From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:25 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1997 12:52:25 -1450535 Subject: predictions Message-ID: Dear FUNKnet, It seems to me that it is a free country and anyone can say anything that they want, as long as it is not libelous. I'm sure that when Fritz was being interviewed he told the reporter that linguists and psycholinguists disagreed sharply on the interpretation of the genetic data. And probably the reporter just decided to ignore his remarks on that issue. And undoubtedly Fritz, like many of us who have been in a similar position, was shocked to see how his story was reported. I'm rather more interested in Fritz's statement that he would never claim that there would be a gene for the subjunctive. It would have seemed to me that UG might very well predict that there should be a gene that controls ability to mark or not mark mood shift on verbs, as triggered by operations involved in subordinate clauses. Aren't there various proposals for how things like this get handled in LF that involve certain formal manipulations, some of which may be more marked and complex than others? I would expect that a weak local neural dissociation of the type reported in the Jaeger et al. article in Language for the past tense would also evident for the subjunctive. Probably there are areas of the brain that light up during processing of the verb in "If I were to go to the store". Assuming that such results could be obtained, why wouldn't we also expect to find genes that control this "skill" or "module". Perhaps there are families that use the subjunctive in certain contexts, but omit it others. Wouldn't this suggest a dominant heritability pattern, as is argued for the past tense gene in the family studied by Gopnik and Vargha-Khadem? Considered more broadly, can we extract at this point in 1997 a specific set of predictions from UG regarding which linguistic abilities should be genetically linked and which should not? Perhaps there are even some functionalists who would like to offer parallel predictions. If the theories are not sharp enough to offer these predictions a priori, then what scientific sense can be made of post hoc attempts to seek for confirmation in sporadic reports from isolated, incompletely reported, gene lines? Fodor presented a framework for characterizing cognitive modules and it appears that Chomsky adopted that framework during the 1980's. But no one has used those efforts to either generate genetic predictions or at least formulate a method for systematically generating genetic predictions. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:28 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 29 Jan 1997 13:37:28 -1438450 Subject: walking around in the brain Message-ID: Colin and FunkNet, As Lise Menn noted, several aspects of your comments have already been run through the email mill on info-childes at andrew.cmu.edu. On that list, Ann Peters initially pointed to Jaeger et al. as a potential challenge to connectionist/emergentist models of language development and processing. I pointed out that there is at least one fully implemented neural network model that fully predicts results of the type found by Jaeger et al. -- this being the model developed in articles in JML and Connection Science by Alan Kawamoto. So, it is very hard to see how this type of differential activation can be used to support modularity above connectionism. Like Lise, Joe Stemberger, and Liz Bates, I pointed to various stimulus and tasks differences involved in the comparison between regulars and irregulars. However, in that discussion, I don't believe that anyone managed to come up with the excellent rival hypothesis that you are suggesting. It seems to me that one of the best potential uses of the fMRI technique which is now supplanting the PET technique used by Jaeger et al. is to check out precisely the type of hypothesis you have suggested. As you note, people like Mishkin, Ungerleider, Schneider, and Damasio have shown that activation of motor concepts leads to activation of parts of motor cortex in extremely systematic ways. The nice think about your hypothesis is that it can be tested so easily. If someone hasn't already run this study, I would be sorely tempted to run it myself. Thanks for the great point. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:56 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 12:53:56 -1431334 Subject: real neurologists Message-ID: Syd, True enough. Real neurologists don't know or care about connectionism or thinking, learning, or the human mind. Real neurologists spend their time studying individual cells or mapping regions. They typically regard information-processing theories about mental functioning as untestable, given current knowledge. Fortunately, there is a large and growing group of neurologists who are willing to transcend these traditional limitations and who have begun to address learning and processing. For an example of this type of work, you may wish to look at books such as "Learning and COmputational Neuroscience: Foundations of Adaptive Networks" Michael Gabriel and John Moore (Eds.). Here you will find articles by people such as Barto, Kehoe, Schmajuk, Desmond, Sutton and others that represent the bridge area between real neurologically faithful models and ones that attempt to form higher level processing abstractions, while still remaining faithful to the neurological facts. All of the models require a good understanding of neurology, as well as a facility with mathematical modelling. None of them look like the vanilla connectionism that you might find in books such as "Parallel Distributed Processing" by Rumelhart and McClelland. However, everywhere you will find links and hooks back and forth between the simple vanilla models and the real neurologically-grounded models. Models that take the details of neuronal functioning seriously and which capture the intricacy of neuroanatomical patterns are going to be tough to build. One area where modelling and real neurological facts seem to be coming into good contact is in regard to the details of the wiring of local map topology. For example, models of Kohonen self-organizing feature maps closely echo facts of lateral inhibition that are important in setting up neuronal fields. Even more interesting is the way in which the neuronal evidence for the importance of minimizing axon length can be represented as a useful constraint in neural network models. In general, network models vary greatly in the degree to which they attend to neurological details and known facts. Given this, it is important to be careful when declaring that all neural network models are egregiously out of accord with know facts of neural functioning. All models are abstractions and hence somewhat out of accord with details, but some network models are really quite close to what we know about neural functioning. Check out Gabriel and Moore, for example. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:55 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 10:57:55 -1412330 Subject: no-modularity-at-all Message-ID: Dear FunkNet, Sorry about the delay in replying to Tom Givon's note from last week about the inadequacy of no-modularity-at-all connectionism. He rightly emphasizes the extent to which most extant connectionist models tend to minimize the modular organization of the human mind. In particular, Givon notes that "the real bridge between the level we are working at and neurology is most like not at the level of individual neurons and their connections" but rather at the level of interconnected modules. Givon furthermore argues that the patterns at the lower level are comparatively universal and therefore could not be the source of the unique human language capacity. I think Givon's point is important for the readers of this list. I agree that connectionism has not properly demonstrated its relevance to functionalist linguistics. At the best, connectionists (myself included) have presented a system for neural-like notation that allows one to believe that the problems of symbolic representation, language processing, and language acquisition might eventually be solved from an emergentist perspective. The value of this demonstration is simply that it provides functional linguists (additional) license to dismiss claims regarding the psychological reality of generative grammar. However, in practice, functional linguists often have their own empirical reasons for constructing alternative accounts of language processing. When a functional linguist looks to psycholinguistics for insight, it is perhaps a bit disappointing to find psycholinguists obsessed with modelling fine details of the acquisition of the past tense. When functionalists look to neurology, it is equally discouraging to find no anatomical level grounding of the human-primate discontinuity. Givon argues that the problem is that connectionists need to be looking at larger models that connect more modules. I agree completely. In fact, I have recently contrasted models that look at "local maps" with models that look at "functional neural circuits", much along lines that match Givon's points. I have argued that models now need to look at both levels. Where I disagree with Givon is on my assessment of the current status of connectionist work. First, I can point to many recent connectionist models that look at the functional level. Consider Prahlad Gupta's connectionist model of Baddeley's phonological memory loop. The memory loop is a classic example of a functional neural circuit that involves the superior temporal, motor cortex, hippocampus, and possibly additional lexical areas. By looking at how people manage to refresh concepts in this loop, we learn about memory for discourse, sentence production, and other things Givon and the rest of us care about. Second, I am a bit surprised that Givon has not realized that his interest in evolution means that he must pay attention to local anatomical patterns. We know there are subtle neuroanatomical differences between man and primate in frontal cortex and elsewhere. My understanding of brain evolution is that changes in patterns of connectivity emerge as a result of subtle changes on the microscopic level. It is my understanding that it is exactly these low-level differences that support the higher-level functional abilities Givon refers to. Givon chides connectionists for reductionism, but Nature herself is a reductionist. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:34 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 15:12:34 -1411915 Subject: claims and Nature Message-ID: Dan, Liz Bates and I sent in a reply to Gibson when the article came out, but the editor of Language refused to publish it. The reply, in the shape it had back in 1994, is available at: http://psyscope.psy.cmu.edu/Local/Brian/papers/gibson.pdf It is a 3.0 Acrobat file. You might find it easier to go first to http://psyscope.psy.cmu.edu/Local/Brian/papers/ Regarding the brain, if your claim is that we have a lot more to learn, I certainly couldn't disagree with that. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:20 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 14:47:20 -1337540 Subject: CMU Symposium on the Emergence of Language - final schedule Message-ID: The final program for the 28th Annual CMU Symposium on Cognition with the theme "Emergentist Approaches to Language" can be viewed by connecting to childes.psy.cmu.edu with a web browser. The final program lists speakers, times, and talk titles. