From lachler at UNM.EDU Sat Feb 6 10:22:39 1999 From: lachler at UNM.EDU (Jordan Lachler) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 03:22:39 -0700 Subject: Schedule of Talks at HDLS-2 Message-ID: HDLS-2 Second Annual High Desert Student Conference in Linguistics Albuquerque, New Mexico March 26-28, 1999 The abstracts for all the talks at this year's conference can be found on the HDLS website at: http://www.unm.edu/~hdls/hdls-2/schedule.html Information on attending the conference can be obtained from us via e-mail. Drop us a line at: hdls at unm.edu --- Jordan Lachler lachler at unm.edu President, HIGH DESERT LINGUISTICS SOCIETY #*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#* #*# FRIDAY, March 26th 8:30-9:15 REGISTRATION 9:15-9:30 WELCOME ADDRESS 930-1000 Image Schema Blending and the Construal of Events: A Cross-Linguistic Account of GO-AND-V Anatol Stefanowitsch, Rice University 1000-1030 English and Spanish Conjunctive Predicates Ivo Sanchez, University of California, Santa Barbara 1030-1100 A Synchronic Study of 'have to' and 'got to' with Diachronic Implications Dawn Nordquist, University of New Mexico 1100-1115 BREAK 1115-1145 Wyandot Phonology: Recovering the Sound System of an Extinct Language Craig Kopris, State University of New York at Buffalo 1145-1215 Monastic and Natural Sign Language: A New Look Dan Parvaz, University of New Mexico 1215-1245 Fluid French Boundaries in Louisiana Megan E. Melançon, Louisiana State University 1245-200 LUNCH 200-300 Interaction and Grammar: Transitivity and Argument Structure in Conversation Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sandy Thompson, University of California, Santa Barbara 300-315 BREAK 315-345 On Managing Sign Complexity in Sign Language Recognition Christian Vogler and Dimitris Metaxas, U of Penn 345-415 Multilingual Lexical Representation: Structure-Sharing versus Micro-Features Carole Tiberius, ITRI, University of Brighton 415-430 BREAK 430-500 English to American Sign Language Machine Translation of Weather Reports Angus B. Grieve-Smith, University of New Mexico 500-530 Using Multiple Machine Translation Packages to Produce "Averaged" Results Dan Tappan, Computing Reasearch laboratory, New Mexico State University SATURDAY, March 27 930-1000 Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives on Negative Modals in ASL, Barbara Shaffer, University of New Mexico 1000-1030 Where is the Spanish 'go' Progressive Going? Frequency Constraints on the Pace of Grammaticization Rena Torres Cacoullos, University of New Mexico 1030-1100 The Aspectual System of Chiyao Alfred J. Matiki, University of New Mexico 1100-1115 BREAK 1115-1145 Grammaticization of the Direct Object marker 'o' in Written Japanese: A Discourse-Based Study Misumi Sadler, University of Arizona 1145-1215 On the Subjectification of Japanese Connective 'tara' Sono Takano Hayes, Carnegie Mellon University, and Rumiko Shinzato, Georgia Institute of Technology 1215-1230 BREAK 1230-100 The Consequences of Token Frequency, Transitional Probablility, and Non-Random Distributions of Lexical Segments: A Causal Explanation for Word-Boundary Palatalization Phenomena in English Nathan Bush, University of New Mexico 100-130 The Role of Alternating Phonetic Environments and Word Frequency in the Development of Latin F- in Spanish Esther L. Brown, University of New Mexico 130-230 LUNCH 230-300 Semantic-Pragmatic Account for Dative-Subject Construction in Japanese Kyoko Masuda, University of Arizona 300-330 Transitivity and Viewpoint in Japanese Giving and Receiving Verbs Soichi Kozai, University of Hawaii 330-345 BREAK 345-415 The Continuity of "Agreement": From Pre-Linguistic Action Gestures to ASL Verbs Shannon Casey, University of California, San Diego 415-445 A Survey of Distributed Pronominal Affix Systems Jordan Lachler, University of New Mexico 415-430 BREAK 430-500 Personal Pronouns in Chinese and English GU Gang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong 500-530 Address Forms in Chinese and their Interactional Functions YANG Jun, University of Arizona SUNDAY, March 28th 930-1000 Parataxis in Old English: Evidence from Translation K. Aaron Smith, University of New Mexico 1000-1030 An Analysis of Passive Constructions in Thai Unchalee Singnoi, University of Oregon 1030-1045 BREAK 1045-1115 The Psychological Reality of 'which' Constructions Catie Berkenfield, University of New Mexico 1115-1145 The Emergence of Inflection: The Case of Spanish -y in 'soy', 'doy','voy', 'estoy' Myriam Eguia, University of New Mexico 1145-1200 BREAK 1200-1230 Focus and Quotative 'like': A Necessary Dichotomy? Andrew Tistadt, University of New Mexico 1230-100 Lavender Languages, Pink Triangles and a Rainbow Flag: Male Sexual Orientation and English Color Term Usage Paul J. Weiss and Robert Hahn, University of New Mexico From fling11 at EMDUCMS1.SIS.UCM.ES Tue Feb 9 15:42:28 1999 From: fling11 at EMDUCMS1.SIS.UCM.ES (Marta Carretero) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 16:42:28 +0100 Subject: conversational implicature Message-ID: Dear funknetters, I would be grateful if some of you gave me some references on genres/text types/other cases in which the Gricean Cooperative Principle and Maxims are not followed or expected to be followed to a large extent (for example: trials, political interviews, etc.) I would especially like works which use authentic spoken or written English material, so as to show examples to my students of Pragmatics. Thanks in advance. Best wishes, Marta. Marta Carretero Departamento de Filologia Inglesa Facultad de Filologia - Edificio A Universidad Complutense 28040 - Madrid. Spain. Fax: (341)394-54-78 From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Tue Feb 9 19:06:49 1999 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (funkadmn Departmental Account) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 13:06:49 -0600 Subject: CALL for Proposals Message-ID: >From Jeff ALLEN ANNOUNCING CALL FOR PROPOSALS ELRA 1999 CALL FOR PROPOSALS ELRA COMMISSIONING PRODUCTION OF LANGUAGE RESOURCES Full version of call of proposals is available at: http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html If you would like to receive a copy of the call for proposals by e-mail, please contact Jeff ALLEN mailto:jeff at elda.fr ____________ 8 February 1999 The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) invites proposals for the first of a series of calls for the (co-)production and packaging of Language Resources (LRs), open to companies and academic organisations that comply with eligibility conditions provided below. ELRA is planning to commission the production, packaging and/or customisation of speech and written LRs needed by the Language Engineering (LE) community, and is inviting applications for production and/or packaging/repackaging projects, which could be eligible for funding from ELRA. The purpose of the call is to ensure that necessary resources are developed in an acceptable framework (in terms of time and legal conditions) by the LE players. This call is targeted towards projects with short time scales (projects lasting up to one year but preferably shorter) and the size of the funding will be considerably small. The ELRA funding is to be seen as effective and useful for producers being both tactical in their aims for the targeted market, which means that they do know all about the needs on the specific market, and strategic with regard to what to produce in order to fulfil these needs. In order to qualify for funding eligibility under the European Commission 4th Programme, the institution(s) making the proposal must belong to one of the European Union Member States, or be in Liechtenstein, Iceland or Norway. It is preferred that proposals not exceed 100,000 ECU. ELRA hopes to fund several proposals. Timetable of deadlines: Announcement of the Call: 8 February 1999 Submission deadline for proposals: 19 March 1999 Notification of reception of proposals before 26 March 1999 Acceptance notifications and negotiations to start on the 5th April 1999 NOTE: Only complete proposals will be reviewed. Should you have further questions, please contact Jeff ALLEN at the ELDA/ELRA office for details before 1 March 1999. Jeff ALLEN c/o ELRA/ELDA 55 rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE e-mail: Tel: (+33) 1 43 13 33 33 Fax: (+33) 1 43 13 33 30 http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html ____________ From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Tue Feb 9 20:05:22 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 15:05:22 EST Subject: conversational implicature In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 09 Feb 1999 16:42:28 +0100." Message-ID: > Dear funknetters, > > I would be grateful if some of you gave me some references on >genres/text types/other cases in which the Gricean Cooperative Principle >and Maxims are not followed or >expected to be followed to a large extent (for example: trials, political >interviews, etc.) I would especially like works which use authentic spoken >or written English material, so as to show examples to my students of >Pragmatics. > > Thanks in advance. > > Best wishes, > > Marta. The only type of discourse I can think of that would not follow the Cooperative Principle to any appreciable extent would be schizophrenic discourse -- but I don't know if you'd consider that a 'genre' or 'text type'. If you think trials or political interviews do not follow Grice, I suggest you give him another read. From eitkonen at UTU.FI Wed Feb 10 09:42:43 1999 From: eitkonen at UTU.FI (Esa) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 01:42:43 -0800 Subject: maxims Message-ID: Dear Marta Carretero You are quite right to assume that politicians (and lawyers) customarily violate the maxims 'Be truthful!' and 'Be relevant! Reading the response(s) to your recent query on the Funknet, you must have gathered that the (additional) maxim 'Be polite!' is also in the habit of being violated. - Best wishes, Esa Itkonen From OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Tue Feb 9 23:13:10 1999 From: OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 15:13:10 PST Subject: maxims Message-ID: Dear Marta Carretero, Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect primarily European male discourse. Olga Yokoyama From lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Tue Feb 9 23:49:03 1999 From: lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (George Lakoff) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 15:49:03 -0800 Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: <4FCABF1FD1@113hum1.humnet.ucla.edu> Message-ID: At 3:13 PM -0800 2/9/99, OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU wrote: >Dear Marta Carretero, >Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by >those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also >seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect >primarily European male discourse. >Olga Yokoyama Eleanor Ochs noted, starting back in the early 70's, that Gricean maxims are not universal and are different in Samoan. Many linguists travelling to Mexico have noticed that they are different there too. And Robin Lakoff (in Language and Woman's Place) observed in 1974 that differences in the pragmatics of politeness between men and women led to different maxims, a fact that has been discussed in the works of Deborah Tannen since then. George From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Wed Feb 10 00:06:28 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 19:06:28 EST Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 09 Feb 1999 15:13:10 PST." <4FCABF1FD1@113hum1.humnet.ucla.edu> Message-ID: >Dear Marta Carretero, >Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by >those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also >seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect >primarily European male discourse. >Olga Yokoyama The whole point of Grice is that the Maxims are *presumed* in any sort of linguistic communication as we know it -- why on earth would anyone ever ask a question if not for the presumption that the addressee's next utterance would be somehow relevant and also non-random with respect to the addressee's beliefs? Furthermore, the Maxims do more work -- by being perceptibly violated, they permit the drawing of non-logical inferences. If anyone knows of a culture or sex for whom things work differently, I would love to hear about it. From Jiansheng.Guo at VUW.AC.NZ Wed Feb 10 01:02:07 1999 From: Jiansheng.Guo at VUW.AC.NZ (Jiansheng Guo) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 01:02:07 GMT Subject: maxims Message-ID: Similar to Ochs' and Lokoff's findings, the recent report by Penelope Brown of "lies" in Tzeltal in the context of child discipline and control also finds conventional violation of the maxism of quality (e.g., Stop crying, or that woman will steal you away forever). However, when critiquing Gricean maxisms, we have to be very careful about what the Gricean maxisms were intended for. As Levinson explained in his 1983 Pragmatics book, they have nothing to do with people's actual behavior, but rather, the fundamental underlying assumptions interlocutors hold in communication. In his example, A: Where's Bill? B: There's a yellow VW outside Sue's house. B has obviously violated the relevance and quantity maxisms in the literally meanings of the answer. But B has given a very relevant answer and A would have the same view. And the mechanism that enables us and also A to see B's answer as good is the essence of the Gricean Maxims, namely, we all have the fundamental assumption about human communication that people observe these maxisms in communication. And these assumptions force interactants to figure out the utterer's intention, or the pragmatic meaning. Following this line of reasoning, a genuine critique of Gricean maxisms has to be in a community, genre, or context, where the communicative assumptions are that when people communicate, they do the opposite of the Gricean maxism and all interactants will infer meaning from these assumptions. According to this criterion, the fact politician and lawyers constant lie does not constitute counter example of Gricean Maxisms, since the listeners have to hold Gricean maxisms in order for the politicians and lawyears to convince them. If not, whatever they say would be only self-defeating. Thus, we should differentiate people's behavior in violating Gricean maxims on the one hand, and the situations (society, genre, context, etc.) where Gricean maxims do not work, on the other. Guo Jiansheng Guo School of Psychology Victoria University Wellington New Zealand From tgb114 at PSU.EDU Wed Feb 10 02:51:31 1999 From: tgb114 at PSU.EDU (Travis Bradley) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 21:51:31 -0500 Subject: Maxims and verbal humor In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Marta, Verbal humor often involves violation of Grice's maxims. Attardo (1994), for example, gives the following conversational jokes, each of which violates one of the Maxims: a. Quality "Why did the Vice-President fly to Panama?" "Because the fighting is over." b. Quantity "Excuse me, do you know what time it is?" "Yes." c. Relation "How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?" "Fish!" d. Manner "Do you believe in clubs for young people?" "Only when kindness fails." Maxims may also be violated in canned jokes, which possess a narrative structure (i.e., the kind of joke you usually find in joke books, or which people usually preface with "Did you hear the one about ...?") As Attardo points out, the claim that the teller of a joke violates Grice's Maxims implies that a narrative joke text constitutes an example of non-cooperative behavior. If such texts violate the Maxims, one would expect them to become non-cooperative and to lose meaningfulness. Nevertheless, jokes are usually understood and are not perceived as lies or as ill-formed or cryptic texts. Raskin (1985) solves the paradox by proposing a modified set of Grice's Maxims to account for what he calls non-bona-fide communication: Raskin's Non-bona-fide Maxims Quantity: Give exactly as much information as is necessary for the joke Quality: Say only what is compatible with the world of the joke Relation: Say only what is relevant to the joke Manner: Tell the joke efficiently The operation of the non-bona-fide Maxims insures that the listener does not expect the joke-teller to be truthful or to convey any relevant information. Rather, he or she recognizes that the intention of the speaker is to elicit a humorous response. So it seems that in the domain of humor, one finds examples of Gricean maxim violations. There is even reason to believe that verbal humor merits its own special set of maxims, at least with respect to narrative/canned jokes. I have an online paper on the subject at the following URL: http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/t/g/tgb114/linguistics/jokes/jokes.htm Best, Travis Bradley At 04:42 PM 2/9/99 +0100, Marta Carretero wrote: > Dear funknetters, > > I would be grateful if some of you gave me some references on >genres/text types/other cases in which the Gricean Cooperative Principle >and Maxims are not followed or >expected to be followed to a large extent (for example: trials, political >interviews, etc.) I would especially like works which use authentic spoken >or written English material, so as to show examples to my students of >Pragmatics. > > Thanks in advance. > > Best wishes, > > Marta. > > >Marta Carretero >Departamento de Filologia Inglesa >Facultad de Filologia - Edificio A >Universidad Complutense >28040 - Madrid. Spain. Fax: (341)394-54-78 > > From mariel at post.tau.ac.il Wed Feb 10 09:30:32 1999 From: mariel at post.tau.ac.il (Mira Ariel) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 11:30:32 +0200 Subject: maxims Message-ID: Hi everyone, I agree with Ellen Prince re the Gricean maxims. In order to show that Grice (or other pragmatic theories such as Relevance theory) doesn't work in a specific genre or community one needs to show that the pragmatic theory is inapplicable to the case, or that it predicts a different utterance/effect than we actually find. Violations which create special implicatures are built into the Gricean theory, and do NOT constitute counter-examples. The way I interpret Och's important work is it shows that different maxims are weighted differently, that politeness (another maxim perhaps) has a different dress/application in different cultures, and that different clashes arise in different cultures (taboos) which cause speakeres to violate the maxims in different ways. There may indeed be specific cultural, gender and other practices of WHAT the clashes are, on HOW to weigh clashing maxims, but that does not invalidate the general program, which embeds human conversations within rationality, I believe. However, a serious problem that I do see with these pragmatic theories is in restricting them. The way I see it, you can rather easily explain almost ANYTHING after the fact. But how to do that is more a socio-psychological endeavor, I find. Yours, Mira Ariel From M.Perkins at SHEFFIELD.AC.UK Wed Feb 10 10:22:48 1999 From: M.Perkins at SHEFFIELD.AC.UK (Mick Perkins) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 10:22:48 +0000 Subject: conversational implicature Message-ID: Dear Marta The conversation of people with communication impairments can often be characterised as violating Grice's maxims. For example people with aphasia could be said to be violating the maxim of quantity to the extent that they are unable to linguistically encode all that they want to, and also people on the autistic spectrum either often say too little or too much because they are unable to accurately judge the communicative needs of their interlocutor. In the latter case, though, one might argue that from the speaker's perspective they are saying EXACTLY the right amount to be appropriately informative according to their reading (albeit atypical) of the situation. For more discussion of such issues and illustrative material from a range of communication impairments including fluent and nonfluent aphasia, 'semantic-pragmatic' disorder, autism, traumatic brain injury, right hemisphere brain damage and schizophrenia, you could check out the following article: Perkins, M. R. (1998) Is pragmatics epiphenomenal? Evidence from communication disorders. Journal of