:  one, la, is homophonous with the
perfective interrogative verbal affix and has a purely mirative sense.
Another such particle is s@~ [nasalized schwa], which carries the
additional sense of disappointment or frustration.  All of this is
detailed at some length in my forthcoming grammar of Chantyal and in my
Chantyal dictionary, which should be out this year [published by Mouton de
Gruyter].

Michael Noonan                  Office:   414-229-4539
Dept. of English                Fax:      414-229-2643
University of Wisconsin         Messages: 414-229-4511
Milwaukee, WI  53201            Webpage:  http://www.uwm.edu/~noonan
USA


From delancey at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU  Thu May  7 21:25:49 1998
From: delancey at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Scott Delancey)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 14:25:49 -0700
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.96.980507200215.2297C-100000@hgins.uia.ac.be>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.1998.142549.0700.DELANCEY@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>

On Thu, 7 May 1998, Jan.Nuyts wrote:

> I may have missed it but I haven't seen Scott DeLancey's recent
> 'Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information' -
> Linguistic Typology 1 (1997), 33-52 - being mentioned yet.

Thanks, Jan -- I was just about to get around to that myself.
Besides original data on a couple of languages, there are references
there to Elena Bashir's work on Khowar/Khalasha, and to work on
Korean, which has a fairly elaborate mirative system.

Elsewhere,  Marja Leinonen <f2male at uta.fi> has a paper on evidentiality
in Komi (Finno-Ugric), which includes a mirative form; she also has
some useful citations to earlier literature on the subject.  I don't
think the paper is out yet; it's destined for a volume "Evidentials:
Turkic, Iranian, and neighbouring languages", ed. by Bo Utas and
Lars Johanson.

Scott DeLancey
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, U.S.A.

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html


From Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU  Fri May  8 05:40:00 1998
From: Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU (Carl Rubino)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 15:40:00 +1000
Subject: Mirativity + Thanks
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.154000.1000.CARL.RUBINO@ANU.EDU.AU>

Dear Fellow Funknetters,
        Many thanks for all of you who have given me example morphemes in
mirativity in your languages.  I will be preparing a short summary of your
responses to put on the list in the next month since my question seems to
have spawned some interest.
        I'm sorry I forgot to attach the bibliography at the end of my last
message, so many people have referred me to the DeLancey article and Chafe
and Nichols volume which I have read with much interest (I am attaching it
now for all interested parties).
        I also would like to mention that I am most interested in
grammatical morphemes that express surprise/contrary to expectation
phenomena, _not_ interjections and constructions dependent on intonation
(i.e. English, Spanish, French data that has been coming in).  Sorry for
all the confusion about my question.  I will do my best to put together my
summary for you all in the near future and thank you all once again for all
the time you have spent answering my questions.
        Best wishes from Australia,
        Carl Rubino

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS ON MIRATIVE-TYPE MORPHOLOGY

Allen, Janet. 1978.  Kankanaey Adjuncts. Studies in Philippine Linguistics
2:1:82-102.
Chafe, Wallace. 1976.  The Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan Languages. Hague:
Mouton.
Chafe, Wallace, and Johanna Nichols (eds.). 1986.  Evidentiality: The
Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing
Corporation.
Chelliah, Shobhana Lakshmi. 1992. A study of Manipuri Grammar. PhD
Dissertation,  Australian National  University.
Crowley, Terry. 1982. The Paamese Language of Vanuatu. Canberra: Pacific
Linguistics B-87.
DeLancey, Scott. 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected
information. Linguistic Typology 1:33-52.
Donohue, Mark. 1995.  The Tukang Besi Language. PhD Thesis, Australian
National University.
Durie, Mark. 1985.  A Grammar of Acehnese. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris
Publications.
Kimball, Geoffrey. 1991. Koasati Grammar. Univ. of Nebraska Press.
Mosel, Ulrike and Even Hovdhangen. 1992.  Samoan Reference Grammar. Oslo:
Scandinavian University Press.
Porter, Doris. 1979. Northern Kankanay Morphology.  Studies in Philippine
Linguistics 3:2:20-62.
Rubino, Carl. 1997. Reference Grammar of Ilocano. PhD Dissertation,
University of California, Santa Barbara.
Sridhar S. N. 1990.  Kannada. London: Routledge.
Senft, Gunter. 1986. Kilivila. Berlin: Mouton.
Smith, Ian, and Steve Johnson. 1985ms. Kugu Nganhcara. manuscript,
Australian National University.
Thomas, David. 1971. Chrau Grammar. Honolulu:  Oceanic Linguistics Special
Publications no. 7.
Thurgood, Graham. 1986.  The nature and Origins of the Akha Evidentials
System.  In Chafe and Nichols (eds.) 214-222.
Verstraelen, Eugene. 1986. Elementary Analysis of Surigaunun Dialect.
Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 14:232-262.
Walrod, Michael. 1979. Discourse Grammar in Gaddang. Dallas: Summer
Institute of Linguistics.

=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=\\=
Dr. Carl Rubino
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology
F-Block OAA
Australian National University,
Canberra, ACT 0200,  AUSTRALIA
Phone: +61 2 6249 2053 (office)
Fax:  +61 2 6249 0332


From ocls at IPA.NET  Fri May  8 12:43:34 1998
From: ocls at IPA.NET (George Elgin, Suzette Haden Elgin)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 07:43:34 -0500
Subject: mirativity
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.074334.0500.OCLS@IPA.NET>

I've been watching the "mirativity" discussion with great interest. I am
wondering whether there is a specific category that is restricted only to
positive -- pleasant -- surprise. (As I would have expected, from the
"admirative" source.)

While I'm here -- though on the topic of pleasantness rather than surprise
-- I know of languages that have a pejorative morpheme. (Navajo, for
example.) Could anyone tell me whether there's a language that has a
morpheme with the opposite function (whatever the term for
"anti-pejorative" might be)?

Thanks....

Suzette Haden Elgin
ocls at ipa.net


From ocls at IPA.NET  Fri May  8 12:52:52 1998
From: ocls at IPA.NET (George Elgin, Suzette Haden Elgin)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 07:52:52 -0500
Subject: agent/patient
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.075252.0500.OCLS@IPA.NET>

I've had a question out to some other lists for quite a while, and would
like your input before I give up. If I relied on the data I've had so far,
I would have to make a statement something like "There exists no language
in which, if the patient is lexicalized in a sentence, the agent *must* be
lexicalized." I asked about sentences like the English "Mistakes were made"
and "Oil was spilled" variety. So far, everyone says that the language in
their response to my query allows passives with deleted agent, or has the
"Oil-spilling happened" or "Oil spilled (itself)" alternatives, or more
than one of that set. Even in languages where pronominal markers on verbs
carry the information, everyone answering me has had examples of
constructions where the morpheme for the agent could be deleted.

I 'm very uneasy about the idea that this is a "universal" (choose your
term). Does anyone on this list know of a language for which, if the oil
that was spilled is mentioned, you *must* present the spiller, if only as
some sort of indefinite? I'd be grateful for your help. Perhaps there is
some simple and obvious functional explanation that makes my question an
absurd or stupid one, and I'm just not perceiving it; it wouldn't be the
first time.

Suzette Haden Elgin
ocls at ipa.net


From nrude at UCINET.COM  Fri May  8 14:51:57 1998
From: nrude at UCINET.COM (Noel Rude)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 06:51:57 -0800
Subject: MIRATIVITY QUESTION
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.065157.0800.>

Greetings,

        There is in Sahaptian (a family of NW American Indian lgs. that
comprises Nez Perce and Sahaptin) a morpheme whose basic meaning seems
to be ?suddenly?.  It is definitely grammaticalized (occupying a
specific morphological slot as verbal prefix) and is very productive.
Yesterday when I described your query to a native Sahaptin speaker, he
immediately came up with examples which contained this prefix, e.g.

1       i-tqA-tiyan-a
        3NOM-suddenly-laugh-PST
        ?he/she burst out laughing? (Sahaptin)

where tqA- connotes surprise, ?laughed out of place?, etc.  In the
following from a recorded text ?the boy? is unexpectedly left alone by
his grandmother.  In the second clause we see another sense of tqA-,
i.e. nonvolitionality.

2       ku awkU i-tqA-waC-a Aswan p at lk-=sA=s at m=k?a
        and then 3NOM-suddenly-be-PST boy 3SG.NOM=alone=only=even
        ?and then the boy was suddenly/surprisingly all alone?

        ku i-tqA-tk?wanin-Xan-a
        and 3NOM-suddenly-walk.about-HAB-PST
        ?and he would walk about aimlessly? (Sahaptin)

Verbs in Sahaptin are inherently transitive or intransitive and this
fact can only be altered by valency changing morphology.  Though not the
case in every occurrence, tqA- can reduce valency, e.g. tamAnuun ?throw
into water?, tqAtamanuun ?fall into water?.