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:27 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 15:20:27 -1246307 Subject: rules Message-ID: Syd Lamb and Pamela Klebaum recently exchanged a couple of messages regarding making questions from sentences of the type "The man who is calling is yelling." I assume that Pamela cited this particular type of sentence largely because of the role it has played in Chomsky's argument regarding structure dependence and the logical problem of language acquisition. For example, in Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980, p. 40, Chomsky claimes that "A person might go through much or all of his life without ever having been exposed to relevant evidence, but he will nevertheless unerringly employ [the structure-dependent generalization], on the first relevant occasion." In his 1996 BLS paper, Geoff Pullum checked out Chomsky's claim by examining questions in the Wall Street Journal. He found that, in the first 500 questions, there were 5 that provided the required positive evidence. Pullum took this as evidence against Chomsky's analysis. Of course, it may be that Pamela was not really concerned about the structure dependent generalization issue and just accidentally happened to cite this particular structure. Perhaps she was just asking how children can form sentences of any type without rules. That's a reasonable question, but hardly one that can be resolved in a few short email messages. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:16 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 17:03:16 -1246124 Subject: easily imagined errors Message-ID: Dan, I agree. It is true that the fact that Chomsky was wrong about the facts concerning the distribution of data to derive the structure-dependency generalization does not mean that the rest of Chomsky's argument is wrong. It is true that, as you and Chomsky say, there is something that "keeps children from making some fairly easy to imagine errors." But these "easy to imagine errors" are not actually ones that ever occurred to the child. The child never tries to derive questions from the corresponding declaratives (as several previous email messages have noted). Because of this, the linear movement or transformation generalization was not one that the child was considering in the first place. I agree that the question is how the child accesses semantic structure in a disciplined enough way to avoid egregious errors. To explore this, we don't need the hard examples. We can just look at a sentence like "Is Daddy coming?" There is a pretty rich child language literature on the development of questions. For this type of question, there appears to be a stage when the aux is missing and we have just "Daddy coming?" The intonation is there, as is the verb and the subject. Only later, it appears, does the child add the aux. I think this path makes sense. The most uniform, reliable marker of the question across types in English is the intonation. That gets mapped first, along with the core proposition. Then the embroidery gets added later. The aux wasn't moved, it was just added. When we get to the harder examples, the story is the same, since the complex-NP subject is a cognitive unit the child doesn't look to it for the required aux. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:28:13 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 12:50:13 -1244138 Subject: need for hooks Message-ID: The idea that restrictive relative clauses are composed of material that has been cognitively unitized is pretty far from hand-waving. Psycholinguistic research from the 60s and 70s by Rommetveit and Turner, Clark, Krauss and Glucksberg showed how restrictive relatives are used to distinguish members of a contrast set. Typological work by Givon, Keenan, Comrie, and others demonstrated asymmetries in relativization types that matched up well with underlying functional characteristics. In more recent psycholinguistic work, Bock and her colleagues have explored processes which allow previously mentioned material to form the kernel of further utterances. Bock has focused on passives and datives. Earlier, Levelt looked at question structures. The message from this work on what Bock calls syntactic persistence is that the use of a syntactic pattern in previous discourse tends to make it available as unit for further processing. Many of the syntactic phenomena that revolve around constraints on raising from relatives emerge rather directly from these facts. I can't remember ever having thought or said that syntax should be eliminated. I consider syntax a wonderful, complex, and fascinating fact of nature. I simply believe, like Geertz, Wilcox, and Aske, that it should be explicated. In particular, I think that syntacticians have a responsibility to the rest of the linguistic community to make their analyses more penetrable to explication. This can be done by including "hooks" in syntactic theory to concepts and constructs that match up with what we know about language processing and use. The treatment of restrictive relative clauses discussed in some of the previous messages is a prime example of a construction for which such a "hook" is needed. Like computer programs that have hooks, theories that have hooks have to be designed in a way that supports communication between disciplinary "modules". For example, the theory of syntax would need to support hooks for things from psychology like cognitive unitization, syntactic persistence, memory strings, construction generalization, and the like. Including hooks to these objects would markedly alter the shape of syntactic theory. It would definitely not make syntax disappear. However, it would allow syntacticians, functionalists, and psycholinguists to communicate and collaborate more effectively. I'm not sure that it would bring us to the point of using syntactic theory to make statements about children as expert witnesses, but it might get closer. I have been told that the increased role of logical form in minimalist syntax may represent a movement in this direction. It would be interesting if that were the case. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:28:06 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 24 Apr 1997 13:37:06 -1234451 Subject: human genes Message-ID: Dear Chris, Yes, there are people who think that there is a human gene that carries linguistic syntactic information. The clearest case is M. Gopnik's letter to Nature Volume 344 April 1990. The article argues for "one dominant gene" that controls the ability to mark regular inflections. Rather than quoting extensively from that article, I recommend that you read it. Researchers who have accepted and extended the analysis provided there include Steven Pinker, Harald Clahsen, and Heather van der Lely. Van der Lely has also argued for a gene that controls the use of ruels that map from syntax to semantics - what she and Wexler call reverse linking rules. There are papers by Gopnik and van der Lely in Cognition. You may wish to track out these issues in the literature. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:21 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 10:45:21 -1205942 Subject: Schadenfreude Message-ID: Dear FunkNet, The discussion of the absence of a word in English for Schadenfreude and its equivalents in many other languages has not yet touched on what I would have considered to be a fairly obvious observation. This is the observation that English has no word for this emotion because the emotion is not supposed to exist. One is not supposed to experience delight in the misery of others. In fact, I would say that, although I have occasionally been tempted to experience such feelings, I usually convert them quickly into something like feeling that others have gotten their "just desserts". In other words, some moral agent intervenes in the process and I get removed from the experience. I can definitely see how someone would experience Schadenfreude, but I sense a cultural prohibition of this emotion in those aspects of American culture with which I am familiar. An interesting ethnographic perspective on issues related to this can be found in an article by Signe Howell titled "Rules not words" in P. Heelas & A. Lock (Eds.) (1981) Indigenous Psychologies. New York: Academic Press. Howell notes how the Chewong of Malaysia avoid language that denotes the expression of inner states except through the actions that accompany them. It seems to me that a fuller understanding (or at least description) of links between emotion, language, and culture is a place where functional linguistics can make a nice contribution. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:21 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 17:50:21 -1205237 Subject: niceness Message-ID: Jane, Good point. However, my claim was a bit more narrow. I was not suggesting that English is in any way "nice", only that it avoids this particular verbal show of pleasure in other's suffering. English accepts the notion of "sadism", but only as a foreign import. English is rich, of course, in terms describing moral violations like greed, sloth, cowardice (the basic sins of Pilgrim's Progress). It is also definitely OK to talk openly about vindictiveness and revenge (witness Timothy McVeigh on the subject of revenge for the Waco FBI attack). These emotional terms are justified by their grounding in righteousness. But it is exactly this that forces us to shift (almost at the last moment?) from feeling "Schadenfreude" to concluding that someone "got his just desserts". In fact, what happens is that the wrath (vindictiveness, vengefulness) of the Almighty ends up descending onto an appropriate target without us having to develop a personal relation grounded on the joy of seeing someone else suffer. Tricky stuff. Does Lakoff have anything on issues like this? English has lots of stuff like "writhing in agony" and "twisting in the wind." Are there metaphors and similes in Schadenfreude languages grounded on "delight in watching someone twist in the wind?" Alternatively, perhaps there is some universal of metaphor that excludes emotions about others' emotions. Maybe such terms are just too cognitively complex according to some version of "theory of mind." What about Akio Kamio's analyses that claim that Japanese limits the speaker's ability to make statements about the hearer's feelings and emotions (speaker's territory of knowledge)? Perhaps we could argue that English is constrained in a similar way. I realize that this is not the original account that I offered, but it is also an interesting possibility. -- Brian From CCarter at BLACKWELLPUBLISHERS.CO.UK Thu Sep 3 14:08:57 1998 From: CCarter at BLACKWELLPUBLISHERS.CO.UK (Carter Clare) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 15:08:57 +0100 Subject: Online Access for Linguistics Journals Message-ID: Online Availability of Blackwell Publishers' Linguistics Journals Did you know that all the linguistics journals published by Blackwell Publishers are now available online? Electronic access to these journals is available to members of any institution that has a subscription to the printed edition. There are a variety of benefits to using the online version of a journal such as unlimited browsing and full text searching. It also offers the facility to download and print articles. Online access is available via a number of service providers. For more information about online access please visit our website at http//:www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/Static/online.htm Or contact: Clare Carter, Journals Marketing, Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK. Tel: ++44 (0)1865 382340. Fax: ++44 (0)1865 381340. Email: ccarter at blackwellpublishers.co.uk Computational Intelligence ISSN: 0824-7935 German Life and Letters ISSN: 0016-8777 Journal of Sociolinguistics ISSN: 1360-6441 Language Learning ISSN: 0023-8333 Mind & Language ISSN: 0268-1064 Studia Linguistica ISSN: 0039-3193 Syntax ISSN: 1368-0005 Transactions of the Philological Society ISSN: 0079-1636 World Englishes ISSN: 0883-2919 From annes at HTDC.ORG Wed Sep 9 00:57:33 1998 From: annes at HTDC.ORG (Anne Sing) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1998 14:57:33 -1000 Subject: Summary of Responses to "UNIQUE NLP" (and CONCLUSION) Message-ID: SUMMARY About two weeks ago I requested information concerning NLP software that offered the ability to do a q&a exchange between animations and a user similar to the "ChatterBox" software (free) we have at http://www.haptek.com. Here is a summary of the responses I got and a short commentary on each. In addition, I have added a few that I have found via Microsoft concerning a parrot named "Perdy" and similar characters. Take a look for yourself and you can see the degree to which these different companies and research institutions are making it possible to chat with computers and animations for fun, internet searches, and information exchange. 