Pragmatics 29: 291-311. Mick Perkins > Dear funknetters, > > I would be grateful if some of you gave me some references on >genres/text types/other cases in which the Gricean Cooperative Principle >and Maxims are not followed or >expected to be followed to a large extent (for example: trials, political >interviews, etc.) I would especially like works which use authentic spoken >or written English material, so as to show examples to my students of >Pragmatics. > > Thanks in advance. > > Best wishes, > > Marta. From nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE Wed Feb 10 11:58:29 1999 From: nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE (Jan.Nuyts) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:58:29 +0100 Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: <36C151B7.1925@ccsg.tau.ac.il> Message-ID: > I agree with Ellen Prince re the Gricean maxims. In order to show that > Grice (or other pragmatic theories such as Relevance theory) doesn't > work in a specific genre or community one needs to show that the > pragmatic theory is inapplicable to the case, or that it predicts a > different utterance/effect than we actually find. Violations which > create special implicatures are built into the Gricean theory, and do > NOT constitute counter-examples > ... > However, a serious problem that I do see with these pragmatic theories > is in restricting them. The way I see it, you can rather easily explain > almost ANYTHING after the fact. But how to do that is more a > socio-psychological endeavor, I find. Maybe this is saying the same thing as in Mira's last paragraph, but: what would constitute a counterexample to the Gricean theory? Or in other words, is this theory refutable? On the other hand, one may wonder whether the 'classical' requirement for a theory to be refutable in order to be a real theory at all (instead of a dogma) is maintainable. In the (usually - or always? - fictive) situation in which a theory optimally accounts for the set of facts it is meant to explain, it should be impossible to come up with counterexamples, or even to conceive of counterexamples ... Jan ***** Jan Nuyts phone: 32/3/820.27.73 University of Antwerp fax: 32/3/820.27.62 Linguistics email: nuyts at uia.ua.ac.be Universiteitsplein 1 B-2610 Wilrijk - Belgium From ocls at IPA.NET Wed Feb 10 13:48:52 1999 From: ocls at IPA.NET (George Elgin, Suzette Haden Elgin) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 07:48:52 -0600 Subject: Maxims and verbal humor Message-ID: At the risk of appearing simplistic, it seems to me that the fact that it's possible to identify particular utterances as clear violations of a theory is in itself proof of the applicability of the theory to that utterance. Suzette Haden Elgin From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Wed Feb 10 17:07:31 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:07:31 EST Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 10 Feb 1999 11:14:01 +0100." <3.0.3.32.19990210111401.00a4eb08@eucmax.sim.ucm.es> Message-ID: >At 19:06 9/02/99 -0500, you wrote: >>>Dear Marta Carretero, >>>Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by >>>those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also >>>seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect >>>primarily European male discourse. >>>Olga Yokoyama >> >>The whole point of Grice is that the Maxims are *presumed* in any >>sort of linguistic communication as we know it -- why on earth would >>anyone ever ask a question if not for the presumption that the >>addressee's next utterance would be somehow relevant and also non-random >>with respect to the addressee's beliefs? > >By the same logic, there is no logical reason why would one would repeat 2 >or 3 times the same answer to a question, or, in a group, repeat 3 or 4 >times the description of something that has happened. Nevertheless, that >is a hallmark of discourse structure in Spanish society. It hasn�t got to >do only with exchanging information. There seems to be more going on that >gets into social interaction. There may be something similar going on in >Mexico, where, as George Lakoff mentioned, linguists have noticed that the >norms are different as well. I can't tell whether you're arguing for or against Grice. If against, the repetitions that you note that have 'no logical reason' do indeed induce implicatures which are precisely explained by a Gricean approach. In fact, the whole notion of repetition as marked in any way PRESUMES a Gricean approach, i.e. that it is a violation of the Maxim of Quantity. Hard to imagine any other way to even identify it. For a formal treatment of how to derive non-logical inferences from repetitions/redundancy, see: Walker, Marilyn. 1993. Informational redundancy and resource bounds in dialogue. Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. dissertation. From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Wed Feb 10 17:22:39 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:22:39 EST Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 09 Feb 1999 15:49:03 PST." Message-ID: George Lakoff writes: >At 3:13 PM -0800 2/9/99, OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU wrote: >>Dear Marta Carretero, >>Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by >>those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also >>seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect >>primarily European male discourse. >>Olga Yokoyama > >Eleanor Ochs noted, starting back in the early 70's, that Gricean maxims >are not universal and are different in Samoan. Many linguists travelling to >Mexico have noticed that they are different there too. And Robin Lakoff (in >Language and Woman's Place) observed in 1974 that differences in the >pragmatics of politeness between men and women led to different maxims, a >fact that has been discussed in the works of Deborah Tannen since then. Could we get a reference, George? The paper I recall by Elinor (then) Keenan appeared in Language in Society and concerned Malagasy, not Samoan. In fact, she claimed but did not show that Gricean maxims are different in Malagasy. In particular, IIRC, she gave an example like the following as a typical Malagasy exchange and took it to be evidence of a lack of Maxim of Quality: A: How do you open the door? B: If you don't open it from the inside, it won't open. Of course, she TAKES FOR GRANTED that A infers from B's response that, if you do open it from the inside, it will open. But this is PRECISELY the sort of non-logical inference that Grice is attempting to account for with his Maxims! (In fact, it's what Geis and Zwicky had already discussed and named 'invited inference', IIRC.) For a Gricean account of how this inference could be accounted for in a Gazdar-type model, see my old paper 'Grice and universality: a reappraisal', downloadable as a postscript file from http://babel.ling.upenn.edu/~ellen. The problem that keeps coming up over the years is that some read Grice as tho he were an ethnographer describing society rather than as a philosopher laying the groundwork for a theory of how people draw predictable inferences that are not logically entailed by what is said. From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Wed Feb 10 20:01:11 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 15:01:11 EST Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:22:39 EST." <199902101722.MAA19507@central.cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: Of course I meant Maxim of QUANTITY below! Sorry. >George Lakoff writes: > >>At 3:13 PM -0800 2/9/99, OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU wrote: >>>Dear Marta Carretero, >>>Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by >>>those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also >>>seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect >>>primarily European male discourse. >>>Olga Yokoyama >> >>Eleanor Ochs noted, starting back in the early 70's, that Gricean maxims >>are not universal and are different in Samoan. Many linguists travelling to >>Mexico have noticed that they are different there too. And Robin Lakoff (in >>Language and Woman's Place) observed in 1974 that differences in the >>pragmatics of politeness between men and women led to different maxims, a >>fact that has been discussed in the works of Deborah Tannen since then. > >Could we get a reference, George? The paper I recall by Elinor (then) >Keenan appeared in Language in Society and concerned Malagasy, not >Samoan. In fact, she claimed but did not show that Gricean maxims are >different in Malagasy. In particular, IIRC, she gave an example like >the following as a typical Malagasy exchange and took it to be >evidence of a lack of Maxim of Quality: ^^^^^^^ > > A: How do you open the door? > B: If you don't open it from the inside, it won't open. > >Of course, she TAKES FOR GRANTED that A infers from B's response that, >if you do open it from the inside, it will open. But this is PRECISELY >the sort of non-logical inference that Grice is attempting to account >for with his Maxims! (In fact, it's what Geis and Zwicky had already >discussed and named 'invited inference', IIRC.) For a Gricean account >of how this inference could be accounted for in a Gazdar-type model, >see my old paper 'Grice and universality: a reappraisal', downloadable >as a postscript file from http://babel.ling.upenn.edu/~ellen. > >The problem that keeps coming up over the years is that some read >Grice as tho he were an ethnographer describing society rather than as >a philosopher laying the groundwork for a theory of how people draw >predictable inferences that are not logically entailed by what is said. From eitkonen at UTU.FI Wed Feb 10 15:27:46 1999 From: eitkonen at UTU.FI (Esa Itkonen) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 17:27:46 +0200 Subject: maxims-qua-norms Message-ID: There seems to be some conceptual confusion concerning the notion of Gricean maxim. The maxims are NORMS; and it is a conceptual truth that norms can be, and are, violated. Therefore it is wrong to assume that pointing out violations of maxims constitutes eo ipso a criticism of those maxims. Counterexamples refute laws of nature, not norms. (This is, in a nutshell, the difference between linguistics and the natural sciences.) On the other hand, it is informative to learn when and where the maxims are violated. Therefore the reference to mendacious, irrelevant, or impolite verbal behavior remains justified (even if, to repeat, it does not refute the norms.) Of course, when the gap between norms and actual behavior widens, the existence of norms becomes questionable. I have dealt with the complicated issue of linguistics & normativity in two more-than-300-page books. Esa Itkonen From dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Thu Feb 11 01:26:32 1999 From: dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew S Dryer) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 20:26:32 -0500 Subject: Grice Message-ID: I too agree with Ellen Prince re the Gricean maxims. But I can't resist the temptation of commenting that I can easily imagine an outsider reading this conversation on Funknet and wondering how some of Ellen's comments conformed to the maxim of relevance. I can only draw the inference that she is interpreting some of the messages in this conversation as implicating that some of the people who have made serious comments about violations to Gricean maxims also believe that violations to Gricean maxims are somehow violations to Gricean theory, which, as both Mira and Guo have pointed out, is not the case. On rereading the messages, I'm not convinced that these messages do implicate that, so I can only infer that Ellen has found in the past that so many linguists mistakenly think that violations to Gricean maxims are somehow a problem for Gricean theory that some of the people who have sent messages in this conversation must be mistaken about that. And she may be right. And I certainly cannot imagine going through any of this reasoning if Gricean theory (or some variation) weren't right. Matthew Dryer From fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU Thu Feb 11 03:46:23 1999 From: fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU (Frederick Newmeyer) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 19:46:23 -0800 Subject: Prague School influence: summary Message-ID: A few weeks ago, on this list and on one other, I posted a query about the influence of the Prague School on current North American and Western European work in syntax. I would like to thank the following, who gave me very helpful replies: Machtelt Bolkestein, John Connolly, Geert Craps, Deborah DuBartell, Tom Givon, Frank Gladney, Eva Hajicova, Paul Hopper, Dick Hudson, John Mackin, Salvador Pons Borderia, Petr Sgall, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen, Jess Tauber, Yishai Tobin, Marina Yaguello, Fumiko Yoshikawa, and several individuals who asked me not to cite them by name. All respondents agreed that several current schools of syntactic analysis that originated in Western Europe owe a great debt to pre-war work in Prague. These include Dik's 'Functional Grammar', Halliday's 'Systemic Functional Grammar', and Alarcos Llorach's 'Funcionalismo'. I am told that these approaches are quite explicit about their debt to Prague, from which they derive an integrated structural-functional approach to syntax. As far the debt of generative grammar is concerned, all agree that any use of feature notation is ultimately a Praguean influence. Dependency-based generative approaches appear to derive from Prague and, in fact, Charles Fillmore in 'The Case for Case' cites Lucien Tesniere, a member of the Prague School, for the idea of 'sequence-free representations'. It was suggested that the approach within generative semantics to topic and focus derived from Halliday, and hence ultimately from the Prague School. And there were suggestions that the work on these issues by, say, Michael Rochemont (within formal syntax) and Barbara Partee (within formal semantics) are generative reinterpretations of Prague School-originated generalizations. Partee is also reported to be writing a joint book with two Prague linguists. However, there was wild disagreement among the respondents on the degree to which mainstream North American functionalism (and the similar German functionalism represented by linguists such as Haspelmath, Heine, and Lehmann) is indebted to Praguean work. The opinions I received ranged from 'deeply indebted' to 'no debt whatsoever'. Those who took the former position pointed to the centrality of Prague-originated notions like 'functional sentence perspective' and 'communicative dynamism' in American functionalism (even if these terms are not generally used) and suggested linguists like Bolinger, Chafe and Greenberg as being instrumental in passing Prague School conceptions on to them. Those who took the latter position say that the 'discovery' of Prague work was post hoc and that 'foundational differences' exist between Prague School functionalism and US functionalism. Prague School work was described as being, at one and the same time, 'too structural' and 'not structural enough'. Too structural in the sense that American functionalists have tended to reject the Saussurean idea (adopted by Prague) that a grammar is a system 'ou tout se tient'. Not structural enough in the sense that the Prague School has tended to advocate a dependency-based analysis, and therefore, unlike much of US functionalism, does not formulate generalizations involving syntactic constituent structure and the structural relationships based on that. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I am summarizing here, not editorializing!) I realize that neither 'the Prague School' nor 'American functionalism' are homogeneous entities, so conflicting responses might well be drawing on the work of different scholars within these schools carried out at different times. Still, since the respondents did not generally qualify their answers by citing persons and times, I have not done so in this summary. Fritz Newmeyer University of Washington fjn at u.washington.edu From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Thu Feb 11 04:07:08 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 23:07:08 EST Subject: Grice In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 10 Feb 1999 20:26:32 EST." Message-ID: Matthew Dryer wrote: >I too agree with Ellen Prince re the Gricean maxims. But I can't resist >the temptation of commenting that I can easily imagine an outsider reading >this conversation on Funknet and wondering how some of Ellen's comments >conformed to the maxim of relevance. I can only draw the inference that >she is interpreting some of the messages in this conversation as >implicating that some of the people who have made serious comments about >violations to Gricean maxims also believe that violations to Gricean >maxims are somehow violations to Gricean theory, which, as both Mira and >Guo have pointed out, is not the case. On rereading the messages, I'm not >convinced that these messages do implicate that, so I can only infer that >Ellen has found in the past that so many linguists mistakenly think that >violations to Gricean maxims are somehow a problem for Gricean theory that >some of the people who have sent messages in this conversation must be >mistaken about that. And she may be right. Um, IIRC, the original post said (or 'presupposed') that trials and something else 'do not follow or are not expected to follow the Gricean maxims' -- or something to that effect. (Wow, we don't presume any non-random relationship between what a witness says and what s/he believes?!? If that's true, how extraordinary that we should even have trials! It would be cheaper to ask the nearest parrot for testimony or even the verdict. ;) ) Later posts invoked various pieces of research purporting to show that such-and-such culture does not follow the Maxims. One post said they 'reflect primarily European male discourse.' Since I am not aware of any findings that European males communicate more than others by (non-logical) implicature, I must infer that the poster believes the theory to be quite different from what you and I have in mind. Anyway, you see that I am not able to interpret most of the thread the way you suggest, tho I wish I could... :( >And I certainly cannot imagine going through any of this reasoning if >Gricean theory (or some variation) weren't right. On that I agree 100%! ;) From lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Thu Feb 11 09:02:26 1999 From: lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (George Lakoff) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 01:02:26 -0800 Subject: Prague School influence: summary In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Fritz, I'm delighted to see you looking at the influence of the Prague School. Let me add a bit to what you have. First a correction: To my knowledge, Halliday had no influence at all on the introduction of discussions of topicality into generative semantics. In my recollection, we starting discussing topicality in 1965-66, under the influence of Dwight Boliger (who was my Harvard colleague and audited the course Haj and I gave there and at MIT in fall 1966) and Susumu Kuno, who ran the project Haj and I worked on and was talking with us about topicality from the perspective of the Japanese syntax, where wa-constructions indicate topicality and are one of the most prominent syntactic features of the language. McCawley, of course, was also thinking about wa-constructions in Japanese. I never met Halliday till 1968, when he came to Cambridge and, as I recall, talked about other issues. Incidentally, the person who puched Prague School ideas on information flow the most here at Berkeley during the 70's was Wally Chafe, who of course was a major force behind the formation of the functionalist school first here and later at Santa Barbara. His influence here has been persistent. About features: I believe they came into generative grammar through the influence of Roman Jakobson. I studied with Jakoboson in 1961, while I was taking Halle's introductory course. Morris was using the Jakobson, Fant and Halle text to provide phonetic motivation for features in phonology. During 1962 while I was starting grad school at Indiana, I read Lees' MIT thesis (he was Noam's first PhD student) and the early Stockwell-Schacter