        Another instance of mirativity, I believe, is provided by external
possession (possessor ascension).  Whereas EP is (certainly in
Sahaptian) very much a discourse related phenomenon, it also marks
emotional involvement.  This is illustrated by the clauses in (3) which
were provided by one woman for whom emotional involvement was definitely
a factor.  The relevant EP morphology are the 2nd position pronominals
=aS/=S and the applicative suffix -ay.  Without such emotional
involvement the alternative without external possession in (4) would be
perfectly grammatical.

3       wiyAnawi-ta=aS pAp nAXS-pa paCwAywit-pa
        arrive-FUT=1SG daughter one-LOC Sunday-LOC
        ?my daughter will arrive on a Sunday?

        ku=S i-nACik-ay-ta tIla
        and=1SG 3NOM-bring-APPL-FUT daughter?s.child
        ?and she will bring my grandchild? (Sahaptin)

4       i-wiyAnawi-ta pAp nAXS-pa paCwAywit-pa
        3NOM-arrive-FUT daughter one-LOC Sunday-LOC
        ?my daughter will arrive on a Sunday?

        ku i-nACik-ta In-tila-an
        and 3NOM-bring-FUT my-daughter?s.child-ACC
        ?and she will bring my grandchild? (Sahaptin)

Thus you have from Sahaptin two aspects of ?mirativity?: surprise
(related to ?suddenly? and ?uncaused?) and emotional involvement (with
connections to a discourse mechanism).

Key to orthography:

A = a with acute accent
I = i with acute accent
U = u with acute accent
C = c-wedge
S = s-wedge
@ = barred i
X = x with dot below

Noel Rude


From chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Fri May  8 17:06:54 1998
From: chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Wallace Chafe)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 10:06:54 -0700
Subject: agent/patient
In-Reply-To: <v02140b02b178ae88f600@[206.27.222.208]>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.100654.0700.CHAFE@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

Dear Suzette,

You wonder about an agent being necessary "as only some sort of
indefinite." I believe there are a number of languages (I am most familiar
with Caddo), where there is no passive as such, but a similar function is
performed by means of a so-called indefinite (I've called it in Caddo a
"defocusing") marker.  So the Caddo equivalent to "the oil was spilled" would
be "one spilled the oil".  The pronominal prefix translated "one" is in
the agent form.  Not at all unusual.  Interestingly, however, if the agent
is specifically identified, as in "the oil was spilled by the mechanic",
"the mechanic" would be added to the above construction as an oblique, in
a prepositional phrase, just as in English.

Wally Chafe


From hilaryy at RUF.RICE.EDU  Fri May  8 19:06:48 1998
From: hilaryy at RUF.RICE.EDU (Hilary Adrienne Young)
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 14:06:48 -0500
Subject: Inuktitut spatial terms
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.1998.140648.0500.HILARYY@RUF.RICE.EDU>

Greetings all,

I was hoping someone out there could help me with my research.  I'm
beginning a project on Inuktitut spatial terms and am looking for any
resources that might be useful.  In particular, I'll be exploring the
'in front of'/'behind' relation in a Cognitive Grammar framework.

I have Spalding's Inuktitut grammar, Fortescue's West Greenlandic grammar,
Denny's article on spatial deixis, and I know of Cornillac's 'Systematiqye
des contructions lexicales en inuktitut', Paillet's 'Deixis et
representation de l'espace en Inuktitut' and Lowe's 'De l'espace au temps
en Inuktitut'.

If anyone knows of other resources on spatial terms in eastern arctic
languages (or related), I'd appreciate hearing from you.

Finally, if anyone knows Michael Fortescue's e-mail address, could they
please pass it on to me.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Hilary Young
Rice University
hilaryy at ruf.rice.edu


From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Tue May 12 15:17:19 1998
From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea)
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 10:17:19 -0500
Subject: agent/patient
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980508095648.18861B-100000@humanitas.ucsb.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.MAY.1998.101719.0500.SPIKEG@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

Wally's example from Caddo calls to mind some languages illustrated in
Giv?n's (1991, Syntax: A Functional-Typological Introduction, Vol. 2)
chapter on passives.  He shows a number of languages where a transitive
verb inflected for third person plural subject is interpreted as having an
indefinite subject; he calls such a construction a "nonpromotional
passive".  Such a construction is even attested in relatively well-known
languages, such as Colombian Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, where third
person plural forms of the verb are replacing the analytical passive in
informal speech.  (Just because I can't resist, one example: a woman is
writing notes over her data, leaves the room for a few minutes, and a young
man enters, picks up her pen, and begins playing with it while conversing
with me.  She re-enters the room, sees that her pen is missing, spots it in
his hands, and says, in a miffed tone of voice, 'Roubarem a minha caneta!'
-- lit. 'They stole my pen!')

The interesting thing is that in Kimbundu, you can actually see the further
evolution of this construction into a more protoypical passive in that when
the patient is topicalized (etymologically left dislocated, later
re-incorporated into the intonation contour of the main clause), an oblique
agent-phrase (of any person or number) can co-occur with the erstwhile
"indefinite subject" marking on the verb.  Thus, you can see where an
obligatory morphological slot on the verb is filled by a morpheme which
etymologically coded a referential third person plural agent, but which
begins to be used in situations where the agent is not specified (even
though it might be identifiable -- i.e. a passive) and which then continues
evolving semantically until the addition of a new agent phrase confirms
that the morpheme does not (at least in this construction) refer to the
agent at all.  Apparently a similar process happened in the Caddo data
Wally refers to.

To bring this back to Suzette's question: is reference to the agent a part
of such a construction (i.e. is it a counterexample to the apparent
universal she is so uncomfortable with)?  Like many typological questions,
the universality of a generalization depends on your definitions, and how
far you are willing to extend categories.  For this case to violate the
putative universal, the key definition that requires stretching is
'reference': If by 'agent' you mean simply a particular participant which
is inherent in the schema of a particular event, and if by 'reference' you
mean simply alluding to the existence of such a participant, then perhaps
such 'indefinite' morphemes serve as place-holders to indicate that such a
participant does exist semantically (even though it may not be
pragmatically feasible or desirable to refer to it explicitly).  However, I
would hesitate to use the term 'refer' for such an indefinite morpheme,
especially since (in this unique case) the person and number of the agent
does not have to match the person and number indexed by the morpheme (i.e.,
agents might be neither third person nor plural).  By the time such a
morpheme arrives at the passive stage seen in Kimbundu and Caddo, I would
consider 'reference' only to be an etymological function of a passive
morpheme.

This example highlights one of my concerns with typologies based solely on
morphosyntax, especially when they do not explicitly attend to functional
shift and incipient grammaticalization.  Given the constant tension between
the semantic roles schematized with each verb and the pragmatic needs of
each utterance which must refer to a specific event, I would be amazed if
you could find a language in which there was no way to move the agent
"off-stage"; in this sense, I am quite comfortable with the functional
usefulness of the universal you posit.  In some languages the means of
moving the agent off-stage might utilize morphology usually restricted to
transitive sentences, even morphology that elsewhere refers to on-stage
agents of transitive events.  While this would not violate the functional
universal, it might violate the morphosyntactic universal.

Spike


>Dear Suzette,
>
>You wonder about an agent being necessary "as only some sort of
>indefinite." I believe there are a number of languages (I am most familiar
>with Caddo), where there is no passive as such, but a similar function is
>performed by means of a so-called indefinite (I've called it in Caddo a
>"defocusing") marker.  So the Caddo equivalent to "the oil was spilled" would
>be "one spilled the oil".  The pronominal prefix translated "one" is in
>the agent form.  Not at all unusual.  Interestingly, however, if the agent
>is specifically identified, as in "the oil was spilled by the mechanic",
>"the mechanic" would be added to the above construction as an oblique, in
>a prepositional phrase, just as in English.
>
>Wally Chafe


From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Thu May 14 14:26:35 1998
From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 09:26:35 -0500
Subject: (fwd) from VIctor Golla re. Agent/Patient
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.092635.0500.SPIKEG@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

5/13/98

I have a footnote to the recent discussion by Wally Chafe and
Spike Gildea of "indefinite" markers functioning in "nonpromotional
passives".  As Spike says, this is a very common phenomenon, no
less so in North America than elsewhere.  In addition to the Caddo
example Wally cites, most Athabaskan languages similarly whisk the
agent off-stage by means of a bleached-out agent marker.

Athabaskanists (particularly those brought up on Navajo) are in the
habit of referring to this category as "4th person", and it is so
widespread in the family that few doubt that it should be recon-
structed to the protolanguage.  Although Chad Thompson and others
have argued that the Proto-Athabaskan 4th person marker was multi-
functional, if so, marking a nonreferential agent was its central
role, with other functions developing in specific discourse contexts.
The commonest of these secondary functions is the coding of 1st person
plural agents.