1. You should have a look at the work by Boris Katz at the MIT AI lab. He's been working on a system called START for some time that does such things and more. See the web page at http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/infolab/ for more info. 2. The Information Science Institute at USC (www.isi.edu) did a lot of work in that area about 10 years ago, using, I believe, their PENMAN syntax analyzer. I think the project was lead by Ed Hovy, who was still a director there last year but seems to have left since. There was also a Dr. Christiensen (spelling?) but he has returned to Australia, probably at McQuarrie University with MAK Halliday. Not much help, but you can try emailing ISI staff: some may remember. 3. Kevin Lenzo has a bot named url which stores information and answers questions online, from multiple users, phrased similarly. url hangs out in MUSHes, but I don't remember which ones. It seems that you developed a kind of chatterbot or digital secretary. There are many chatterbots developed. You can see the other chatterbots 'http://www.toptown.com/hp/sjlaven/' 4. The Microsoft and several other industry sites for this research are at: http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/ui/persona/home.htm http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/projects/interface9495-srct.html http://merl.co.jp http://www.csl.sony.co.jp http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/cmu.edu/misc/mosaic/common/omega/web/frontdoor.html http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gva/gvatop.html http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/projects/cait/index.html CONCLUSION While all these sites have interesting applications for speech and animations they do not have the ability to put in factual information and then query for that information. Usually they have a key word search ability which allows them to return particular paragraphs from a body of data based on the key words of a query. However, to ask and answer questions like the following only seems to be possible with ChatterBox at http://www.haptek.com. There were no announcements of the development of such technology at these other companies. Who was the first president of the United States? Who invented the telescope? When did Columbus come to America? Hey Mickey, Where did you find that treasure map? What is your email address? What is your fax number? and so on. Phil Bralich Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 From Ziv at HUM.HUJI.AC.IL Mon Sep 14 20:47:00 1998 From: Ziv at HUM.HUJI.AC.IL (Ziv Yael) Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 13:47:00 PDT Subject: Second Call for Papers Message-ID: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ FORWARDED FROM: Ziv Yael Return-Path: Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19980909000730.007a4d00 at post.tau.ac.il> X-Sender: anatbi at post.tau.ac.il (Unverified) X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.5 (32) Date: Wed, 09 Sep 1998 00:07:30 -0700 To: Annie , Jonathan Berg , marcelo dascal , Anat Biletzki , Elda Weizman , Tamar Katriel , Shoshana Blum-Kulka , nomi shir , Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot , Mira Ariel , Yael Ziv , Ruth W Manor , Rachel Giora , sarfati at ccsg.tau.ac.il From: Anat Biletzki Subject: Second Call for Papers Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hi everyone, I'm enclosing a clean copy of the second Call for Papers. I've sent it to the two philosophy lists. Please distribute widely and let me or Annie (at Pragma99 at ccsg.tau.ac.il) know where it's gone. Lehitra'ot, Anat *************** 2nd Call for Papers PRAGMA99 International Pragmatics Conference on PRAGMATICS AND NEGOTIATION June 13-16, 1999 Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Israel The main theme of this conference is the pragmatics of negotiation, interpreted in a very broad sense. Interlocutors engage in negotiations about every aspect of their interaction - such as floor access and topic selection, contextual assumptions, conversational goals, and the (mis)interpretation and repair of their messages. Topics such as cross-cultural and cross-gender (mis)communications, conversational procedures in disputes and collaborations, argumentation practices, and effects of assumptions and goals on the negotiating strategies of interlocutors are of special interest for this conference. The conference will be interdisciplinary, bringing together pragmaticists, linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. We are soliciting papers on all issues relevant to the theme of the conference, as well as papers in other areas of pragmatics and dialogue analysis. The conference will include plenary addresses, regular session lectures, and organized panels around any of the relevant topics. Among the plenary speakers: Elinor Ochs (UCLA), Itamar Rabinovitch (Tel Aviv University), Emanual Schegloff (UCLA), Thomas Schelling (University of Maryland), Deborah Schiffrin (Georgetown University), Deborah Tannen (Georgetown University), Ruth Wodak (University of Vienna). Presentation of regular session lectures is 30 minutes long, with a subsequent discussion of 10 minutes. Panels take the form of a series of closely related lectures on a specific topic, which may or may not be directly related to the special topic of the conference. They may consist of one, two or three units of 120 minutes. Within each panel unit a maximum of four 20-minute presentations are given consecutively, followed by a minimum of 30 minutes of discussion (either devoted entirely to an open discussion, or taken up in part by comments by a discussant or discussants). Panels are composed of contributions attracted by panel organizers, combined with individually submitted papers when judged appropriate by the Program Committee in consultation with the panel organizers. Typically, written versions or extensive outlines of all panel contributions should be available before the conference to facilitate discussion. SUBMISSIONS Abstracts for papers and panels should be submitted in the following format: 1. For papers - five copies of an anonymous abstract (up to 300 words). 2. For panels - a preliminary proposal of one page, detailing title, area of interest, name of organizer(s) and invited participants to be sent by Sept. 30, 1998. Organizers of approved panels will then be invited to submit a full set of abstracts, including: a. a brief description of the topic area, b. a list of participants (with full details, see below), c. abstracts by each of the participants by November 1, 1998. 3. In all cases, a page stating: a. title, b. audiovisual/computer request, and c. for each author: I. Full name and affiliation; II. Current address; III. E-mail address; IV. Fax number. Deadline for submission of abstracts: Nov. 1, 1998. Abstracts may be sent by hard copy, disk, or e-mail to Pragma99, Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, ISRAEL. E-mail: pragma99 at post.tau.ac.il Date of notification: March 1, 1999. PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Mira Ariel, Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot, Jonathan Berg, Anat Biletzki, Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Marcelo Dascal, Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Tamar Katriel, Ruth Manor, George-Elia Sarfati, Elda Weizman, Yael Ziv. ============================================================ PRAGMA99 REGISTRATION FORM Please send the following information, accompanied by cheque payable to Tel-Aviv University in the amount of US$75 if paid before November 1, 1998, otherwise US$100, to Pragma99 Faculty of Humanities Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv 69978, ISRAEL Dr./Mr./Mrs./Ms./ Name:__________________________ Address:_______________________________________________ University/Organization:___________________________________ Email:__________________________ Fax:____________________(Home)_______________(Office) Telephone:____________________(Home)_____________(Office) Signature:_____________________ Date:________________ Those wishing to pay by credit card should provide the following information: Type of Credit Card: Mastercard/Visa/American Express Name as it appears on Credit Card: Sum of Paymnt: US$__________ Card No.________________________ Expiration Date: __________________ Date:_______________ Signature: _____________________ ********** Those wishing to present a paper should follow the instructions above. Hotel information will be provided after registration. The International Association for Dialogue Analysis is co-sponsoring a part of our conference, which will be devoted to "Negotiation as a Dialogic Concept." For further information, contact Edda Weigand (e-mail: weigand at uni-muenster.de). ============================================================ [Forms can also be returned by fax to 972-3-6407839, or by e-mail to pragma99 at post.tau.ac.il . ] From osp at GEMA.COM.AR Mon Sep 21 00:49:17 1998 From: osp at GEMA.COM.AR (Osvaldo Spoltore) Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 21:49:17 -0300 Subject: VII Congreso - Sociedad Argentina de Linguistica - 22/09 a 25-09 Message-ID: Lo invitamos al: VII Congreso de la Sociedad Argentina de Linguistica a traves de la web: www.gema.com.ar/CO_VII 22 de septiembre a 25 de septiembre de 1998 San Martin de los Andes - Pcia. de Neuquen Republica Argentina -Programas -Resumenes de las ponencias ( cerca de 200 ) -Contactos con el Congreso Lo esperamos... SAL From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Wed Sep 23 14:47:39 1998 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (Funknet Administration) Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 09:47:39 -0500 Subject: Message from Eduard Hovy (fwd) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 10:32:25 -0800 To: FUNKNET-request at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU From: Eduard Hovy Subject: Request to post a correction on FUNKNET The following somewhat misleading message was posted on Tue, 8 Sep 1998: >X-Sender: annes at mana.htdc.org >Subject: Corpora: Summary of Responses to "UNIQUE NLP" (and CONCLUSION) >Sender: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no >Precedence: bulk > >SUMMARY >About two weeks ago I requested information concerning NLP >software that offered the ability to do a q&a exchange >between animations and a user similar to the "ChatterBox" >software (free) we have at http://www.haptek.com. Here is >a summary of the responses I got > >2. >The Information Science Institute at USC (www.isi.edu) did a lot of >work in that area about 10 years ago, using, I believe, their PENMAN >syntax analyzer. I think the project was lead by Ed Hovy, who was >still a director there last year but seems to have left since. There >was also a Dr. Christiensen (spelling?) but he has returned to >Australia, probably at McQuarrie University with MAK Halliday. Not >much help, but you can try emailing ISI staff: some may remember. There is, and has been for about two decades, an active research group in NLP at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). The PENMAN system, a natural language *generator*, was developed from circa 1979 to 1986 in a project led by Bill Mann and Christian Matthiessen; Mann has since retired and Matthiessen is a professor of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Melbourne, Australia (cmatthie at pip.engl.mq.edu.au). The NLP Group at ISI currently contains several complementary projects. More recent research at ISI includes: 1. Machine Translation (the Japangloss/GAZELLE system): Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish to English, using a hybridization of statistical and symbolic techniques. Contact Kevin Knight (knight at isi.edu). 