papers from UCLA, both of which used really ugly subcategorization rules with no features. In the spring of 1963, I wrote a paper for Fred Householder at Indiana suggesting the introduction of features into transformational grammar, as a way of improving on the work of Lees and Stockwell-Schacter. When I went to Cambridge on spring break I showed it to Noam, who showed no particular interest, and said that Hugh Mathews had written a paper in 1958 suggesting the use of features in syntax while he was working on Yngve's mechanical translation project.I never found that paper. I continued during my graduate work to think and write using features. My first paper on generative semantics in the summer of 1963 used them. When Postal came out to Indiana in the summer of 1964 to teach at the Linguistic Institute, he was using features as well and said that Chomsky had adopted them. And of course, the 1964 paper on semantics in genrative grammar by Katz and Fodor used them. About dependency grammar: My introduction to dependency grammar came from the writings of David Hayes and Jane Robinson in computational linguistics, which I read as a grad student at Indiana around 63 or 64. As I recall, the Kuno-Oettinger computational linguistics project at Harvard around 1965 used dependency representations (but my memory is hazy). I assumed they came from the Hayes tradition. Bill Woods worked on that project. When I moved to Michigan I began playing around with dependency representations (in unpublished notes) trying to see if they could replace phrase structures. Woods came out with his ATN grammars in the early 70's. When I read his work, I went back to my earlier notes and realized that phrase structures and transformations could indeed be eliminated using gramamtical relations formalized as dependecy structures. Henry Thompson and I made such a proposal in our 1975 BLS paper on Cognitive Grammar. These ideas were carried over in my 1977 CLS paper "Linguistic Gestalts" which was a precursor to my early work with Fillmore moving toward construction grammars. Those dependency grammar ideas have now come to prominence again in the current development of the Neural Theory of Grammar here at Berkeley. I don't know where Hayes got his dependency ideas from, but I would not be surprised if Tesniere were the source. Hope the fills out the picture a bit. George At 7:46 PM -0800 2/10/99, Frederick Newmeyer wrote: >A few weeks ago, on this list and on one other, I posted a query about the >influence of the Prague School on current North American and Western >European work in syntax. I would like to thank the following, who gave me >very helpful replies: Machtelt Bolkestein, John Connolly, Geert Craps, >Deborah DuBartell, Tom Givon, Frank Gladney, Eva Hajicova, Paul Hopper, >Dick Hudson, John Mackin, Salvador Pons Borderia, Petr Sgall, Sanna-Kaisa >Tanskanen, Jess Tauber, Yishai Tobin, Marina Yaguello, Fumiko Yoshikawa, >and several individuals who asked me not to cite them by name. > >All respondents agreed that several current schools of syntactic analysis >that originated in Western Europe owe a great debt to pre-war work in >Prague. These include Dik's 'Functional Grammar', Halliday's 'Systemic >Functional Grammar', and Alarcos Llorach's 'Funcionalismo'. I am told that >these approaches are quite explicit about their debt to Prague, from which >they derive an integrated structural-functional approach to syntax. > >As far the debt of generative grammar is concerned, all agree that any use >of feature notation is ultimately a Praguean influence. Dependency-based >generative approaches appear to derive from Prague and, in fact, Charles >Fillmore in 'The Case for Case' cites Lucien Tesniere, a member of the >Prague School, for the idea of 'sequence-free representations'. It was >suggested that the approach within generative semantics to topic and focus >derived from Halliday, and hence ultimately from the Prague School. And >there were suggestions that the work on these issues by, say, Michael >Rochemont (within formal syntax) and Barbara Partee (within formal >semantics) are generative reinterpretations of Prague School-originated >generalizations. Partee is also reported to be writing a joint book with >two Prague linguists. > >However, there was wild disagreement among the respondents on the degree >to which mainstream North American functionalism (and the similar German >functionalism represented by linguists such as Haspelmath, Heine, and >Lehmann) is indebted to Praguean work. The opinions I received ranged from >'deeply indebted' to 'no debt whatsoever'. Those who took the former >position pointed to the centrality of Prague-originated notions like >'functional sentence perspective' and 'communicative dynamism' in American >functionalism (even if these terms are not generally used) and suggested >linguists like Bolinger, Chafe and Greenberg as being instrumental in >passing Prague School conceptions on to them. Those who took the latter >position say that the 'discovery' of Prague work was post hoc and that >'foundational differences' exist between Prague School functionalism and >US functionalism. Prague School work was described as being, at one and >the same time, 'too structural' and 'not structural enough'. Too >structural in the sense that American functionalists have tended to reject >the Saussurean idea (adopted by Prague) that a grammar is a system 'ou >tout se tient'. Not structural enough in the sense that the Prague School >has tended to advocate a dependency-based analysis, and therefore, unlike >much of US functionalism, does not formulate generalizations involving >syntactic constituent structure and the structural relationships based on >that. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I am summarizing here, not editorializing!) > >I realize that neither 'the Prague School' nor 'American functionalism' >are homogeneous entities, so conflicting responses might well be drawing >on the work of different scholars within these schools carried out at >different times. Still, since the respondents did not generally qualify >their answers by citing persons and times, I have not done so in this >summary. > >Fritz Newmeyer >University of Washington >fjn at u.washington.edu From geoffn at SIU.EDU Thu Feb 11 14:43:37 1999 From: geoffn at SIU.EDU (Geoffrey S. Nathan) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 08:43:37 -0600 Subject: Prague School influence: summary In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1168 bytes Desc: not available URL: From wcmann at JUNO.COM Thu Feb 11 17:44:17 1999 From: wcmann at JUNO.COM (William Mann) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 12:44:17 -0500 Subject: avoiding conversational implicature Message-ID: Marta: There are plenty of varieties of written text that routinely avoid the Cooperative Principle and others. Many sorts of legal documents do: laws, patents, sales contracts, insurance policies -- more generally text written to establish rights, and text for which the effects depend on legal precedents, prior use of the same words in laws or court cases, for example. Orally, there are the airline safety announcements, that seem to try to straddle the fence. Poetry, in my experience, often gains effect by deviating from the maxims. Songs also, in similar ways. I think the list could be extended. Bill Mann From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Fri Feb 12 04:06:22 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 23:06:22 EST Subject: Prague School influence: summary In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 11 Feb 1999 01:02:26 PST." Message-ID: George Lakoff wrote: >To my knowledge, Halliday had no influence at all on the introduction of >discussions of topicality into generative semantics. In my recollection, we >starting discussing topicality in 1965-66, under the influence of Dwight >Boliger >(who was my Harvard colleague and audited the course Haj and I gave there >and at MIT in fall 1966) and Susumu Kuno, who ran the project Haj and I >worked on and was talking with us about topicality from the perspective of >the Japanese syntax, where wa-constructions indicate topicality and are >one of the most prominent syntactic features of the language. McCawley, of >course, was also thinking about wa-constructions in Japanese. I never met >Halliday till 1968, when he came to Cambridge and, as I recall, talked >about other issues. > >Incidentally, the person who puched Prague School ideas on information flow >the most here at Berkeley during the 70's was Wally Chafe, who of course >was a major force behind the formation of the functionalist school first >here and later at Santa Barbara. His influence here has been persistent. What you say about Halliday is exactly how I remember it but, at least by the early '70s, Kuno was indeed talking about the Prague school. I remember reading Mathesius and Firbas on his recommendation at that time. From Carl.Mills at UC.Edu Fri Feb 12 13:12:21 1999 From: Carl.Mills at UC.Edu (Carl Mills) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 08:12:21 -0500 Subject: Prague School influence: summary Message-ID: >>To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU >Reply-to: "Ellen F. Prince" > >George Lakoff wrote: > > > >>To my knowledge, Halliday had no influence at all on the introduction of >>discussions of topicality into generative semantics. In my recollection, we >>starting discussing topicality in 1965-66, under the influence of Dwight >>Boliger >>(who was my Harvard colleague and audited the course Haj and I gave there >>and at MIT in fall 1966) and Susumu Kuno, who ran the project Haj and I >>worked on and was talking with us about topicality from the perspective of >>the Japanese syntax, where wa-constructions indicate topicality and are >>one of the most prominent syntactic features of the language. McCawley, of >>course, was also thinking about wa-constructions in Japanese. I never met >>Halliday till 1968, when he came to Cambridge and, as I recall, talked >>about other issues. >> >>Incidentally, the person who puched Prague School ideas on information flow >>the most here at Berkeley during the 70's was Wally Chafe, who of course >>was a major force behind the formation of the functionalist school first >>here and later at Santa Barbara. His influence here has been persistent. > And Ellen Prince replied: >What you say about Halliday is exactly how I remember it but, at least >by the early '70s, Kuno was indeed talking about the Prague school. I >remember reading Mathesius and Firbas on his recommendation at that >time. > At Oregon in the early 70's, Jim Hoard and Dale Sloat did have Trubetzkoy on the reserve reading list for phonology courses. In syntax, neither Hoard nor Sloat nor, as far as I remember, Derry Malsch required Firbas or any of the other Prague School syntacticians. I read them on my own, and Jim Hoard was perfectly willing to discuss them. It was in the late 70's at Tromsoe that I had a chance to discuss Functional Sentence Perspective with Leiv Egil Breivik, who was at that time working on English existential-there sentences. Carl Mills From Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at COLORADO.EDU Fri Feb 12 14:51:27 1999 From: Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at COLORADO.EDU (FRAJZYNGIER ZYGMUNT) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 07:51:27 -0700 Subject: Information about fonts Message-ID: Dear friends, I am looking for a font for the Mac that would include (in one character set) characters for glottalized b and d, velar and palatal nasal, and would allow to put accent markers over any character. The font must Times based. I have heard about a font called AfroRoman from an outlet in Washington, but I cannot trace it. I will be most grateful for any information, Zygmunt Frajzyngier. From christa.kilian at UNI-KOELN.DE Fri Feb 12 16:58:57 1999 From: christa.kilian at UNI-KOELN.DE (Christa Kilian-Hatz) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 17:58:57 +0100 Subject: listing Message-ID: Please note that I receive all messages twice. Perhaps I appear on your mailing list two times. If so, please reduce the listing to a single one. Thank you!! - ___________________________ Dr. Christa Kilian-Hatz Institut fuer Afrikanistik Universitaet zu Koeln Meister-Ekkehart-Str. 7 50923 Koeln/Cologne Germany/Allemagne Tel: 49.221.470.4741 Fax: 49.221.470.5158 From W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Fri Feb 12 18:00:00 1999 From: W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 19:00:00 +0100 Subject: Prague School influence: summary Message-ID: Frederick Newmeyer wrote: > However, there was wild disagreement among the respondents on the degree > to which mainstream North American functionalism (and the similar German > functionalism represented by linguists such as Haspelmath, Heine, and > Lehmann) is indebted to Praguean work. Let me just add that there is another Western European linguistic tradition maintained by people who had first been trained in Indo-European linguistics but lateron turned to "functionalism" or language typology etc. In Indo-European linguistics the Prague School has played an important role since the first (recorded) gathering of the group on March 13, 1925. Since then (or, say, since 1926) the names of Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, Jakobson , Trnka, Skalichka etc. have become part of the reading canon of Indo-Europeanists (except for Germany in the years 1938-1945). In Germany, some departments of General Linguistics emerged from departments of Indo-European studies, and it takes no wonder that - contrary to what had been taught in newly founded linguistic departments (often GLOW or Montague oriented) - the Prague School enjoyed an unbroken tradition in these institutes. This kind of tradition established a more or less tacit knowledge of what Prague stands for. For most IE-ists "Prague" was much more like a matter of fact than the name of a specific "school". Hence, there had seldom been the need to "teach" Prague: Its phonological and syntactic claims had been (and still are) transmitted in any lecture on say Old Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, or Gothic. The same seems to be true for what we call the "Single Language Philologies" such as Germanic, Romanic, or Slavic languages. In consequence, quite a number of typologically oriented people in Western Europe have "internalized" the assumptions and methods of the Prague School via their formation as Indo-Europeanists. That does not imply that these researchers have an uncritical access to Prague; rather that they operate in terms that reflect the "functional-structural method" (By-Laws of the "Prague Linguistic Circle", § 1) per se.... These people did not need to rediscover Prague work or to extract it from what has been taught in the US in terms of "mainstream North American functionalism" [though they participate in this mainstream, now]. Funny enough that it is just this group of people that has gained lesser or limited interest in the US....[perhaps this is also due to the fact that some of these people are used to publish - at least partly - in German]. "Geoffrey S. Nathan" wrote: > One of the questions I have discussed with European friends is whether the > word 'functionalism' has a different meaning in Europe and the US. It seems > that European linguists generally use the word to mean the study of the > function of units within the system (and hence the European functionalist > theory is compatible with an autonomy hypothesis) while on this side of the > pond the word generally means the study of how grammar is shaped by the > functions that language has in human behavior (thus, functionalist > phonology, as I practice it, is shaped by the physical equipment that is > used to produce and perceive it). American functionalism, thus, is by > definition, non-autonomous. This sometimes leads to puzzling > non-conversations at international conferences. This may explain the > contradictory results that Fritz has received in his survey. It may be true that some European linguists concentrate on "system internal (or immanent) functionalism". But that does not imply that assumption resulting from therefrom are automatically "compatible with an autonomy hypothesis". Some people simply are not interested in this question. What they do can perhaps best be labeled as "Neo-Grammar in Synchrony". But many people at least in Germany do not belong to this paradigm in its simplicity. Rather, they refer to "functionalism" in both a "system immanent" and a "system transcendent" sense and claim that the explanation of linguistic facts has to respect both aspects (but with the same rigorositiy what again stems from Prague). The syncrestistic amalgamation of external and internal motivations for linguistic data often to be found in European linguistics does not result from any kind of random explanatory access to these data [I hope], but from a formulated interest in a holistic approach that encompasses all possible motivations for language structure [to give a humble reference: I myself have recently tried to outline such an approach (what I call the "Grammar of Scenes and Scenarios") in Schulze 1998 ("Person, Klasse, Kongruenz", vol. 1 (in two parts): Die Grundlagen, München: LINCOM Europa)]. [By the way, if you have a look at Eastern European linguistics (in the tradition of the communicative-functional paradigm that itself goes back to Prague [despite of Stalin's intervention] you can easily recognize that "functionalism" refers to a "dependent reading"]. Wolfgang _____________________________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21802485 (office) | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: W.Schulze.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 192 bytes Desc: Visitenkarte f?r Wolfgang Schulze URL: From tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Sun Feb 14 01:16:46 1999 From: tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Thomas E Payne) Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 17:16:46 -0800 Subject: Lumpers vs. splitters Message-ID: Does anyone know who first used the terms "lumper" and "splitter" by any chance? Thanks for your help. Tom Payne From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL Thu Feb 18 09:41:55 1999 From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 11:41:55 +0200 Subject: Anna Wierzbicka's email address? Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, Can anyone tell me Anna Wierzbicka's email address? Thanks very much. John From elc9j at UNIX.MAIL.VIRGINIA.EDU Thu Feb 18 13:45:35 1999 From: elc9j at UNIX.MAIL.VIRGINIA.EDU (Ellen L. Contini-Morava) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 08:45:35 -0500 Subject: conference announcement Message-ID: [Apologies for cross-postings] CALL FOR PAPERS 6th International Columbia School Conference on the Interaction between Linguistic Form, Meaning, and Human Behavior October 9-11, 1999 Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey Invited speakers: Ronald Langacker University of California, La Jolla Melissa Bowerman Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Wallis Reid Rutgers University Papers invited on any aspect of linguistic analysis in which the postulation of meaningful signals plays a central role in explaining the distribution of linguistic forms. The Columbia School is a group of linguists developing the theoretical framework established by the late William Diver. In this framework language is seen as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative function and by the characteristics of its human users. Grammatical analyses seek to explain the distribution of linguistic forms as an interaction between meaningful signals and pragmatic and functional factors such as inference, ease of processing, iconicity, and the like. Phonological analyses seek to explain the syntagmatic and paradigmatic distributions of phonological units within signals, also drawing on both communicative function and human physiological and psychological characteristics. Please submit: � 3 copies of a one-page anonymous abstract (optional second page for references and/or examples), to the address below. � 1 3x5 index card with the following information: Title of paper Author's name and affiliation Address, phone number, and e-mail address for notification E-mail abstracts should include the above information, which will be deleted before the abstracts are reviewed. DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ABSTRACTS: 15 April 1999 Address for e-mail abstracts: Address for hard-copy abstracts and other correspondence: Ellen Contini-Morava Department of Anthropology University of Virginia Charlottesville VA 22903 **** **** **** **** The support of the conference by The Columbia School Linguistics Society is gratefully acknowledged **** **** **** **** **** Selected Columbia School bibliography: Contini-Morava, Ellen. 