However, a much less expectable thing happens to the 4th person
in the California subgroup (Hupa, Mattole, Kato and a few other
dialects).  While Mattole preserves the marker in its general
Athabaskan impersonal role, Hupa and Kato appear to have have
reversed the evolutionary process and have re-coded the prefix
to mark a discourse-salient 3rd person.  The inherited 3rd person
marker, meanwhile, has assumed an obviative function.  Schematically:

General Athabaskan:

 SOMEONE sees you. (= 'you are seen'; 'we see you') [4th person]
 HE/SHE sees me.  [3rd person]

Hupa:

 HE/SHE (whom we're talking about here) sees you.  [4th person]
 HE/SHE/IT (who is not our focus) sees you.   [3rd person]

(It was this pronominal opposition that P. E. Goddard notoriously--and
mistakenly--described as distinguishing adult Hupa men from children,
women, animals, and non-Hupas.)

The formal history of this shift is pretty clear (at least to me),
but the functional motivation is not.  Does anyone know of other
instances of nonreferential "indefinite" agent markers evolving
a salient referential function?

--Victor Golla


From dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU  Thu May 14 16:41:28 1998
From: dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew S Dryer)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 12:41:28 -0400
Subject: indefinite subject constructions
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.124128.0400.DRYER@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>

A few comments on the recent discussion of "indefinite subject"
constructions.

First, the discussion ignores that there are two possible types of such
clauses, ones which are semantically intransitive ("someone was singing")
and ones which are semantically transitive ("someone ate the pie").  While
the latter may resemble agentless passives functionally, the former does
not (ignoring instances of passives of intransitives in languages which
allow such - "it was danced").  Languages differ as to whether they have
a single construction covering both of these.

Second, referring to such clauses as "passive" runs the risk of
Eurocentrism.  Prototypical instances of such clauses in languages which
have them are grammatically active and transitive, with a structure like
English "someone ate the pie", except that the "someone" is expressed by a
pronominal affix on the verb rather than with an independent pronoun: in
prototypical cases, the "patient" is grammatical object, the "agent" is
expressed by the indefinite pronominal affix occurring in a morphological
slot associated with subjects, and the "agent" cannot be expressed by a
independent noun phrase.  As Spike suggests, such constructions may
sometimes get reanalyzed as passive constructions, though my impression is
that more often than not, they behave "schizophrenically", behaving like
indefinite subject constructions in some ways and like passive
constructions in other ways.  It is not clear whether this "schizophrenic"
stage is only an intermediate stage in a reanalysis to a passive
construction, or a state in which languages can happily remain
indefinitely.

Indefinite subject constructions appear to be much more common in North
America than in most areas of the world, though the constructions often
deviate from the prototype and the conditions in which they are used are
rarely discussed.  There is a long history of debate among Algonquianists
as to whether the construction in question in Algonquian languages should
be viewed as a passive or as an indefinite subject construction (see
Hockett's preface to Bloomfield's grammar of Ojibwa, where he takes issue
with Bloomfield's characterization).  Boas points out that the apparent
indefinite subject construction in Tlingit occasionally occurs with an
independent expression of the agent.  And I have been working on a
construction in Kutenai which is clearly a passive morphologically and
syntactically, but which is used in texts in ways that are unusual for a
passive, but which are shared with the intransitive indefinite subject
construction, showing that at the level of text, the passive must be
viewed as being a kind of transitive indefinite subject construction.

Matthew Dryer


From fhirata at LPG.FCLAR.UNESP.BR  Thu May 14 20:44:34 1998
From: fhirata at LPG.FCLAR.UNESP.BR (Flavia B. M. Hirata)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 17:44:34 -0300
Subject: comparative clauses
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.174434.0300.FHIRATA@LPG.FCLAR.UNESP.BR>

Dear colleagues

I would like to receive information about bibliography (references and/or books)
concerning to comparative clauses in general.

Thanks in advance

Flavia Hirata


From norri at IBM.NET  Thu May 14 19:17:31 1998
From: norri at IBM.NET (Noriko Akiho-Toyoda)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 20:17:31 +0100
Subject: Question: semilingualism
Message-ID: <THU.14.MAY.1998.201731.0100.NORRI@IBM.NET>

Hi, I am a Japanese, studying for MA Applied Linguistics in London.
With the dissertation's deadline is now close at hand, it seems I am looking
for different reference every single day.
Could anybody please help me answering the questions as follow:

1) Child's L1 acquisition or SLA
I have heard and read that a child first states only facts, then they learn
to narrate in temporal sequence.  And after that, around at the age of 5 to
9, he expresses in causal sequence.
If anybody know the actual article(s) or paper please let me know. (Could be
Slobin_DI and I searched for no luck) And your opinion is welcome as well.

2) Semilingualism
My supervisor, Prof.. Larry Selinker, told me that this term is not
politically correct.  What is the most appropriate word, would you think?

3) One of the participants of my dissertation research shows that she could
express herself both in Japanese (L1) and English (L2) fluently.  Seems a
balanced bilingual.  But she does not understand once narrative gets
complicated (not in temporal order, abstract).  I am looking for any related
paper.

4)  To collect data, I used a silence film, giving her questions in both
language.  If anybody knows the articles/paper mentioning a similar method
please let me know!

Thank you.



**********  *****************************
This e-mail address accepts Japanese language
**********  *****************************
Noriko Akiho
MA Applied Linguistics, Birkbeck College, London Univ..
19, 2 Greencroft Gardens, London NW6 3LR, UK
Tel:0171-624-3506 fax:0171-328-4854


From yui at IPIED.TU.AC.TH  Fri May 15 07:35:53 1998
From: yui at IPIED.TU.AC.TH (Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 14:35:53 +0700
Subject: Job at Thammasat University, Bangkok
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.143553.0700.YUI@IPIED.TU.AC.TH>

Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Liberal Arts,
Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand has an opening for a "foreign"
(i.e. non-Thai) Faculty position.

Qualifications: Postgraduate degree in General Linguistics, M.A.
essential, with teaching and research experience.
Ph.D. preferred.  Knowledge of  Thai/Southeast Asian Linguistics desirable.

Duties: - teach  general linguistics and applied
linguistics courses, in undergraduate and graduate levels (minimum 3
courses per semester)
                 - academic consultation
                 - language editor of English articles in the Department
of Linguistics's Journal (Journal of Langauge and Linguistics)

Teaching is expected to start in September 1998.
Initial contract is for one year, renewable.

Document required: CV including recent photograph; names and addresses of
three reference persons.
Apply by  July 31, 1998  to:
   Head of Department of Linguistics
   Faculty of Liberal Arts
   Thammasat University
   Prachan Rd.
 Bangkok 10200, THAILAND

Fax: (66 2)224-1389
Tel: (66 2)221-6111...20 ext. 2656, 2655

For inquiry: contact the above address/fax/phone number or e-mail to:
    waen at ipied.tu.ac.th, yui at ipied.tu.ac.th, yui at alpha.tu.ac.th

For information about the Department and Thammasat University, please
visit our web page at:

http://www.tu.ac.th/org/arts/ling/lingdept.htm

The cost of living in Bangkok in roughly three times less than that in
the US.  Meals for one day is about 100 baht or less.  A condo apt ranges
from 5,000
 baht per month.  the exchange rate is  40  baht for a dollar


From David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG  Fri May 15 11:41:00 1998
From: David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG (David_Tuggy at SIL.ORG)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 06:41:00 -0500
Subject: (fwd) from VIctor Golla re. Agent/Patient
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.064100.0500.>

Victor asked for examples of impersonals becoming specific person subject
markers. Here's one:

In some towns of the Orizaba Nawatl (Nahuatl de la Sierra de Zongolica)
area, the subject prefix se- (or see-) has pretty clearly developed from an
impersonal subject meaning to mean 'we'.  This phenomenon was first, to my
knowledge, reported by Jeff Burnham, who described it in a grammatical
sketch of Rafael Delgado Nahuatl which he distributed in the late 70's at
the Friends of Uto-Aztecan meeting).

se- is transparently related to the numeral se or see (the length is very
slippery) 'one'. In other towns in the dialect area 'impersonal subject' is
its primary meaning. The verbal morphology associated with it is that
appropriate to a singular subject, even when the meaning is clearly 'we'.
The towns that use it to mean 'we' still conserve, at least in that they
understand in their neighbors' speech, the standard Nahuatl ti- 'we' prefix
(which has plural morphology, as you would expect. ti- with singular
morphology means 'you sg.') Even in the towns which do not use it to
clearly mean 'we', there are of course many contexts in which either
meaning would be appropriate, especially in procedural discourses: "that's
the way we do it/it is done".