2. Text Summarization (the SUMMARIST system): multilingual summarization using several complementary techniques, including discourse structure. Contact Eduard Hovy (hovy at isi.edu) and Daniel Marcu (marcu at isi.edu). 3. Multilingual Information Management (the MuST and C*ST*RD systems): this work includes multilingual Information Retrieval, clustering, and so on; contact Chin-Yew Lin (cyl at isi.edu). 4. Construction of large ontologies and lexicons: the semi-automated merging of large ontologies, and the enhancement of these using information extracted out of dictionaries and the web; contact Eduard Hovy (hovy at isi.edu). 5. Sentence Planning and Generation (the HealthDoc Sentence Planner and the NITROGEN system): the pre-realization stage of microplanning sentence structure and content, using a variety of methods; contact Eduard Hovy (hovy at isi.edu). For realization, NITROGEN combines a phrase structure grammar with a bigram model of English to generate from underspecified input; contact Kevin Knight (knight at isi.edu). More information on all this is available from http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html E ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Eduard Hovy email: hovy at isi.edu USC Information Sciences Institute tel: 310-822-1511 ext 731 4676 Admiralty Way fax: 310-823-6714 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 project homepage: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Thu Sep 24 00:37:40 1998 From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike L Gildea) Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 19:37:40 -0500 Subject: CSDL-4 abstracts online (fwd) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 01:06:53 -0400 From: csdl-4 To: spikeg at owlnet.rice.edu Subject: CSDL-4 abstracts online The abstracts for most of the paper and poster presentations for the Fourth Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language (CSDL-4) are now posted to the conference web site. You can access them by clicking on the titles in the conference program at http://www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/LINGUISTICS/CSDL/program.html The conference will be held at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on October 10-12. For further information, please contact Alan Cienki Chair of the organizing committee csdl-4 at learnlink.emory.edu +1-404-727-2689 From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Tue Sep 29 20:39:02 1998 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (Funknet Administration) Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 15:39:02 -0500 Subject: (fwd) Neural Theory of Language Group questionnaire Message-ID: Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 11:36:21 -0700 (PDT) From: MARIYA BRODSKY Hello, everyone, I am a member of the Neural Theory of Language group at Berkeley. Our group would like to ask for you help in the following matter: We are beginning research on a neural theory of grammar to accompany work the group has already done on semantics. Part of the research will involve a cognitively based notion of "focus". I would like to find out what the best current survey of literature on focus is, and what you think the best works on the subject are. By focus, I mean the phenomenon displayed in sentences like: John only WASHED the apples. versus John only washed the APPLES. Here the capitalized elements are in "focus" and constitute the scope of "only." Similar cases occurs with questions, Did John WASH the apples? versus Did John wash the APPLES? versus Did JOHN wash the apples? as well as negatives, just, even, and contrastive stress John washed the APPLES (not the oranges). Quantifiers that are surface adverbs also take focused elements John mostly WASHED the apples. versus John mostly washed the APPLES. I would like to know if anyone working on this phenomenon has a good list of grammatical elements or constructions that take focused elements (e.g., questions, negatives, only, etc.) Is there a study of constructions dedicated to focus (e. g., clefts and pseudo-clefts)? Is there a study of alternative constrution that differ largely in focus? For example, John sliced the appled with a chainsaw. versus John used a chainsaw to slice the apple. Is there a study of universals of focus, or a typologial study on focus? What is there in the child language acquistion literature on focus? What have computational linguists done on focus? What is the current status of focus studies in various conemporary linguistic theories? For example, what do Chomsky's minimalism, functional grammar, HPSG, cognitive grammar, lexical functionalism, role and reference grammar, and construction grammar have to say about focus? Are there studies on the relationship between focus and deixis? Or on the constraints on focus compared to the constraints on anaphora? Are there focus studies in discourse representation theory? Are there any neurolinguistic or psycholinguistic studies of focus, in particular, are there priming studies involving focus? Thank you in advance for any leads you can give me. I will compile the responses and list them for the community. With best wishes, Masha Brodsky From A.M.Bolkestein at LET.UVA.NL Wed Sep 30 10:59:44 1998 From: A.M.Bolkestein at LET.UVA.NL (A.M. Bolkestein) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 11:59:44 +0100 Subject: (fwd) Neural Theory of Language Group questionnaire In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Why don't you have a look at Matthew Dryers paper in the Journal of Pragmatics 1996: 475-523 Focus, pragmatic presupposition and activated propositions, and you'll have a useful survey. Also of course Knut Lambrecht's 1994 book on Information structure and sentence form. For more references see a paper by me `What to do with topic and focus' in a recent volume edited by Hannay, Mike & Bolkestein, A. Machtelt (1998) Functional Grammar and Verbal Interaction (Amsterdam / philadelphia: John Benjamins). Good luck! !! CHANGE OF ADDRESS: `hum'.uva.nl instead of `let'.uva.nl !! Machtelt Bolkestein Dept. of Classics, University of Amsterdam Oude Turfmarkt 129 NL-1012 GC Amsterdam Fax: ++31.20.5252544 E-mail: a.m.bolkestein at hum.uva.nl From charon at UCLINK4.BERKELEY.EDU Wed Sep 30 15:08:54 1998 From: charon at UCLINK4.BERKELEY.EDU (charon at UCLINK4.BERKELEY.EDU) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 08:08:54 -0700 Subject: BLS Call for Papers Message-ID: Please distribute the following announcement to all interested parties. THE BERKELEY LINGUISTICS SOCIETY BLS 25 CALL FOR PAPERS The Berkeley Linguistics Society is pleased to announce its Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting, to be held February 13-15, 1999. The conference will consist of a General Session and a Parasession on Saturday and Sunday, followed by a Special Session on Monday. **************************************************************************** *** General Session: The General Session will cover all areas of general linguistic interest. Invited Speakers CAROL FOWLER, Haskins Laboratories, Univ. of Connecticut, Yale Univ. STEPHEN LEVINSON, Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen BJØRN LINDBLOM, Univ. of Stockholm and Univ. of Texas, Austin ALEC MARANTZ, Massachusetts Institute of Technology **************************************************************************** *** Parasession: Loan Word Phenomena The Parasession invites papers on loan word phenomena from various theoretical, historical, sociolinguistic, and typological perspectives, as well as descriptive works and field reports. Areas of interest include stratification of the lexicon and loan word 'subgrammars', re-lexification, the role of orthography, markedness effects, second-language acquisition, child language, bilingualism and code-switching, etc. Invited Speakers ELLEN BROSELOW, State University of New York, Stony Brook GARLAND CANNON, Texas A&M University JUNKO ITO & ARMIN MESTER, University of California, Santa Cruz **************************************************************************** *** Special Session: Issues in Caucasian, Dravidian and Turkic Linguistics The Special Session will feature research on Caucasian, Dravidian and Turkic languages. Papers addressing both diachronic and synchronic issues are welcome. Potential topics include theoretical and descriptive accounts of structural features, writing systems and transcription problems, language reform, and the reconstruction of the respective Proto-languages, including the question of Altaic linguistic unity. Invited Speakers JOHANNA NICHOLS, University of California, Berkeley K.P. MOHANAN, National University of Singapore LARS JOHANSON, Universität Mainz **************************************************************************** *** We encourage proposals from diverse theoretical frameworks and welcome papers from related disciplines, such as Anthropology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Literature, Philosophy, and Psychology. Papers presented at the conference will be published in the Society's Proceedings, and authors who present papers agree to provide camera-ready copy (not to exceed 12 pages) by May 15, 1999. Presentations will be allotted 20 minutes with 10 minutes for questions. We ask that you make your abstract as specific as possible, including a statement of your topic or problem, your approach, and your conclusions. Please send 10 copies of an anonymous one-page (8 1/2" x 11", unreduced) abstract. A second page, or reverse side of the single page, may be used for data and references only. Along with the abstract send a 3"x5" card listing: (1) paper title, (2) session (general, Parasession, or special), (3) for general session abstracts only, subfield, viz., Discourse Analysis, Historical Linguistics, Morphology, Philosophy and Methodology of Linguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics, Semantics, Sociolinguistics, or Syntax, (4) name(s) of author(s), (5) affiliation(s) of author(S), (6) address to which notification of acceptance or rejection should be mailed (in November 1998), (7) author's office and home phone numbers, (8) author's e-mail address, if available. An author may submit at most one single and one joint abstract. In case of joint authorship, one address should be designated for communication with BLS. Send abstracts to: BLS 25 Abstracts Committee, 1203 Dwinelle Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. Abstracts must be received by 4:00 p.m., November 2, 1998. We may be contacted by e-mail at bls at socrates.berkeley.edu. Information on e-mail submission and additional guidelines for abstracts can be found at our web site (http://faust.linguistics.berkeley.edu/BLS). We will not accept faxed abstracts. Registration Fees: Before February 5, 1999; $15 for students, $30 for non-students; After February 5, 1999; $20 for students, $35 for non-students. From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:25 