1995. "Introduction: On linguistic sign theory", in Ellen Contini-Morava and Barbara S. Goldberg (eds.), Meaning as Explanation: Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Huffman, Alan. 1997. The Categories of Grammar: French lui and le. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Reid, Wallis. 1991. Verb and Noun Number in English: a Functional Explanation. London: Longman. Tobin, Yishai. 1997. Phonology as Human Behavior: Theoretical Implications and Clinical Applications. Duke University Press. From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL Fri Feb 19 06:15:25 1999 From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 08:15:25 +0200 Subject: thanks Message-ID: Thanks very much to all the funknetters who sent me Anna Wierzbicka's email address. John From lieven at EVA.MPG.DE Fri Feb 19 11:36:39 1999 From: lieven at EVA.MPG.DE (Elena Lieven) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 12:36:39 +0100 Subject: postdoctoral position Message-ID: Postdoctoral position in language acquisition Julian Pine and Elena Lieven are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to work on an ESRC-funded project on lexical specificity in early grammatical development and its possible relation to lexical specificity in child-directed speech from a constructivist perspective. This is a two-year post based at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nottingham and the position is available from May 1999. Although the exact starting time is negotiable, we would hope to appoint a candidate as early as possible. The appointment will be on the RA1A scale with a salary of between £15,735 and £20,107 depending on qualifications and experience. The position will involve working on an extensive database of naturalistic speech data from 12 English-speaking children and their mothers between the ages of 2 and 3 years all of which have already been transcribed in CHAT format. Applicants should have completed a Ph.D. in psychology, linguistics or a related discipline (preferably on some aspect of language acquisition), and should be prepared to develop their own research line within the general remit of the project as a whole. Familiarity with the CHILDES system would also be an advantage Please send a C.V., statement of research interests, two letters of recommendation, and a sample of written work on a relevant topic to: Julian Pine Department of Psychology University of Nottingham Nottingham NG7 2RD United Kingdom tel: +44 115 9515285 fax: +44 115 9515324 e-mail: jp at psyc.nott.ac.uk Deadline for receipt of applications: Friday 19th March 1999 From dgohre at INDIANA.EDU Fri Feb 19 23:25:16 1999 From: dgohre at INDIANA.EDU (David Gohre) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 18:25:16 -0500 Subject: FUNKNET: Main/Subordinate clauses: markedness Message-ID: Is there any difference in the markedness of the syntax of subordinate clauses as opposed to main clauses, or to Infinitival clauses? Does anyone know of some Bib that they might send me? Thanks, Dave From alex_francois at HOTMAIL.COM Sat Feb 20 14:13:55 1999 From: alex_francois at HOTMAIL.COM (Alexandre FRANCOIS) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 06:13:55 PST Subject: Main/Subordinate clauses: markedness Message-ID: ----Original Message Follows---- Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 18:25:16 -0500 Reply-To: David Gohre From: David Gohre Subject: FUNKNET: Main/Subordinate clauses: markedness To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU Is there any difference in the markedness of the syntax of subordinate clauses as opposed to main clauses, or to Infinitival clauses? Does anyone know of some Bib that they might send me? Thanks, Dave ************** Dear Dave, As a matter of fact, I wrote a PhD [= French D.E.A.] in 1997, about markedness / unmarkedness of Subordinate clauses. I can give you the reference, although it is as yet unpublished, and written in French ; if you wish, I could send it to you using your personal e-mail. FRAN�OIS Alexandre, "La subordination sans marques segmentales, Formes de d�pendance interpropositionnelle dans le discours", Univ. Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, DEA en Sciences du Langage, October 1997, 180 p. (unpublished). My main concern was to examine, in a typological perspective (> 25 languages referenced, including French, English, Chinese, Fulani, Turkish, Hausa, Melanesian Pidgin), types of structures that were apparently / supposedly independent clauses, from lack of marks which would have clearly indicated them as being subordinate. I would then discuss whether these so-called independent clauses could show some kind of "hypersyntactic" (e.g., pragmatic) dependence with another main clause. I then hypothesized a (thus far neglected) PRAGMATIC SUBORDINATION (in Fr. "la subordination �nonciative"), to account for such sentences. In a way, my aim was to (re)define the linguistic limits of the sentence / utterance ("�nonc�"), based on its fundamentally pragmatic nature : performing a speech act in a given situation. A simplified way to sum it up, would be as follows : a clause, which by its syntactic marking seems to be independent, will be considered to be (pragmatically) subordinate to another one, every time it can be proved that it is not performing a satisfying speech act in the situation. For instance, the English sentence "Suppose you had come earlier" is syntactically well-formed to be called 'independent' (with imperative form of the verb "to suppose"), but this is definitely not the case from a pragmatic point of view (see discussion & demonstration in my PhD). Instead, this clause is to be considered subordinate (to the following clause), at least pragmatically � or even syntactically, provided we redefine syntax on a pragmatic base. And we would then understand better how the main verb "Suppose" was grammaticized in Pidgin English as a conjunction /sapos/ meaning "if", where subordination is clearly marked as syntactic (within the classical definition of Syntax). *********** Out of my 200 bibliogr. references, here are a few I selected for you, because they deal more specifically with this issue, and are written in English (some of them are "classics" you may already know) : FOLEY W., VAN VALIN R. (1984), Functional syntax and universal grammar, Cambridge University Press. GIV�N T. (1979), "From discourse to syntax : grammar as a processing strategy", in Giv�n (ed.), p. 81-112. �� (ed.) (1979), Discourse and syntax, coll. Syntax and Semantics 12, Academic Press, New York. HAIMAN J., THOMPSON S. (eds) (1988), Clause combining in grammar and discourse, Typological studies in language, vol. 2, Benjamins, Amsterdam. LI C., THOMPSON S. (1973), "Serial verb constructions in Mandarin Chinese : subordination or coordination ?", in Corum C. & al. (eds.) Papers from the comparative syntax festival, Chicago linguistic society. LONGACRE R. (1979), "The paragraph as a grammatical unit", in Giv�n (ed), p. 115-134. �� (1983), The grammar of discourse. �� (1985), "Sentences as combinations of clauses", in T. Shopen (ed), p. 235-286. NICHOLS J., WOODBURY A. (eds) (1985), Grammar inside and outside the clause, Cambridge University Press. PAYNE T. (1991), "Medial clauses and interpropositional relations in Panare (Ge-Pano-Carib subgroup)", Cognitive linguistics, 2, 3, 1991, p. 247-281. SHOPEN T. (ed.) (1985), Language typology and syntactic description, II (Complex constructions), Cambridge University Press. SLOBIN D. (1985), "Crosslinguistic evidence for the language-making capacity", in Slobin (ed), tome II, p.1157-1256. �� (ed.) (1985), The cross-linguistic study of language acquisition, I (The data) & II (Theoretical issues), Hillsdale, New Jersey. THURMAN R. (1978), Interclausal Relations in Chuave, MA Thesis, Los Angeles. ***** Here are other useful references, partly in French : AKSU-KO� A., SLOBIN D. (1985), "The acquisition of Turkish", in Slobin (ed) I, p.839-878. ANDERSEN, H. L. (1993), "Compl�tives non introduites en fran�ais parl�", in CERLICO n� 6, p. 5-14. �� (1996), "Verbes parenth�tiques comme marqueurs discursifs", in M�ller (ed.), p. 307-315. BALLY C. (1944), Linguistique g�n�rale et linguistique fran�aise, Francke, Berne. BLANCHE-BENVENISTE C. (1990), Le fran�ais parl� (�tudes grammaticales), coll. Sciences du Langage, CNRS, Paris. BORILLO A. (1996), "Les relations temporelles entre propositions : subordination ou parataxe ?", in M�ller (ed.), p. 127-139. BOUSCAREN J., FRANCKEL J.-J., ROBERT S. (eds) (1995), Langues et langage. Probl�mes et raisonnement en linguistique (M�langes offerts � Antoine Culioli), coll. Linguis-tique Nouvelle, PUF, Paris. CARON B. (1986), "Les accomplis I et II du haoussa et la subordination", in D.R.L. (1986), p. 109-120. CERLICO (1992-93), Subordination Subordinations, Travaux linguistiques du CERLICO n� 5 et 6, Presses Universitaires de Rennes. CHAKER S. (1985), "Syntaxe de la langue / syntaxe de la parole ? Intonation et situation dans l'analyse syntaxique : quelques points controvers�s en berb�re.", Travaux du CLAIX, 3, p. 122-139, repris dans Chaker (1995), p. 83-95. �� (1995), Linguistique berb�re, Etudes de syntaxe et de diachronie, coll. M.S.-Ussun Amazig, Peeters, Louvain. CHAO Y.-R. (1968), A grammar of spoken Chinese, University of California Press, Berkeley. COMRIE B. (1995), "Serial verbs in Haruai and their theoretical implications", in Bouscaren, Franckel, Robert (eds), p. 25-37. DANON-BOILEAU L., MOREL M.-A., MEUNIER A., TOURNADRE N. (1991), "Int�gration discursive et int�gration syntaxique", Langages, Paris, n� 104, p. 111-128. GALAND L. (1984), "Typologie des propositions relatives : la place du berb�re", Lalies n� 6, Presses de l'Ecole Normale Sup�rieure, Paris, p. 81-101. HAIMAN J. (1978) "Conditionals are Topics", Language, 54, p. 564-589. HAIMAN J., MUNRO P. (eds) (1983), Switch reference and universal grammar, Typological studies in language, Benjamins, Amsterdam. LE FUR D. (1995), "Juxtaposition, argumentation, et intonation � l'oral", in Morel (ed.), p. 71-97. LEMAR�CHAL A. (1995 a), "Superposition des marques, z�ro et morphologisation", Journ�e d'Etudes de la SLP (21.1.95) sur La Gramma-ticalisation, � para�tre aux M�moires de la SLP, Paris. �� (1995 b), "Z�ros, superpositions des marques et relation minimale", Actes du Colloque Absence de marque et repr�sentation de l'absence, Travaux linguistiques du CERLICO, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, p. 111-139. MULLER C. (ed.) (1996), D�pendance et int�gration syntaxique (Subordination, coordination, connexion), coll. Linguistische Arbeiten, Niemeyer, T�bingen. ROBERT S. (1995), "Aoristique et mode subordinatif : liens entre aspect et pr�dication", in Bouscaren, Franckel, Robert (eds), p. 373-389. �� (1996), "Aspect z�ro et d�pendance situationnelle : l'exemple du wolof", in M�ller (ed.), p. 153-161. *********** Hope this will help you find what you desire, Alex FRANCOIS (currently on a PhD in Melanesian syntax), Univ. Strasbourg-2 / Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com From bralich at HAWAII.EDU Sun Feb 21 21:01:54 1999 From: bralich at HAWAII.EDU (Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 11:01:54 -1000 Subject: Ergo's Parsing Contest Message-ID: The parsing contest we announced six weeks ago is still open and will close in six more weeks (the end of March) though this could be extended if there are such requests. To date no one has dared to take our challenge on these very practical and relatively easy parsing tasks. We can only assume that the computational linguistics community is that much behind us, because, if there were any tools that would even come close to the practical abilities we offer, those who had such tools would have a simple and straightforward opportunity to demonstrate the supperiority of their methods and tools over ours with just one demonstration. That is, we assume that the only reason that this opportunity for a demonstration of the superiority of other's tools is being ignored is because there are no tools currently superior to those we offer. To reiterate briefly, Ergo Linguistic Technologies is offering its first annual parsing contest based on a fixed set of sentences and a fixed set of tasks to be performed on that set of sentences. The area of NLP to be explored is that of increased syntactic analysis to provide: 1) improvements in navigation and control technology through more complex commands and chained commands, 2) improvements in the implementation of question/answer, statement/ response dialogs with computers and computer characters, and 3) improvements in web and database searching using natural language queries. The contest will be based on a comparison of results for parses of a fixed set of sentences (included on our web site) and various tasks that can be performed as a result of those parses. Ergo's results on these tasks for these questions as well as for the Air Travel Industry Sentences (ATIS) can be downloaded from our site. That is, the comparison will be based on the actual parse tree and the ability to use that parsed output to generate theory independent parse trees and output and to perform various NLP tasks. The judging will be based on the standards for evaluating NLP that have been proposed previously on this list by myself and Derek Bickerton and which are currently being developed into an ISO standard for the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) as part of the VRML Consortium's development efforts (http://www.vrml.org/WorkingGroups/ NLP-ANIM). The standards proposed are theory and field independent standards which allow both linguists and non-linguists to evaluate NLP systems in the areas of navigation and control, question/answer dialogues, and database and web searching. The sentences chosen for this contest are rather simple, but as we find more and more parsers that can accomplish the tasks on this list, we will add more complex sentences and tasks to the list. Please, be aware that systems that may be designed for large corpora of unrestricted text actually cannot work in this domain. Thus, while such systems may be useful for certain searching tasks, they are not useful in the domain explored in this contest — and this is evidenced by their inability to perform on tests such as the one provide here. The full contest instructions and an HTML document of Ergo's results in this area can be found at http://www.ergo-ling.com. The standards were designed to allow the developers of a parsing system (statistical or syntactic) to demonstrate the thoroughness and accuracy of the parses they produce by using the parsed output to perform a number of straightforward, traditional syntactic tasks such as changing a statement to a question or an active to a passive as well as demonstrating an ability to create standard trees (Using the Penn Treebank II guidelines) and standard grammatical analyses. All the standards chosen were chosen to be theory independent measures of the accuracy of a parse through the use of standard and ordinary grammatical and syntactic output. The contest officially begins on January 15th and will be closed on March 31st. This will allow developers 2.5 months to develop tools and to work with trouble spots that they may have with the set of sentences offered in this contest. The contest will be offered in subsequent years from January to March. As time develops we hope the parsers, the contest rules, and the test sentences will all grow in sophistication and scope. However, as most parsers have existed many more years than ours, it is reasonable to think these tools exist already. Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. President and CEO Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 Tel: (808)539-3920 Fax: (808)539-3924 bralich at hawaii.edu http://www.ergo-ling.com Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 From fling11 at EMDUCMS1.SIS.UCM.ES Wed Feb 24 20:03:21 1999 From: fling11 at EMDUCMS1.SIS.UCM.ES (Marta Carretero) Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 21:03:21 +0100 Subject: implicature -thanks Message-ID: Dear funknetters, Thanks a lot to all of you who have sent contributions to the discussion of implicatures! I feel very happy about it: I was just looking for some references to fill a couple of class hours, but now I have many interesting points to consider about this subject. I must also make clear, especially to those of you who I think misunderstood part of my message, that I did not mean that Grice's implicatures were not followed AT ALL in such genres as political interviews and trials, but that they were not generally followed IN THE SAME WAY as in other genres, such as most face-to-face conversation between members of a family or close friends. Thanks again, Marta. Marta Carretero Departamento de Filologia Inglesa Facultad de Filologia - Edificio A Universidad Complutense 28040 - Madrid. Spain. Fax: (341)394-54-78 From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Sat Feb 27 18:00:44 1999 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (funkadmn Departmental Account) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 12:00:44 -0600 Subject: Book announcement--Newmeyer (fwd) Message-ID: The following is a book which readers of this list might find of interest. For more information please visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/NEULHF98 Language Form and Language Function Frederick J. Newmeyer The two basic approaches to linguistics are the formalist and the functionalist approaches. In this monograph, Frederick J. Newmeyer, a formalist, argues that both approaches are valid. However, because formal and functional linguists have avoided direct confrontation, they remain unaware of the compatability of their results. One of the author's goals is to make each side accessible to the other. While remaining an ardent formalist, Newmeyer stresses the limitations of a narrow formalist outlook that refuses to consider that anything of interest might have been discovered in the course of functionalist-oriented research. He argues that the basic principles of generative grammar, in interaction with principles in other linguistic domains, provide compelling accounts of phenomena that functionalists have used to try to refute the generative approach. Frederick J. Newmeyer is Chair of the Department of Linguistics, University of Washington. Language, Speech, and Communication series 6 x 9, 400 pp., 6 illus. cloth ISBN 0-262-14064-0 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | Jud Wolfskill ||||||| Associate Publicist Phone: (617) 253-2079 ||||||| MIT Press Fax: (617) 253-1709 ||||||| Five Cambridge Center E-mail: wolfskil at mit.edu | Cambridge, MA 02142-1493 http://mitpress.mit.edu From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Sat Feb 27 18:02:05 1999 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (funkadmn Departmental Account) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 12:02:05 -0600 Subject: Summer School Message-ID: The Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT) in cooperation with the Graduate School "Economy and Complexity of Language" at the University of Potsdam and the Humboldt University Berlin, with support of the "Center of Excellence: Formal Models of Cognitive Complexity" at the University of Potsdam and the ZAS Research Centre for General Linguistics, Typology and Universals will be organizing the LINGUISTICS SUMMER SCHOOL in Potsdam (Germany), >>From July 19 till July 31 1999. We are pleased to announce that you are able to enroll as of now!! All information can be found on our webpage: http://wwwlot.let.uu.nl/zs99.html On behalf of the organisors, Jan Don Gisbert Fanselow Ina Hockl Lara Groen -------------------------------------------------------------- LOT Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics Trans 10 NL - 3512 JK Utrecht Phone: +31 30 2536006 Fax: +31 30 2536000 -------------------------------------------------------------- From