In most Nahuatl se / see does not function as a subject prefix, but can be
an independent subject preceding the zero 3rd person subject marker. In
other words, the acoustic difference between se 0-kineki 'one wants it' and
sekineki 'impersonal wants it' is somewhere between slight and
non-existent.  In certain tenses an o- other prefixes precede the subject
prefixes, so it is the innovation of words like y-o-sekinek 'impersonal
already wanted it' (as opposed to se yosekinek) that seals se-'s status as
a subject prefix.

--David Tuggy


From nc206 at HERMES.CAM.AC.UK  Fri May 15 13:51:19 1998
From: nc206 at HERMES.CAM.AC.UK (N. Chipere)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 14:51:19 +0100
Subject: Real Language Users
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.145119.0100.NC206@HERMES.CAM.AC.UK>

Apologies to members of Linguists List for the multiple posting.

I have just written up an experiment carried out to investigate the
conventional notion of linguistic competence (the abstract is appended to
this message). I am planning further experiments based on  what I found. It
would be very useful for me to get some feedback on the first experiment
during this planning stage. If you are interested in reading the
experimental report and offering comments on any aspect of it, no
matter how brief, please let me know and I will send you a copy. Please
also specify the format in which you prefer to view the document and
whether or not you would like me to summarise the responses.

Thanks in advance,

Ngoni Chipere

----------------

Abstract : Real Language Users


The idea of a perfectly competent but resource limited language user is the
basis of many psychological models of sentence comprehension. It is widely
assumed that linguistic competence is a) uniform; b) generative; c)
autonomous; d) automatic and e) constant. It is  also believed that  the
free expression of these properties is frustrated by limits in the
availability of computational resources. However, no firm experimental
evidence for the classical language user appears to exist. Negative evidence
for each assumption is reviewed here and the notion of resource limitations
is shown to be suspect. An experiment is reported which tested each of the
five assumptions underlying the conventional idea of linguistic competence.
It was found that native speakers of English a) differed in  grammatical
competence; b) often failed to display syntactic productivity; c) grossly
violated syntax in favour of plausibility; d) expended conscious effort to
comprehend some sentences and e) appeared to adapt to novel structures as
the experiment progressed. In line with previous studies, a relationship was
found between comprehension skill and formal education. A new finding is
that highly educated non-native speakers of English can outperform less
educated native speakers of English in comprehending grammatically
challenging English sentences. The results indicate that the classical
language user is an inaccurate model of real language users, who appear to
vary widely in grammatical skill. A number of specific questions for further
research are raised.


From mithun at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Fri May 15 16:40:18 1998
From: mithun at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Marianne Mithun)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 09:40:18 -0700
Subject: (fwd) from VIctor Golla re. Agent/Patient
In-Reply-To: <l03110702b180af42de94@[128.42.180.126]>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.094018.0700.MITHUN@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

Victor writes about the Proto-Athabaskan impersonal pronoun
developing into a discourse-salient third person pronominal prefix in
California Athabaskan.


> However, a much less expectable thing happens to the 4th person
> in the California subgroup (Hupa, Mattole, Kato and a few other
> dialects).  While Mattole preserves the marker in its general
> Athabaskan impersonal role, Hupa and Kato appear to have have
> reversed the evolutionary process and have re-coded the prefix
> to mark a discourse-salient 3rd person.  The inherited 3rd person
> marker, meanwhile, has assumed an obviative function.  Schematically:
>
> General Athabaskan:
>
>  SOMEONE sees you. (= 'you are seen'; 'we see you') [4th person]
>  HE/SHE sees me.  [3rd person]
>
> Hupa:
>
>  HE/SHE (whom we're talking about here) sees you.  [4th person]
>  HE/SHE/IT (who is not our focus) sees you.   [3rd person]
>
> (It was this pronominal opposition that P. E. Goddard notoriously--and
> mistakenly--described as distinguishing adult Hupa men from children,
> women, animals, and non-Hupas.)
>
> The formal history of this shift is pretty clear (at least to me),
> but the functional motivation is not.  Does anyone know of other
> instances of nonreferential "indefinite" agent markers evolving
> a salient referential function?

                                Victor Golla



Sure.  The very same thing happened in Iroquoian.  The indefinite/
impersonal pronominal prefix ye- (probably cognate with the Caddo, if the
Caddoan-Iroquoian connection turns out to be right, which is likely)
has evolved into a feminine pronominal prefix in most of the Northern
Iroquoian languages.  In all of the languages, the original indefinite
prefix retains its indefinite meaning `someone'.  The Northern languages
have innovated a masculine pronominal prefix (not present in Southern
Iroquoian).  In some of the languages (Tuscarora, Seneca, Cayuga) the
original indefinite (y)e- is now the only pronoun used for women and
girls.  In Huron, it is still only an indefinite, with women and girls
referred to with the same pronoun as neuters (ka-).  In Onondaga, Oneida,
and Mohawk, the descendants of the indefinite (ye-) and the neuter-zoic
(ka-) are both used for female persons.  Circumstances behind the choice
are interesting.


Marianne Mithun


From fianna at GEOCITIES.COM  Sat May 16 03:58:37 1998
From: fianna at GEOCITIES.COM (Angela Conn)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 22:58:37 -0500
Subject: Occupations
Message-ID: <FRI.15.MAY.1998.225837.0500.FIANNA@GEOCITIES.COM>

Hello,
        Currently, I am studying linguistics on my own, but I plan to attend
the University of Oklahoman, then possibly Rice University.  I would also
plan to major in Russian (yes, ack, a double major). I have been reading and
lurking on this mailling list for quite some time, and I graduate high
school next week. I would like to ask those of you who are studying/teaching
linguistics/Russian what jobs are available to someone with a degree in
these fields. What degrees make one eligible for this job. (besides
professor i've seen that a quite a bit).

Thanks
Angela Conn
fianna at geocities.com
student @ Bartlesville High School, Bartlesville Oklahoma


From barlow at RUF.RICE.EDU  Sun May 17 05:15:49 1998
From: barlow at RUF.RICE.EDU (Michael Barlow)
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 00:15:49 -0500
Subject: Spoken Corpus -- Announcement
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.1998.001549.0500.BARLOW@RUF.RICE.EDU>

Announcement

The Corpus of Spoken, Professional American-English (CSPA) is available
from Athelstan. The corpus of 2 million words is based on a variety of
transcripts of (i) faculty meetings and committee meetings (1 million
words) and (ii) White House press conferences (1 million words). To obtain
information about the corpus or to download a 50,000 word sample, visit the
CSPA webpage at http://www.athel.com/cspa.html

A tagged version of the corpus is now available. For info, see
http://www.athel.com/cspatg.html

Michael
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Barlow,      Department of Linguistics,       Rice University
barlow at rice.edu                               www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow
Athelstan barlow at athel.com  www.athel.com (U.S.) www.athelstan.com (UK)


From chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU  Sun May 17 18:49:08 1998
From: chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Wallace Chafe)
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 11:49:08 -0700
Subject: From VIctor Golla re. Agent/Patient
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.1998.114908.0700.CHAFE@HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU>

As a supplement to Marianne's response regarding the change of Iroquoian
ye- "one" to ye- "feminine", I might also point out that the probably
cognate yi- in Caddo developed into an inclusive first person marker when
it was accompanied by a dual or plural marker.  In other words Caddo yi-
means "one" in the singular, but "we inclusive" in the dual and plural.  I
don't think this extension from "one" to "we" is at all unusual, and
others have remarked on it.  It's even found in French.

Wally Chafe


From Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU  Mon May 18 01:18:05 1998
From: Carl.Rubino at ANU.EDU.AU (Carl Rubino)
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 11:18:05 +1000
Subject: Summary of Responses to Mirative question
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.1998.111805.1000.CARL.RUBINO@ANU.EDU.AU>

RE:  Summary of Mirative Responses from the list

Dear Funknetters,
        As promised I am sending mirative data to you (5 pages only, not a
long file), seeing that my question was received with much interest.  First
of all I would like to thank all of you for all your help with my
mirativity question.  I profitted immensely from useful discussions and/or
data from David Wilkins (Aranda), David Beck (Bella Coola), Hyo Sang Lee
(Korean), Sherman Fox (ASL), Scott DeLancey, Michael Noonan, Rob Freeman,
Olga Yokoyama (Russian), Cecilia Ford (Nepali), Wallace Chafe (Caddo),
David Parkinson (Inuktitut), Richard Cameron (Spanish), Enrique Sanchis
(Quechua), Guillermo Lorenzo (Jacaru), John Bowden (Makian Dalam), Sasha
Aikhenvald (Tariana), Noel Rude (Sahaptian), and Paul Hopper.
        I am working hard to put my paper together, so if any of you has
other suggestions for me (or data on exclamatives/ morphemes or systems
encoding information that is unexpected by the speaker), please let me
know.  The data below are partially contributed by FUNKNETters and
Austronesianists, and partially extracted from reference grammars here in
Australia.

