From jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES Sat Apr 1 22:07:35 2000 From: jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES (Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro) Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 00:07:35 +0200 Subject: frequency and agreement In-Reply-To: <38E5219A.68D3887B@indiana.edu> Message-ID: At 17:07 -0500 31/3/00, Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden wrote: >Is anyone aware of work that has been done on grammatical agreement and >frequency? For example, if a verb agrees with an object (variably) by >(variably)adding some sort of verbal inflection, at what point is there >generally considered to be "agreement." Is it at 50%, 75%, 100% of the >time? >The particular phenomenon that I am working with is indirect object >clitic-doubling in Spanish. This has been called agreement by many >working in formalist and functionalist frameworks. I am interested in >at what point clitic-doubling ceases to be doubling and begins to be >grammatical agreement. Any references to relevant literature (perhaps >in the field of grammaticalization?) would be greatly appreciated. If >there is sufficent interest, I'll post a summary. > >Andrew I'm afraid I have no answer to your first question. But your second question has an interesting (for me at least ) 'implicature': doubling and agreement are different things in an example such as: _le di el balón a Peter_ . I think that, in this example, indirect object doubling and indirect object agreement with the clitic 'le' are two different analyses, and not two different grammatical processes. That is, if you consider 'le' a pronoun, there is doubling, and if you consider 'le' an agreement marker, there is agreement. It depends on the analysis, then. If what you mean is the historical process, there is an interesting work by Fontana Fontana, J. (1993): Phrase Structure and the Syntax of Clitics in the History of Spanish. Doctoral Dissertation, Pensilvania. and, of course, a classic you surely know: Givón, T (1976): "Topic, Pronoun, and Grammatical Agreement", in Li, C., Ed. (1976): Subject and Topic. Academic Press: New York: 149-188. The following may be useful too (both from synchronic and diachronic points of view): Authier, J.M. (1992): "Arbitrary Null Object Languages in a Parametric Theory of Linguistic Variation". In Lakarra, J.A. & J. Ortiz de Urbina (eds.) (1992): Syntactic Theory and Basque Syntax. San Sebastián: Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia/Diputación Foral de Guipúzcoa: 37-52. Cartagena, N. (1972): Sentido y estructura de las construcciones pronominales en español, Concepcion (Chile): ICL Guéron, J. (1991): "Le clitique se et la grammaire des pronoms indéfinis". In J. Guéron y J-Y. Pollock (eds.): Grammaire générative et syntaxe comparée. París: Éditions du CNRS:. 191-213. Lehamnn, Ch. (1995): Thougts on Grammaticalization. Lincom Europa, München. Mendikoetxea, A. (1992): "Some Speculations on the Nature of Agreement". In Lakarra & Ortiz de Urbina, Eds. (1992): 233-264. Monge, F. (1955): "Las frases pronominales con sentido impersonal en español". In Archivo de Filología Aragonesa, 7, pp.: 7-102. Suñer, M. (1988): "The Role of Agreement in Clitic-Doubled Constructions". In Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 6/3: 391-434. Best regards, Jose-Luis. From W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Mon Apr 3 12:36:00 2000 From: W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 14:36:00 +0200 Subject: frequency and agreement Message-ID: Andrew asked: > Is anyone aware of work that has been done on grammatical agreement and > frequency? For example, if a verb agrees with an object (variably) by > (variably)adding some sort of verbal inflection, at what point is there > generally considered to be "agreement." Is it at 50%, 75%, 100% of the > time? > > The particular phenomenon that I am working with is indirect object > clitic-doubling in Spanish. This has been called agreement by many > working in formalist and functionalist frameworks. I am interested in > at what point clitic-doubling ceases to be doubling and begins to be > grammatical agreement. > In this context, statistics appears to be a rather problematic indicator, at least to me. The grammaticalization of clitics (or what-so-ever) as agreement markers has a high functional value (e.g., focus, anaphoric or cataphoric (pragmatic) reference (clefting), assignment of syntactic functions (grounding)...). In case a language system is 'on the way' to develop agreement techniques we should expect that the occurence or 'missing' of agreement elements correponds to the activation degree of such functional properties. Consider the following example from Udi (South East Caucasian): (1) chowal-ay tur-e sa cac baIq'-ec-e sparrow-gen foot-dat one thorn stick-intrans-perf 'In the sparrow's foot there was stuck a thorn.' (2) chowal sa karna-n-a-ne tac-i sparrow:abs one old=woman-sa-dat-3sg:s go:past-aor 'The sparrow went ('flew') to an old woman.' (3) chowal t'ia ar-i p-i-ne s^o-t'-u sparrow:abs there come:past-aor say-aor-3sg:a dist-sa-dat 'The sparrow came there [and] said to her...' In (1) AGR is mssing, in (2) it is present, and in (3) it is missing with the first verb, but present with the second one. The distribution of both patterns is conditioned by functional aspects: In (1) we have a stative construction without a distinct focus constituent, in (2) the 'old woman' is focused (constituent focusing) [note that we have floating agreement clitics in Udi!], in (3) _ari_ and _pine_ are chained which conditions that only the last part of such a chain is marked by a clitic. If we count all occurences of agreement elements in an Udi text, we would arrive at perhaps 60% (depending on the kind of text you choose, some text go up to 95%). This figure would tell us that agreement techniques in Udi have strong functional properties in a synchronic perspective (which can also be inferred from the 'floating' technique). The problem Andrew addresses is associated with the presence or absence of pronominal referents (that is agreement is trigerred by personal pronouns or something like that). Only in such instances we can describe 'doubling' techniques, scugh as Udi (4) zu kala-zu I big-1sg:s 'I [am] big (foc).' (5) zu-zu kala I-1sg:s big 'I (foc) am big' It sounds logical (to me) to call such a technique an 'agreement' technique if the pronominal constituent can be deleted, cf. (6) kala-zu big-1sg:s 'I am big' (no constituent focus here) In such cases, the clitic does not have an overt (textual) antecedent but serves to identify a given actant on the verb. But I do not think that this assumption is adequate in the opposite sense. A language has (pronoun based) agrement if the clitic in question can appear without its antecedent (but not necessarily does). A language has a system of pronominal doubling, if the antecedent can appear without the clitic (but not necessarily does). [Note that I superficially use 'antecedent' for any kind of pronominal trigger ('ante-cedent' (anaphoric) as well as 'post-cedent' (cataphoric)] Wolfgang -- ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 München Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU Tue Apr 4 03:22:28 2000 From: jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 19:22:28 -0800 Subject: Need Quechua translation Message-ID: Hello all, I am looking for someone who can translate (morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, plus idiomatic translation, and verification of phonemic transcription) of a song in Quechua (don't know which dialect). If there is anyone out there who can help with this, please get in touch with me. The song is not terribly long. It's called 'Tinku'. I'm using it in an intro linguistics class, and would like to be able to say what the words mean!! Thanks in advance. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics English Department, California Polytechnic State University One Grand Avenue • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 Tel. (805)-756-2184 • Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone. 756-259 • E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu • Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba ** "Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally" - Frank Oppenheimer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From agarbode at indiana.edu Tue Apr 4 10:03:18 2000 From: agarbode at indiana.edu (Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 05:03:18 -0500 Subject: frequency and agreement Message-ID: Wolfgang Schulze wrote: > In such cases, the clitic does not have an overt (textual) antecedent > but serves to identify a given actant on the verb. But I do not think > that this assumption is adequate in the opposite sense. > A language has (pronoun based) agrement if the clitic in question > can appear without its antecedent (but not necessarily does). > A language has a system of pronominal doubling, if the antecedent > can appear without the clitic (but not necessarily does). > [Note that I superficially use 'antecedent' for any kind of > pronominal trigger ('ante-cedent' (anaphoric) as well as 'post-cedent' > (cataphoric)] And if a language has both, then it is possibly on the way from one type to another? All three types occurs in Spanish (I have been looking at the Madrid and Buenos Aires dialects as represented in journalism). They following are constructed, but possible, examples. Juan le envio el libro a su madre. JUAN CLITIC-SEND-PAST DET BOOK BEN POSS MOTHER. 'Juan sent the book to his mother.' Juan envio el libro a su madre. 'Juan sent the book to his bother.' Juan le envio el libro. 'Juan sent her/him the book.' Andrew > > Wolfgang > -- > ***************************** > Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze > Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft > Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München > Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 > D-80539 München > Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 > Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de > http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ > ***************************** > -- Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden Department of Linguistics and Department of Spanish and Portuguese Indiana University Ballantine Hall 848 Bloomington, IN 47405 U.S.A. From msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Tue Apr 4 15:36:00 2000 From: msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX (Ricardo Maldonado) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 10:36:00 -0500 Subject: frequency and agreement In-Reply-To: <38E9BDE6.B9A35C47@indiana.edu> Message-ID: A minor comment on Andrew's observation on clitic doubling in Spanish. The cases where the NP does not have the clitic in Spanish are highly marked and most probably correspond to an recent development in the language. While example 2)repeated here: 2) Juan envio el libro a su madre. 'Juan sent the book to his bother.' is possible, it is highly marked in several dialects of Latin American Spanish. Examples 1) and 3) below are the most natural outputs. Even in mre conservative dialects structure 2) corresponds to literary and formal uses. Only in the last Century however 2) was the normal way to code indirect objects (benfactives do not take clitic doubling). This suggests, I beleive, a recent historical development in Spanish towards clitic doubling. I hope this helps Best regards Ricardo >> A language has (pronoun based) agrement if the clitic in question >> can appear without its antecedent (but not necessarily does). >> A language has a system of pronominal doubling, if the antecedent >> can appear without the clitic (but not necessarily does). >> [Note that I superficially use 'antecedent' for any kind of >> pronominal trigger ('ante-cedent' (anaphoric) as well as 'post-cedent' >> (cataphoric)] > >And if a language has both, then it is possibly on the way from one type >to another? All three types occurs in Spanish (I have been looking at >the Madrid and Buenos Aires dialects as represented in journalism). >They following are constructed, but possible, examples. > 1) Juan le envio el libro a su madre. JUAN CLITIC-SEND-PAST DET BOOK BEN POSS MOTHER. 'Juan sent the book to his mother.' 2) Juan envio el libro a su madre. 'Juan sent the book to his bother.' 3) Juan le envio el libro. 