lachler at UNM.EDU Sat Feb 6 10:22:39 1999 From: lachler at UNM.EDU (Jordan Lachler) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 03:22:39 -0700 Subject: Schedule of Talks at HDLS-2 Message-ID: HDLS-2 Second Annual High Desert Student Conference in Linguistics Albuquerque, New Mexico March 26-28, 1999 The abstracts for all the talks at this year's conference can be found on the HDLS website at: http://www.unm.edu/~hdls/hdls-2/schedule.html Information on attending the conference can be obtained from us via e-mail. Drop us a line at: hdls at unm.edu --- Jordan Lachler lachler at unm.edu President, HIGH DESERT LINGUISTICS SOCIETY #*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#* #*# FRIDAY, March 26th 8:30-9:15 REGISTRATION 9:15-9:30 WELCOME ADDRESS 930-1000 Image Schema Blending and the Construal of Events: A Cross-Linguistic Account of GO-AND-V Anatol Stefanowitsch, Rice University 1000-1030 English and Spanish Conjunctive Predicates Ivo Sanchez, University of California, Santa Barbara 1030-1100 A Synchronic Study of 'have to' and 'got to' with Diachronic Implications Dawn Nordquist, University of New Mexico 1100-1115 BREAK 1115-1145 Wyandot Phonology: Recovering the Sound System of an Extinct Language Craig Kopris, State University of New York at Buffalo 1145-1215 Monastic and Natural Sign Language: A New Look Dan Parvaz, University of New Mexico 1215-1245 Fluid French Boundaries in Louisiana Megan E. Melan?on, Louisiana State University 1245-200 LUNCH 200-300 Interaction and Grammar: Transitivity and Argument Structure in Conversation Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sandy Thompson, University of California, Santa Barbara 300-315 BREAK 315-345 On Managing Sign Complexity in Sign Language Recognition Christian Vogler and Dimitris Metaxas, U of Penn 345-415 Multilingual Lexical Representation: Structure-Sharing versus Micro-Features Carole Tiberius, ITRI, University of Brighton 415-430 BREAK 430-500 English to American Sign Language Machine Translation of Weather Reports Angus B. Grieve-Smith, University of New Mexico 500-530 Using Multiple Machine Translation Packages to Produce "Averaged" Results Dan Tappan, Computing Reasearch laboratory, New Mexico State University SATURDAY, March 27 930-1000 Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives on Negative Modals in ASL, Barbara Shaffer, University of New Mexico 1000-1030 Where is the Spanish 'go' Progressive Going? Frequency Constraints on the Pace of Grammaticization Rena Torres Cacoullos, University of New Mexico 1030-1100 The Aspectual System of Chiyao Alfred J. Matiki, University of New Mexico 1100-1115 BREAK 1115-1145 Grammaticization of the Direct Object marker 'o' in Written Japanese: A Discourse-Based Study Misumi Sadler, University of Arizona 1145-1215 On the Subjectification of Japanese Connective 'tara' Sono Takano Hayes, Carnegie Mellon University, and Rumiko Shinzato, Georgia Institute of Technology 1215-1230 BREAK 1230-100 The Consequences of Token Frequency, Transitional Probablility, and Non-Random Distributions of Lexical Segments: A Causal Explanation for Word-Boundary Palatalization Phenomena in English Nathan Bush, University of New Mexico 100-130 The Role of Alternating Phonetic Environments and Word Frequency in the Development of Latin F- in Spanish Esther L. Brown, University of New Mexico 130-230 LUNCH 230-300 Semantic-Pragmatic Account for Dative-Subject Construction in Japanese Kyoko Masuda, University of Arizona 300-330 Transitivity and Viewpoint in Japanese Giving and Receiving Verbs Soichi Kozai, University of Hawaii 330-345 BREAK 345-415 The Continuity of "Agreement": From Pre-Linguistic Action Gestures to ASL Verbs Shannon Casey, University of California, San Diego 415-445 A Survey of Distributed Pronominal Affix Systems Jordan Lachler, University of New Mexico 415-430 BREAK 430-500 Personal Pronouns in Chinese and English GU Gang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong 500-530 Address Forms in Chinese and their Interactional Functions YANG Jun, University of Arizona SUNDAY, March 28th 930-1000 Parataxis in Old English: Evidence from Translation K. Aaron Smith, University of New Mexico 1000-1030 An Analysis of Passive Constructions in Thai Unchalee Singnoi, University of Oregon 1030-1045 BREAK 1045-1115 The Psychological Reality of 'which' Constructions Catie Berkenfield, University of New Mexico 1115-1145 The Emergence of Inflection: The Case of Spanish -y in 'soy', 'doy','voy', 'estoy' Myriam Eguia, University of New Mexico 1145-1200 BREAK 1200-1230 Focus and Quotative 'like': A Necessary Dichotomy? Andrew Tistadt, University of New Mexico 1230-100 Lavender Languages, Pink Triangles and a Rainbow Flag: Male Sexual Orientation and English Color Term Usage Paul J. Weiss and Robert Hahn, University of New Mexico From fling11 at EMDUCMS1.SIS.UCM.ES Tue Feb 9 15:42:28 1999 From: fling11 at EMDUCMS1.SIS.UCM.ES (Marta Carretero) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 16:42:28 +0100 Subject: conversational implicature Message-ID: Dear funknetters, I would be grateful if some of you gave me some references on genres/text types/other cases in which the Gricean Cooperative Principle and Maxims are not followed or expected to be followed to a large extent (for example: trials, political interviews, etc.) I would especially like works which use authentic spoken or written English material, so as to show examples to my students of Pragmatics. Thanks in advance. Best wishes, Marta. Marta Carretero Departamento de Filologia Inglesa Facultad de Filologia - Edificio A Universidad Complutense 28040 - Madrid. Spain. Fax: (341)394-54-78 From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Tue Feb 9 19:06:49 1999 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (funkadmn Departmental Account) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 13:06:49 -0600 Subject: CALL for Proposals Message-ID: >From Jeff ALLEN ANNOUNCING CALL FOR PROPOSALS ELRA 1999 CALL FOR PROPOSALS ELRA COMMISSIONING PRODUCTION OF LANGUAGE RESOURCES Full version of call of proposals is available at: http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html If you would like to receive a copy of the call for proposals by e-mail, please contact Jeff ALLEN mailto:jeff at elda.fr ____________ 8 February 1999 The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) invites proposals for the first of a series of calls for the (co-)production and packaging of Language Resources (LRs), open to companies and academic organisations that comply with eligibility conditions provided below. ELRA is planning to commission the production, packaging and/or customisation of speech and written LRs needed by the Language Engineering (LE) community, and is inviting applications for production and/or packaging/repackaging projects, which could be eligible for funding from ELRA. The purpose of the call is to ensure that necessary resources are developed in an acceptable framework (in terms of time and legal conditions) by the LE players. This call is targeted towards projects with short time scales (projects lasting up to one year but preferably shorter) and the size of the funding will be considerably small. The ELRA funding is to be seen as effective and useful for producers being both tactical in their aims for the targeted market, which means that they do know all about the needs on the specific market, and strategic with regard to what to produce in order to fulfil these needs. In order to qualify for funding eligibility under the European Commission 4th Programme, the institution(s) making the proposal must belong to one of the European Union Member States, or be in Liechtenstein, Iceland or Norway. It is preferred that proposals not exceed 100,000 ECU. ELRA hopes to fund several proposals. Timetable of deadlines: Announcement of the Call: 8 February 1999 Submission deadline for proposals: 19 March 1999 Notification of reception of proposals before 26 March 1999 Acceptance notifications and negotiations to start on the 5th April 1999 NOTE: Only complete proposals will be reviewed. Should you have further questions, please contact Jeff ALLEN at the ELDA/ELRA office for details before 1 March 1999. Jeff ALLEN c/o ELRA/ELDA 55 rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE e-mail: Tel: (+33) 1 43 13 33 33 Fax: (+33) 1 43 13 33 30 http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html ____________ From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Tue Feb 9 20:05:22 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 15:05:22 EST Subject: conversational implicature In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 09 Feb 1999 16:42:28 +0100." Message-ID: > Dear funknetters, > > I would be grateful if some of you gave me some references on >genres/text types/other cases in which the Gricean Cooperative Principle >and Maxims are not followed or >expected to be followed to a large extent (for example: trials, political >interviews, etc.) I would especially like works which use authentic spoken >or written English material, so as to show examples to my students of >Pragmatics. > > Thanks in advance. > > Best wishes, > > Marta. The only type of discourse I can think of that would not follow the Cooperative Principle to any appreciable extent would be schizophrenic discourse -- but I don't know if you'd consider that a 'genre' or 'text type'. If you think trials or political interviews do not follow Grice, I suggest you give him another read. From eitkonen at UTU.FI Wed Feb 10 09:42:43 1999 From: eitkonen at UTU.FI (Esa) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 01:42:43 -0800 Subject: maxims Message-ID: Dear Marta Carretero You are quite right to assume that politicians (and lawyers) customarily violate the maxims 'Be truthful!' and 'Be relevant! Reading the response(s) to your recent query on the Funknet, you must have gathered that the (additional) maxim 'Be polite!' is also in the habit of being violated. - Best wishes, Esa Itkonen From OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Tue Feb 9 23:13:10 1999 From: OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 15:13:10 PST Subject: maxims Message-ID: Dear Marta Carretero, Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect primarily European male discourse. Olga Yokoyama From lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Tue Feb 9 23:49:03 1999 From: lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (George Lakoff) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 15:49:03 -0800 Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: <4FCABF1FD1@113hum1.humnet.ucla.edu> Message-ID: At 3:13 PM -0800 2/9/99, OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU wrote: >Dear Marta Carretero, >Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by >those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also >seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect >primarily European male discourse. >Olga Yokoyama Eleanor Ochs noted, starting back in the early 70's, that Gricean maxims are not universal and are different in Samoan. Many linguists travelling to Mexico have noticed that they are different there too. And Robin Lakoff (in Language and Woman's Place) observed in 1974 that differences in the pragmatics of politeness between men and women led to different maxims, a fact that has been discussed in the works of Deborah Tannen since then. George From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Wed Feb 10 00:06:28 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 19:06:28 EST Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 09 Feb 1999 15:13:10 PST." <4FCABF1FD1@113hum1.humnet.ucla.edu> Message-ID: >Dear Marta Carretero, >Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by >those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also >seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect >primarily European male discourse. >Olga Yokoyama The whole point of Grice is that the Maxims are *presumed* in any sort of linguistic communication as we know it -- why on earth would anyone ever ask a question if not for the presumption that the addressee's next utterance would be somehow relevant and also non-random with respect to the addressee's beliefs? Furthermore, the Maxims do more work -- by being perceptibly violated, they permit the drawing of non-logical inferences. If anyone knows of a culture or sex for whom things work differently, I would love to hear about it. From Jiansheng.Guo at VUW.AC.NZ Wed Feb 10 01:02:07 1999 From: Jiansheng.Guo at VUW.AC.NZ (Jiansheng Guo) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 01:02:07 GMT Subject: maxims Message-ID: Similar to Ochs' and Lokoff's findings, the recent report by Penelope Brown of "lies" in Tzeltal in the context of child discipline and control also finds conventional violation of the maxism of quality (e.g., Stop crying, or that woman will steal you away forever). However, when critiquing Gricean maxisms, we have to be very careful about what the Gricean maxisms were intended for. As Levinson explained in his 1983 Pragmatics book, they have nothing to do with people's actual behavior, but rather, the fundamental underlying assumptions interlocutors hold in communication. In his example, A: Where's Bill? B: There's a yellow VW outside Sue's house. B has obviously violated the relevance and quantity maxisms in the literally meanings of the answer. But B has given a very relevant answer and A would have the same view. And the mechanism that enables us and also A to see B's answer as good is the essence of the Gricean Maxims, namely, we all have the fundamental assumption about human communication that people observe these maxisms in communication. And these assumptions force interactants to figure out the utterer's intention, or the pragmatic meaning. Following this line of reasoning, a genuine critique of Gricean maxisms has to be in a community, genre, or context, where the communicative assumptions are that when people communicate, they do the opposite of the Gricean maxism and all interactants will infer meaning from these assumptions. According to this criterion, the fact politician and lawyers constant lie does not constitute counter example of Gricean Maxisms, since the listeners have to hold Gricean maxisms in order for the politicians and lawyears to convince them. If not, whatever they say would be only self-defeating. Thus, we should differentiate people's behavior in violating Gricean maxims on the one hand, and the situations (society, genre, context, etc.) where Gricean maxims do not work, on the other. Guo Jiansheng Guo School of Psychology Victoria University Wellington New Zealand From tgb114 at PSU.EDU Wed Feb 10 02:51:31 1999 From: tgb114 at PSU.EDU (Travis Bradley) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 21:51:31 -0500 Subject: Maxims and verbal humor In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Marta, Verbal humor often involves violation of Grice's maxims. Attardo (1994), for example, gives the following conversational jokes, each of which violates one of the Maxims: a. Quality "Why did the Vice-President fly to Panama?" "Because the fighting is over." b. Quantity "Excuse me, do you know what time it is?" "Yes." c. Relation "How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?" "Fish!" d. Manner "Do you believe in clubs for young people?" "Only when kindness fails." Maxims may also be violated in canned jokes, which possess a narrative structure (i.e., the kind of joke you usually find in joke books, or which people usually preface with "Did you hear the one about ...?") As Attardo points out, the claim that the teller of a joke violates Grice's Maxims implies that a narrative joke text constitutes an example of non-cooperative behavior. If such texts violate the Maxims, one would expect them to become non-cooperative and to lose meaningfulness. Nevertheless, jokes are usually understood and are not perceived as lies or as ill-formed or cryptic texts. Raskin (1985) solves the paradox by proposing a modified set of Grice's Maxims to account for what he calls non-bona-fide communication: Raskin's Non-bona-fide Maxims Quantity: Give exactly as much information as is necessary for the joke Quality: Say only what is compatible with the world of the joke Relation: Say only what is relevant to the joke Manner: Tell the joke efficiently The operation of the non-bona-fide Maxims insures that the listener does not expect the joke-teller to be truthful or to convey any relevant information. Rather, he or she recognizes that the intention of the speaker is to elicit a humorous response. So it seems that in the domain of humor, one finds examples of Gricean maxim violations. There is even reason to believe that verbal humor merits its own special set of maxims, at least with respect to narrative/canned jokes. I have an online paper on the subject at the following URL: http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/t/g/tgb114/linguistics/jokes/jokes.htm Best, Travis Bradley At 04:42 PM 2/9/99 +0100, Marta Carretero wrote: > Dear funknetters, > > I would be grateful if some of you gave me some references on >genres/text types/other cases in which the Gricean Cooperative Principle >and Maxims are not followed or >expected to be followed to a large extent (for example: trials, political >interviews, etc.) I would especially like works which use authentic spoken >or written English material, so as to show examples to my students of >Pragmatics. > > Thanks in advance. > > Best wishes, > > Marta. > > >Marta Carretero >Departamento de Filologia Inglesa >Facultad de Filologia - Edificio A >Universidad Complutense >28040 - Madrid. Spain. Fax: (341)394-54-78 > > From mariel at post.tau.ac.il Wed Feb 10 09:30:32 1999 From: mariel at post.tau.ac.il (Mira Ariel) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 11:30:32 +0200 Subject: maxims Message-ID: Hi everyone, I agree with Ellen Prince re the Gricean maxims. In order to show that Grice (or other pragmatic theories such as Relevance theory) doesn't work in a specific genre or community one needs to show that the pragmatic theory is inapplicable to the case, or that it predicts a different utterance/effect than we actually find. Violations which create special implicatures are built into the Gricean theory, and do NOT constitute counter-examples. The way I interpret Och's important work is it shows that different maxims are weighted differently, that politeness (another maxim perhaps) has a different dress/application in different cultures, and that different clashes arise in different cultures (taboos) which cause speakeres to violate the maxims in different ways. There may indeed be specific cultural, gender and other practices of WHAT the clashes are, on HOW to weigh clashing maxims, but that does not invalidate the general program, which embeds human conversations within rationality, I believe. However, a serious problem that I do see with these pragmatic theories is in restricting them. The way I see it, you can rather easily explain almost ANYTHING after the fact. But how to do that is more a socio-psychological endeavor, I find. Yours, Mira Ariel From M.Perkins at SHEFFIELD.AC.UK Wed Feb 10 10:22:48 1999 From: M.Perkins at SHEFFIELD.AC.UK (Mick Perkins) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 10:22:48 +0000 Subject: conversational implicature Message-ID: Dear Marta The conversation of people with communication impairments can often be characterised as violating Grice's maxims. For example people with aphasia could be said to be violating the maxim of quantity to the extent that they are unable to linguistically encode all that they want to, and also people on the autistic spectrum either often say too little or too much because they are unable to accurately judge the communicative needs of their interlocutor. In the latter case, though, one might argue that from the speaker's perspective they are saying EXACTLY the right amount to be appropriately informative according to their reading (albeit atypical) of the situation. For more discussion of such issues and illustrative material from a range of communication impairments including fluent and nonfluent aphasia, 'semantic-pragmatic' disorder, autism, traumatic brain injury, right hemisphere brain damage and schizophrenia, you could check out the following article: Perkins, M. R. (1998) Is pragmatics epiphenomenal? Evidence from communication disorders. Journal