SYNTACTIC EXPRESSION - Mirative systems

Andean Spanish (Bolivian highlands)  Use of pluperfect

        Habian sabido fumar.
        (They DO smoke I just found out).

Georgian (Aronson; Tuite)  present perfect = surprise

        Amerik'eli              q'opila!
        American.NOM    be-PERF:3s
        'He has been an American-  so he's an American!'

Rapa Nui (Du Feu 1996:91)  Double negative strategy

        Kai     hini    'o      koe.
        NEG     delay   NEG     2s
        'That didn't take you long!'

Tariana (Aikhenvald, p.c.)  (lexicalized)

        nu-ka-mhe       nu-a-mahka                      na-i~tu-nipe-nuku
        1s-see-ADM      1s-say-REC.P.NON.VIS    3p-steal-NOM-TOP.NON.A/S
        'I was unpleasantly surprised by the theft (I didn't see).'

Surigaunun (Verstraelen 1986:257)

        pagka-gana              sa      pagka'un!
        NOM-delicious   GEN     food
        'How delicious is the food!'

Tagalog

        ang     sar?p           ng      pans?t
        TOP     delicious       GEN     noodles
        'How delicious the noodles are!'

CLAUSE COMBINING - CONJUNCTIONS

Karo Batak (Woollams 1996)

        ..tapi  temu?na ?       dungna          ipelawesna              kang.
          but   guest.his       that    finish.NMS      PASS.CAUS.go.he EMPH
        '... but in the end, he sent his guest away after all.'

        Agr?si          pemana  tentara kerajaan        Belanda  reh    ka.
        agression       first           army    kingdom Holland  come EMPH
        'The first Dutch Police Action came after all.'

Koasati- differentiates y- 'but' contrary to expectation, from -tikabut
        statement must be contrary to expectation  (Kimball 1991)

        My grandmother said, their hair used to be braided-Y-, but contrary
to what one might think, they ysed to be able to keep on in such a way.'

        They looked for a doctor-tika  but where unable to find one.

Tukang Besi (Donohue 1995:425)
        io and padahal (loan from Indonesian)


MORPHOLOGICAL EXPRESSION

Jacaru (Peru) (Lorenzo, p.c.)

        tz'iq   ampra-j-ilii
        left    hand-SURP-so
        'so it is his left hand!'

Quechua- (Cuzco, Sanchis p.c.)

        jamu-sqa 'he unexpectedly came'

Washo-

        di      m?tiwe iti/.a?yi? i     I'm starting to get grey hairs.'
        ? ?.yel m?ma?.??yi i            He is getting big (in my absence)

Manipuri (Chelliah 1997:296)

        m?      ngerang skul    cet-pe-jat-le.
        he      yesterday       school  go-NOM-TYPE(NOM)-INTERROG
        'Could it be that he went to school yesterday?!'

Korean (Lee 1993)

        uchepu          o-ass-kuna
        postman come-ANT-UNASSIM
        'The postman has come.'  (He comes every day)

        uchepu-ka       o-ass-ne
        postman-NOM     come-ANT-FR(factual.realization)
        'The postman has come (surprisingly).'

Korean system -ne vs. -kun vs. declarative -ta (noteworthy, provoking or
intriguing, question, command or proposal) (Lee 1993)

-ne                                                          -kun
more factual info, definitive                    less definitive info.
immediate (just perceived)                      info past /immediate info.
unexpected / unassimilated                     unassimilated
speaker confident about truth of info.     speaker not always confident
about truth

Bella Coola (Nater 1984:126)
        7nts+su.                        Surprise, it's me!
        tic+su  t'ayc   ti+staltmc      You might not have expected it, but
he is a chief.

Kugu Nganchara (Australia, Smith and Johnson, ms)

        thana           nganhca nga'a   kamba   minha   piki-ku
        3pNOM   1pexcNOM        fish    cook    animal  big-EXCL
        'They and we cooked fish in ashes, and even pig too!'

Ilocano- (Rubino 1997)

        Nag-bassit=en
        PF.AF-small=CONTR
        'How small!'

Caddo- Chafe 1995:357  hus- prefix; Chafe 1976:82 was- prefix.

        h?s-ba-?a=sa=yi=k'awihsa?
        ADMIR-1ST.BENEF.IRREALS-name-know-PROGRESSIVE
        My goodness he knows my name!

        was-sa-n?y-?aw  >  w?s?n?y?aw
        he is not likely to sing

        was-ba-?a-sa-yik-?awi-hah > w?sba:s?yk'awihah
        my goodness, he knows my name!

Paamese (Vanuatu, Crowley 1982:229-232)

        Tahosi=visi                     Ostrelia        mari+aute=visi
        3s.REAL.good.EXTREME    Aus.            big.place.EXTREME
        'It was really good!'           'Australia is a really big place!'

-se  negative expectation, contrast,  event contrary to expectation +
Uniqueness (alone)

        kaiko=se=suk            ko+doo
        2s=neg.exp.SUB  2sREAL.stay
        'Are you staying on your own now?'

        Kove            torongo=s       velah
        2sREAL.COP      drunk.neg.exp   ong
        'You are still drunk (rather than being sober)!'


Aranda (Alice Springs, Aus).  Wilkins 1986:582.

        Lhwerrpe-k-itanye,      unrip-irre-me
        winter-DAT-SURP hot-INCH-NPP
        'Even though it's winter, it's getting hot.'

        Also used where unexpected behavior of speaker is affecting the
speaker in a negative way... Even though there were all those women around,
the man took all his clothes off (how disgusting!)

Acehnese (Durie 1985:259, 268).

        meu=ji=jak      lon=seutot
        if=3=go 1=follow
        'If he goes, I'll follow.'  (p. 259)

        meu=i=kap=keuh
        SURPR=3=bite=2
        'If it didn't go and bite you!'

Kannada (Sridhar 1990:230)

        eraDu   nimiSadalli     eNTu    mayli   o:DibiTTa
        two     minutes.LOC     eight   mile    run.pp.pf.pst.3sm
        'He ran eight miles in two minutes!'

        'The umbrella accidentally poked the girl in her side.'

PARTICLES

Sarangani Manobo-  DuBois 1976:56

        Nekeabat=ka kedi te osa.        Surprisingly you got the pig.

Chrau (Thomas 1971:88)

        Anh vlam de co sipai.           I met (surprise!) the rabbit!
        Neh deh de la-u!                She gave birth to a coconut!

Kankanaey (Allen 1978:86-87)

        Manlalaba       baw     adis    Lola.
        launder         SURP    EMPH    Lola
        'Oh, I see Lola is doing the laundry!'

        Ey,     niliw-ak        gayam   di!
        EXCL    forgot-I        SURP    that
        'Oh no!  I forgot it!'

Kilivila (Senft, p.c.)

        ina sopa!
        mother lie!     what a lie!

Akha (Thurgood 1986:218)-

        nja     'nonpast, nonexpected event'
        nj?     'past, nonexpected event'  (high tone)
        nja     'to be able to'

REFERENCES:

Allen, Janet. 1978.  Kankanaey Adjuncts. Studies in Philippine Linguistics
2:1:82-102.
Chafe, Wallace. 1976.  The Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan Languages. Hague:
Mouton.
Chafe, Wallace, and Johanna Nichols (eds.). 1986.  Evidentiality: The
Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing
Corporation.
Chelliah, Shobhana Lakshmi. 1992. A study of Manipuri Grammar. PhD
Dissertation,  Australian National  University.
Crowley, Terry. 1982. The Paamese Language of Vanuatu. Canberra: Pacific
Linguistics B-87.
DeLancey, Scott. 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected
information. Linguistic Typology 1:33-52.
Donohue, Mark. 1995.  The Tukang Besi Language. PhD Thesis, Australian
National University.
Du Bois, Carl. 1976. Sarangani Manobo. Manila: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Du Feu, Veronica. 1996.  Rapa Nui. London: Routledge.
Du Houx, Yves. 1992. Le verbe grec ancien. Louvain, Belgium: Linguistiques
de Louvain.
Durie, Mark. 1985.  A Grammar of Acehnese. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris
Publications.
Jacobsen, William H., Jr. 1964. A grammar of the Washo Language. UC
Berkeley Dissertation.
Kimball, Geoffrey. 1991. Koasati Grammar. Univ. of Nebraska Press.
Lee, Hyo Sang. 1993. Cognitive constraints on expressing newly perceived
information, with reference to epistemic modal suffixes in Korean.
Lipski, John M. 1994.  Latin American Spanish. New York: Longman Publishing.
Mosel, Ulrike and Even Hovdhangen. 1992.  Samoan Reference Grammar. Oslo:
Scandinavian University Press.
Nater, H. F. The Bella Coola Language. Ottawa: Canadian Ethnology Service
Paper no. 92, National Museum of Man, Mercury Series.
Porter, Doris. 1979. Northern Kankanay Morphology.  Studies in Philippine
Linguistics 3:2:20-62.
Rubino, Carl. 1997. Reference Grammar of Ilocano. PhD Dissertation,
University of California, Santa Barbara.
Sridhar S. N. 1990.  Kannada. London: Routledge.
Senft, Gunter. 1986. Kilivila. Berlin: Mouton.
Smith, Ian, and Steve Johnson. 1985ms. Kugu Nganhcara. manuscript,
Australian National University.
Thomas, David. 1971. Chrau Grammar. Honolulu:  Oceanic Linguistics Special
Publications no. 7.
Thurgood, Graham. 1986.  The nature and Origins of the Akha Evidentials
System.  In Chafe and Nichols (eds.) 214-222.
Verstraelen, Eugene. 1986. Elementary Analysis of Surigaunun Dialect.
Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 14:232-262.
Walrod, Michael. 1979. Discourse Grammar in Gaddang. Dallas: Summer
Institute of Linguistics.
Wilkins, David. 1986. Particles/clitics for criticism and complaint in
Mparntwe Arrente (Aranda). Journal of Pragmatics 10:575-596.