'Juan sent her/him the book.' >Andrew > > >> >> Wolfgang >> -- >> ***************************** >> Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze >> Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft >> Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München >> Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 >> D-80539 München >> Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 >> Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de >> http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ >> ***************************** >> > >-- > >Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden >Department of Linguistics and >Department of Spanish and Portuguese >Indiana University >Ballantine Hall 848 >Bloomington, IN 47405 >U.S.A. > > From hartmut at RUC.DK Tue Apr 4 18:44:16 2000 From: hartmut at RUC.DK (Hartmut Haberland) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 20:44:16 +0200 Subject: frequency and agreement Message-ID: Cases of 'clitic doubling' in Modern Greek are clearly not optional since clitic doubling in this language has a pragmatic function (roughly Topic marking, although this interacts in an intricate way with VS/SV word order). This doesn't mean you cannot do statistics on this phenomenon; but it is not a case of (socio)linguistic variation, rather it codes (pragmatic) meaning. The following two articles which I wrote with Johan van der Auwera mainly deal with clitic resumption in relative clauses, but contain ample references to the general discussion on clitic doubling: 1987. Doubling and Resumption in Modern Greek. In: Melétes gia tin ellinikí glóssa/Studies in Greek Linguistics. Proceedings of the 8th annual meeting of the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, 27-29 April 1987 (A Festschrift for John Chadwick), 323-334 1990. Topics and Clitics in Greek Relatives, Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 22:127-157 (The latter reference is probably more easily accessible.) Regards, Hartmut Haberland From tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Wed Apr 5 09:39:13 2000 From: tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 02:39:13 -0700 Subject: frequency and agreement Message-ID: Maybe it is time to mention (I may have missed it) that the kind of "pragmatic variation" that one finds in Greek & Spanish (& many Bantu lgs too, for that matter; there was a nice article on Zulu by Sr. Euphrasia Kunene in the mid 1970's in Studies in African Linguistics that described some of the early, non-obligatory ["pragmatic"] stages of this) -- is but a diachronic stage in the rise of obligatory object agreement. The frequencies creep slowly up the old "topicality hierarchies", gradually inching toward 100% for some categories. So as Ricardo Maldonado has pointed out, for several Latin-American varieties of Spanish, Dative agreement is approaching obligatory status. So nobody should be disturbed by finding less than 100% in any particular language. In parenthesis, also, I think the term "clitic doubling" is a bit funny. All these things begin rather innocently with L-dislocation or R-dislocation constructions. Only within some very ancient versions generative theory that perceive the contrast of PRO vs. NP as a totally exclusive one (and does not recognize grammatical agreement as a pronominal phenomenon, thus leading to the further hilarity of "pro-drop"...) does this appear remarkable. TG ======================== Hartmut Haberland wrote: > > Cases of 'clitic doubling' in Modern Greek are clearly not optional > since clitic doubling in this language has a pragmatic function (roughly > Topic marking, although this interacts in an intricate way with VS/SV > word order). This doesn't mean you cannot do statistics on this > phenomenon; but it is not a case of (socio)linguistic variation, rather > it codes (pragmatic) meaning. > > The following two articles which I wrote with Johan van der Auwera > mainly deal with clitic resumption in relative clauses, but contain > ample references to the general discussion on clitic doubling: > > 1987. Doubling and Resumption in Modern Greek. In: Melétes gia tin > ellinikí glóssa/Studies in Greek Linguistics. Proceedings of the 8th > annual meeting of the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philosophy, > Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, 27-29 April 1987 (A Festschrift > for John Chadwick), 323-334 > > 1990. Topics and Clitics in Greek Relatives, Acta Linguistica Hafniensia > 22:127-157 > > (The latter reference is probably more easily accessible.) > > Regards, Hartmut Haberland From iwasaki at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Wed Apr 5 07:42:29 2000 From: iwasaki at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (Shoichi Iwasaki) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 00:42:29 -0700 Subject: Thai and Vietnamese positions at UCLA Message-ID: Job Openings The Program in South and Southeast Asian Languages and Cultures (SSEALC) at UCLA seeks applicants for one lecturer position each in Thai and Vietnamese for the academic year 2000-2001 with possibility of renewal. Thai Language Position The lecturer in Thai will be responsible for two (or three) levels of instruction (pending funding). Demonstrated excellence in teaching at all levels of Thai. The lecturer will work collaboratively with other language lecturers in the program, participate in curriculum development, including establishing rigorous programs for both "heritage" and "non-heritage" students. Candidates must have native or near-native fluency in Thai, advanced degrees (Ph.D. preferred), background in Linguistics, and previous experience in language teaching in an English-speaking educational setting. Vietnamese Language Position The demand for Vietnamese language has grown rapidly, and this is the first time the position is being advertised as a full-time one. The lecturer will be responsible for coordinating all instruction in Vietnamese and teaching two or three levels (pending funding). The lecturer will work collaboratively with other language lectures in the program, and work toward establishing rigorous programs for both "heritage" and "non- heritage" students. Candidates must have native or near-native fluency in Vietnamese, familiarity with both northern and southern dialects, advanced degrees (Ph.D. preferred), a background in Linguistics, and previous experience in language teaching in an English-speaking educational setting. SSEALC is part of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures [http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/ealc/], and works closely with the newly established Center for Southeast Asian Studies [http:// www.isop.ucla.edu/cseas]. Review of candidates will begin May 1, 2000. Applications should include a letter of interest, CV, and three letters of recommendation. Applications should be sent to: Shoichi Iwasaki, Director of South and Southeast Asian Languages Program, c/o Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, 290 Royce Hall, Box 951540, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1540. UCLA is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply. AA/EOE. From kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU Wed Apr 5 19:23:13 2000 From: kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Keith Johnson) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 15:23:13 -0400 Subject: Summer School - Ohio State University Message-ID: Second Notice Updated information available on the website. --------------------------- Summer 2000 at Ohio State University Spoken Language in Context: Methods and Models During July of 2000, the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University will be offering a unique combination of short courses aimed at exploring spoken language, with a particular focus on the empirical study of naturally-occurring speech through various instrumental, quantitative, and analytic means. Scholars, researchers (industry or academic), and students are invited to join us for an intense and rewarding summer session. Course offerings: Laboratory Phonology - Mary Beckman Quantitative Methods - Michael Broe Field Phonetics - Keith Johnson Historical Phonology - Brian Joseph & Richard Janda Practicum in English Intonation - Julia McGory The Pragmatics of Focus - Craige Roberts For more information see the website: http://ling.ohio-state.edu/SU2000 From dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu Wed Apr 5 20:18:09 2000 From: dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu (John W. Du Bois) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 13:18:09 -0700 Subject: Language and Spatial Information; CSDL registration deadlines Message-ID: Please note the there will be a special pre-conference session on: "Language and Spatial Information" at the conference on "Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language" (May 11-14, 2000, at UC Santa Barbara) Details of the program for this session are given below. The program for the entire conference will be posted within a week. Please note that the deadline for early registration for the CSDL conference is fast approaching: your check made out to "UC Regents" in the appropriate amount ($50 general, $30 student), in US dollars drawn on a US bank, should be *postmarked* by April 15, and sent to: CSDL Registration Linguistics Department UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, California 93106 Please make your arrangements for lodging soon too: the rooms we have reserved for the conference will be held only until April 20, and are first-come, first-serve. For full information on lodging and registration, consult our web site at: http://linguistics.ucsb.edu/events/CSDL/CSDL.htm Or contact me at: dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu John Du Bois Patricia Clancy Dan Montello ================================== Session Program for "Language and Spatial Information" Session time: Thursday, May 11, 7:00-9:30pm 7-7:25 pm "Describing Routes and Events" Barbara Tversky Dept. of Psychology, Stanford University 7:30-7:55 pm "Environmental Influences on Route Descriptions: A Component Analysis" Gary Allen Dept. of Psychology, University of South Carolina 8-8:25 pm "Natural Language in a GIS" Helen Couclelis Dept. of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara 8:30-8:55 pm "Where Do Basic (Geo)Spatial Relations Between Lines and Regions Come From?" David M. Mark Dept. of Geography, State University of New York at Buffalo 9-9:25 pm "A Formalism of Metaphorical Transfer -- From Spatial to Non-Spatial" Andrew Frank Dept. of Geoinformation, Technical University, Vienna, Austria From bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sat Apr 8 13:30:21 2000 From: bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Emily Bender) Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2000 06:30:21 -0700 Subject: Request for references Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, In my dissertation, I have come to the question of what a linguist's grammar is a model of. I am writing to this list in the hopes that you might be able to provide references to places in the functionalist literature where this question has been addressed. Thank you, Emily Bender From edith at CSD.UWM.EDU Tue Apr 11 19:55:46 2000 From: edith at CSD.UWM.EDU (Edith A Moravcsik) Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 14:55:46 -0500 Subject: Sixth Himalayan Languages Symposium Message-ID: The Sixth Himalayan Languages Symposium will be held June 15-17 2000 on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. The program is given below. For program updates and information on registration and accommodations, consult Mickey Noonan's webpage at http://www.uwm.edu/~noonan or e-mail either Mickey (noonan at uwm.edu) or Edith Moravcsik (edith at uwm.edu). ***************************************************************************** SIXTH HIMALAYAN LANGUAGES SYMPOSIUM JUNE 15-17 2000 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE CURTIN HALL #175A (3243 N. DOWNER AVENUE, MILWAUKEE, WI) PROGRAM THURSDAY, JUNE 15 THURSDAY MORNING: 8:00-8:30 /TITLE TO BE ANNOUNCED/ Michael Noonan, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee 8:30-9:00 ONE LANGUAGE, TWO SYSTEMS. NEPAL BHASHA VERB MORPHOLOGY Daya R. Shakya, A Center for Nepalese Language and Culture, Portland, OR 9:00-9:30 A TYPOLOGY OF VERB AGREEMENT IN BURUSHASKI Gregory D. S. Anderson and Randall H. Eggert, University of Chicago 9:30-10:00 THE IRREALIS CATEGORY IN CAODENG rGYALRONG Jackson T.