of Pragmatics 29: 291-311. Mick Perkins > Dear funknetters, > > I would be grateful if some of you gave me some references on >genres/text types/other cases in which the Gricean Cooperative Principle >and Maxims are not followed or >expected to be followed to a large extent (for example: trials, political >interviews, etc.) I would especially like works which use authentic spoken >or written English material, so as to show examples to my students of >Pragmatics. > > Thanks in advance. > > Best wishes, > > Marta. From nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE Wed Feb 10 11:58:29 1999 From: nuyts at UIA.UA.AC.BE (Jan.Nuyts) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:58:29 +0100 Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: <36C151B7.1925@ccsg.tau.ac.il> Message-ID: > I agree with Ellen Prince re the Gricean maxims. In order to show that > Grice (or other pragmatic theories such as Relevance theory) doesn't > work in a specific genre or community one needs to show that the > pragmatic theory is inapplicable to the case, or that it predicts a > different utterance/effect than we actually find. Violations which > create special implicatures are built into the Gricean theory, and do > NOT constitute counter-examples > ... > However, a serious problem that I do see with these pragmatic theories > is in restricting them. The way I see it, you can rather easily explain > almost ANYTHING after the fact. But how to do that is more a > socio-psychological endeavor, I find. Maybe this is saying the same thing as in Mira's last paragraph, but: what would constitute a counterexample to the Gricean theory? Or in other words, is this theory refutable? On the other hand, one may wonder whether the 'classical' requirement for a theory to be refutable in order to be a real theory at all (instead of a dogma) is maintainable. In the (usually - or always? - fictive) situation in which a theory optimally accounts for the set of facts it is meant to explain, it should be impossible to come up with counterexamples, or even to conceive of counterexamples ... Jan ***** Jan Nuyts phone: 32/3/820.27.73 University of Antwerp fax: 32/3/820.27.62 Linguistics email: nuyts at uia.ua.ac.be Universiteitsplein 1 B-2610 Wilrijk - Belgium From ocls at IPA.NET Wed Feb 10 13:48:52 1999 From: ocls at IPA.NET (George Elgin, Suzette Haden Elgin) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 07:48:52 -0600 Subject: Maxims and verbal humor Message-ID: At the risk of appearing simplistic, it seems to me that the fact that it's possible to identify particular utterances as clear violations of a theory is in itself proof of the applicability of the theory to that utterance. Suzette Haden Elgin From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Wed Feb 10 17:07:31 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:07:31 EST Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 10 Feb 1999 11:14:01 +0100." <3.0.3.32.19990210111401.00a4eb08@eucmax.sim.ucm.es> Message-ID: >At 19:06 9/02/99 -0500, you wrote: >>>Dear Marta Carretero, >>>Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by >>>those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also >>>seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect >>>primarily European male discourse. >>>Olga Yokoyama >> >>The whole point of Grice is that the Maxims are *presumed* in any >>sort of linguistic communication as we know it -- why on earth would >>anyone ever ask a question if not for the presumption that the >>addressee's next utterance would be somehow relevant and also non-random >>with respect to the addressee's beliefs? > >By the same logic, there is no logical reason why would one would repeat 2 >or 3 times the same answer to a question, or, in a group, repeat 3 or 4 >times the description of something that has happened. Nevertheless, that >is a hallmark of discourse structure in Spanish society. It hasn?t got to >do only with exchanging information. There seems to be more going on that >gets into social interaction. There may be something similar going on in >Mexico, where, as George Lakoff mentioned, linguists have noticed that the >norms are different as well. I can't tell whether you're arguing for or against Grice. If against, the repetitions that you note that have 'no logical reason' do indeed induce implicatures which are precisely explained by a Gricean approach. In fact, the whole notion of repetition as marked in any way PRESUMES a Gricean approach, i.e. that it is a violation of the Maxim of Quantity. Hard to imagine any other way to even identify it. For a formal treatment of how to derive non-logical inferences from repetitions/redundancy, see: Walker, Marilyn. 1993. Informational redundancy and resource bounds in dialogue. Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. dissertation. From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Wed Feb 10 17:22:39 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:22:39 EST Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 09 Feb 1999 15:49:03 PST." Message-ID: George Lakoff writes: >At 3:13 PM -0800 2/9/99, OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU wrote: >>Dear Marta Carretero, >>Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by >>those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also >>seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect >>primarily European male discourse. >>Olga Yokoyama > >Eleanor Ochs noted, starting back in the early 70's, that Gricean maxims >are not universal and are different in Samoan. Many linguists travelling to >Mexico have noticed that they are different there too. And Robin Lakoff (in >Language and Woman's Place) observed in 1974 that differences in the >pragmatics of politeness between men and women led to different maxims, a >fact that has been discussed in the works of Deborah Tannen since then. Could we get a reference, George? The paper I recall by Elinor (then) Keenan appeared in Language in Society and concerned Malagasy, not Samoan. In fact, she claimed but did not show that Gricean maxims are different in Malagasy. In particular, IIRC, she gave an example like the following as a typical Malagasy exchange and took it to be evidence of a lack of Maxim of Quality: A: How do you open the door? B: If you don't open it from the inside, it won't open. Of course, she TAKES FOR GRANTED that A infers from B's response that, if you do open it from the inside, it will open. But this is PRECISELY the sort of non-logical inference that Grice is attempting to account for with his Maxims! (In fact, it's what Geis and Zwicky had already discussed and named 'invited inference', IIRC.) For a Gricean account of how this inference could be accounted for in a Gazdar-type model, see my old paper 'Grice and universality: a reappraisal', downloadable as a postscript file from http://babel.ling.upenn.edu/~ellen. The problem that keeps coming up over the years is that some read Grice as tho he were an ethnographer describing society rather than as a philosopher laying the groundwork for a theory of how people draw predictable inferences that are not logically entailed by what is said. From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Wed Feb 10 20:01:11 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 15:01:11 EST Subject: maxims In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:22:39 EST." <199902101722.MAA19507@central.cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: Of course I meant Maxim of QUANTITY below! Sorry. >George Lakoff writes: > >>At 3:13 PM -0800 2/9/99, OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU wrote: >>>Dear Marta Carretero, >>>Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by >>>those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also >>>seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect >>>primarily European male discourse. >>>Olga Yokoyama >> >>Eleanor Ochs noted, starting back in the early 70's, that Gricean maxims >>are not universal and are different in Samoan. Many linguists travelling to >>Mexico have noticed that they are different there too. And Robin Lakoff (in >>Language and Woman's Place) observed in 1974 that differences in the >>pragmatics of politeness between men and women led to different maxims, a >>fact that has been discussed in the works of Deborah Tannen since then. > >Could we get a reference, George? The paper I recall by Elinor (then) >Keenan appeared in Language in Society and concerned Malagasy, not >Samoan. In fact, she claimed but did not show that Gricean maxims are >different in Malagasy. In particular, IIRC, she gave an example like >the following as a typical Malagasy exchange and took it to be >evidence of a lack of Maxim of Quality: ^^^^^^^ > > A: How do you open the door? > B: If you don't open it from the inside, it won't open. > >Of course, she TAKES FOR GRANTED that A infers from B's response that, >if you do open it from the inside, it will open. But this is PRECISELY >the sort of non-logical inference that Grice is attempting to account >for with his Maxims! (In fact, it's what Geis and Zwicky had already >discussed and named 'invited inference', IIRC.) For a Gricean account >of how this inference could be accounted for in a Gazdar-type model, >see my old paper 'Grice and universality: a reappraisal', downloadable >as a postscript file from http://babel.ling.upenn.edu/~ellen. > >The problem that keeps coming up over the years is that some read >Grice as tho he were an ethnographer describing society rather than as >a philosopher laying the groundwork for a theory of how people draw >predictable inferences that are not logically entailed by what is said. From eitkonen at UTU.FI Wed Feb 10 15:27:46 1999 From: eitkonen at UTU.FI (Esa Itkonen) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 17:27:46 +0200 Subject: maxims-qua-norms Message-ID: There seems to be some conceptual confusion concerning the notion of Gricean maxim. The maxims are NORMS; and it is a conceptual truth that norms can be, and are, violated. Therefore it is wrong to assume that pointing out violations of maxims constitutes eo ipso a criticism of those maxims. Counterexamples refute laws of nature, not norms. (This is, in a nutshell, the difference between linguistics and the natural sciences.) On the other hand, it is informative to learn when and where the maxims are violated. Therefore the reference to mendacious, irrelevant, or impolite verbal behavior remains justified (even if, to repeat, it does not refute the norms.) Of course, when the gap between norms and actual behavior widens, the existence of norms becomes questionable. I have dealt with the complicated issue of linguistics & normativity in two more-than-300-page books. Esa Itkonen From dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Thu Feb 11 01:26:32 1999 From: dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew S Dryer) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 20:26:32 -0500 Subject: Grice Message-ID: I too agree with Ellen Prince re the Gricean maxims. But I can't resist the temptation of commenting that I can easily imagine an outsider reading this conversation on Funknet and wondering how some of Ellen's comments conformed to the maxim of relevance. I can only draw the inference that she is interpreting some of the messages in this conversation as implicating that some of the people who have made serious comments about violations to Gricean maxims also believe that violations to Gricean maxims are somehow violations to Gricean theory, which, as both Mira and Guo have pointed out, is not the case. On rereading the messages, I'm not convinced that these messages do implicate that, so I can only infer that Ellen has found in the past that so many linguists mistakenly think that violations to Gricean maxims are somehow a problem for Gricean theory that some of the people who have sent messages in this conversation must be mistaken about that. And she may be right. And I certainly cannot imagine going through any of this reasoning if Gricean theory (or some variation) weren't right. Matthew Dryer From fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU Thu Feb 11 03:46:23 1999 From: fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU (Frederick Newmeyer) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 19:46:23 -0800 Subject: Prague School influence: summary Message-ID: A few weeks ago, on this list and on one other, I posted a query about the influence of the Prague School on current North American and Western European work in syntax. I would like to thank the following, who gave me very helpful replies: Machtelt Bolkestein, John Connolly, Geert Craps, Deborah DuBartell, Tom Givon, Frank Gladney, Eva Hajicova, Paul Hopper, Dick Hudson, John Mackin, Salvador Pons Borderia, Petr Sgall, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen, Jess Tauber, Yishai Tobin, Marina Yaguello, Fumiko Yoshikawa, and several individuals who asked me not to cite them by name. All respondents agreed that several current schools of syntactic analysis that originated in Western Europe owe a great debt to pre-war work in Prague. These include Dik's 'Functional Grammar', Halliday's 'Systemic Functional Grammar', and Alarcos Llorach's 'Funcionalismo'. I am told that these approaches are quite explicit about their debt to Prague, from which they derive an integrated structural-functional approach to syntax. As far the debt of generative grammar is concerned, all agree that any use of feature notation is ultimately a Praguean influence. Dependency-based generative approaches appear to derive from Prague and, in fact, Charles Fillmore in 'The Case for Case' cites Lucien Tesniere, a member of the Prague School, for the idea of 'sequence-free representations'. It was suggested that the approach within generative semantics to topic and focus derived from Halliday, and hence ultimately from the Prague School. And there were suggestions that the work on these issues by, say, Michael Rochemont (within formal syntax) and Barbara Partee (within formal semantics) are generative reinterpretations of Prague School-originated generalizations. Partee is also reported to be writing a joint book with two Prague linguists. However, there was wild disagreement among the respondents on the degree to which mainstream North American functionalism (and the similar German functionalism represented by linguists such as Haspelmath, Heine, and Lehmann) is indebted to Praguean work. The opinions I received ranged from 'deeply indebted' to 'no debt whatsoever'. Those who took the former position pointed to the centrality of Prague-originated notions like 'functional sentence perspective' and 'communicative dynamism' in American functionalism (even if these terms are not generally used) and suggested linguists like Bolinger, Chafe and Greenberg as being instrumental in passing Prague School conceptions on to them. Those who took the latter position say that the 'discovery' of Prague work was post hoc and that 'foundational differences' exist between Prague School functionalism and US functionalism. Prague School work was described as being, at one and the same time, 'too structural' and 'not structural enough'. Too structural in the sense that American functionalists have tended to reject the Saussurean idea (adopted by Prague) that a grammar is a system 'ou tout se tient'. Not structural enough in the sense that the Prague School has tended to advocate a dependency-based analysis, and therefore, unlike much of US functionalism, does not formulate generalizations involving syntactic constituent structure and the structural relationships based on that. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I am summarizing here, not editorializing!) I realize that neither 'the Prague School' nor 'American functionalism' are homogeneous entities, so conflicting responses might well be drawing on the work of different scholars within these schools carried out at different times. Still, since the respondents did not generally qualify their answers by citing persons and times, I have not done so in this summary. Fritz Newmeyer University of Washington fjn at u.washington.edu From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Thu Feb 11 04:07:08 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 23:07:08 EST Subject: Grice In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 10 Feb 1999 20:26:32 EST." Message-ID: Matthew Dryer wrote: >I too agree with Ellen Prince re the Gricean maxims. But I can't resist >the temptation of commenting that I can easily imagine an outsider reading >this conversation on Funknet and wondering how some of Ellen's comments >conformed to the maxim of relevance. I can only draw the inference that >she is interpreting some of the messages in this conversation as >implicating that some of the people who have made serious comments about >violations to Gricean maxims also believe that violations to Gricean >maxims are somehow violations to Gricean theory, which, as both Mira and >Guo have pointed out, is not the case. On rereading the messages, I'm not >convinced that these messages do implicate that, so I can only infer that >Ellen has found in the past that so many linguists mistakenly think that >violations to Gricean maxims are somehow a problem for Gricean theory that >some of the people who have sent messages in this conversation must be >mistaken about that. And she may be right. Um, IIRC, the original post said (or 'presupposed') that trials and something else 'do not follow or are not expected to follow the Gricean maxims' -- or something to that effect. (Wow, we don't presume any non-random relationship between what a witness says and what s/he believes?!? If that's true, how extraordinary that we should even have trials! It would be cheaper to ask the nearest parrot for testimony or even the verdict. ;) ) Later posts invoked various pieces of research purporting to show that such-and-such culture does not follow the Maxims. One post said they 'reflect primarily European male discourse.' Since I am not aware of any findings that European males communicate more than others by (non-logical) implicature, I must infer that the poster believes the theory to be quite different from what you and I have in mind. Anyway, you see that I am not able to interpret most of the thread the way you suggest, tho I wish I could... :( >And I certainly cannot imagine going through any of this reasoning if >Gricean theory (or some variation) weren't right. On that I agree 100%! ;) From lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Thu Feb 11 09:02:26 1999 From: lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (George Lakoff) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 01:02:26 -0800 Subject: Prague School influence: summary In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Fritz, I'm delighted to see you looking at the influence of the Prague School. Let me add a bit to what you have. First a correction: To my knowledge, Halliday had no influence at all on the introduction of discussions of topicality into generative semantics. In my recollection, we starting discussing topicality in 1965-66, under the influence of Dwight Boliger (who was my Harvard colleague and audited the course Haj and I gave there and at MIT in fall 1966) and Susumu Kuno, who ran the project Haj and I worked on and was talking with us about topicality from the perspective of the Japanese syntax, where wa-constructions indicate topicality and are one of the most prominent syntactic features of the language. McCawley, of course, was also thinking about wa-constructions in Japanese. I never met Halliday till 1968, when he came to Cambridge and, as I recall, talked about other issues. Incidentally, the person who puched Prague School ideas on information flow the most here at Berkeley during the 70's was Wally Chafe, who of course was a major force behind the formation of the functionalist school first here and later at Santa Barbara. His influence here has been persistent. About features: I believe they came into generative grammar through the influence of Roman Jakobson. I studied with Jakoboson in 1961, while I was taking Halle's introductory course. Morris was using the Jakobson, Fant and Halle text to provide phonetic motivation for features in phonology. During 1962 while I was starting grad school at Indiana, I read Lees' MIT thesis (he was Noam's first PhD student) and the early Stockwell-Schacter papers