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1997 12:52:25 -1450535 Subject: predictions Message-ID: Dear FUNKnet, It seems to me that it is a free country and anyone can say anything that they want, as long as it is not libelous. I'm sure that when Fritz was being interviewed he told the reporter that linguists and psycholinguists disagreed sharply on the interpretation of the genetic data. And probably the reporter just decided to ignore his remarks on that issue. And undoubtedly Fritz, like many of us who have been in a similar position, was shocked to see how his story was reported. I'm rather more interested in Fritz's statement that he would never claim that there would be a gene for the subjunctive. It would have seemed to me that UG might very well predict that there should be a gene that controls ability to mark or not mark mood shift on verbs, as triggered by operations involved in subordinate clauses. Aren't there various proposals for how things like this get handled in LF that involve certain formal manipulations, some of which may be more marked and complex than others? I would expect that a weak local neural dissociation of the type reported in the Jaeger et al. article in Language for the past tense would also evident for the subjunctive. Probably there are areas of the brain that light up during processing of the verb in "If I were to go to the store". Assuming that such results could be obtained, why wouldn't we also expect to find genes that control this "skill" or "module". Perhaps there are families that use the subjunctive in certain contexts, but omit it others. Wouldn't this suggest a dominant heritability pattern, as is argued for the past tense gene in the family studied by Gopnik and Vargha-Khadem? Considered more broadly, can we extract at this point in 1997 a specific set of predictions from UG regarding which linguistic abilities should be genetically linked and which should not? Perhaps there are even some functionalists who would like to offer parallel predictions. If the theories are not sharp enough to offer these predictions a priori, then what scientific sense can be made of post hoc attempts to seek for confirmation in sporadic reports from isolated, incompletely reported, gene lines? Fodor presented a framework for characterizing cognitive modules and it appears that Chomsky adopted that framework during the 1980's. But no one has used those efforts to either generate genetic predictions or at least formulate a method for systematically generating genetic predictions. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:28 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 29 Jan 1997 13:37:28 -1438450 Subject: walking around in the brain Message-ID: Colin and FunkNet, As Lise Menn noted, several aspects of your comments have already been run through the email mill on info-childes at andrew.cmu.edu. On that list, Ann Peters initially pointed to Jaeger et al. as a potential challenge to connectionist/emergentist models of language development and processing. I pointed out that there is at least one fully implemented neural network model that fully predicts results of the type found by Jaeger et al. -- this being the model developed in articles in JML and Connection Science by Alan Kawamoto. So, it is very hard to see how this type of differential activation can be used to support modularity above connectionism. Like Lise, Joe Stemberger, and Liz Bates, I pointed to various stimulus and tasks differences involved in the comparison between regulars and irregulars. However, in that discussion, I don't believe that anyone managed to come up with the excellent rival hypothesis that you are suggesting. It seems to me that one of the best potential uses of the fMRI technique which is now supplanting the PET technique used by Jaeger et al. is to check out precisely the type of hypothesis you have suggested. As you note, people like Mishkin, Ungerleider, Schneider, and Damasio have shown that activation of motor concepts leads to activation of parts of motor cortex in extremely systematic ways. The nice think about your hypothesis is that it can be tested so easily. If someone hasn't already run this study, I would be sorely tempted to run it myself. Thanks for the great point. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:56 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 12:53:56 -1431334 Subject: real neurologists Message-ID: Syd, True enough. Real neurologists don't know or care about connectionism or thinking, learning, or the human mind. Real neurologists spend their time studying individual cells or mapping regions. They typically regard information-processing theories about mental functioning as untestable, given current knowledge. Fortunately, there is a large and growing group of neurologists who are willing to transcend these traditional limitations and who have begun to address learning and processing. For an example of this type of work, you may wish to look at books such as "Learning and COmputational Neuroscience: Foundations of Adaptive Networks" Michael Gabriel and John Moore (Eds.). Here you will find articles by people such as Barto, Kehoe, Schmajuk, Desmond, Sutton and others that represent the bridge area between real neurologically faithful models and ones that attempt to form higher level processing abstractions, while still remaining faithful to the neurological facts. All of the models require a good understanding of neurology, as well as a facility with mathematical modelling. None of them look like the vanilla connectionism that you might find in books such as "Parallel Distributed Processing" by Rumelhart and McClelland. However, everywhere you will find links and hooks back and forth between the simple vanilla models and the real neurologically-grounded models. Models that take the details of neuronal functioning seriously and which capture the intricacy of neuroanatomical patterns are going to be tough to build. One area where modelling and real neurological facts seem to be coming into good contact is in regard to the details of the wiring of local map topology. For example, models of Kohonen self-organizing feature maps closely echo facts of lateral inhibition that are important in setting up neuronal fields. Even more interesting is the way in which the neuronal evidence for the importance of minimizing axon length can be represented as a useful constraint in neural network models. In general, network models vary greatly in the degree to which they attend to neurological details and known facts. Given this, it is important to be careful when declaring that all neural network models are egregiously out of accord with know facts of neural functioning. All models are abstractions and hence somewhat out of accord with details, but some network models are really quite close to what we know about neural functioning. Check out Gabriel and Moore, for example. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:55 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 10:57:55 -1412330 Subject: no-modularity-at-all Message-ID: Dear FunkNet, Sorry about the delay in replying to Tom Givon's note from last week about the inadequacy of no-modularity-at-all connectionism. He rightly emphasizes the extent to which most extant connectionist models tend to minimize the modular organization of the human mind. In particular, Givon notes that "the real bridge between the level we are working at and neurology is most like not at the level of individual neurons and their connections" but rather at the level of interconnected modules. Givon furthermore argues that the patterns at the lower level are comparatively universal and therefore could not be the source of the unique human language capacity. I think Givon's point is important for the readers of this list. I agree that connectionism has not properly demonstrated its relevance to functionalist linguistics. At the best, connectionists (myself included) have presented a system for neural-like notation that allows one to believe that the problems of symbolic representation, language processing, and language acquisition might eventually be solved from an emergentist perspective. The value of this demonstration is simply that it provides functional linguists (additional) license to dismiss claims regarding the psychological reality of generative grammar. However, in practice, functional linguists often have their own empirical reasons for constructing alternative accounts of language processing. When a functional linguist looks to psycholinguistics for insight, it is perhaps a bit disappointing to find psycholinguists obsessed with modelling fine details of the acquisition of the past tense. When functionalists look to neurology, it is equally discouraging to find no anatomical level grounding of the human-primate discontinuity. Givon argues that the problem is that connectionists need to be looking at larger models that connect more modules. I agree completely. In fact, I have recently contrasted models that look at "local maps" with models that look at "functional neural circuits", much along lines that match Givon's points. I have argued that models now need to look at both levels. Where I disagree with Givon is on my assessment of the current status of connectionist work. First, I can point to many recent connectionist models that look at the functional level. Consider Prahlad Gupta's connectionist model of Baddeley's phonological memory loop. The memory loop is a classic example of a functional neural circuit that involves the superior temporal, motor cortex, hippocampus, and possibly additional lexical areas. By looking at how people manage to refresh concepts in this loop, we learn about memory for discourse, sentence production, and other things Givon and the rest of us care about. Second, I am a bit surprised that Givon has not realized that his interest in evolution means that he must pay attention to local anatomical patterns. We know there are subtle neuroanatomical differences between man and primate in frontal cortex and elsewhere. My understanding of brain evolution is that changes in patterns of connectivity emerge as a result of subtle changes on the microscopic level. It is my understanding that it is exactly these low-level differences that support the higher-level functional abilities Givon refers to. Givon chides connectionists for reductionism, but Nature herself is a reductionist. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:34 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 15:12:34 -1411915 Subject: claims and Nature Message-ID: Dan, Liz Bates and I sent in a reply to Gibson when the article came out, but the editor of Language refused to publish it. The reply, in the shape it had back in 1994, is available at: http://psyscope.psy.cmu.edu/Local/Brian/papers/gibson.pdf It is a 3.0 Acrobat file. You might find it easier to go first to http://psyscope.psy.cmu.edu/Local/Brian/papers/ Regarding the brain, if your claim is that we have a lot more to learn, I certainly couldn't disagree with that. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:20 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 14:47:20 -1337540 Subject: CMU Symposium on the Emergence of Language - final schedule Message-ID: The final program for the 28th Annual CMU Symposium on Cognition with the theme "Emergentist Approaches to Language" can be viewed by connecting to childes.psy.cmu.edu with a web browser. The final program lists speakers, times, and talk titles. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:27 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 15:20:27 -1246307 Subject: rules Message-ID: Syd Lamb and Pamela Klebaum recently exchanged a couple of messages regarding making questions from sentences of the type "The man who is calling is yelling." I assume that Pamela cited this particular type of sentence largely because of the role it has played in Chomsky's argument regarding structure dependence and the logical problem of language acquisition. For example, in Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980, p. 40, Chomsky claimes that "A person might go through much or all of his life without ever having been exposed to relevant evidence, but he will nevertheless unerringly employ [the structure-dependent generalization], on the first relevant occasion." In his 1996 BLS paper, Geoff Pullum checked out Chomsky's claim by examining questions in the Wall Street Journal. He found that, in the first 500 questions, there were 5 that provided the required positive evidence. Pullum took this as evidence against Chomsky's analysis. Of course, it may be that Pamela was not really concerned about the structure dependent generalization issue and just accidentally happened to cite this particular structure. Perhaps she was just asking how children can form sentences of any type without rules. That's a reasonable question, but hardly one that can be resolved in a few short email messages. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:16 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 17:03:16 -1246124 Subject: easily imagined errors Message-ID: Dan, I agree. It is true that the fact that Chomsky was wrong about the facts concerning the distribution of data to derive the structure-dependency generalization does not mean that the rest of Chomsky's argument is wrong. It is true that, as you and Chomsky say, there is something that "keeps children from making some fairly easy to imagine errors." But these "easy to imagine errors" are not actually ones that ever occurred to the child. The child never tries to derive questions from the corresponding declaratives (as several previous email messages have noted). Because of this, the linear movement or transformation generalization was not one that the child was considering in the first place. I agree that the question is how the child accesses semantic structure in a disciplined enough way to avoid egregious errors. To explore this, we don't need the hard examples. We can just look at a sentence like "Is Daddy coming?" There is a pretty rich child language literature on the development of questions. For this type of question, there appears to be a stage when the aux is missing and we have just "Daddy coming?" The intonation is there, as is the verb and the subject. Only later, it appears, does the child add the aux. I think this path makes sense. The most uniform, reliable marker of the question across types in English is the intonation. That gets mapped first, along with the core proposition. Then the embroidery gets added later. The aux wasn't moved, it was just added. When we get to the harder examples, the story is the same, since the complex-NP subject is a cognitive unit the child doesn't look to it for the required aux. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:28:13 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 12:50:13 -1244138 Subject: need for hooks Message-ID: The idea that restrictive relative clauses are composed of material that has been cognitively unitized is pretty far from hand-waving. Psycholinguistic research from the 60s and 70s by Rommetveit and Turner, Clark, Krauss and Glucksberg showed how restrictive relatives are used to distinguish members of a contrast set. Typological work by Givon, Keenan, Comrie, and others demonstrated asymmetries in relativization types that matched up well with underlying functional characteristics. In more recent psycholinguistic work, Bock and her colleagues have explored processes which allow previously mentioned material to form the kernel of further utterances. Bock has focused on passives and datives. Earlier, Levelt looked at question structures. The message from this work on what Bock calls syntactic persistence is that the use of a syntactic pattern in previous discourse tends to make it available as unit for further processing. Many of the syntactic phenomena that revolve around constraints on raising from relatives emerge rather directly from these facts. I can't remember ever having thought or said that syntax should be eliminated. I consider syntax a wonderful, complex, and fascinating fact of nature. I simply believe, like Geertz, Wilcox, and Aske, that it should be explicated. In particular, I think that syntacticians have a responsibility to the rest of the linguistic community to make their analyses more penetrable to explication. This can be done by including "hooks" in syntactic theory to concepts and constructs that match up with what we know about language processing and use. The treatment of restrictive relative clauses discussed in some of the previous messages is a prime example of a construction for which such a "hook" is needed. Like computer programs that have hooks, theories that have hooks have to be designed in a way that supports communication between disciplinary "modules". For example, the theory of syntax would need to support hooks for things from psychology like cognitive unitization, syntactic persistence, memory strings, construction generalization, and the like. Including hooks to these objects would markedly alter the shape of syntactic theory. It would definitely not make syntax disappear. However, it would allow syntacticians, functionalists, and psycholinguists to communicate and collaborate more effectively. I'm not sure that it would bring us to the point of using syntactic theory to make statements about children as expert witnesses, but it might get closer. I have been told that the increased role of logical form in minimalist syntax may represent a movement in this direction. It would be interesting if that were the case. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:28:06 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 24 Apr 1997 13:37:06 -1234451 Subject: human genes Message-ID: Dear Chris, Yes, there are people who think that there is a human gene that carries linguistic syntactic information. The clearest case is M. Gopnik's letter to Nature Volume 344 April 1990. The article argues for "one dominant gene" that controls the ability to mark regular inflections. Rather than quoting extensively from that article, I recommend that you read it. Researchers who have accepted and extended the analysis provided there include Steven Pinker, Harald Clahsen, and Heather van der Lely. Van der Lely has also argued for a gene that controls the use of ruels that map from syntax to semantics - what she and Wexler call reverse linking rules. There are papers by Gopnik and van der Lely in Cognition. You may wish to track out these issues in the literature. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:21 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 10:45:21 -1205942 Subject: Schadenfreude Message-ID: Dear FunkNet, The discussion of the absence of a word in English for Schadenfreude and its equivalents in many other languages has not yet touched on what I would have considered to be a fairly obvious observation. This is the observation that English has no word for this emotion because the emotion is not supposed to exist. One is not supposed to experience delight in the misery of others. In fact, I would say that, although I have occasionally been tempted to experience such feelings, I usually convert them quickly into something like feeling that others have gotten their "just desserts". In other words, some moral agent intervenes in the process and I get removed from the experience. I can definitely see how someone would experience Schadenfreude, but I sense a cultural prohibition of this emotion in those aspects of American culture with which I am familiar. An interesting ethnographic perspective on issues related to this can be found in an article by Signe Howell titled "Rules not words" in P. Heelas & A. Lock (Eds.) (1981) Indigenous Psychologies. New York: Academic Press. Howell notes how the Chewong of Malaysia avoid language that denotes the expression of inner states except through the actions that accompany them. It seems to me that a fuller understanding (or at least description) of links between emotion, language, and culture is a place where functional linguistics can make a nice contribution. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at CMU.EDU Sun Sep 20 22:27:21 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 17:50:21 -1205237 Subject: niceness Message-ID: Jane, Good point. However, my claim was a bit more narrow. I was not suggesting that English is in any way "nice", only that it avoids this particular verbal show of pleasure in other's suffering. English accepts the notion of "sadism", but only as a foreign import. English is rich, of course, in terms describing moral violations like greed, sloth, cowardice (the basic sins of Pilgrim's Progress). It is also definitely OK to talk openly about vindictiveness and revenge (witness Timothy McVeigh on the subject of revenge for the Waco FBI attack). These emotional terms are justified by their grounding in righteousness. But it is exactly this that forces us to shift (almost at the last moment?) from feeling "Schadenfreude" to concluding that someone "got his just desserts". In fact, what happens is that the wrath (vindictiveness, vengefulness) of the Almighty ends up descending onto an appropriate target without us having to develop a personal relation grounded on the joy of seeing someone else suffer. Tricky stuff. Does Lakoff have anything on issues like this? English has lots of stuff like "writhing in agony" and "twisting in the wind." Are there metaphors and similes in Schadenfreude languages grounded on "delight in watching someone twist in the wind?" Alternatively, perhaps there is some universal of metaphor that excludes emotions about others' emotions. Maybe such terms are just too cognitively complex according to some version of "theory of mind." What about Akio Kamio's analyses that claim that Japanese limits the speaker's ability to make statements about the hearer's feelings and emotions (speaker's territory of knowledge)? Perhaps we could argue that English is constrained in a similar way. I realize that this is not the original account that I offered, but it is also an interesting possibility. -- Brian From CCarter at BLACKWELLPUBLISHERS.CO.UK Thu Sep 3 14:08:57 1998 From: CCarter at BLACKWELLPUBLISHERS.CO.UK (Carter Clare) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 15:08:57 +0100 Subject: Online Access for Linguistics Journals Message-ID: Online Availability of Blackwell Publishers' Linguistics Journals Did you know that all the linguistics journals published by Blackwell Publishers are now available online? Electronic access to these journals is available to members of any institution that has a subscription to the printed edition. There are a variety of benefits to using the online version of a journal such as unlimited browsing and full text searching. It also offers the facility to download and print articles. Online access is available via a number of service providers. For more information about online access please visit our website at http//:www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/Static/online.htm Or contact: Clare Carter, Journals Marketing, Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK. Tel: ++44 (0)1865 382340. Fax: ++44 (0)1865 381340. Email: ccarter at blackwellpublishers.co.uk Computational Intelligence ISSN: 0824-7935 German Life and Letters ISSN: 0016-8777 Journal of Sociolinguistics ISSN: 1360-6441 Language Learning ISSN: 0023-8333 Mind & Language ISSN: 0268-1064 Studia Linguistica ISSN: 0039-3193 Syntax ISSN: 1368-0005 Transactions of the Philological Society ISSN: 0079-1636 World Englishes ISSN: 0883-2919 From annes at HTDC.ORG Wed Sep 9 00:57:33 1998 From: annes at HTDC.ORG (Anne Sing) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1998 14:57:33 -1000 Subject: Summary of Responses to "UNIQUE NLP" (and CONCLUSION) Message-ID: SUMMARY About two weeks ago I requested information concerning NLP software that offered the ability to do a q&a exchange between animations and a user similar to the "ChatterBox" software (free) we have at http://www.haptek.com. Here is a summary of the responses I got and a short commentary on each. In addition, I have added a few that I have found via Microsoft concerning a parrot named "Perdy" and similar characters. Take a look for yourself and you can see the degree to which these different companies and research institutions are making it possible to chat with computers and animations for fun, internet searches, and information exchange. 