-S. Sun, Academia Sinica, Taiwan * * * * * * 10:00-10:30 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 10:30-11:00 REFLEXIVE VERBS IN KOITS (SUNWAR) Dvrte Borchers, Himalayan Languages Project, Leiden University 11:00-11:30 A COMPARATIVE SKETCH OF TWO MAGAR DIALECTS Karen Grunow-Harsta, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee 11:30-12:00 REFLEXIVES IN OMBULE Jean Robert M.L. Opgenort, Himalayan Languages Project, Leiden University * * * * * * 12:00-2:00 LUNCH * * * * * * THURSDAY AFTERNOON: 2:00-2:30 LEXICAL ANAPHORS IN KHASI AND LONG-DISTANCE BINDING Saralin A. Lyngdoh and K.V. Subbarao, University of Delhi 2:30-3:00 DEICTIC CATEGORIES IN THE WEST BODISH LANGUAGES OF NEPAL. A TYPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Tej R. Kansakar, Tribhuvan University 3:00-3:30 A DIMENSION MISSED: EAST AND WEST IN SITU rGYLARONG ORIENTATION-MARKING You-Jing Lin, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan 3:30-4:00 MOTION EXPRESSIONS IN GHALE Holly Smith, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 4:00-4:30 PRONOUNS AND PROFORMS D.N.S. Bhat, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore * * * * * * 4:30-5:00 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 5:00-6:30 WORKSHOP /TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED/ David Gil, Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig FRIDAY, JUNE 16 FRIDAY MORNING: 8:00-8:30 SYNTACTIC ERGATIVITY AND PRAGMATICS: RAISING AND CONTROL IN BELHARE Balthasar Bickel, University of California at Berkeley and University of Z|rich 8:30-9:00 OBJECT MARKING IN CENTRAL TIBETAN Ellen Bartee, University of California at Santa Barbara 9:00-9:30 /TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED/ Cassandra Stephens, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee 9:30-10:00 CASE MARKING AND GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS IN SOME INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES OF NEPAL C.M. Bandhu, Tribhuvan University * * * * * * 10:00-10:30 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 10:30-11:00 THANGMI TIME CONCEPTS OF THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE Mark Turin, Himalayan Languages Project, Leiden University 11:00-11:30 RELATIVE CLAUSES IN KHOWAR Elena Bashir, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 11:30-12:00 THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELATIVE CLAUSES IN THE TIBETAN DIALECTS OF LENDE (KYIRONG) Brigitte Huber, University of Berne * * * * * * 12:00-2:00 LUNCH * * * * * * FRIDAY AFTERNOON: 2:00-2:30 THE CULTURAL ASPECTS OF BORROWING "CULTURE": CIRCULATION OF "SAMKRTI" IN BHAKTAPUR, NEPAL Gregory Price Grieve, University of Chicago 2:30-3:00 PATTERNINGS OF VOCALIC SEQUENCES: EVIDENCE FROM TIBETO-BURMAN LANGUAGES Kathy L. Sands, University of California at Santa Barbara 3:00-3:30 AN ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF TONE IN MANANGE Kristine A. Hildebrandt, University of California at Santa Barbara 3:30-4:00 COMPARATIVE PHONOLOGY OF MANCHAD AND BUNAN Suhnu Ram Sharma, Deccan College, Pune and Himalayan Language Project, Leiden * * * * * * 4-4:30 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 4:30-6 WORKSHOP /TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED/ Ian Maddieson, University of California in Los Angeles SATURDAY, JUNE 17 SATURDAY MORNING: 8:00-8:30 ON FINITE CLAUSES IN KINNAURI NARRATIVES Anju Saxena, Uppsala University 8:30-9:00 INDEXICAL CATEGORIES IN KHAM AND CENTRAL TIBETAN Krisadawan Hongladarom, Chulalongkorn University 9:00-9:30 ON TAMANGIC IMPERATIVES Isao Honda, Nagoya College 9:30-10:00 HONORIFICS IN BARAGAUNLE Mary Brehm, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee * * * * * * 10:00-10:30 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 10:30-11:00 INFLECTIONAL TENSE CATEGORIES IN DOLAKH. NEW.R Carol Genetti, University of California at Santa Barbara 11:00-11:30 TYPES OF VERBS AND FUNCTIONS OF THE CAUSATIVE SUFFIX -K IN NEWARI Kazuyuki Kiryu, Mimasaka Women's College 11:30-12:00 A UNIFIED ACCOUNT OF NEPALI VERB INFLECTION Gilles Boyi, University of Paris 7 * * * * * * 12:00-2:00 LUNCH * * * * * * SATURDAY AFTERNOON: 2:00-2:30 /TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED/ Werner Winter, University of Kiel 2:30-3:00 THE TIBETAN TRANSLATION OF THE PANINI-SUTRA: A STUDY Narendra Kumar Dash, Visva-Bharati University 3:00-3:30 THE FOCUSING FUNCTIONS OF "YIN" AND "YV" IN IMIGRI DOKPA TIBETAN Nancy J. Caplow, University 3:30-4:00 THE GONGDUK LANGUAGE OF CENTRAL BHUTAN George van Driem, Himalayan Language Project, Leiden * * * * * * 4:00-4:30 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 4:30-6:00 WORKSHOP /TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED/ Matthew Dryer, State University of New York in Buffalo ************************************************************************ Edith A. Moravcsik Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413 USA E-mail: edith at uwm.edu Telephone: (414) 229-6794 /office/ (414) 332-0141 /home/ Fax: (414) 229-2741 From jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU Wed Apr 12 04:20:44 2000 From: jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 20:20:44 -0800 Subject: share room at CSDL? Message-ID: Hi folks, I hope you don't consider this an inappropriate use of the listserv ... I'm looking for someone who would like to share a hotel room at CSDL (yes, I live in San Luis Obispo, but that is still 1.5 hrs' drive away). I would probably want to stay Friday and Sat. nights. Looking for a female non-smoker. Oh, I'll have transportation, so you'll have rides! Cheers, Jo ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics English Department, California Polytechnic State University One Grand Avenue • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 Tel. (805)-756-2184 • Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone. 756-259 • E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu • Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba ** "Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally" - Frank Oppenheimer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu Thu Apr 13 22:28:48 2000 From: dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu (John W. Du Bois) Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 15:28:48 -0700 Subject: CSDL 2000 Conference Program Message-ID: Following is the preliminary program for the conference on "Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language" (CSDL 2000), to be held at UC Santa Barbara May 11-14, 2000. Please note that the postmark deadline for early registration is April 15. Also, special rates on conference hotels are available only until April 20, so please make your hotel reservations now. For program update, registration, lodging, and other conference information please see our web site at: http://linguistics.ucsb.edu/events/CSDL/CSDL.htm John Du Bois CSDL 2000 Organizing Committee dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu Preliminary Program: Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language 2000 [Revised April 12, 2000] Note: All CSDL events (except the banquet) take place in the University Center (UCen, pronounced U-Cen) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. All plenary sessions are in Corwin Pavilion East (excluding the two Thursday afternoon workshops, which are in the Santa Barbara Harbor Room). Other rooms are indicated in the program version posted on the web. Thursday May 11 (afternoon) 12-8:00 PM Registration 1:30-3:00 Gilles Fauconnier (San Diego), Mark Turner (Maryland) and Eve Sweetser (Berkeley) Workshop: Topics in Blending Theory 3:00-3:30 Coffee Break 3:30-5:00 John Du Bois (Santa Barbara) and Patricia Clancy (Santa Barbara), Organizers Workshop: Topics in Discourse, Grammar, and Interaction 5:00-7:00 Dinner Break 7:00-9:30 Dan Montello (Santa Barbara), Organizer Pre-Conference Session: Language and Spatial Information 7:00-7:30 Barbara Tversky (Stanford) "Describing Routes and Events" 7:30-8:00 Gary Allen (South Carolina) "Environmental Influences on Route Descriptions: A Component Analysis" 8:00-8:30 Helen Couclelis (Santa Barbara) "Natural Language in a Geographic Information System" 8:30-9:00 David M. Mark (SUNY Buffalo) "Where Do Basic (Geo) Spatial Relations Between Lines and Regions Come From?" 9:00-9:30 Andrew Frank (Technical University, Vienna) "A Formalism of Metaphorical Transfer: From Spatial to Non-Spatial" Friday May 12 (morning) 8:30-8:45 Welcome and Opening Remarks 8:45-9:45 George Lakoff (Berkeley) The Neural Theory of Language (Plenary Lecture) 9:45-10:15 Coffee Break 10:15-12:15 Acquisition of Grammar 10:15-10:45 Patricia Clancy "Exceptional Casemarking in Korean Acquisition: A Discourse-Functional Account" 10:45-11:15 Nancy Budwig & Bhuvana Narasimhan "Transitive and Intransitive Constructions in Hindi-Speaking Caregiver-Child Discourse" 11:15-11:45 Holger Diessel & Michael Tomasello "The Emergence of Relative Constructions in Early Child Language" 11:45-12:15 Michael Israel "How Children Get Constructions" 10:15-12:15 Grammar of Pre-/Postpositions & Particles 10:15-10:45 Nancy Chang & Benjamin Bergen "Spatial Schematicity of Prepositions in Neural Grammar" 10:45-11:15 Stefan Gries "Particle Placement in English: A Cognitive and Multifactorial Investigation" 11:15-11:45 David Zubin & Klaus-Michael Koepcke "Experiencer in the Landscape: Gender in the Geographic Lexicon of German" 11:45-12:15 Kyoko Masuda "The Evidence from Conversation for a Usage-Based Model: The Occurrence and Non-Occurrence of Japanese Locative Particles in Conversation" 10:15-12:15 Metaphor 10:15-10:45 Eleni Koutsomitopoulos "The Role of Conceptual Metaphor in Knowledge Engineering: Metaphor-Based Ontologies" 10:45-11:15 Mary Helen Immordino "Metaphor Use in a Seventh-Grade Science Lesson: Implications for Students' Understandings" 11:15-11:45 Mari Takada, Kazuko Shinohara & Fumi Morizumi "Socio-Cultural Values as Motivation of Mapping: An Analysis of Daughter-as-Commodity Metaphor in Japanese" 11:45-12:15 Kevin Moore "More vs. Less Language-Specific Temporal Concepts" 12:15-1:30 Lunch Break Friday May 12 (afternoon) 1:30-2:30 Rachel Giora (Tel Aviv) Salience and Context Effects: The Case of Humor (Plenary Lecture) 2:30-3:30 Literal & Nonliteral Meaning 2:30-3:00 Mira Ariel "Salient, Linguistic, and Interactional Meanings: The Demise of a Unique Literal Meaning" 3:00-3:30 Balthasar Bickel "Conversational Relativity: An Aspect of Irony and Reproach in Belhare" 2:30-3:30 Argument Structure + 2:30-3:00 Ki-Sun Hong "Thematic Roles and Cognition: A Case of Korean Idioms" 3:00-3:30 Tsuyoshi Ono "Japanese (W)Atashi 'I': It's Not Just a Pronoun" 2:30-3:30 Prosody 2:30-3:00 Scott Liddell "Suprasegmentals at the Core of an English Construction" 3:00-3:30 [TBA] 3:30-4:00 Coffee Break 4:00-5:00 Literal & Nonliteral Meaning 4:00-4:30 Paula Lima, Raymond Gibbs, & E. Francozo "DESIRE IS HUNGER: New Ideas About Old Conceptual Metaphors" 4:30-5:00 Barbara Holder &Seana Coulson "Hints on How to Drink from a Fire Hose: Conceptual Blending in the Wild Blue Yonder" 4:00-5:00 Argument Structure 4:00-4:30 Jean-Pierre Koenig "Class Selectivity and the Participant/Setting Distinction" 4:30-5:00 Patrick Farrell "The Conceptual Structure of "Agentive" -er" 4:00-5:00 Interactionally Distributed Cognition 4:00-4:30 Gene Lerner "Finding 'Interactionally Distributed' and 'Shared' Cognition in Searching for a Word" 4:30-5:00 Monica Turk "Discontinuity and Conversational Uses of 'and'" 5:00-7:00 Dinner Break 7:00-8:00 Sandra Thompson (Santa Barbara) Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Object Complements (Plenary Lecture) 8:00-9:00 Wallace Chafe (Santa Barbara) Discourse Appreciation (Plenary Lecture) Saturday May 13 (morning) 9-10 Dedre Gentner (Northwestern) Analogy (Plenary Lecture) 10-10:30 Coffee Break 10:30-12:30 Analogy 10:30-11:00 Jeffrey Loewenstein & Dedre Gentner "Spatial Relational Language Facilitates Preschoolers' Understanding of Relations" 11:00-11:30 Esther Kim "Analogy as Discourse Process" 11:30-12:00 David Uttal & Jeffrey Loewenstein "On the Relation Between Maps and Analogies" 12:00-12:30 Lindsey Engle "Analogy in US Classrooms: Pedagogical Processes Structuring the Acquisition of Abstract Mathematical Concepts" 10:30-12:30 Form, Meaning, and Mapping 10:30-11:00 Mark Lee & John Brandon "Metaphor, Pretence and Counterfactuals" 11:00-11:30 Michael Hanson "The Importance of Being Ironic: Uses of Irony in A Group Discussion about Race, Gender and Adulthood" 11:30-12:00 Haldur Oim "STRAIGHT in Estonian" 12:00-12:30 Pilar Duran & Stacy Kingler "Positive and Negative Evidence Provided to Hispanic Women by Children and Teachers" 10:30-12:30 Syntax Across Clauses 10:30-11:00 Beaumont Brush "Force, Time, and Predicate Structure in Interclausal Relations" 11:00-11:30 Cristiano Broccias "A Cognitive Account of English Resultative Constructions" 11:30-12:00 Joseph Park "The Intonation Unit as a Cognitive Unit: Evidence from Korean Complex Sentences" 12:00-12:30 Mirna Pit "Subjectivity in Causal Coherence Relations" 12:30-1:30 Lunch Break Saturday May 13 (afternoon) 1:30-2:30 Kathryn Bock (Illinois) The Persistence of Structural Priming in Language Production (Plenary Lecture) 2:30-3:30 Priming in Discourse 2:30-3:00 John Du Bois "Reusable Syntax: Socially Distributed Cognition in Dialogic Interaction" 3:00-3:30 Michele Emanatian "Metaphor Clustering in Discourse" 2:30-3:30 Sound and Meaning 2:30-3:00 Tim Rohrer "Conceptual Integration Networks in Political Thought: Visual and Phonemic Blends" 3:00-3:30 Benjamin Bergen "Probabilistic Associations Between Sound and Meaning: Belief Networks for Modeling Phonaesthemes" 2:30-3:30 Non-Literal Meaning Across Languages 2:30-3:00 Heather Bortfield "Comprehending Idioms Cross-Linguistically" 3:00-3:30 Ashlee Bailey "On the Non-Existence of Blue-Yellow and Red-Green Color Terms: The Case of Semantic Extension" 3:30-4:00 Coffee Break 4:00-5:30 Phonology: Sound and Use 4:00-4:30 Joan Bybee "Phonological Clues to the Size of Storage and Processing Units" 4:30-5:00 Liang Tao "Transnumerality and