=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=//=\\=\\=
Dr. Carl Rubino
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology
F-Block OAA
Australian National University,
Canberra, ACT 0200,  AUSTRALIA
Phone: +61 2 6249 2053 (office)
Fax:  +61 2 6249 0332


From Zylogy at AOL.COM  Wed May 20 03:24:29 1998
From: Zylogy at AOL.COM (Zylogy)
Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 23:24:29 EDT
Subject: sound symbolism
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.1998.232429.EDT.ZYLOGY@AOL.COM>

Hi. A new organization is being put together for folks interested in sound
symbolism and other forms of nonarbitrariness in human communication. Over 50
people have already signed up. If this sounds like something that you would
like to participate in, please let me know. Thanks.

Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com


From jrubba at POLYMAIL.CPUNIX.CALPOLY.EDU  Sat May 23 00:00:26 1998
From: jrubba at POLYMAIL.CPUNIX.CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba)
Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 17:00:26 -0700
Subject: London housing sought spring 1999
Message-ID: <FRI.22.MAY.1998.170026.0700.JRUBBA@POLYMAIL.CPUNIX.CALPOLY.EDU>

Dear listers,

There is a strong possibility that I will be teaching in London between
late March and early June, 1999. I am already thinking about possibilities
for a place to live. Temporary accommodations seem to be incredibly
expensive, so I am hoping to find one of the following, in the London
area or within a reasonable commute distance (our classes will be held in
the Birkbeck College building in Bloomsbury):
(a) a room in a private home
(b) a temporary flat-share
(c) a housing-exchange deal (I live in yours in London, you in mine in
sunny California!)

Cost to be negotiated.

I am single, no children, female, non-smoker, fastidious and relatively
neat and well-organized. I do not shy away from my share of housecleaning
and also like to cook (and can!) I may have a visitor from America for a
short time at some point during the visit. I cannot live with smokers or
large dogs. I have lived in England before, so I know to expect (and
respect) things like small fridges and hot water heaters (compared to our
huge appliances here). I keep 'normal' hours (that is, I am diurnal).

Also, I may extend my stay in England past the end of the teaching term. I
might want to stay on in the London area for something between 2 weeks and
a month -- into late June, early July.

Please reply directly to me if you know of any possibilities, and please
forward this to anyone you know who might be able to help me out.

Thank you!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics              ~
English Department, California Polytechnic State University   ~
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407                                     ~
Tel. (805)-756-2184  E-mail: jrubba at polymail.calpoly.edu      ~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


From bingfu at USC.EDU  Tue May 26 16:27:19 1998
From: bingfu at USC.EDU (bingfu)
Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 09:27:19 -0700
Subject: drift from OV to VO
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.1998.092719.0700.BINGFU@USC.EDU>

Dear Netters,

 On Sat, 24 Jan 1998, Frederick Newmeyer wrote:

  Matthew Dryer has shown that, once we correct for areal and genetic
  bias,
  the 'preference' for OV order is greater than that for VO order in the
  world's languages. But interestingly, I have seen it claimed in a
  variety
  of places that attested (or uncontroversially reconstructed) word order
  changes from OV to VO are far more common than those from VO to OV.

  My first question is how widely accepted is such a claim among
  historical
  linguists and typologists? Is there much support for such an idea and
  its
  implication of an overall general 'drift' from OV to VO?

  If this claim seems well motivated, the conjunction of the 'preference'
  for OV and the 'drift' to VO is very curious, no? One might even
  conclude
  that the OV preference is a remnant of a 'proto-world' OV (caused by
  what?), which functional forces (but what functional forces?) are
  skewing
  gradually to VO. And, indeed, linguists coming from a variety of
  directions(Venneman, Givon, Bichakjian, and others) have concluded
  something very much along those lines.

  I'm curious what thoughts FUNKNET subscribers might have on this
  question.
  I'll summarize if there is enough interest.

Fritz  <fjn at u.washington.edu>

I regard Newmeyer's query very interesting and theoretically
significant.  It seems to be
a pity that responses to his query have been far from enough so far.
To solicit more discussion on the issue,
I venture to posting my tentative opinions below.

1.
There may be several reasons for proto-languages to tend be OV rather than
VO.

For instance, OV and SV are harmonious.  Both O and S are dependents of
the head V.
Languages prefer OV over VO just like they prefer SV over VS.

2.
Proto-languages are expected to be simple in terms of nominal expressions.
However, along with the developing of NP internal structure and
 the extension of the size of NP, the pressure to move large NP
 to the end of sentence increases too.  Between S and O, O is
more likely to be heavy.  That is why O, but not S, tend to postpone.

Matthew Dryer 1980's  "The Positional Tendencies of
Sentential Noun Phrases in Universal Grammar."
(Canadian Journal of Linguistics 25: 12-195)
argues that postposing of sentential NPs is overall
preferred over preposing.  Languages only resort to preposing when
postposing would violate the rigid V-final order.

3. In addition, a heavy O is normally a piece of new information.
New information tends to appear later
in the sentence. Therefore, everything else being equal, a heavy
O tends postpone rather than prepose.

4. On the other hand, if a language starts with SVO order, there seems
no obvious motivation to drift to SOV, unless O is a pronominal or
clitic.

In short, the drift from OV to VO is motivated by the processing ease.

Based on the above conjectures, I think now the issue is why
some verb-final languages are so stubborn to resist O proposing rather
than why O postpose.
According to Steele's "word order variation" (1978), half of SOV
languages (nonrigid OV pattern) allow SVO orders.
I wonder are there some common typological features shared by
all rigid OV languages?

Bingfu Lu
USC


From meira at RUF.RICE.EDU  Tue May 26 22:40:24 1998
From: meira at RUF.RICE.EDU (Sergio Meira S.C.O.)
Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 17:40:24 -0500
Subject: drift from OV to VO
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SV4.3.94.980526091627.9380A-100000@aludra.usc.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.1998.174024.0500.MEIRA@RUF.RICE.EDU>

Dear Funknetters,

I am interested in purpose constructions and their diachronic sources.
Does anyone know of a general study of purpose constructions, especially a
typology, if possible with information on the etymologies (especially
semantic changes)?

Thank you in advance for any help,

Sergio Meira.
meira at ruf.rice.edu


From bingfu at USC.EDU  Wed May 27 23:46:34 1998
From: bingfu at USC.EDU (bingfu)
Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 16:46:34 -0700
Subject: summary of Italian NP
Message-ID: <WED.27.MAY.1998.164634.0700.BINGFU@USC.EDU>

Dear Netters,

        A while ago, I posted the following query.
Longogbardi 1994 provides the following paradigm.

               a.      Il  mio Giani ha finalmente telefonato
                       the my Gianni    finally    called up

               b.      *Mio Gianni ha finalmente telefonato
                         my Gianni    finally    called up

               c.      Gianni mio ha finalmente telefonato
                       Gianni my     finally    called up
                       Gianni my     finally    called up

               d.      Il  Gianni  mio ha finalmente telefonato
                       the Gianni  my     finally    called up


He accounts for the paradigm in formalist terms and takes them as crucial
evidence
for N movement hypothesis.

My questions are:

1. Is there any functional explanation?

2. Is there any meaning difference among a, c and d,
especially between c and d.

        Bingfu Lu

        I now got eight responses and the following is my summary for
your information.  If somebody needs all these responses, let me know
and I will forward them to the individual.

                        SUMMARY
Most importantly, several netters pointed out that the four sentences
belong to different
Italian dialects.  Specifically, (a) is of standard Italian (Northern
dialect) and
(c) and (d) are of Southern dialects.