from UCLA, both of which used really ugly subcategorization rules with no features. In the spring of 1963, I wrote a paper for Fred Householder at Indiana suggesting the introduction of features into transformational grammar, as a way of improving on the work of Lees and Stockwell-Schacter. When I went to Cambridge on spring break I showed it to Noam, who showed no particular interest, and said that Hugh Mathews had written a paper in 1958 suggesting the use of features in syntax while he was working on Yngve's mechanical translation project.I never found that paper. I continued during my graduate work to think and write using features. My first paper on generative semantics in the summer of 1963 used them. When Postal came out to Indiana in the summer of 1964 to teach at the Linguistic Institute, he was using features as well and said that Chomsky had adopted them. And of course, the 1964 paper on semantics in genrative grammar by Katz and Fodor used them. About dependency grammar: My introduction to dependency grammar came from the writings of David Hayes and Jane Robinson in computational linguistics, which I read as a grad student at Indiana around 63 or 64. As I recall, the Kuno-Oettinger computational linguistics project at Harvard around 1965 used dependency representations (but my memory is hazy). I assumed they came from the Hayes tradition. Bill Woods worked on that project. When I moved to Michigan I began playing around with dependency representations (in unpublished notes) trying to see if they could replace phrase structures. Woods came out with his ATN grammars in the early 70's. When I read his work, I went back to my earlier notes and realized that phrase structures and transformations could indeed be eliminated using gramamtical relations formalized as dependecy structures. Henry Thompson and I made such a proposal in our 1975 BLS paper on Cognitive Grammar. These ideas were carried over in my 1977 CLS paper "Linguistic Gestalts" which was a precursor to my early work with Fillmore moving toward construction grammars. Those dependency grammar ideas have now come to prominence again in the current development of the Neural Theory of Grammar here at Berkeley. I don't know where Hayes got his dependency ideas from, but I would not be surprised if Tesniere were the source. Hope the fills out the picture a bit. George At 7:46 PM -0800 2/10/99, Frederick Newmeyer wrote: >A few weeks ago, on this list and on one other, I posted a query about the >influence of the Prague School on current North American and Western >European work in syntax. I would like to thank the following, who gave me >very helpful replies: Machtelt Bolkestein, John Connolly, Geert Craps, >Deborah DuBartell, Tom Givon, Frank Gladney, Eva Hajicova, Paul Hopper, >Dick Hudson, John Mackin, Salvador Pons Borderia, Petr Sgall, Sanna-Kaisa >Tanskanen, Jess Tauber, Yishai Tobin, Marina Yaguello, Fumiko Yoshikawa, >and several individuals who asked me not to cite them by name. > >All respondents agreed that several current schools of syntactic analysis >that originated in Western Europe owe a great debt to pre-war work in >Prague. These include Dik's 'Functional Grammar', Halliday's 'Systemic >Functional Grammar', and Alarcos Llorach's 'Funcionalismo'. I am told that >these approaches are quite explicit about their debt to Prague, from which >they derive an integrated structural-functional approach to syntax. > >As far the debt of generative grammar is concerned, all agree that any use >of feature notation is ultimately a Praguean influence. Dependency-based >generative approaches appear to derive from Prague and, in fact, Charles >Fillmore in 'The Case for Case' cites Lucien Tesniere, a member of the >Prague School, for the idea of 'sequence-free representations'. It was >suggested that the approach within generative semantics to topic and focus >derived from Halliday, and hence ultimately from the Prague School. And >there were suggestions that the work on these issues by, say, Michael >Rochemont (within formal syntax) and Barbara Partee (within formal >semantics) are generative reinterpretations of Prague School-originated >generalizations. Partee is also reported to be writing a joint book with >two Prague linguists. > >However, there was wild disagreement among the respondents on the degree >to which mainstream North American functionalism (and the similar German >functionalism represented by linguists such as Haspelmath, Heine, and >Lehmann) is indebted to Praguean work. The opinions I received ranged from >'deeply indebted' to 'no debt whatsoever'. Those who took the former >position pointed to the centrality of Prague-originated notions like >'functional sentence perspective' and 'communicative dynamism' in American >functionalism (even if these terms are not generally used) and suggested >linguists like Bolinger, Chafe and Greenberg as being instrumental in >passing Prague School conceptions on to them. Those who took the latter >position say that the 'discovery' of Prague work was post hoc and that >'foundational differences' exist between Prague School functionalism and >US functionalism. Prague School work was described as being, at one and >the same time, 'too structural' and 'not structural enough'. Too >structural in the sense that American functionalists have tended to reject >the Saussurean idea (adopted by Prague) that a grammar is a system 'ou >tout se tient'. Not structural enough in the sense that the Prague School >has tended to advocate a dependency-based analysis, and therefore, unlike >much of US functionalism, does not formulate generalizations involving >syntactic constituent structure and the structural relationships based on >that. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I am summarizing here, not editorializing!) > >I realize that neither 'the Prague School' nor 'American functionalism' >are homogeneous entities, so conflicting responses might well be drawing >on the work of different scholars within these schools carried out at >different times. Still, since the respondents did not generally qualify >their answers by citing persons and times, I have not done so in this >summary. > >Fritz Newmeyer >University of Washington >fjn at u.washington.edu From geoffn at SIU.EDU Thu Feb 11 14:43:37 1999 From: geoffn at SIU.EDU (Geoffrey S. Nathan) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 08:43:37 -0600 Subject: Prague School influence: summary In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1168 bytes Desc: not available URL: From wcmann at JUNO.COM Thu Feb 11 17:44:17 1999 From: wcmann at JUNO.COM (William Mann) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 12:44:17 -0500 Subject: avoiding conversational implicature Message-ID: Marta: There are plenty of varieties of written text that routinely avoid the Cooperative Principle and others. Many sorts of legal documents do: laws, patents, sales contracts, insurance policies -- more generally text written to establish rights, and text for which the effects depend on legal precedents, prior use of the same words in laws or court cases, for example. Orally, there are the airline safety announcements, that seem to try to straddle the fence. Poetry, in my experience, often gains effect by deviating from the maxims. Songs also, in similar ways. I think the list could be extended. Bill Mann From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Fri Feb 12 04:06:22 1999 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 23:06:22 EST Subject: Prague School influence: summary In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 11 Feb 1999 01:02:26 PST." Message-ID: George Lakoff wrote: >To my knowledge, Halliday had no influence at all on the introduction of >discussions of topicality into generative semantics. In my recollection, we >starting discussing topicality in 1965-66, under the influence of Dwight >Boliger >(who was my Harvard colleague and audited the course Haj and I gave there >and at MIT in fall 1966) and Susumu Kuno, who ran the project Haj and I >worked on and was talking with us about topicality from the perspective of >the Japanese syntax, where wa-constructions indicate topicality and are >one of the most prominent syntactic features of the language. McCawley, of >course, was also thinking about wa-constructions in Japanese. I never met >Halliday till 1968, when he came to Cambridge and, as I recall, talked >about other issues. > >Incidentally, the person who puched Prague School ideas on information flow >the most here at Berkeley during the 70's was Wally Chafe, who of course >was a major force behind the formation of the functionalist school first >here and later at Santa Barbara. His influence here has been persistent. What you say about Halliday is exactly how I remember it but, at least by the early '70s, Kuno was indeed talking about the Prague school. I remember reading Mathesius and Firbas on his recommendation at that time. From Carl.Mills at UC.Edu Fri Feb 12 13:12:21 1999 From: Carl.Mills at UC.Edu (Carl Mills) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 08:12:21 -0500 Subject: Prague School influence: summary Message-ID: >>To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU >Reply-to: "Ellen F. Prince" > >George Lakoff wrote: > > > >>To my knowledge, Halliday had no influence at all on the introduction of >>discussions of topicality into generative semantics. In my recollection, we >>starting discussing topicality in 1965-66, under the influence of Dwight >>Boliger >>(who was my Harvard colleague and audited the course Haj and I gave there >>and at MIT in fall 1966) and Susumu Kuno, who ran the project Haj and I >>worked on and was talking with us about topicality from the perspective of >>the Japanese syntax, where wa-constructions indicate topicality and are >>one of the most prominent syntactic features of the language. McCawley, of >>course, was also thinking about wa-constructions in Japanese. I never met >>Halliday till 1968, when he came to Cambridge and, as I recall, talked >>about other issues. >> >>Incidentally, the person who puched Prague School ideas on information flow >>the most here at Berkeley during the 70's was Wally Chafe, who of course >>was a major force behind the formation of the functionalist school first >>here and later at Santa Barbara. His influence here has been persistent. > And Ellen Prince replied: >What you say about Halliday is exactly how I remember it but, at least >by the early '70s, Kuno was indeed talking about the Prague school. I >remember reading Mathesius and Firbas on his recommendation at that >time. > At Oregon in the early 70's, Jim Hoard and Dale Sloat did have Trubetzkoy on the reserve reading list for phonology courses. In syntax, neither Hoard nor Sloat nor, as far as I remember, Derry Malsch required Firbas or any of the other Prague School syntacticians. I read them on my own, and Jim Hoard was perfectly willing to discuss them. It was in the late 70's at Tromsoe that I had a chance to discuss Functional Sentence Perspective with Leiv Egil Breivik, who was at that time working on English existential-there sentences. Carl Mills From Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at COLORADO.EDU Fri Feb 12 14:51:27 1999 From: Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at COLORADO.EDU (FRAJZYNGIER ZYGMUNT) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 07:51:27 -0700 Subject: Information about fonts Message-ID: Dear friends, I am looking for a font for the Mac that would include (in one character set) characters for glottalized b and d, velar and palatal nasal, and would allow to put accent markers over any character. The font must Times based. I have heard about a font called AfroRoman from an outlet in Washington, but I cannot trace it. I will be most grateful for any information, Zygmunt Frajzyngier. From christa.kilian at UNI-KOELN.DE Fri Feb 12 16:58:57 1999 From: christa.kilian at UNI-KOELN.DE (Christa Kilian-Hatz) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 17:58:57 +0100 Subject: listing Message-ID: Please note that I receive all messages twice. Perhaps I appear on your mailing list two times. If so, please reduce the listing to a single one. Thank you!! - ___________________________ Dr. Christa Kilian-Hatz Institut fuer Afrikanistik Universitaet zu Koeln Meister-Ekkehart-Str. 7 50923 Koeln/Cologne Germany/Allemagne Tel: 49.221.470.4741 Fax: 49.221.470.5158 From W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Fri Feb 12 18:00:00 1999 From: W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 19:00:00 +0100 Subject: Prague School influence: summary Message-ID: Frederick Newmeyer wrote: > However, there was wild disagreement among the respondents on the degree > to which mainstream North American functionalism (and the similar German > functionalism represented by linguists such as Haspelmath, Heine, and > Lehmann) is indebted to Praguean work. Let me just add that there is another Western European linguistic tradition maintained by people who had first been trained in Indo-European linguistics but lateron turned to "functionalism" or language typology etc. In Indo-European linguistics the Prague School has played an important role since the first (recorded) gathering of the group on March 13, 1925. Since then (or, say, since 1926) the names of Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, Jakobson , Trnka, Skalichka etc. have become part of the reading canon of Indo-Europeanists (except for Germany in the years 1938-1945). In Germany, some departments of General Linguistics emerged from departments of Indo-European studies, and it takes no wonder that - contrary to what had been taught in newly founded linguistic departments (often GLOW or Montague oriented) - the Prague School enjoyed an unbroken tradition in these institutes. This kind of tradition established a more or less tacit knowledge of what Prague stands for. For most IE-ists "Prague" was much more like a matter of fact than the name of a specific "school". Hence, there had seldom been the need to "teach" Prague: Its phonological and syntactic claims had been (and still are) transmitted in any lecture on say Old Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, or Gothic. The same seems to be true for what we call the "Single Language Philologies" such as Germanic, Romanic, or Slavic languages. In consequence, quite a number of typologically oriented people in Western Europe have "internalized" the assumptions and methods of the Prague School via their formation as Indo-Europeanists. That does not imply that these researchers have an uncritical access to Prague; rather that they operate in terms that reflect the "functional-structural method" (By-Laws of the "Prague Linguistic Circle", ? 1) per se.... These people did not need to rediscover Prague work or to extract it from what has been taught in the US in terms of "mainstream North American functionalism" [though they participate in this mainstream, now]. Funny enough that it is just this group of people that has gained lesser or limited interest in the US....[perhaps this is also due to the fact that some of these people are used to publish - at least partly - in German]. "Geoffrey S. Nathan" wrote: > One of the questions I have discussed with European friends is whether the > word 'functionalism' has a different meaning in Europe and the US. It seems > that European linguists generally use the word to mean the study of the > function of units within the system (and hence the European functionalist > theory is compatible with an autonomy hypothesis) while on this side of the > pond the word generally means the study of how grammar is shaped by the > functions that language has in human behavior (thus, functionalist > phonology, as I practice it, is shaped by the physical equipment that is > used to produce and perceive it). American functionalism, thus, is by > definition, non-autonomous. This sometimes leads to puzzling > non-conversations at international conferences. This may explain the > contradictory results that Fritz has received in his survey. It may be true that some European linguists concentrate on "system internal (or immanent) functionalism". But that does not imply that assumption resulting from therefrom are automatically "compatible with an autonomy hypothesis". Some people simply are not interested in this question. What they do can perhaps best be labeled as "Neo-Grammar in Synchrony". But many people at least in Germany do not belong to this paradigm in its simplicity. Rather, they refer to "functionalism" in both a "system immanent" and a "system transcendent" sense and claim that the explanation of linguistic facts has to respect both aspects (but with the same rigorositiy what again stems from Prague). The syncrestistic amalgamation of external and internal motivations for linguistic data often to be found in European linguistics does not result from any kind of random explanatory access to these data [I hope], but from a formulated interest in a holistic approach that encompasses all possible motivations for language structure [to give a humble reference: I myself have recently tried to outline such an approach (what I call the "Grammar of Scenes and Scenarios") in Schulze 1998 ("Person, Klasse, Kongruenz", vol. 1 (in two parts): Die Grundlagen, M?nchen: LINCOM Europa)]. [By the way, if you have a look at Eastern European linguistics (in the tradition of the communicative-functional paradigm that itself goes back to Prague [despite of Stalin's intervention] you can easily recognize that "functionalism" refers to a "dependent reading"]. Wolfgang _____________________________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21802485 (office) | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: W.Schulze.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 192 bytes Desc: Visitenkarte f?r Wolfgang Schulze URL: From tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Sun Feb 14 01:16:46 1999 From: tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Thomas E Payne) Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 17:16:46 -0800 Subject: Lumpers vs. splitters Message-ID: Does anyone know who first used the terms "lumper" and "splitter" by any chance? Thanks for your help. Tom Payne From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL Thu Feb 18 09:41:55 1999 From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 11:41:55 +0200 Subject: Anna Wierzbicka's email address? Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, Can anyone tell me Anna Wierzbicka's email address? Thanks very much. John From elc9j at UNIX.MAIL.VIRGINIA.EDU Thu Feb 18 13:45:35 1999 From: elc9j at UNIX.MAIL.VIRGINIA.EDU (Ellen L. Contini-Morava) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 08:45:35 -0500 Subject: conference announcement Message-ID: [Apologies for cross-postings] CALL FOR PAPERS 6th International Columbia School Conference on the Interaction between Linguistic Form, Meaning, and Human Behavior October 9-11, 1999 Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey Invited speakers: Ronald Langacker University of California, La Jolla Melissa Bowerman Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Wallis Reid Rutgers University Papers invited on any aspect of linguistic analysis in which the postulation of meaningful signals plays a central role in explaining the distribution of linguistic forms. The Columbia School is a group of linguists developing the theoretical framework established by the late William Diver. In this framework language is seen as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative function and by the characteristics of its human users. Grammatical analyses seek to explain the distribution of linguistic forms as an interaction between meaningful signals and pragmatic and functional factors such as inference, ease of processing, iconicity, and the like. Phonological analyses seek to explain the syntagmatic and paradigmatic distributions of phonological units within signals, also drawing on both communicative function and human physiological and psychological characteristics. Please submit: ? 3 copies of a one-page anonymous abstract (optional second page for references and/or examples), to the address below. ? 