Classifier: Do They Come as a Package Deal?" 5:00-5:30 Marilyn Vihmann "The Role of Vocal Production in the Ontogeny of Language: Theoretical and Experimental Evidence" 4:00-5:30 Grammaticization and Language Use 4:00-4:30 Shoichi Iwasaki "Structural Reanalysis in Discourse" 4:30-5:00 Kaoru Horie & Debra Occhi "Borrowing for 'Thinking For Speaking': A Case Study from Japanese" 5:00-5:30 Ritva Laury "The Definite Article in Interlanguage and Grammaticization: A Comparison" 4:00-5:30 Metaphor, Blending, and Change 4:00-4:30 Hilary Young & Anatol Stefanowitsch "Domain Blending in English: The adj-and-adj Construction" 4:30-5:00 Mei-Chung Liu "Categorical Structure and Semantic Representation of Mandarin Verbs of Communication" 5:00-5:30 Josef Ruppenhofer & Esther J. Wood "Pragmatic Inferencing and Metaphor in Semantic Change" 5:30-5:40 Break 5:40-6:40 Charles Li (Santa Barbara) The Evolutionary Origin of Language (Plenary Lecture) 6:40-7:30 Cash Bar (Faculty Club) 7:30-9:30 Banquet (Faculty Club) Sunday May 14 9:30-10:30 Mark Turner (Maryland) Compression in Thought and Language (Plenary Lecture) 10:30-45 Coffee Break 10:45-12:15 Cognition in Gesture & Sign 10:45-11:15 Alan Cienki "Gesture, Metaphor, and Thinking for Speaking" 11:15-11:45 Paul Dudis "Visible Tokens in Signed Languages" 11:45-12:15 Sarah Taub "Description of Motion in ASL: Cognitive Strategies Rather Than Arbitrary Rules" 10:45-12:15 Syntax Within the Clause 10:45-11:15 Terry Klahfen "Cognitive Processing of Japanese Inflectional Morphology" 11:15-11:45 Victor Balaban "I Was Blessed by the Virgin Mary: Use of Passive Constructions to Reduce Agency in Naturally Occurring Religious Discourse" 11:45-12:15 Todd McDaniels "Deictic Shift as a Function of Preposing in Comanche Narrative" 10:45-12:15 Acquisition of Narrative 10:45-11:15 Molly Losh "Affective and Social-Cognitive Underpinnings of Narrative: Insights from Autism" 11:15-11:45 Anita Zamora, Sarah Kriz & Judy Reilley "The Linguistic Encoding of Stance in Written and Spoken Texts: A Developmental Study" 11:45-12:15 Ravid Abramson "The Distribution of Non-Imageable Predicates: A Developmental Perspective" 12:15-1:15 Lunch Break 1:15-2:15 Metaphor & Personification/ Objectification 1:15-1:45 Joe Grady "Personification and the Typology of Conceptual Metaphors" 1:45-2:15 Melinda Chen "A Cognitive-Linguistic View of Linguistic (Human) Objectification" 1:15-2:15 Origins of Relational Meaning: Cognitive Influences and Cross-Linguistic Evidence 1:15-1:45 Lorraine McCune "Relational Meaning: Sources in Infant Perception, Motion and Cognition" 1:45-2:15 Marilyn Vihmann & Lorraine McCune "Relational Words: Cross-Linguistic Evidence" Soonja Choi [Discussant] 1:15-2:15 Meaning in Discourse 1:15-1:45 Kingkarn Thepkanjana "Semantic Variations of the Verb in Context: A Case Study in Thai" 1:45-2:15 Masahiko Minami "Establishing Viewpoint: Wrapping-up Devices in Japanese Oral Narrative Discourse" 2:15-3:15 Ron Langacker (San Diego) Viewing Arrangements and Experiential Reporting (Plenary Lecture) 3:15-3:30 Closing: John Du Bois, Patricia Clancy, Dan Montello From vanvalin at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Mon Apr 17 15:42:25 2000 From: vanvalin at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (vanvalin at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 11:42:25 -0400 Subject: Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik Message-ID: New Theoretical Perspectives on Syntax and Semantics in Cognitive Science September 2-10, 2000 Dubrovnik, Croatia ORGANIZERS University of Zagreb ­ Center for Technology Transfer State University of New York at Buffalo, USA International Center of Croatian Universities, Dubrovnik, Croatia COMMITTEE Zrinka Jelaska, University of Zagreb, Croatia Melita Kovacevic, University of Zagreb, Croatia Ranko Matasovic, University of Zagreb, Croatia Robert D. Van Valin Jr., State University of New York at Buffalo, USA David Wilkins, Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, the Netherlands Milena Zic Fuchs, University of Zagreb, Croatia CONFERENCE SECRETARIES Nina Tudjman, University of Zagreb, Croatia Irena Zovko, University of Zagreb, Croatia CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS Cognitive Syntax and Semantics Conference ­ CSSCC 2000 Center for Technology Transfer Ivana Lucica 5 10000 Zagreb CROATIA phone:+385 1 6168530 fax: +385 1 6118710 e-mail: ctt.cogsci at fsb.hr http://www.ffzg.hr/oling/tekst/eng/conf.html The webpage will be updated regularly. LOCATION The conference will be held at the International Center of Croatian Universities in Dubrovnik, Croatia. LANGUAGE English COURSES (September 3-7) A five-day working week of courses will be held by: Melissa Bowerman (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) Language Acquisition; title tba Dan Everett (SIL International Brazil) ŒLexical Integrity and Word-formation in Optimality Theory¹ Ranko Matasovic (University of Zagreb) ŒSynchronic and Diachronic Typology of Syntactic Structures¹ (tentative) James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University, Massachussets) ŒGenerative Lexicon and semantic theory¹ Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (State University of New York, Buffalo) ŒSyntactic Theory¹ David Wilkins (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) ŒDiachronic Semantics¹ Courses will be held from Sunday, September 3 until Thursday, September 7. Participants are expected to arrive on Saturday, September 2. All participants will receive a certificate of attendance. CONFERENCE The five-day course week will be followed by a three-day conference, from Friday, Sept. 8 until Sunday, Sept. 10. DEADLINES Preregistration for both Courses and Conference: May 1, 2000 Abstracts submission (for the 3 day conference): June 1, 2000 ABSTRACTS Abstracts should not be more than 300 words in length. Also include Name(s) of Author(s), Affiliation, Address, E-mail and Phone and Fax numbers. Abstracts should be preferably submitted by E-mail. If sent by surface mail, please include disk. REGISTRATION The registration fee is US$ 150 for the courses and US$ 150 for the conference. For both events, the fee is US$ 250. The fee will include use of conference materials, opening reception, coffee, refreshments and lunches. There will be a limited number of grants for students (please contact conference secretaries for more information). An online preregistration form is available on the Conference website. ACCOMODATION Dubrovnik offers a wide range of hotels, most of which are within walking distance from the conference site. More information including prices will be given in the second announcement. OTHER USEFUL INFORMATION About Croatia: http://www.hr About Dubrovnik: http://www.hr/dubrovnik Croatia Airlines: http://www.ctn.tel.hr/ctn Dubrovnik Hotels: http://www.dubrovnikhotels.hr *************** Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. Tel 716 645-2177, ext. 713 Professor & Chair Fax 716 645-3825 Department of Linguistics 609 Baldy Hall State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260-1030 USA VANVALIN at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU From kiekhoef at EVA.MPG.DE Mon Apr 17 16:30:40 2000 From: kiekhoef at EVA.MPG.DE (Kai Kiekhoefer) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 18:30:40 +0200 Subject: Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik Message-ID: New Theoretical Perspectives on Syntax and Semantics in Cognitive Science September 2-10, 2000 Dubrovnik, Croatia ORGANIZERS University of Zagreb ­ Center for Technology Transfer State University of New York at Buffalo, USA International Center of Croatian Universities, Dubrovnik, Croatia COMMITTEE Zrinka Jelaska, University of Zagreb, Croatia Melita Kovacevic, University of Zagreb, Croatia Ranko Matasovic, University of Zagreb, Croatia Robert D. Van Valin Jr., State University of New York at Buffalo, USA David Wilkins, Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, the Netherlands Milena Zic Fuchs, University of Zagreb, Croatia CONFERENCE SECRETARIES Nina Tudjman, University of Zagreb, Croatia Irena Zovko, University of Zagreb, Croatia CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS Cognitive Syntax and Semantics Conference ­ CSSCC 2000 Center for Technology Transfer Ivana Lucica 5 10000 Zagreb CROATIA phone:+385 1 6168530 fax: +385 1 6118710 e-mail: ctt.cogsci at fsb.hr http://www.ffzg.hr/oling/tekst/eng/conf.html The webpage will be updated regularly. LOCATION The conference will be held at the International Center of Croatian Universities in Dubrovnik, Croatia. LANGUAGE English COURSES (September 3-7) A five-day working week of courses will be held by: Melissa Bowerman (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) Language Acquisition; title tba Dan Everett (SIL International Brazil) ŒLexical Integrity and Word-formation in Optimality Theory¹ Ranko Matasovic (University of Zagreb) ŒSynchronic and Diachronic Typology of Syntactic Structures¹ (tentative) James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University, Massachussets) ŒGenerative Lexicon and semantic theory¹ Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (State University of New York, Buffalo) ŒSyntactic Theory¹ David Wilkins (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) ŒDiachronic Semantics¹ Courses will be held from Sunday, September 3 until Thursday, September 7. Participants are expected to arrive on Saturday, September 2. All participants will receive a certificate of attendance. CONFERENCE The five-day course week will be followed by a three-day conference, from Friday, Sept. 8 until Sunday, Sept. 10. DEADLINES Preregistration for both Courses and Conference: May 1, 2000 Abstracts submission (for the 3 day conference): June 1, 2000 ABSTRACTS Abstracts should not be more than 300 words in length. Also include Name(s) of Author(s), Affiliation, Address, E-mail and Phone and Fax numbers. Abstracts should be preferably submitted by E-mail. If sent by surface mail, please include disk. REGISTRATION The registration fee is US$ 150 for the courses and US$ 150 for the conference. For both events, the fee is US$ 250. The fee will include use of conference materials, opening reception, coffee, refreshments and lunches. There will be a limited number of grants for students (please contact conference secretaries for more information). An online preregistration form is available on the Conference website. ACCOMODATION Dubrovnik offers a wide range of hotels, most of which are within walking distance from the conference site. More information including prices will be given in the second announcement. OTHER USEFUL INFORMATION About Croatia: http://www.hr About Dubrovnik: http://www.hr/dubrovnik Croatia Airlines: http://www.ctn.tel.hr/ctn Dubrovnik Hotels: http://www.dubrovnikhotels.hr *************** Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. Tel 716 645-2177, ext. 713 Professor & Chair Fax 716 645-3825 Department of Linguistics 609 Baldy Hall State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260-1030 USA VANVALIN at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU From matmies at ling.helsinki.fi Thu Apr 20 11:10:15 2000 From: matmies at ling.helsinki.fi (Matti Miestamo) Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 14:10:15 +0300 Subject: Calls: Parts of Speech - 2nd Call Message-ID: (Apologies for any cross-postings) 2nd CALL FOR PAPERS The Linguistic Association of Finland is organizing a symposium on *** PARTS OF SPEECH IN AND ACROSS LANGUAGES *** to be held at the University of Helsinki, August 17-19, 2000. The symposium will bring together linguists interested in problems relating to parts of speech. We invite papers addressing general typological questions as well as papers taking the viewpoint of one (or more) particular language(s). Possible themes include the universality of the noun/verb distinction, (the grammaticalization of) adpositions, the status of particles and interjections in grammar and discourse. Other topics relating to parts of speech are equally welcome. Invited speakers: Leon Stassen (University of Nijmegen) Anneli Pajunen (University of Turku) Activities: Lectures by invited speakers Presentations by other participants (20 min + 10 min for discussion) Theme sessions Abstracts: The deadline for submission of abstracts (in English; max 500 words) is May 15, 2000. Please submit your abstract by e-mail to the following address: . The abstract should be included in the body of the message. E-mail submissions are strongly recommended. If, however, you send your abstract by ordinary mail, please provide an e-mail address as a contact address. Participants will be notified about acceptance by June 5, 2000. Registration: The deadline for registration and payment for all participants (with or without paper) is June 21, 2000. Register by e-mail to the address above. Registration fees: -general: FIM 200 -members of the association: FIM 100 -undergraduate and MA students free -send by giro account no 800013-1424850 to The Linguistic