1. You should have a look at the work by Boris Katz at the MIT AI lab. He's been working on a system called START for some time that does such things and more. See the web page at http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/infolab/ for more info. 2. The Information Science Institute at USC (www.isi.edu) did a lot of work in that area about 10 years ago, using, I believe, their PENMAN syntax analyzer. I think the project was lead by Ed Hovy, who was still a director there last year but seems to have left since. There was also a Dr. Christiensen (spelling?) but he has returned to Australia, probably at McQuarrie University with MAK Halliday. Not much help, but you can try emailing ISI staff: some may remember. 3. Kevin Lenzo has a bot named url which stores information and answers questions online, from multiple users, phrased similarly. url hangs out in MUSHes, but I don't remember which ones. It seems that you developed a kind of chatterbot or digital secretary. There are many chatterbots developed. You can see the other chatterbots 'http://www.toptown.com/hp/sjlaven/' 4. The Microsoft and several other industry sites for this research are at: http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/ui/persona/home.htm http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/projects/interface9495-srct.html http://merl.co.jp http://www.csl.sony.co.jp http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/cmu.edu/misc/mosaic/common/omega/web/frontdoor.html http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gva/gvatop.html http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/projects/cait/index.html CONCLUSION While all these sites have interesting applications for speech and animations they do not have the ability to put in factual information and then query for that information. Usually they have a key word search ability which allows them to return particular paragraphs from a body of data based on the key words of a query. However, to ask and answer questions like the following only seems to be possible with ChatterBox at http://www.haptek.com. There were no announcements of the development of such technology at these other companies. Who was the first president of the United States? Who invented the telescope? When did Columbus come to America? Hey Mickey, Where did you find that treasure map? What is your email address? What is your fax number? and so on. Phil Bralich Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 From Ziv at HUM.HUJI.AC.IL Mon Sep 14 20:47:00 1998 From: Ziv at HUM.HUJI.AC.IL (Ziv Yael) Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 13:47:00 PDT Subject: Second Call for Papers Message-ID: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ FORWARDED FROM: Ziv Yael Return-Path: Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19980909000730.007a4d00 at post.tau.ac.il> X-Sender: anatbi at post.tau.ac.il (Unverified) X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.5 (32) Date: Wed, 09 Sep 1998 00:07:30 -0700 To: Annie , Jonathan Berg , marcelo dascal , Anat Biletzki , Elda Weizman , Tamar Katriel , Shoshana Blum-Kulka , nomi shir , Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot , Mira Ariel , Yael Ziv , Ruth W Manor , Rachel Giora , sarfati at ccsg.tau.ac.il From: Anat Biletzki Subject: Second Call for Papers Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hi everyone, I'm enclosing a clean copy of the second Call for Papers. I've sent it to the two philosophy lists. Please distribute widely and let me or Annie (at Pragma99 at ccsg.tau.ac.il) know where it's gone. Lehitra'ot, Anat *************** 2nd Call for Papers PRAGMA99 International Pragmatics Conference on PRAGMATICS AND NEGOTIATION June 13-16, 1999 Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Israel The main theme of this conference is the pragmatics of negotiation, interpreted in a very broad sense. Interlocutors engage in negotiations about every aspect of their interaction - such as floor access and topic selection, contextual assumptions, conversational goals, and the (mis)interpretation and repair of their messages. Topics such as cross-cultural and cross-gender (mis)communications, conversational procedures in disputes and collaborations, argumentation practices, and effects of assumptions and goals on the negotiating strategies of interlocutors are of special interest for this conference. The conference will be interdisciplinary, bringing together pragmaticists, linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. We are soliciting papers on all issues relevant to the theme of the conference, as well as papers in other areas of pragmatics and dialogue analysis. The conference will include plenary addresses, regular session lectures, and organized panels around any of the relevant topics. Among the plenary speakers: Elinor Ochs (UCLA), Itamar Rabinovitch (Tel Aviv University), Emanual Schegloff (UCLA), Thomas Schelling (University of Maryland), Deborah Schiffrin (Georgetown University), Deborah Tannen (Georgetown University), Ruth Wodak (University of Vienna). Presentation of regular session lectures is 30 minutes long, with a subsequent discussion of 10 minutes. Panels take the form of a series of closely related lectures on a specific topic, which may or may not be directly related to the special topic of the conference. They may consist of one, two or three units of 120 minutes. Within each panel unit a maximum of four 20-minute presentations are given consecutively, followed by a minimum of 30 minutes of discussion (either devoted entirely to an open discussion, or taken up in part by comments by a discussant or discussants). Panels are composed of contributions attracted by panel organizers, combined with individually submitted papers when judged appropriate by the Program Committee in consultation with the panel organizers. Typically, written versions or extensive outlines of all panel contributions should be available before the conference to facilitate discussion. SUBMISSIONS Abstracts for papers and panels should be submitted in the following format: 1. For papers - five copies of an anonymous abstract (up to 300 words). 2. For panels - a preliminary proposal of one page, detailing title, area of interest, name of organizer(s) and invited participants to be sent by Sept. 30, 1998. Organizers of approved panels will then be invited to submit a full set of abstracts, including: a. a brief description of the topic area, b. a list of participants (with full details, see below), c. abstracts by each of the participants by November 1, 1998. 3. In all cases, a page stating: a. title, b. audiovisual/computer request, and c. for each author: I. Full name and affiliation; II. Current address; III. E-mail address; IV. Fax number. Deadline for submission of abstracts: Nov. 1, 1998. Abstracts may be sent by hard copy, disk, or e-mail to Pragma99, Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, ISRAEL. E-mail: pragma99 at post.tau.ac.il Date of notification: March 1, 1999. PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Mira Ariel, Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot, Jonathan Berg, Anat Biletzki, Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Marcelo Dascal, Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Tamar Katriel, Ruth Manor, George-Elia Sarfati, Elda Weizman, Yael Ziv. ============================================================ PRAGMA99 REGISTRATION FORM Please send the following information, accompanied by cheque payable to Tel-Aviv University in the amount of US$75 if paid before November 1, 1998, otherwise US$100, to Pragma99 Faculty of Humanities Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv 69978, ISRAEL Dr./Mr./Mrs./Ms./ Name:__________________________ Address:_______________________________________________ University/Organization:___________________________________ Email:__________________________ Fax:____________________(Home)_______________(Office) Telephone:____________________(Home)_____________(Office) Signature:_____________________ Date:________________ Those wishing to pay by credit card should provide the following information: Type of Credit Card: Mastercard/Visa/American Express Name as it appears on Credit Card: Sum of Paymnt: US$__________ Card No.________________________ Expiration Date: __________________ Date:_______________ Signature: _____________________ ********** Those wishing to present a paper should follow the instructions above. Hotel information will be provided after registration. The International Association for Dialogue Analysis is co-sponsoring a part of our conference, which will be devoted to "Negotiation as a Dialogic Concept." For further information, contact Edda Weigand (e-mail: weigand at uni-muenster.de). ============================================================ [Forms can also be returned by fax to 972-3-6407839, or by e-mail to pragma99 at post.tau.ac.il . ] From osp at GEMA.COM.AR Mon Sep 21 00:49:17 1998 From: osp at GEMA.COM.AR (Osvaldo Spoltore) Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 21:49:17 -0300 Subject: VII Congreso - Sociedad Argentina de Linguistica - 22/09 a 25-09 Message-ID: Lo invitamos al: VII Congreso de la Sociedad Argentina de Linguistica a traves de la web: www.gema.com.ar/CO_VII 22 de septiembre a 25 de septiembre de 1998 San Martin de los Andes - Pcia. de Neuquen Republica Argentina -Programas -Resumenes de las ponencias ( cerca de 200 ) -Contactos con el Congreso Lo esperamos... SAL From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Wed Sep 23 14:47:39 1998 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (Funknet Administration) Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 09:47:39 -0500 Subject: Message from Eduard Hovy (fwd) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 10:32:25 -0800 To: FUNKNET-request at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU From: Eduard Hovy Subject: Request to post a correction on FUNKNET The following somewhat misleading message was posted on Tue, 8 Sep 1998: >X-Sender: annes at mana.htdc.org >Subject: Corpora: Summary of Responses to "UNIQUE NLP" (and CONCLUSION) >Sender: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no >Precedence: bulk > >SUMMARY >About two weeks ago I requested information concerning NLP >software that offered the ability to do a q&a exchange >between animations and a user similar to the "ChatterBox" >software (free) we have at http://www.haptek.com. Here is >a summary of the responses I got > >2. >The Information Science Institute at USC (www.isi.edu) did a lot of >work in that area about 10 years ago, using, I believe, their PENMAN >syntax analyzer. I think the project was lead by Ed Hovy, who was >still a director there last year but seems to have left since. There >was also a Dr. Christiensen (spelling?) but he has returned to >Australia, probably at McQuarrie University with MAK Halliday. Not >much help, but you can try emailing ISI staff: some may remember. There is, and has been for about two decades, an active research group in NLP at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). The PENMAN system, a natural language *generator*, was developed from circa 1979 to 1986 in a project led by Bill Mann and Christian Matthiessen; Mann has since retired and Matthiessen is a professor of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Melbourne, Australia (cmatthie at pip.engl.mq.edu.au). The NLP Group at ISI currently contains several complementary projects. More recent research at ISI includes: 1. Machine Translation (the Japangloss/GAZELLE system): Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish to English, using a hybridization of statistical and symbolic techniques. Contact Kevin Knight (knight at isi.edu). 