The explanation of the pragmatic differences among the four sentences seem
to be
various form person to person.

Francesca Fici points out that both (b) and (d) are bad.

Rick Mc Callister
says that while article + possessive + noun is the norm in standard
Italian for
inanimate objects, the article is dropped for human relationships.

Giampaolo Poletto provides a very detailed explanation of the differences
among the four.
In his, opinions, (b) is not completely bad, but just not complete.

Nigel J. Ross claims:
(b). could more or less be heard in fast speech, the article "il" being
just
about lost. Nevertheless, there would be some slight slurred indication of
the presence of "il".
In addition to regional difference, (c) could also suggest a slightly
stronger
involvement, perhaps indicating a closer affection (than a.) In the
Italian
versions of "Oh my God!": "O mio Dio!" and "O Dio mio!", the second is in
some ways stronger, more tragic, and - of course - more southern (more
histrionic??).


        Thanks for the followin netters who offered their
responses.

Giulia Bencini <bencini at psych.colorado.edu
Pier Marco Bertinetto" <bertiNET at SNS.IT
Rick Mc Callister <rmccalli at MUW.Edu
Francesca Fici <frafici at CESIT1.UNIFI.IT
Seth Jerchower <sejerchower at JTSA.EDU
Gabriele Pallotti <pallotti at dsc.unibo.it
Giampaolo Poletto <brave at chiostro.univr.it>, <dylandog at btk.jpte.hu>
Nigel J. Ross" <njross at iol.it


Bingfu Lu
USC


From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU  Fri May 29 17:32:25 1998
From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike L Gildea)
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 12:32:25 -0500
Subject: 8th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse (fwd)
Message-ID: <FRI.29.MAY.1998.123225.0500.SPIKEG@OWLNET.RICE.EDU>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 11:14:48 -0600
From: "Rachel R. W. Robertson" <rrrobert at facstaff.wisc.edu>

Eighth Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse
Madison, WI
July 29 - 31, 1998

For more information about the conference, visit our web site at
http://www.psyc.memphis.edu/ST&D/ST&D.htm, or contact Rachel Robertson at
textdis at macc.wisc.edu or 608-262-6989.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 29

7:00 - 8:00 p.m.  INVITED PRESENTATION
          EVE SWEETSER, Levels and channels in discourse structure
8:00 - 10:00 p.m.  Reception


THURSDAY, JULY 30

9:00 - 10:00 a.m.  INVITED PRESENTATION
          DOUGLAS BIBER, Literacy and linguistic specialization: Synchronic
and diachronic evidence concerning the linguistic correlates of literacy

10:00 - 10:20  Break

Thursday, Paper Session 1

Talk #01, Thursday, July 30, 10:20 - 10:40 a.m.
     Authors: Tony Noice and Helga Noice
     Title: Memory benefits of active experiencing for expository and
narrative material
Talk #02, Thursday, July 30, 10:45 - 11:05 a.m.
     Authors: Danielle McNamara
     Title: Self-explanation: Effects of practice, prior domain knowledge,
and reading skill
Talk #03, Thursday, July 30, 11:10 - 11:30 a.m.
     Authors: Guy Denhi?re and C?drick Bellissens
     Title: Retrieval from long-term working memory during reading
Talk #04, Thursday, July 30, 11:35 - 11:55 a.m.
     Authors: Arthur Glenberg and David A. Robertson
     Title: Indexical understanding of instructions

Thursday, Paper Session 2

Talk #05, Thursday, July 30, 10:20 - 10:40 a.m.
     Authors: Michelle Gregory and Laura Michaelis
     Title: Topicalization and left dislocation: A functional opposition
revisited
Talk #06, Thursday, July 30, 10:45 - 11:05 a.m.
     Authors: Pamela Downing
     Title: The use of reference forms to negotiate stance in English
conversation
Talk #07, Thursday, July 30, 11:10 - 11:30 a.m.
     Authors: T?nia Mara Gast?o Sali?s
     Title: Linguistic attributes and conceptual organization: A
cross-linguistic analysis of discourse in the light of Cognitive Grammar
Talk #08, Thursday, July 30, 11:35 - 11:55 a.m.
     Authors: Hirokuni Masuda
     Title: Narrative representation theory: Universals in Creole discourse

12:00 - 1:30 p.m. Lunch

Symposium, Thursday, July 30, 1:30 - 3:00 p.m.
     Symposium Organizer: Art Graesser
     Title: AutoTutor: A computer tutor that simulates human tutorial dialogue

     The goals and design of AutoTutor, Art Graesser & Stan Franklin

     A Demonstration of AutoTutor, Lee McCauley, Barry Gholson, & Bill Marks

     A curriculum script on the topic of computer literacy, Myles Bogner,
Doug Hacker, Holly Yetman, & Bianca Klettke

     Language modules and speech act classification, Jim Hoeffner, Brent
Olde, & Zhoahua Zhang

     Using Latent Semantic Analysis to represent knowledge about computer
literacy, Peter Wiemer-Hasting

     Tests of Latent Semantic Analysis in the domain of computer literacy,
Katja Wiemer-Hastings & Ashraf Anwar

     Tutor dialogue moves in naturalistic tutoring, Natalie Person,
Victoria Pomeroy, & Matt Weeks

     AutoTutor's generation of dialogue moves, Derek Harter

     Intonation and facial expressions of talking head, Roger Kreuz,
Kristen Link, & Xiangen Hu

Thursday, Paper Session 3

Talk #09, Thursday, July 30, 1:30 - 1:50 p.m.
     Authors: Francisco Ocampo
     Title: The interaction between discourse, cognition, syntax,
pragmatics, and prosody: The case of word order variation in spoken Spanish
in constructions with a verb, a noun phrase argument, and an adverb
Talk #10, Thursday, July 30, 1:55 - 2:15 p.m.
     Authors: St?phanie Montoya, Thierry Baccino and Guy Denhi?re
     Title: The effect of referent accessibility on pronoun processing:
Evidence from eye movement recordings
Talk #11, Thursday, July 30, 2:20 - 2:40 p.m.
     Authors: Pierre Th?rouanne and Guy Denhi?re
     Title: Time course of single-word context effects on meaning access
Talk #12, Thursday, July 30, 2:45 - 3:05 p.m.
     Authors: Martine Cornuejols and Jean-Pierre Rossi
     Title: What is associated in the mind of a subject when he reads words
or sees pictures?

3:10 - 3:30  Break

Thursday, Paper Session 4

Talk #13, Thursday, July 30, 3:30 - 3:50 p.m.
     Authors: Paul van den Broek, Yuhtsuen Tzeng and Michael E. Young
     Title: The role of attention allocation during reading in the
construction of mental representation of a text
Talk #14, Thursday, July 30, 3:55 - 4:15 p.m.
     Authors: Franz Schmalhofer and Ludger van Elst
     Title: The comprehension of scandals: Cognitive implications from
descriptions of cheating behavior
Talk #15, Thursday, July 30, 4:20 - 4:40 p.m.
     Authors: Isabelle Tapiero and Nathalie Blanc
     Title: The multidimensional aspects of a situation model constructed
from text: Effects of spatial and non spatial information
Talk #16, Thursday, July 30, 4:45 - 5:05 p.m.
     Authors: Sami Gulgoz, Tarcan Kumkale and M. Emrah Aktunc
     Title: The effects of text coherence, need for cognition, and prior
knowledge on situation models

Thursday, Paper Session 5

Talk #17, Thursday, July 30, 3:30 - 3:50 p.m.
     Authors: Heather Bortfeld
     Title: A cross-linguistic analysis of idiom comprehension by native
and non-native speakers
Talk #18, Thursday, July 30, 3:55 - 4:15 p.m.
     Authors: Rachel Giora and Ofer Fein
     Title: Familiar and less familiar ironies: The graded salience hypothesis
Talk #19, Thursday, July 30, 4:20 - 4:40 p.m.
     Authors: Herbert Colston
     Title: An evaluation of conceptual metaphor via extra-linguistic
paradigms: Evidence from category accessibility and reading inferences
Talk #20, Thursday, July 30, 4:45 - 5:05 p.m.
     Authors: Mark Andrews and Frank Keil
     Title: Conceptual organization and discourse processing

5:15 - 5:45 p.m.  Business Meeting

8:00 - 10:00 p.m. Poster Session
Shape - the elusive property of discourse and the design of digital documents
Andrew Dillon

An intertextual typology for text analysis
Juanita Marinkovich & Ricardo Benitez

Updating a situation model: Evidence for on-line and backward processes
Nathalie Blanc & Isabelle Tapiero

The effects of prior knowledge on the content of a situation model
constructed from a descriptive text
Nathalie Blanc & Isabelle Tapiero

Evolution of subjects' initial knowledge structure on a specific domain:
Effects of relations between concepts and of expertise
Isabelle Tapiero & Gaelle Molinari