Association of Finland (SKY)/Symposium. When paying from abroad, please pay via Eurogiro or SWIFT to our account (number 800013-1424850) with Leonia Bank plc, Helsinki, Finland. SWIFT-address: PSPBFIHH; Telex 121 698 pgiro sf -In case of technical difficulty, payment in cash upon arrival is also accepted. Accommodation: A list of hotels is to be found at For further information, please contact , or visit the home page of the symposium at The organizing committee: Marja-Liisa Helasvuo Matti Miestamo Marja Pälsi Marja-Leena Sorjonen From kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU Thu Apr 20 20:56:02 2000 From: kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Keith Johnson) Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 16:56:02 -0400 Subject: XML at OSU Message-ID: Announcing a 5-day workshop associated with "Spoken Language in Context: Methods and Models" July 3-7, 2000 (see http://ling.ohio-state.edu/SU2000 for further information) XML and Linguistic Annotation Chris Brew Department of Linguistics Ohio State University Corpora of spoken and written language are crucial to much of linguistics, providing both quantitive and qualitative data which informs and grounds our work. Much of the material which is available is raw text, but this is complemented by a substantial and increasing number of annotated corpora. It is important to ensure that such annotated corpora are reliable, re-usable and maximally informative, but it is not immediately obvious how this is to be achieved, not least because the corpus data often stimulates research which was not envisaged at the time that the data was collected. XML(the eXtensible Markup Language) provides a standardized vehicle for the generation, processing and exchange of arbitrary structured data, including, but not limited to, texts marked up with linguistic information. Many, but no means all, corpus creation initiatives have chosen to adopt the XML route. This means that researchers who want to use (and perhaps add to) the products of these efforts need to understand something of what XML is and how it can be used. Non-linguistic applications of XML will be covered only tangentially. This workshop introduces XML as a means for creating and using linguistic annotations, gives hands-on experience of both corpus annotation and corpus use, and discusses its strengths and weaknesses as a research tool. There will be five 105 minute sessions, one per day, spread over a week, along with practical sessions covering the use of text and speech data. Students should expect to spend approximately 60 minutes per day on the practicals. The only prerequisite is a very basic training in any of the language sciences. It should therefore be accessible to all participants in "Spoken Language in Context: Methods and Models". From bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Thu Apr 20 21:28:54 2000 From: bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Emily Bender) Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 14:28:54 -0700 Subject: Request for references---summary Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, I recently posted the following query: >In my dissertation, I have come to the question of what a linguist's >grammar is a model of. I am writing to this list in the hopes that >you might be able to provide references to places in the functionalist >literature where this question has been addressed. Here is a list of references compiled from the responses I've received so far: Dik, Simon. 1997. The Theory of Functional Grammar. [Ch. 1] Harder, Peter. 1996. Functional Semantics. [around p.164] Harder, Peter. 2000. The status of linguistic facts: Rethinking the relation between cognition, social institution and utterance from a functional point of view. University of Copenhagen ms. Haukioja, Jussi. Forthcoming. "Grammaticality, Response-Dependence and the Ontology of Linguistic Objects". Nordic Journal of Linguistics 23. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol 1. [Section 2.1, also chs 2-3 more generally] Maatta, Urho. 1994. Functional explanation in morphology. PhD Thesis. [In Finnish] Maatta, Urho. 1998. Rules of language as emerging phenomena. Paper presented at the International Multidisciplinary Colloquium on Rules Rule-Following: Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, Janus Pannonius University, Pecs, Hungary. Thanks to: Peter Harder, Jussi Haukioja, Ron Langacker, J.L. Mackenzie, Urho Maatta, and David Tuggy. -- Emily Bender From david_tuggy at SIL.ORG Mon Apr 24 02:09:12 2000 From: david_tuggy at SIL.ORG (David Tuggy) Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2000 22:09:12 -0400 Subject: Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik Message-ID: Friends, A phenomenon I find fascinating is relational predicates which do a diachronic flip-flop in meaning so that the subject becomes object and vice versa. Here are a few examples from English. (1) "In charge of" used to mean "in the charge of, under the responsibility of." (You find this usage in some 19th century English literature, like Jane Austen, anyway.) Thus children would be put in charge of the nanny. Now it's backwards; the nanny (or babysitter) is put in charge of the children. (2) "Comprised of/by" used to mean "included within"; the container or whole comprised the contents or parts. For some of us pedantically-minded types that still sounds right, but for the general populous (who mispell that word wrong too) "comprised of" is synonymous with "composed of", and the contents or parts comprise the container or the whole. (I suspect that this arose malapropistically, by people unfamiliar with such erudite words as "compose" and "comprise". But I am not sure of this.) (3) "Consult (with)" used to mean talk with a wiser person in order to receive his or her counsel. It still has that usage for many of us. But others seems to use it exclusively to mean "give counsel (to), act as consultant (for)". This seems to have arisen prototypically in situations of psychological counselling, but has spread far beyond there; generally the consultee is the one who goes to the expert for advice, not the one who is gone to for counsel. (Did the whole thing arise from giving the name "consultant" to the expert, extrapolating to "consultee", and then back-forming to "consult"? Was the change from "getting counsel" to "getting counselling" relevant?) My question is: How can such backwards meanings (a) arise, (b) survive and eventually prevail? Most languages make it possible to tell most of the time, in ways independent of wide-ranging context, who is doing what to whom, and I would suppose there is a strong functional pressure to do so. But these meaning changes seem to fly in the face of such tendencies. Most meaning changes "live by keeping out of each others' way", by not having many contexts where the old and new meanings could compete directly. But these pretty much in the nature of the case occur precisely where they can cause most confusion. #3 above in particular does so, in my experience. (I have gone along for multiple paragraphs in conversation or listening to a monologue, actively trying to confirm or disconfirm one or other of the meanings the speaker might have had in mind.) I'd be interested in any comments people might have on why these changes might happen, and how they happen. Also, good examples of parallel things in English (I know there are others) or other languages would be interesting to see. And comments on how people cope during the time when the old and new meanings are in competition. --David Tuggy From l.stassen at LET.KUN.NL Mon Apr 24 14:14:08 2000 From: l.stassen at LET.KUN.NL (stassen) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 16:14:08 +0200 Subject: flip-flop predicates Message-ID: David Tuggy calls attention to (relational) predicates for which the argument structure seems to have been reversed. Here's an example of a (non-relational) predicate in Dutch. The verb "mankeren" (a loan from the French "manquer") means more or less "to ail". It used to be the case that the ailment was the subject and the afflicted person the direct object, as in: Wat mankeer-t jou? What ail-3SG.PRES 2SG.OBL "What is ailing you?" Nowadays, however, the situation is reversed, n that the "ailee" is the subject, as is indicated by its nominative case, and by the fact that the verb has agreement with it: Wat mankeer-0 jij? what ail-2SG.PRES 2SG.NOM Just thought I'd mention it. Cheers, Leon Stassen. From edith at CSD.UWM.EDU Mon Apr 24 13:39:33 2000 From: edith at CSD.UWM.EDU (Edith A Moravcsik) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 08:39:33 -0500 Subject: Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik In-Reply-To: <0004249565.AA956574729@router-8.camnet.com> Message-ID: Some other examples of verbs (or words, more generally) that have converse meanings: - English "teach" and "learn" (in some varieties, "learn" is used for "teach"; compare the proverbial answer of a parent to the teacher who complained that the child was not kept clean enough: "You are there to learn 'em, not to smell 'em!") - English "borrow" and "lend" (some people use "borrow" for "lend") - Latin "altus" 'deep', 'high' - Hungarian "ural" 'to dominate' (etymological and original meaning now dying out I believe: 'to consider somebody one's lord') ************************************************************************ Edith A. Moravcsik Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413 USA E-mail: edith at uwm.edu Telephone: (414) 229-6794 /office/ (414) 332-0141 /home/ Fax: (414) 229-2741 From david_tuggy at SIL.ORG Mon Apr 24 12:46:25 2000 From: david_tuggy at SIL.ORG (David Tuggy) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 08:46:25 -0400 Subject: Apology; subject-object flip-flop Message-ID: Oy! I apparently hit the wrong button and got a half-baked message into my outbox instead of the drafts box. I apologize to you all, and particularly to the organizers of the "Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik", whose subject line wound up on my message even though the message had nothing to do with the conference. But, I am interested in the question (about structures that flip-flop their subject and object) and would be interested in you all's ideas about what functional pressures shape such anomalies. --David Tuggy From gthomson at GPU.SRV.UALBERTA.CA Mon Apr 24 16:23:41 2000 From: gthomson at GPU.SRV.UALBERTA.CA (Greg Thomson) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 10:23:41 -0600 Subject: Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Some other examples of verbs (or words, more generally) that have converse >meanings: > > - English "teach" and "learn" (in some varieties, "learn" is used for > "teach"; compare the proverbial answer of a parent to the teacher > who complained that the child was not kept clean enough: "You are > there to learn 'em, not to smell 'em!") > - English "borrow" and "lend" (some people use "borrow" for "lend") > - Latin "altus" 'deep', 'high' > - Hungarian "ural" 'to dominate' (etymological and original meaning > now dying out I believe: 'to consider somebody one's lord') According to common anecdotal reports and my own observations, a fairly common error among second language users involves the substitution of antonyms. Why would an L2 effort to retrieve "happy" end up activating "sad"? In relation to Tuggy's question and Edith's response, I think that an answer could lie in the tendency of the language processor to use partial information in interpreting utterances. For example, "teach" and "learn" involve conceptual structures with all the same components. The grammatical relations signalled, and the argument structure of the verbs, can work together to constrain the interpretation. However, often these cues are not necessary, as the discourse context and world knowledge may adequately constrain the interpretation. If a listener frequently interprets the verb "learn" without relying on grammatical cues, s/he might also come to produce utterances in which the verb is used with indifference with to such cues. That wouldn't interfere with further listeners' comprehension for the same reason. If it happened enough it could affect the way the verb is treated when grammatical cues _are_ processed, so that "learn" becomes ambiguous with respect to it assignment of roles to its arguments. Greg Thomson From dkp at U.