2. Text Summarization (the SUMMARIST system): multilingual summarization using several complementary techniques, including discourse structure. Contact Eduard Hovy (hovy at isi.edu) and Daniel Marcu (marcu at isi.edu). 3. Multilingual Information Management (the MuST and C*ST*RD systems): this work includes multilingual Information Retrieval, clustering, and so on; contact Chin-Yew Lin (cyl at isi.edu). 4. Construction of large ontologies and lexicons: the semi-automated merging of large ontologies, and the enhancement of these using information extracted out of dictionaries and the web; contact Eduard Hovy (hovy at isi.edu). 5. Sentence Planning and Generation (the HealthDoc Sentence Planner and the NITROGEN system): the pre-realization stage of microplanning sentence structure and content, using a variety of methods; contact Eduard Hovy (hovy at isi.edu). For realization, NITROGEN combines a phrase structure grammar with a bigram model of English to generate from underspecified input; contact Kevin Knight (knight at isi.edu). More information on all this is available from http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html E ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Eduard Hovy email: hovy at isi.edu USC Information Sciences Institute tel: 310-822-1511 ext 731 4676 Admiralty Way fax: 310-823-6714 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 project homepage: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Thu Sep 24 00:37:40 1998 From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike L Gildea) Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 19:37:40 -0500 Subject: CSDL-4 abstracts online (fwd) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 01:06:53 -0400 From: csdl-4 To: spikeg at owlnet.rice.edu Subject: CSDL-4 abstracts online The abstracts for most of the paper and poster presentations for the Fourth Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language (CSDL-4) are now posted to the conference web site. You can access them by clicking on the titles in the conference program at http://www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/LINGUISTICS/CSDL/program.html The conference will be held at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on October 10-12. For further information, please contact Alan Cienki Chair of the organizing committee csdl-4 at learnlink.emory.edu +1-404-727-2689 From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Tue Sep 29 20:39:02 1998 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (Funknet Administration) Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 15:39:02 -0500 Subject: (fwd) Neural Theory of Language Group questionnaire Message-ID: Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 11:36:21 -0700 (PDT) From: MARIYA BRODSKY Hello, everyone, I am a member of the Neural Theory of Language group at Berkeley. Our group would like to ask for you help in the following matter: We are beginning research on a neural theory of grammar to accompany work the group has already done on semantics. Part of the research will involve a cognitively based notion of "focus". I would like to find out what the best current survey of literature on focus is, and what you think the best works on the subject are. By focus, I mean the phenomenon displayed in sentences like: John only WASHED the apples. versus John only washed the APPLES. Here the capitalized elements are in "focus" and constitute the scope of "only." Similar cases occurs with questions, Did John WASH the apples? versus Did John wash the APPLES? versus Did JOHN wash the apples? as well as negatives, just, even, and contrastive stress John washed the APPLES (not the oranges). Quantifiers that are surface adverbs also take focused elements John mostly WASHED the apples. versus John mostly washed the APPLES. I would like to know if anyone working on this phenomenon has a good list of grammatical elements or constructions that take focused elements (e.g., questions, negatives, only, etc.) Is there a study of constructions dedicated to focus (e. g., clefts and pseudo-clefts)? Is there a study of alternative constrution that differ largely in focus? For example, John sliced the appled with a chainsaw. versus John used a chainsaw to slice the apple. Is there a study of universals of focus, or a typologial study on focus? What is there in the child language acquistion literature on focus? What have computational linguists done on focus? What is the current status of focus studies in various conemporary linguistic theories? For example, what do Chomsky's minimalism, functional grammar, HPSG, cognitive grammar, lexical functionalism, role and reference grammar, and construction grammar have to say about focus? Are there studies on the relationship between focus and deixis? Or on the constraints on focus compared to the constraints on anaphora? Are there focus studies in discourse representation theory? Are there any neurolinguistic or psycholinguistic studies of focus, in particular, are there priming studies involving focus? Thank you in advance for any leads you can give me. I will compile the responses and list them for the community. With best wishes, Masha Brodsky From A.M.Bolkestein at LET.UVA.NL Wed Sep 30 10:59:44 1998 From: A.M.Bolkestein at LET.UVA.NL (A.M. Bolkestein) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 11:59:44 +0100 Subject: (fwd) Neural Theory of Language Group questionnaire In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Why don't you have a look at Matthew Dryers paper in the Journal of Pragmatics 1996: 475-523 Focus, pragmatic presupposition and activated propositions, and you'll have a useful survey. Also of course Knut Lambrecht's 1994 book on Information structure and sentence form. For more references see a paper by me `What to do with topic and focus' in a recent volume edited by Hannay, Mike & Bolkestein, A. Machtelt (1998) Functional Grammar and Verbal Interaction (Amsterdam / philadelphia: John Benjamins). Good luck! !! CHANGE OF ADDRESS: `hum'.uva.nl instead of `let'.uva.nl !! Machtelt Bolkestein Dept. of Classics, University of Amsterdam Oude Turfmarkt 129 NL-1012 GC Amsterdam Fax: ++31.20.5252544 E-mail: a.m.bolkestein at hum.uva.nl From charon at UCLINK4.BERKELEY.EDU Wed Sep 30 15:08:54 1998 From: charon at UCLINK4.BERKELEY.EDU (charon at UCLINK4.BERKELEY.EDU) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 08:08:54 -0700 Subject: BLS Call for Papers Message-ID: Please distribute the following announcement to all interested parties. THE BERKELEY LINGUISTICS SOCIETY BLS 25 CALL FOR PAPERS The Berkeley Linguistics Society is pleased to announce its Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting, to be held February 13-15, 1999. The conference will consist of a General Session and a Parasession on Saturday and Sunday, followed by a Special Session on Monday. **************************************************************************** *** General Session: The General Session will cover all areas of general linguistic interest. Invited Speakers CAROL FOWLER, Haskins Laboratories, Univ. of Connecticut, Yale Univ. STEPHEN LEVINSON, Max Planck Institut f?r Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen BJ?RN LINDBLOM, Univ. of Stockholm and Univ. of Texas, Austin ALEC MARANTZ, Massachusetts Institute of Technology **************************************************************************** *** Parasession: Loan Word Phenomena The Parasession invites papers on loan word phenomena from various theoretical, historical, sociolinguistic, and typological perspectives, as well as descriptive works and field reports. Areas of interest include stratification of the lexicon and loan word 'subgrammars', re-lexification, the role of orthography, markedness effects, second-language acquisition, child language, bilingualism and code-switching, etc. Invited Speakers ELLEN BROSELOW, State University of New York, Stony Brook GARLAND CANNON, Texas A&M University JUNKO ITO & ARMIN MESTER, University of California, Santa Cruz **************************************************************************** *** Special Session: Issues in Caucasian, Dravidian and Turkic Linguistics The Special Session will feature research on Caucasian, Dravidian and Turkic languages. Papers addressing both diachronic and synchronic issues are welcome. Potential topics include theoretical and descriptive accounts of structural features, writing systems and transcription problems, language reform, and the reconstruction of the respective Proto-languages, including the question of Altaic linguistic unity. Invited Speakers JOHANNA NICHOLS, University of California, Berkeley K.P. MOHANAN, National University of Singapore LARS JOHANSON, Universit?t Mainz **************************************************************************** *** We encourage proposals from diverse theoretical frameworks and welcome papers from related disciplines, such as Anthropology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Literature, Philosophy, and Psychology. Papers presented at the conference will be published in the Society's Proceedings, and authors who present papers agree to provide camera-ready copy (not to exceed 12 pages) by May 15, 1999. Presentations will be allotted 20 minutes with 10 minutes for questions. We ask that you make your abstract as specific as possible, including a statement of your topic or problem, your approach, and your conclusions. Please send 10 copies of an anonymous one-page (8 1/2" x 11", unreduced) abstract. A second page, or reverse side of the single page, may be used for data and references only. Along with the abstract send a 3"x5" card listing: (1) paper title, (2) session (general, Parasession, or special), (3) for general session abstracts only, subfield, viz., Discourse Analysis, Historical Linguistics, Morphology, Philosophy and Methodology of Linguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics, Semantics, Sociolinguistics, or Syntax, (4) name(s) of author(s), (5) affiliation(s) of author(S), (6) address to which notification of acceptance or rejection should be mailed (in November 1998), (7) author's office and home phone numbers, (8) author's e-mail address, if available. An author may submit at most one single and one joint abstract. In case of joint authorship, one address should be designated for communication with BLS. Send abstracts to: BLS 25 Abstracts Committee, 1203 Dwinelle Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. Abstracts must be received by 4:00 p.m., November 2, 1998. We may be contacted by e-mail at bls at socrates.berkeley.edu. Information on e-mail submission and additional guidelines for abstracts can be found at our web site (http://faust.linguistics.berkeley.edu/BLS). We will not accept faxed abstracts. Registration Fees: Before February 5, 1999; $15 for students, $30 for non-students; After February 5, 1999; $20 for students, $35 for non-students.