Memory for metaphors and similes in meaningful discourse
Richard Harris & Noah Jacob Mosier

Violating orientational metaphors affects text comprehension
William Langston & John

The eventuality of propositions
Max Louwerse

The influence of causal connections on the construction of a coherent
memory text representation: Connection strength versus connectivity strength
Marie-Pilar Quintana, Isabelle & Paul van den Broek

Implicit causality effects in the interpretation of pronouns
Jane Oakhill, Alan Garnham, David Reynolds, & Carolyn Wilshire

The influence of verb bias information on clausal integration: Implicit
causality and implicit consequentiality
Andrew Stewart, Martin J. Pickering & Anthony J. Sanford

Detecting subgoal relations in narrative comprehension
Eric Richards & Murray Singer

Are elaborative task conditions necessary for making on-line inferences
about fictional characters' emotional states?
Tammy Bourg, Lori Bernard, Candise Bockrath , & Peter Tran

The importance of reactions for inferring characters' emotions in narrative
texts
Scott Vincent Masten & Tammy Bourg

Does instrument inference occur on-line during reading?
Sung-il Kim , Jung-Mo Lee , Jae-Ho Lee , & Kun-Hyo Lee

The contribution of associative processes to the generation of predictive
inferences
Nicolas Campion & Jean Pierre Rossi

What inference generation research can learn from cinema studies
Per Persson

Cultural influences on online text elaborations
Darcia Narvaez, Christyan Mitchell & Brian Linzie

Cognitive-cooperative strategies in the writing classroom
Pilar Mor?n

Reading-writing connections: discourse-oriented research
Giovanni Parodi

Plan implementation in narrative writing
Brian Linzie & Amy R. Briggs

Task and context: Factors that contribute to expressing one's own ideas in
multiple-source writing
Rosalind Horowitz

The effects and sources of effects of questioning timing on comprehension
of stories
Yuhtsuen Tzeng & Paul van den Broek

The effects of causal text revision on more- and less-skilled readers'
comprehension of easy/difficult text
Tracy Linderholm, Michelle Gaddy, Maureen Mischinski, & Paul van den Broek

Individual differences in remediating poor text comprehension
Mina Johnson-Glenberg

The role of working memory capacity in integrating outline material with text
Amber Wells & Peter W. Foltz

Locating information in complex text: Domain expertise or document literacy?
Jean-Fran?ois Rouet & Laurent Guillon

Effects of literacy and type of TV news on recall
Fatos Goksen, Sami Gulgoz & Cigdem Kagitcibasi

Suppression mechanisms in children: Memory for previously relevant
information in good and poor comprehenders
Alix Seigneuric & Marie-France Ehrlich

Modelisation of sentence comprehension in reading by children
C?line Asmussen


FRIDAY, JULY 31

9:00 - 10:00 a.m.  INVITED PRESENTATION
          JANE OAKHILL, Individual differences in children's comprehension
skill

10:00 - 10:20 Break

Friday, Paper Session 6

Talk #21, Friday, July 31, 10:20 - 10:40 a.m.
     Authors: Wilbert Spooren and Ted Sanders
     Title: What does children's discourse tell us about the nature of
coherence relations?
Talk #22, Friday, July 31, 10:45 - 11:05 a.m.
     Authors: Peter Meyerson, Susan R. Goldman, Nathalie Cote, Cynthia
Mayfield-Stewart, and David M. Bloome
     Title: "Where's Glowbird?": Children's use of multiple dimensions in
story narratives
Talk #23, Friday, July 31, 11:10 - 11:30 a.m.
     Authors: Jean-Fran?ois Rouet and Caroline Golder
     Title: Why did the protest turn violent? 12 to 14 year-olds'
understanding of controversy accounts
Talk #24, Friday, July 31, 11:35 - 11:55 a.m.
     Authors: Guy Denhi?re and Patrick Boug?
     Title: Using a corpus of textbooks to predict and to simulate
organization of knowledge concerning biological concepts

Friday, Paper Session 7

Talk #25, Friday, July 31, 10:20 - 10:40 a.m.
     Authors: Mike Rinck and Andrea Haehnel
     Title: The comprehension and retention of temporal information in
situation models
Talk #26, Friday, July 31, 10:45 - 11:05 a.m.
     Authors: Joe Magliano and Michelle Schleich
     Title: Grammatical markers as processing instructions for situation
model construction: A case for verb aspect
Talk #27, Friday, July 31, 11:10 - 11:30 a.m.
     Authors: Keith Millis, Anne King and Shelly Walquist
     Title: Updating situation models across readings of descriptive texts
Talk #28, Friday, July 31, 11:35 - 11:55 a.m.
     Authors: Rolf Zwaan, K. Anders Ericsson, Carolyn E. Lally, and Len Hill
     Title: Translation of text: A new approach to monitoring the
construction of situation models during comprehension

12:00 - 1:30  Lunch Break

1:30 - 2:30  INVITED PRESENTATION
          ELIZABETH BATES, Processing language in real time:
Cross-linguistic evidence

Friday, Paper Session 8

Talk #29, Friday, July 31, 2:35 - 2:55 p.m.
     Authors: Susan Duncan
     Title: Gestures in relation to speech: Clues to discourse processes in
Chinese and English
Talk #30, Friday, July 31, 3:00 - 3:20 p.m.
     Authors: Timothy Koschmann and Curtis D. LeBaron
     Title: The complementarity of speech and gesticulation in learner
articulation
Talk #31, Friday, July 31, 3:25 - 3:45 p.m.
     Authors: Leo Noordman, Ingrid Dassen, Marc Swerts, and Jacques Terken
     Title: Prosodic expressions of text structure

Friday, Paper Session 9

Talk #32, Friday, July 31, 2:35 - 2:55 p.m.
     Authors: Ellen Spertus
     Title: Automatic recognition of hostile electronic messages
Talk #33, Friday, July 31, 3:00 - 3:20 p.m.
     Authors: Peter Foltz
     Title: Human and computer evaluation of student essays
Talk #34, Friday, July 31, 3:25 - 3:45 p.m.
     Authors: Ken Samuel
     Title: Discourse learning: Dialogue act tagging with
transformation-based learning

3:50 - 4:10  Break

Friday, Paper Session 10

Talk #35, Friday, July 31, 4:10 - 4:25 p.m.
     Authors: James Voss, Jennifer Wiley and Rebecca Sandak
     Title: On the use of narrative as argument
Talk #36, Friday, July 31, 4:30 - 4:50 p.m.
     Authors: M. Anne Britt, Rebecca Sandak, Charles Perfetti, and
Jean-Francois Rouet
     Title: Content integration and source separation in learning from
multiple texts
Talk #37, Friday, July 31, 4:55 - 5:15 p.m.
     Authors: Bonnie McLain-Allen and Douglas J. Hacker
     Title: Delayed revisions

Friday, Paper Session 11

Talk #38, Friday, July 31, 4:10 - 4:25 p.m.
     Authors: Per Persson
     Title: Coherence and inference generation in cinematic texts
Talk #39, Friday, July 31, 4:30 - 4:50 p.m.
     Authors: David Mortensen
     Title: Boundary crossing in miscommunication and problematic talk
Talk #40, Friday, July 31, 4:55 - 5:15 p.m.
     Authors: Stanton Wortham
     Title: Denotational and interactional structure in autobiographical
narrative: A dialogic approach


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Rachel R.W. Robertson
Department of Psychology
1202 W. Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6989


From bingfu at USC.EDU  Sun May 31 00:34:38 1998
From: bingfu at USC.EDU (bingfu)
Date: Sat, 30 May 1998 17:34:38 -0700
Subject: the distinction between compound noun and NP
Message-ID: <SAT.30.MAY.1998.173438.0700.BINGFU@USC.EDU>

About the category of 'fun' in 'fun game', which is hotly discussed
in the discussion about recent change of English, in linguist list.

There seems no clear demarcation between compound nouns and
[adjecitve + noun] NPs in English. However, this demarcation appear
formally clear
in Chinese. In Chinese, all [modifier + noun] structures are
compounds while all [modifier + de + noun] structures are
noncompound, either [adjective + noun] NPs or [relative + noun]
NPs.  In fact, in Chinese there is no distinction between the above two
modification, which is clearly distinguished in English.

Thus, there seems to be a typology of modification hierarchy as
the following.

                relative clause   adjectival one     in-compound one,
Chinese:        ________________________________     ________________
English:        _______________   ___________________________________


In other words,
Chinese makes clear distinction between relative clauses/adjectival
modifiers vs. in-compound modifiers; while English makes the distinction
mainly between relative clauses vs. adjectival/in-compound modifiers.

If your native language is not English and Chinese, please tell me which
is is similar to: Chinese or English?

If responses are sufficient, I will make a summary.

Bingfu Lu
USC