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Apr 24 17:00:12 2000 From: dkp at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Dianne K. Patterson) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 10:00:12 -0700 Subject: flip-flop predicates In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000424161408.007ae610@hooft.let.kun.nl> Message-ID: How about itch? ....as in...."that thing itched me"...at least children used to say that here in Arizona...perhaps it is a little different because it has gone from being an intransitive verb...to being transitive...but I wonder if these things share some feature like shifting toward a more "normal"?? (for English) thematic relation. The "learn" (He learned me to read) sort of structure seems similar...it is a simple agent- verb-patient sort of structure, whereas our standard use of the word "learn" is a bit more abstract (the object of the verb is not always a good example of a patient)... Just a thought. Humbly yours, Dianne Patterson From wi.vandeweghe at WORLDONLINE.BE Mon Apr 24 16:51:57 2000 From: wi.vandeweghe at WORLDONLINE.BE (Willy Vandeweghe) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 18:51:57 +0200 Subject: flip-flop Message-ID: David Tuggy draws attention to the phenomenon of (subject-object- flip-flop (nice name, by the way). His questions are: How can such backwards meanings (a) arise, (b) survive, and (c) eventually prevail? The whole phenomenon seems to have to do with what in lexicology is known as 'metonymy': meanings which are very close to each other might eventually replace one another. But they also can coexist. (a) Why there is such a thing as metonymy is hard to say, but is most probably has to do with the way in which lexical information is stored in the brain. The 'flip-flop' occurs when a particular form gets attached to the related meaning: - as a diachronic process: the 'in charge of' example A nice example is also represented in the evolution from 'me liketh' (Shakespeare) to modern English 'I like' (an evolution very similar to the one in the Dutch predicate given by Stassen) - two meanings side by side: in Dutch RUIKEN ('smell') and SMAKEN ('taste') may apply to the participant receiving the smell or taste, or the participant emitting it; I think the samen holds true for English as well Die bloem ruikt (lekker) That flower smells (good) Ik ruik die bloem niet I don't smell that flower In the case of relational predicates, the metonymy results in subject-object flip-flop, but in other cases the converse relationship may take another shape: Edith Moravcsik's Lat. ALTUS example. A striking case is again to be found in Dutch: the word WAL is related to the result of digging, in two ways: it can, at least in some Flemish dialects, refer to the cavity in the ground (the moat around a castle) or to the heap of earth, e.g. used as a defense (the normal meaning in standard Dutch); the same holds true for DIJK, which in some dialects is the equivalent of Eng. 'ditch' , but in standard Dutch is used for something erected, e.g. to keep the water out (Eng. 'dike') (b) How is survival possible? Couldn't it have to do with the saliency of participants? And case hierarchies? Eng. 'like' evolved into a predicate taking a [+ animate] [+ human] participant as a subject. In the case of the smell/taste example, the contexts are very similar, but still ambiguity is impossible as the subject participant is [+ animate] and [+human] in one case, [- animate] and [-human] in the other. (c) How does it prevail? I have no answer for why in some cases the flip-flop replaces the original, and in other cases continues to exist side by side to the original. I have the impression that I haven't done much more than rewording the original question rather than answering it. Still I hope this does contribute a little bit to a better understanding of the problem. Willy Vandeweghe Ghent -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aaghbar at GROVE.IUP.EDU Mon Apr 24 18:45:48 2000 From: aaghbar at GROVE.IUP.EDU (Ali Aghbar) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 14:45:48 -0400 Subject: Question: Language Awareness Course Message-ID: I teach a language awareness course to American undergraduate students from various disciplines. For them, this is the only course about language and its role in their lives. I include both topics that deal with language in its social context and topics that are more restrictively linguistic. I will tell you more when I provide a summary of responses. Here is my question. If you were to teach a language-awareness course provided this is the only such course) to undergraduates, what three topics would you feel you must include in it? Also, if you have taught such a course, I would love to hear how you have handled it. PLEASE RESPOND. For your information, my students get bored easily, so I would prefer to include topics, or present them in such a way, that I engage the students in discussion and discovery and rely less on lecturing. Also, students prefer topics with a practical application. Reading is not a problem. Please reply to ME. I will be using the responses (anonymously, of course) in actual revision of the course and in a conference presentation. I will summarize the results for this list. Ali A. Aghbar, Dept. of English, Indiana U. of PA, Indiana PA 15705 aaghbar at grove.iup.edu Phone: 724 357 4937 From wi.vandeweghe at WORLDONLINE.BE Mon Apr 24 21:19:53 2000 From: wi.vandeweghe at WORLDONLINE.BE (Willy Vandeweghe) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 23:19:53 +0200 Subject: Fw: flip-flop Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Willy Vandeweghe To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu Sent: Monday, April 24, 2000 6:51 PM Subject: flip-flop David Tuggy draws attention to the phenomenon of (subject-object- flip-flop (nice name, by the way). His questions are: How can such backwards meanings (a) arise, (b) survive, and (c) eventually prevail? The whole phenomenon seems to have to do with what in lexicology is known as 'metonymy': meanings which are very close to each other might eventually replace one another. But they also can coexist. (a) Why there is such a thing as metonymy is hard to say, but is most probably has to do with the way in which lexical information is stored in the brain. The 'flip-flop' occurs when a particular form gets attached to the related meaning: - as a diachronic process: the 'in charge of' example A nice example is also represented in the evolution from 'me liketh' (Shakespeare) to modern English 'I like' (an evolution very similar to the one in the Dutch predicate given by Stassen) - two meanings side by side: in Dutch RUIKEN ('smell') and SMAKEN ('taste') may apply to the participant receiving the smell or taste, or the participant emitting it; I think the samen holds true for English as well Die bloem ruikt (lekker) That flower smells (good) Ik ruik die bloem niet I don't smell that flower In the case of relational predicates, the metonymy results in subject-object flip-flop, but in other cases the converse relationship may take another shape: Edith Moravcsik's Lat. ALTUS example. A striking case is again to be found in Dutch: the word WAL is related to the result of digging, in two ways: it can, at least in some Flemish dialects, refer to the cavity in the ground (the moat around a castle) or to the heap of earth, e.g. used as a defense (the normal meaning in standard Dutch); the same holds true for DIJK, which in some dialects is the equivalent of Eng. 'ditch' , but in standard Dutch is used for something erected, e.g. to keep the water out (Eng. 'dike') (b) How is survival possible? Couldn't it have to do with the saliency of participants? And case hierarchies? Eng. 'like' evolved into a predicate taking a [+ animate] [+ human] participant as a subject. In the case of the smell/taste example, the contexts are very similar, but still ambiguity is impossible as the subject participant is [+ animate] and [+human] in one case, [- animate] and [-human] in the other. (c) How does it prevail? I have no answer for why in some cases the flip-flop replaces the original, and in other cases continues to exist side by side to the original. I have the impression that I haven't done much more than rewording the original question rather than answering it. Still I hope this does contribute a little bit to a better understanding of the problem. Willy Vandeweghe Ghent -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From david_tuggy at SIL.ORG Mon Apr 24 22:53:21 2000 From: david_tuggy at SIL.ORG (David Tuggy) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 18:53:21 -0400 Subject: flip-flop predicates Message-ID: That's cool. In order to be a complete flip-flop the erstwhile subject should now be a (direct?) object: does that happen? Would the ailment now be able to appear with the OBL marking? --DT ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: flip-flop predicates Author: at Internet Date: 4/24/2000 4:14 PM David Tuggy calls attention to (relational) predicates for which the argument structure seems to have been reversed. Here's an example of a (non-relational) predicate in Dutch. The verb "mankeren" (a loan from the French "manquer") means more or less "to ail". It used to be the case that the ailment was the subject and the afflicted person the direct object, as in: Wat mankeer-t jou? What ail-3SG.PRES 2SG.OBL "What is ailing you?" Nowadays, however, the situation is reversed, n that the "ailee" is the subject, as is indicated by its nominative case, and by the fact that the verb has agreement with it: Wat mankeer-0 jij? what ail-2SG.PRES 2SG.NOM Just thought I'd mention it. Cheers, Leon Stassen. From jaakko.leino at HELSINKI.FI Tue Apr 25 06:22:22 2000 From: jaakko.leino at HELSINKI.FI (Jaakko Leino) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 09:22:22 +0300 Subject: flip-flop Message-ID: I get the feeling that the following point must have something to it: > Willy Vandeweghe wrote: > [snip] > Couldn't it have to do with the saliency of participants? And case > hierarchies? Eng. 'like' evolved into a predicate taking a [+ animate] > [+ human] participant as a subject. In most, if not all, of the examples cited so far, the subject in the "new" meaning denotes a participant that could be seen as more salient, more active and/or more in control than the one denoted by the subject in the "old" meaning. In other words: - When there's a "putting in charge" that involves the nanny and the children, it is (hopefully) the nanny who's in control. - In consultation, the expert/consultant is probably more active than the one who receives the advice. - In classroom, the teacher is (again, hopefully) more active and more in control than the students. Thus, this looks like a unidirectional process, rather than arbitrary back-and-forth flipping and flopping. I'd assume that "teach" is not used for "learn", and "lend" is not used for "borrow", for example. But, on the other hand, I'd be surprised if this were a strict rule rather than just a tendency. There must be quite a few counterexamples available. One point about how or why such backwards meanings arise is influence from other languages. To stick with the "learn" vs. "teach" example, there are languages (e.g. French and Swedish) that don't make the distinction. French "apprendre" and Swedish "lära" (i.e. la"ra, umlaut on the first a) mean both "teach" and "learn", and there's not an equally common verb that only means either one of the two. I remember having heard someone use "borrow" for "lend" just once (outside English classes in Finland, that is), and the speaker was Japanese. I don't know whether Japanese has separate verbs for these two meanings, but I know I always had a hard time keeping them separate since Finnish doesn't. Thus, for me, "borrow" and "lend" are synonyms (they both mean the same as the Finnish verb "lainata"), they just "happen to have" different argument structures. I know this is all pretty vague, but I think it makes more sense than nonsense anyway. I'd like to raise a further question, however: what are the properties of the "more salient" participant that makes him/her/it more salient? [+ human] and [+ animate] are good candidates, of course, but there must be more (in the classroom, for example, everyone's [+ human, + animate]). How do we know who's the most salient guy in the sentence? +----+----+ +----+----+ / /| |\ Jaakko Leino /| |\ \ +----+ | | + PhD student + | | +----+ | | +----+ | | +----+ | | | |/ \ \| University of Helsinki |/ / \| | +----+ +----+ Department of General +----+ +----+ |\ \ /| | linguistics | |\ / /| | +----+ | | www.helsinki.fi/~jaaleino/ | | +----+ | + | | +----+ jaakko.leino at helsinki.fi +----+ | | + \| |/ / +358-9-191 23327 \ \| |/ +----+----+ +----+----+ From eitkonen at UTU.FI Tue Apr 25 08:08:06 2000 From: eitkonen at UTU.FI (Esa Itkonen) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 11:08:06 +0300 Subject: Form Message-ID: How did 'formalism' get started, in the first place? It got started when Chomsky claimed in the early 60's that the basic terms of syntax (= S, NP, VP, N, V, etc.) need not be defined as long as 'the system works'. This was claimed in ANALOGY with the axiomatization of Newtonian physics (popularized at the time by Nagel, Hempel, and others). However, this ANALOGY was misconceived from the start. In reality, the cross-linguistic framework required all the time an implicit reliance on such NON-formal notions as thing vs. action, reference vs. predication, agent vs. patient, human vs. non-human, etc. 'Functionalism' has 'only' made explicit what had previously been implicit. 