1 3x5 index card with the following information: Title of paper Author's name and affiliation Address, phone number, and e-mail address for notification E-mail abstracts should include the above information, which will be deleted before the abstracts are reviewed. DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ABSTRACTS: 15 April 1999 Address for e-mail abstracts: Address for hard-copy abstracts and other correspondence: Ellen Contini-Morava Department of Anthropology University of Virginia Charlottesville VA 22903 **** **** **** **** The support of the conference by The Columbia School Linguistics Society is gratefully acknowledged **** **** **** **** **** Selected Columbia School bibliography: Contini-Morava, Ellen. 1995. "Introduction: On linguistic sign theory", in Ellen Contini-Morava and Barbara S. Goldberg (eds.), Meaning as Explanation: Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Huffman, Alan. 1997. The Categories of Grammar: French lui and le. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Reid, Wallis. 1991. Verb and Noun Number in English: a Functional Explanation. London: Longman. Tobin, Yishai. 1997. Phonology as Human Behavior: Theoretical Implications and Clinical Applications. Duke University Press. From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL Fri Feb 19 06:15:25 1999 From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 08:15:25 +0200 Subject: thanks Message-ID: Thanks very much to all the funknetters who sent me Anna Wierzbicka's email address. John From lieven at EVA.MPG.DE Fri Feb 19 11:36:39 1999 From: lieven at EVA.MPG.DE (Elena Lieven) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 12:36:39 +0100 Subject: postdoctoral position Message-ID: Postdoctoral position in language acquisition Julian Pine and Elena Lieven are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to work on an ESRC-funded project on lexical specificity in early grammatical development and its possible relation to lexical specificity in child-directed speech from a constructivist perspective. This is a two-year post based at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nottingham and the position is available from May 1999. Although the exact starting time is negotiable, we would hope to appoint a candidate as early as possible. The appointment will be on the RA1A scale with a salary of between ?15,735 and ?20,107 depending on qualifications and experience. The position will involve working on an extensive database of naturalistic speech data from 12 English-speaking children and their mothers between the ages of 2 and 3 years all of which have already been transcribed in CHAT format. Applicants should have completed a Ph.D. in psychology, linguistics or a related discipline (preferably on some aspect of language acquisition), and should be prepared to develop their own research line within the general remit of the project as a whole. Familiarity with the CHILDES system would also be an advantage Please send a C.V., statement of research interests, two letters of recommendation, and a sample of written work on a relevant topic to: Julian Pine Department of Psychology University of Nottingham Nottingham NG7 2RD United Kingdom tel: +44 115 9515285 fax: +44 115 9515324 e-mail: jp at psyc.nott.ac.uk Deadline for receipt of applications: Friday 19th March 1999 From dgohre at INDIANA.EDU Fri Feb 19 23:25:16 1999 From: dgohre at INDIANA.EDU (David Gohre) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 18:25:16 -0500 Subject: FUNKNET: Main/Subordinate clauses: markedness Message-ID: Is there any difference in the markedness of the syntax of subordinate clauses as opposed to main clauses, or to Infinitival clauses? Does anyone know of some Bib that they might send me? Thanks, Dave From alex_francois at HOTMAIL.COM Sat Feb 20 14:13:55 1999 From: alex_francois at HOTMAIL.COM (Alexandre FRANCOIS) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 06:13:55 PST Subject: Main/Subordinate clauses: markedness Message-ID: ----Original Message Follows---- Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 18:25:16 -0500 Reply-To: David Gohre From: David Gohre Subject: FUNKNET: Main/Subordinate clauses: markedness To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU Is there any difference in the markedness of the syntax of subordinate clauses as opposed to main clauses, or to Infinitival clauses? Does anyone know of some Bib that they might send me? Thanks, Dave ************** Dear Dave, As a matter of fact, I wrote a PhD [= French D.E.A.] in 1997, about markedness / unmarkedness of Subordinate clauses. I can give you the reference, although it is as yet unpublished, and written in French ; if you wish, I could send it to you using your personal e-mail. FRAN?OIS Alexandre, "La subordination sans marques segmentales, Formes de d?pendance interpropositionnelle dans le discours", Univ. Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, DEA en Sciences du Langage, October 1997, 180 p. (unpublished). My main concern was to examine, in a typological perspective (> 25 languages referenced, including French, English, Chinese, Fulani, Turkish, Hausa, Melanesian Pidgin), types of structures that were apparently / supposedly independent clauses, from lack of marks which would have clearly indicated them as being subordinate. I would then discuss whether these so-called independent clauses could show some kind of "hypersyntactic" (e.g., pragmatic) dependence with another main clause. I then hypothesized a (thus far neglected) PRAGMATIC SUBORDINATION (in Fr. "la subordination ?nonciative"), to account for such sentences. In a way, my aim was to (re)define the linguistic limits of the sentence / utterance ("?nonc?"), based on its fundamentally pragmatic nature : performing a speech act in a given situation. A simplified way to sum it up, would be as follows : a clause, which by its syntactic marking seems to be independent, will be considered to be (pragmatically) subordinate to another one, every time it can be proved that it is not performing a satisfying speech act in the situation. For instance, the English sentence "Suppose you had come earlier" is syntactically well-formed to be called 'independent' (with imperative form of the verb "to suppose"), but this is definitely not the case from a pragmatic point of view (see discussion & demonstration in my PhD). Instead, this clause is to be considered subordinate (to the following clause), at least pragmatically ? or even syntactically, provided we redefine syntax on a pragmatic base. And we would then understand better how the main verb "Suppose" was grammaticized in Pidgin English as a conjunction /sapos/ meaning "if", where subordination is clearly marked as syntactic (within the classical definition of Syntax). *********** Out of my 200 bibliogr. references, here are a few I selected for you, because they deal more specifically with this issue, and are written in English (some of them are "classics" you may already know) : FOLEY W., VAN VALIN R. (1984), Functional syntax and universal grammar, Cambridge University Press. GIV?N T. (1979), "From discourse to syntax : grammar as a processing strategy", in Giv?n (ed.), p. 81-112. ?? (ed.) (1979), Discourse and syntax, coll. Syntax and Semantics 12, Academic Press, New York. HAIMAN J., THOMPSON S. (eds) (1988), Clause combining in grammar and discourse, Typological studies in language, vol. 2, Benjamins, Amsterdam. LI C., THOMPSON S. (1973), "Serial verb constructions in Mandarin Chinese : subordination or coordination ?", in Corum C. & al. (eds.) Papers from the comparative syntax festival, Chicago linguistic society. LONGACRE R. (1979), "The paragraph as a grammatical unit", in Giv?n (ed), p. 115-134. ?? (1983), The grammar of discourse. ?? (1985), "Sentences as combinations of clauses", in T. Shopen (ed), p. 235-286. NICHOLS J., WOODBURY A. (eds) (1985), Grammar inside and outside the clause, Cambridge University Press. PAYNE T. (1991), "Medial clauses and interpropositional relations in Panare (Ge-Pano-Carib subgroup)", Cognitive linguistics, 2, 3, 1991, p. 247-281. SHOPEN T. (ed.) (1985), Language typology and syntactic description, II (Complex constructions), Cambridge University Press. SLOBIN D. (1985), "Crosslinguistic evidence for the language-making capacity", in Slobin (ed), tome II, p.1157-1256. ?? (ed.) (1985), The cross-linguistic study of language acquisition, I (The data) & II (Theoretical issues), Hillsdale, New Jersey. THURMAN R. (1978), Interclausal Relations in Chuave, MA Thesis, Los Angeles. ***** Here are other useful references, partly in French : AKSU-KO? A., SLOBIN D. (1985), "The acquisition of Turkish", in Slobin (ed) I, p.839-878. ANDERSEN, H. L. (1993), "Compl?tives non introduites en fran?ais parl?", in CERLICO n? 6, p. 5-14. ?? (1996), "Verbes parenth?tiques comme marqueurs discursifs", in M?ller (ed.), p. 307-315. BALLY C. (1944), Linguistique g?n?rale et linguistique fran?aise, Francke, Berne. BLANCHE-BENVENISTE C. (1990), Le fran?ais parl? (?tudes grammaticales), coll. Sciences du Langage, CNRS, Paris. BORILLO A. (1996), "Les relations temporelles entre propositions : subordination ou parataxe ?", in M?ller (ed.), p. 127-139. BOUSCAREN J., FRANCKEL J.-J., ROBERT S. (eds) (1995), Langues et langage. Probl?mes et raisonnement en linguistique (M?langes offerts ? Antoine Culioli), coll. Linguis-tique Nouvelle, PUF, Paris. CARON B. (1986), "Les accomplis I et II du haoussa et la subordination", in D.R.L. (1986), p. 109-120. CERLICO (1992-93), Subordination Subordinations, Travaux linguistiques du CERLICO n? 5 et 6, Presses Universitaires de Rennes. CHAKER S. (1985), "Syntaxe de la langue / syntaxe de la parole ? Intonation et situation dans l'analyse syntaxique : quelques points controvers?s en berb?re.", Travaux du CLAIX, 3, p. 122-139, repris dans Chaker (1995), p. 83-95. ?? (1995), Linguistique berb?re, Etudes de syntaxe et de diachronie, coll. M.S.-Ussun Amazig, Peeters, Louvain. CHAO Y.-R. (1968), A grammar of spoken Chinese, University of California Press, Berkeley. COMRIE B. (1995), "Serial verbs in Haruai and their theoretical implications", in Bouscaren, Franckel, Robert (eds), p. 25-37. DANON-BOILEAU L., MOREL M.-A., MEUNIER A., TOURNADRE N. (1991), "Int?gration discursive et int?gration syntaxique", Langages, Paris, n? 104, p. 111-128. GALAND L. (1984), "Typologie des propositions relatives : la place du berb?re", Lalies n? 6, Presses de l'Ecole Normale Sup?rieure, Paris, p. 81-101. HAIMAN J. (1978) "Conditionals are Topics", Language, 54, p. 564-589. HAIMAN J., MUNRO P. (eds) (1983), Switch reference and universal grammar, Typological studies in language, Benjamins, Amsterdam. LE FUR D. (1995), "Juxtaposition, argumentation, et intonation ? l'oral", in Morel (ed.), p. 71-97. LEMAR?CHAL A. (1995 a), "Superposition des marques, z?ro et morphologisation", Journ?e d'Etudes de la SLP (21.1.95) sur La Gramma-ticalisation, ? para?tre aux M?moires de la SLP, Paris. ?? (1995 b), "Z?ros, superpositions des marques et relation minimale", Actes du Colloque Absence de marque et repr?sentation de l'absence, Travaux linguistiques du CERLICO, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, p. 111-139. MULLER C. (ed.) (1996), D?pendance et int?gration syntaxique (Subordination, coordination, connexion), coll. Linguistische Arbeiten, Niemeyer, T?bingen. ROBERT S. (1995), "Aoristique et mode subordinatif : liens entre aspect et pr?dication", in Bouscaren, Franckel, Robert (eds), p. 373-389. ?? (1996), "Aspect z?ro et d?pendance situationnelle : l'exemple du wolof", in M?ller (ed.), p. 153-161. *********** Hope this will help you find what you desire, Alex FRANCOIS (currently on a PhD in Melanesian syntax), Univ. Strasbourg-2 / Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com From bralich at HAWAII.EDU Sun Feb 21 21:01:54 1999 From: bralich at HAWAII.EDU (Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 11:01:54 -1000 Subject: Ergo's Parsing Contest Message-ID: The parsing contest we announced six weeks ago is still open and will close in six more weeks (the end of March) though this could be extended if there are such requests. To date no one has dared to take our challenge on these very practical and relatively easy parsing tasks. We can only assume that the computational linguistics community is that much behind us, because, if there were any tools that would even come close to the practical abilities we offer, those who had such tools would have a simple and straightforward opportunity to demonstrate the supperiority of their methods and tools over ours with just one demonstration. That is, we assume that the only reason that this opportunity for a demonstration of the superiority of other's tools is being ignored is because there are no tools currently superior to those we offer. To reiterate briefly, Ergo Linguistic Technologies is offering its first annual parsing contest based on a fixed set of sentences and a fixed set of tasks to be performed on that set of sentences. The area of NLP to be explored is that of increased syntactic analysis to provide: 1) improvements in navigation and control technology through more complex commands and chained commands, 2) improvements in the implementation of question/answer, statement/ response dialogs with computers and computer characters, and 3) improvements in web and database searching using natural language queries. The contest will be based on a comparison of results for parses of a fixed set of sentences (included on our web site) and various tasks that can be performed as a result of those parses. Ergo's results on these tasks for these questions as well as for the Air Travel Industry Sentences (ATIS) can be downloaded from our site. That is, the comparison will be based on the actual parse tree and the ability to use that parsed output to generate theory independent parse trees and output and to perform various NLP tasks. The judging will be based on the standards for evaluating NLP that have been proposed previously on this list by myself and Derek Bickerton and which are currently being developed into an ISO standard for the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) as part of the VRML Consortium's development efforts (http://www.vrml.org/WorkingGroups/ NLP-ANIM). The standards proposed are theory and field independent standards which allow both linguists and non-linguists to evaluate NLP systems in the areas of navigation and control, question/answer dialogues, and database and web searching. The sentences chosen for this contest are rather simple, but as we find more and more parsers that can accomplish the tasks on this list, we will add more complex sentences and tasks to the list. Please, be aware that systems that may be designed for large corpora of unrestricted text actually cannot work in this domain. Thus, while such systems may be useful for certain searching tasks, they are not useful in the domain explored in this contest ? and this is evidenced by their inability to perform on tests such as the one provide here. The full contest instructions and an HTML document of Ergo's results in this area can be found at http://www.ergo-ling.com. The standards were designed to allow the developers of a parsing system (statistical or syntactic) to demonstrate the thoroughness and accuracy of the parses they produce by using the parsed output to perform a number of straightforward, traditional syntactic tasks such as changing a statement to a question or an active to a passive as well as demonstrating an ability to create standard trees (Using the Penn Treebank II guidelines) and standard grammatical analyses. All the standards chosen were chosen to be theory independent measures of the accuracy of a parse through the use of standard and ordinary grammatical and syntactic output. The contest officially begins on January 15th and will be closed on March 31st. This will allow developers 2.5 months to develop tools and to work with trouble spots that they may have with the set of sentences offered in this contest. The contest will be offered in subsequent years from January to March. As time develops we hope the parsers, the contest rules, and the test sentences will all grow in sophistication and scope. However, as most parsers have existed many more years than ours, it is reasonable to think these tools exist already. Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. President and CEO Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 Tel: (808)539-3920 Fax: (808)539-3924 bralich at hawaii.edu http://www.ergo-ling.com Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 From fling11 at EMDUCMS1.SIS.UCM.ES Wed Feb 24 20:03:21 1999 From: fling11 at EMDUCMS1.SIS.UCM.ES (Marta Carretero) Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 21:03:21 +0100 Subject: implicature -thanks Message-ID: Dear funknetters, Thanks a lot to all of you who have sent contributions to the discussion of implicatures! I feel very happy about it: I was just looking for some references to fill a couple of class hours, but now I have many interesting points to consider about this subject. I must also make clear, especially to those of you who I think misunderstood part of my message, that I did not mean that Grice's implicatures were not followed AT ALL in such genres as political interviews and trials, but that they were not generally followed IN THE SAME WAY as in other genres, such as most face-to-face conversation between members of a family or close friends. Thanks again, Marta. Marta Carretero Departamento de Filologia Inglesa Facultad de Filologia - Edificio A Universidad Complutense 28040 - Madrid. Spain. Fax: (341)394-54-78 From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Sat Feb 27 18:00:44 1999 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (funkadmn Departmental Account) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 12:00:44 -0600 Subject: Book announcement--Newmeyer (fwd) Message-ID: The following is a book which readers of this list might find of interest. For more information please visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/NEULHF98 Language Form and Language Function Frederick J. Newmeyer The two basic approaches to linguistics are the formalist and the functionalist approaches. In this monograph, Frederick J. Newmeyer, a formalist, argues that both approaches are valid. However, because formal and functional linguists have avoided direct confrontation, they remain unaware of the compatability of their results. One of the author's goals is to make each side accessible to the other. While remaining an ardent formalist, Newmeyer stresses the limitations of a narrow formalist outlook that refuses to consider that anything of interest might have been discovered in the course of functionalist-oriented research. He argues that the basic principles of generative grammar, in interaction with principles in other linguistic domains, provide compelling accounts of phenomena that functionalists have used to try to refute the generative approach. Frederick J. Newmeyer is Chair of the Department of Linguistics, University of Washington. Language, Speech, and Communication series 6 x 9, 400 pp., 6 illus. cloth ISBN 0-262-14064-0 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | Jud Wolfskill ||||||| Associate Publicist Phone: (617) 253-2079 ||||||| MIT Press Fax: (617) 253-1709 ||||||| Five Cambridge Center E-mail: wolfskil at mit.edu | Cambridge, MA 02142-1493 http://mitpress.mit.edu From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Sat Feb 27 18:02:05 1999 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (funkadmn Departmental Account) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 12:02:05 -0600 Subject: Summer School Message-ID: The Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT) in cooperation with the Graduate School "Economy and Complexity of Language" at the University of Potsdam and the Humboldt University Berlin, with support of the "Center of Excellence: Formal Models of Cognitive Complexity" at the University of Potsdam and the ZAS Research Centre for General Linguistics, Typology and Universals will be organizing the LINGUISTICS SUMMER SCHOOL in Potsdam (Germany), >>From July 19 till July 31 1999. We are pleased to announce that you are able to enroll as of now!! All information can be found on our webpage: http://wwwlot.let.uu.nl/zs99.html On behalf of the organisors, Jan Don Gisbert Fanselow Ina Hockl Lara Groen -------------------------------------------------------------- LOT Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics Trans 10 NL - 3512 JK Utrecht Phone: +31 30 2536006 Fax: +31 30 2536000 --------------------------------------------------------------