'Functionalism' has 'only' done this, but to me it seems a lot. I may be mistaken, but it seems at least possible that, in the opinion of those who disagree with me, some additional obscurity will be shed on the issue in my forthcoming book 'Analogy inside linguistics and outside'. Esa Itkonen From dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK Tue Apr 25 07:52:05 2000 From: dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK (Dick Hudson) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 08:52:05 +0100 Subject: subject-object flip-flop In-Reply-To: <0004249565.AA956584635@router-8.camnet.com> Message-ID: Dear David, An interesting message. Of course RENT is 'correctly' used for both directions: I can rent a bike either to or from you. I don't think there's anything very surprising about these flip-flop cases - the verb refers to the whole situation, the choice of subject is at least partly arbitrary, and the verbs concerned are all pretty rare so learners don't have that much chance to check against their models. What's interesting about such cases, from the point of view of general theory, is that they demonstrate rather clearly that our choice of subject and object is NOT so constrained by universal principles that our choice of subject candidate is guaranteed to reduce to one. Dick At 08:46 24/04/2000 -0400, you wrote: > Oy! > > I apparently hit the wrong button and got a half-baked message into my > outbox instead of the drafts box. I apologize to you all, and > particularly to the organizers of the "Conference: Syntax & Semantics > in Dubrovnik", whose subject line wound up on my message even though > the message had nothing to do with the conference. > > But, I am interested in the question (about structures that flip-flop > their subject and object) and would be interested in you all's ideas > about what functional pressures shape such anomalies. > > --David Tuggy > > Richard (= Dick) Hudson Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. +44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108; http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm From jtang at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Tue Apr 25 15:59:16 2000 From: jtang at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (Joyce Tang Boyland) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 08:59:16 -0700 Subject: flip-flop predicates Message-ID: Along lines similar to Greg Thomson's: My informal thought on how meanings can get and stay flipped is that there's a lot more uncertainty+indeterminacy going on when people use language than linguists often acknowledge. In on-line sentence production, people are having to choose something quickly that's in the right semantic neighborhood (syntactic too, for that matter), even if they don't quite "know" the "correct" form at that moment. I made that argument in my dissertation for why people sometimes say things like "Why would've you done that?". When you ask them in a survey whether they'd say "Why would you have?" or "Why would've you?" they are often puzzled, and say, Hm, I don't know. When people speak, though, they have to make these split-second decisions, and all sorts of cognitive (and social) factors start playing a part in what form gets selected. Anyway, then, once the heterogeneity starts, it propagates, (by frequency effects etc.), particularly when there is some uncertainty in the first place. If you think about the cognitive aspects of hypercorrection, you have some of the same features -- reversal of the originally sanctioned usage, arising (at least partly) from uncertainty and surviving (at least partly) because of continued flip-flopped input. I've recently finished a paper on this, and in the works is another paper giving empirical + computational evidence for cognitive factors in the propagation of arbitrary forms in general. ___________________________________________________________________ Joyce Tang Boyland Alverno College (Dept. of Psychology) & UW-Milwaukee (Dept. of Foreign Languages + Linguistics) From david_tuggy at SIL.ORG Tue Apr 25 11:56:49 2000 From: david_tuggy at SIL.ORG (David Tuggy) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 07:56:49 -0400 Subject: flip-flop predicates Message-ID: Bert.Peeters at utas.edu.anu writes: In my own usage of Dutch (Flemish, the Belgian variety), "wat mankeer je" is mos tly used not to enquire about a person's ailments, but about what (s)he appears to b e missing. For ailments, I'd rather say "wat mankeert er" (and I would translate i t as "what is it that ails"). Even so, the problem is the same verb would never be us ed in the answer, and I think Leon Stassen's usage wouldn't differ from mine in thi s respect. Therefore, oblique marking on the ailment is unverifiable and it's not a complete flip-flop. Bert -- Dr Bert Peeters Acting Head School of English & European Languages & Literatures University of Tasmania GPO Box 252-82 Hobart TAS 7001, Australia Tel.: +61 (0)3 6226 2344 Fax.: +61 (0)3 6226 7631 E-mail: Bert.Peeters at utas.edu.au www.arts.utas.edu.au/efgj/french/index.htm www.arts.utas.edu.au/efgj/french/staff/peeters/peeters.htm From Gary.Holton at UAF.EDU Tue Apr 25 18:08:39 2000 From: Gary.Holton at UAF.EDU (Gary Holton) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 10:08:39 -0800 Subject: Fellowship in Alaska Native Languages Message-ID: GRADUATE FELLOWSHIP IN ALASKA NATIVE LANGUAGES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ALAKSA The University of Alaska invites applications for a Graduate Fellowship in Linguistics and Alaska Native Languages. The fellowship is open to post-baccalaureate students who are actively engaged in learning an Alaska Native Language and who intend to pursue a career in teaching or researching that language. It is intended to provide students with the financial resources to devote full attention to completing a graduate degree. Students will work closely with a committee of faculty to determine appropriate coursework and research design. The student must be accepted for graduate work at UAF under one of the following options: 1) M.Ed. in Language and Literacy; 2) M.A. or Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology; 3) an interdisciplinary M.A. or Ph.D. (For more information on these degree programs, consult the UAF catalog or call the number below.) Terms of the award This award provides a $10,000 stipend in addition to tuition and fees. Recipients must maintain continuous full-time enrollment and good academic standing at UAF throughout the tenure of the award. Please note, award recipients may not be employed during the tenure of the award. Application Procedure For more information see our website at: http://www.uaf.edu/linguist/fellowship.html Or contact: Dr. Charlotte Basham Linguistics Program Box 757720 University of Alaska Fairbanks, AK 99775-7720 (907) 474-6884 [voice] (907) 474-7453 [fax] ffcsb at uaf.edu Application deadline: June 15, 2000 The University of Alaska Fairbanks is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and Educational Institution. -- ============================== Gary Holton Alaska Native Language Center P.O. Box 757680 University of Alaska Fairbanks, AK 99775-7680 (907) 474-6585 [voice] (907) 474-6586 [fax] gary.holton at uaf.edu http://www.uaf.edu/anlc From lise.menn at COLORADO.EDU Wed Apr 26 03:13:13 2000 From: lise.menn at COLORADO.EDU (Lise Menn) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 21:13:13 -0600 Subject: flip-flops Message-ID: The source for 'flip-flops' presumably has to be some point during language acquisition when the child is trying to solve the problem of how the participant roles for each verb are encoded. That's probably very early, to judge from the fact kids at the 1-word stage are reported as being able to distinguish whether a picture of transitive asymmetrical action fits better with 'Big Bird and Oscar are gorping' or 'Big Bird is gorping Oscar' (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, Origins of Grammar, 1997). A recent Colorado dissertation by Andrea Feldman reports her son's early use of 'carry' to mean 'ride in someone's arms, be carried by someone' - e.g. in demanding that he and not his baby sister be carried. So 'Laura carry Daddy' meant that Laura was being carried by their father. This fits in with Jaakko Leino's idea of the salience of the subject, if for Feldman's child, what was most salient (hence encoded as subject) was the fortunate child who got to be carried, the beneficiary of the action. Lise Menn Beware Procrustes bearing Occam's razor. Lise Menn's home page http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/ "Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia" http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf From hilaryy at RUF.RICE.EDU Wed Apr 26 04:25:18 2000 From: hilaryy at RUF.RICE.EDU (Hilary Young) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 23:25:18 -0500 Subject: borrowing Message-ID: I have been reading about contact languages and I came across the claim that languages will borrow up to 45% of their vocabulary, which would usually be considered heavy borrowing, or 90-100% which would be the case in many bilingual mixtures/mixed languages (where the syntax remains that of the �original language�). The claim is that no languages will borrow between 45% and 90% - that there is no continuum between extensive borrowing and mixed languages (Bakker+Mous, 1994 'Mixed Languages', pg 5). I was wondering if the members of this list could contribute examples or counterexamples of this. Also, does anyone have a functional explanation of why this might be? Thanks, Hilary Young Rice University From lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Wed Apr 26 06:51:39 2000 From: lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (George Lakoff) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 23:51:39 -0700 Subject: Emily's List Message-ID: Emily Bender has been collecting answers to the question, "What is a grammar a model of?" Here's mine: A grammar of a language - including the lexicon - models the capacity of native speakers to express ideas using the language and to understand ideas expressed by others in discourse. This entails: (1) Since grammar is about speakers' capacities, it must take seriously what is know about the mind and brain, including our knowledge of the embodiment of mind. What is required is a cognitive grammar, consistent with knowledge of how the brain works (e.g., consistent with what we know about neural structure and neural computation) (2) Serious cognitive semantics. Linguists are responsible for giving an account of the ideas expressed - that is a theory of the conceptual systems of speakers and of the concepts expressible in the language. This will include what has been learned in cognitive semantics - Prototypes and basic-level categories, radial categories, image-schemas, force-dynamics, windowing of attention, frame semantics, conceptual metaphor and metonymy, mental spaces, and conceptual blending. (3) Dynamic simulation semantics: An account of dynamic mental simulation of what sentences mean in context using background knowledge, with inferences flowing from the simulation. This means that sentences must contain enough information to characterize the parameters needed for such a simulation. (4) Constructions: General mappings between surface phonological forms and meanings in such a form that they can be used in real time. This requires a construction grammar in which both form and meaning have a bodily grounding. And it must work probabilistically to account for the facts that: (1) certain psycholinguistic effects (like garden-path sentences) are dependent on frequency of lexical items, where frequency for a speaker is presumably reflected in strength of neural connections, and (2) change is in process, with constructions having various degrees of entrenchment, again presumably reflecting varying strengths of neural connections. (5) Grammars must be able to fit a theory of recruitment learning to mesh with Chris Johnson's discoveries about the role of conflation in the extension of constructions, polysemy, and metaphor. (6) Whatever is universal in grammar should come out of what is universal about the ideas expressed and the cognitive/neural capacities to express and understand them online and to have them govern mental simulations in context. George Lakoff -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 2669 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK Wed Apr 26 07:40:05 2000 From: dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK (Dick Hudson) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 08:40:05 +0100 Subject: borrowing In-Reply-To: <001901bfaf37$90765740$f4b02a80@rice> Message-ID: *English* is supposed to have about 60% borrowed vocabulary (mostly from French, Latin or Greek)! At 23:25 25/04/2000 -0500, you wrote: >I have been reading about contact languages and I came across the claim that >languages will borrow up to 45% of their vocabulary, which would usually be >considered heavy borrowing, or 90-100% which would be the case in many >bilingual mixtures/mixed languages (where the syntax remains that of the > original language ). The claim is that no languages will borrow between >45% and 90% - that there is no continuum between extensive borrowing and >mixed languages (Bakker+Mous, 1994 'Mixed Languages', pg 5). I was >wondering if the members of this list could contribute examples or >counterexamples of this. Also, does anyone have a functional explanation of >why this might be? > >Thanks, > >Hilary Young >Rice University > > Richard (= Dick) Hudson Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. +44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108; http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm From Zylogy at AOL.COM Wed Apr 26 16:32:51 2000 From: Zylogy at AOL.COM (Jess Tauber) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 12:32:51 EDT Subject: borrowing Message-ID: Vietnamese is supposed to be @60% borrowed Chinese vocabulary, heavily restructured phonologically to the point folks used to think it was related to Tai, though Thompson has demonstrated it's Austroasiatic origins. Jess Tauber zylogy at aol.com From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Wed Apr 26 16:41:07 2000 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 18:41:07 +0200 Subject: borrowing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hilary Young wrote: >I was wondering if the members of this list could contribute examples or >counterexamples of this. Also, does anyone have a functional explanation >of why this might be? It is not particularly difficult at to find exceptions to this generalisation -- the most obvious one being, as Dick Hudson pointed out, English, with its 60% or so of borrowed material. Until recently, I thought that was pretty exceptional, but I have now realised that it is more common that I originally thought. For instance, figures of borrowed vocabulary that have been suggested for some other languages include: Korean - at least more than half Swedish - 65-70% Vietnamese - 60-70% Breton - 60-80% (including 40% core vocab) Lolak (Austronesian) - 80% Vlax Romani - 90% (note that this is not a so-called Para-Romani variety!) Hungarian - 90% Albanian - 90% Clearly, then, such languages abound. I still think Bakker & Mous have a point, though, that there is a rather clear difference between languages such as the above, and what I would call truly mixed (aka "intertwined") languages. In the former case, borrowing goes, so to speak, from the periphery and towards the core. Presumably, the 10% of Fenno-Ugric lexical material in Hungarian is core vocabulary, whereas the core is mostly Spanish (ie from the "intruding" language in an intertwiner such as Media Lengua). Similarly, while English is 60% French, there are only six French items on the English version of the Swadesh 100 list. Secondly, it would probably be possible to divide those 90% borrowed items according to 1) different source languages, and/or 2) different diachronic layers (as manifested by different sound correspondences or the like). I would suspect that what I would call true intertwined languages (eg Media Lengua and Michif), on the other hand, typically derive the "borrowed" lexicon from one single source language to the virtual exclusion of others, and the "borrowed" component can not be demonstrated to have grown over time, but seems rather to have entered the language all at once. So, while it is not remarkable that most of a language's word stock gets replaced bit by bit over time, it is indeed remarkable that a large proportion (and in particular its core vocabulary) is replaced overnight, and this is what makes intertwined languages unique. I think that is what Bakker & Mous were after, although the expressed themselves somewhat awkwardly. As for Hilary Young's follow-up question "does anyone have a functional explanation of why this might be?", the way I see it (and I'm now deliberately oversimplifying) is that borrowing reflects one culture being impressed by another. There may then be a "critical mass" of how many borrowings can be received from one language at any one given time before the perceived cultural superiority of the other party would make you rather want to shift language altogether. In other words, there is a limit for how impressed you can be by somebody without giving in completely, and you want to become fully assimilated. So (if we for the sake of discussion) assume the Bakker & Mous quote to be true, 45% would reflect speakers of A being impressed by speakers of B, 100% would reflect a complete language shift to B, and 90%+ would represent the unique cases of language intertwining. 45% is then the threshold that represents the point where there is no longer any perceived use for the ethnic language as a symbol of identity -- this would then be (empirically, if the quote were true) how impressed you can be before being completely outcooled by the socioeconomically superior group. Again, I am of course deliberately oversimplifying here, but I hope you get the point. /MP * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Mikael Parkvall Institutionen för lingvistik Stockholms Universitet SE-10691 STOCKHOLM +46 (0)8 16 14 41, +46 (0)8 656 68 24 (home) Fax: +46 (0)8 15 53 89 parkvall at ling.su.se Creolist Archives: http://www.ling.su.se/Creole -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From susan at LING.UTA.EDU Wed Apr 26 17:55:17 2000 From: susan at LING.UTA.EDU (Susan Herring) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 12:55:17 -0500 Subject: language endangerment and universals Message-ID: For my Language Universals and Linguistic Typology course this semester, I would like to have my students read something about the consequences of global language endangerment and loss for the study of linguistic universals and typology. Ken Hale touches on this theme briefly in his 1992 article in Language, but does not develop it fully. Has anything been written recently that tackles this important issue head on? I am teaching the course from a Functional-Typological perspective, but would be receptive to using articles from any theoretical perspective, as long as they engage responsibly with issues that loss of linguistic diversity raises for the scholarly investigation of language universals. Thanks, Susan Herring From bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Apr 26 18:16:56 2000 From: bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Emily Bender) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:16:56 -0700 Subject: flip-flop predicates In-Reply-To: <200004251559.IAA21090@cogsci.berkeley.edu> from "Joyce Tang Boyland" at Apr 25, 2000 08:59:16 AM Message-ID: Another example of a flip-flop predicate: 'subcategorize', as in: This verb is subcategorized for a PP complement. This verb subcategorizes for a PP complement. -- Emily From jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU Wed Apr 26 19:52:58 2000 From: jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:52:58 -0800 Subject: schema reading Message-ID: Hi, I'm looking for a short (max. 30-40 pages) reading introducing schema/frame/cognitive model theory to students who are beginners at linguistics. I've cruised chapters of various books ('Women, Fire & Dangerous Things', 'Cultural Models of Language & thought'), but haven't found a straightforward introduction. Anybody have any tips? -- Thanks! Jo ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics English Department, California Polytechnic State University One Grand Avenue • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 Tel. (805)-756-2184 • Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone. 756-259 • E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu • Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba ** "Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally" - Frank Oppenheimer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From david_tuggy at SIL.ORG Wed Apr 26 19:49:04 2000 From: david_tuggy at SIL.ORG (David Tuggy) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 15:49:04 -0400 Subject: flip-flop predicates Message-ID: A number of examples people are sending in are interesting, and no doubt relevant, cases of something approaching a flip-flop, where something changes, say, from object to subject, but where the concomitant change of the erstwhile subject to object doesn't take place. I think this is such an example. I don't speak the dialect involved here with any confidence :-), but I don't think you can say A PP complement subcategorizes for this verb with the meaning that used to be/might still be phrased as This verb subcategorizes for a PP complement nor can you say A PP complement is subcategorized for this verb and mean This verb is subcategorized for a PP complement The other kinds of progression from one argument slot to another are indeed interesting, and probably relevant, but they are (1) more common and in that sense less noteworthy, and more importantly (2) they don't as blatantly violate the functional pressure to keep clear who's doing what to whom. Those two factors are what make the full flip-flops so striking. Generally linguistic changes are shiftings of place like at the Mad Hatter's tea party, where everybody moves down one space and only one gets a clean plate (i.e. where BC(DEF...) becomes AB(CDE...)). Reciprocal place-swapping (flip-flopping) is less normal. And of course things sometimes get jammed up at one end: AB(CDE...) becomes AA'(BCD...), and sometimes the thing at the end of the line gets thrown out (A becomes A-chomeur, so to speak). E.g. vowel shifts usually work like that, so it is striking to find a place in Utah (reported to me by Jeff Burnham, some of whose relatives speak the dialect) where "ar" and "or" have changed places, so that you would pork the cor in the born, but also you might eat park-link sausages, or have been barn during a parring rainstarm. That case is not just a shift, but what we've been calling a flip-flop. --David ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Re: flip-flop predicates Author: at Internet Date: 4/26/2000 11:16 AM Another example of a flip-flop predicate: 'subcategorize', as in: This verb is subcategorized for a PP complement. This verb subcategorizes for a PP complement. -- Emily From paul at BENJAMINS.COM Thu Apr 27 18:28:57 2000 From: paul at BENJAMINS.COM (Paul Peranteau) Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 14:28:57 -0400 Subject: Three New Books in of Functional Interest Message-ID: John Benjamins Publishing has published these three books which deal with Functional themes: Grammaticalization. Studies in Latin and Romance morphosyntax. Jurgen KLAUSENBURGER (University of Washington) Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 193 US & Canada: 1 55619 971 6 / USD 59.00 (Hardcover) Rest of world: 90 272 3700 X / NLG 118.00 (Hardcover) In this monograph, various aspects of the morphosyntactic evolution of the Romance languages are shown to interact in a theory of grammaticalization. The study argues for the incorporation and subordination of inflectional morphology within a grammaticalization continuum, constituting but a portion of the latter. Parameters of natural morphology are seen as principles of grammaticalization, but the reverse is also true, rendering grammaticalization and natural morphology indistinguishable. In the context of this theoretical framework, Chapter 2 deals with Latin, French, and Italian verbal inflection, focusing on universal and system-dependent parameters of natural morphology. In Chapter 3, a theory of grammaticalization is built on divergent elements, including not only grammaticalization studies proper, but also the perception/production line of inquiry, and typology and branching issues, permitting the phasing out of the traditional synthesis/analyis cycle. Chapter 4 touches on nominal inflection, in particular that of Old French and Rumanian, the most revealing histories in the Romance domain. Chapter 5, finally, thoroughly discusses extant theoretical questions in grammaticalization, prominently featuring the relevance of 'invisible hand' explanations and the crucial role played by unidirectionality. This study will be of interest to specialists in Romance and historical linguistics, as well as morphological theory. Text and Context in Functional Linguistics. Mohsen GHADESSY (University of Brunei Darussalam) (ed.) Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 169 US & Canada: 1 55619 885 X / USD 89.00 (Hardcover) Rest of world: 90 272 3674 7 / NLG 178.00 (Hardcover) The shift towards a sociolinguistic approach to the analysis of language in the last few decades has necessitated new definitions for a number of concepts that linguists have taken for granted for a long time. This volume attempts to demystify the important notions of 'text' and 'context' by providing clear definitions and examples within the assumptions of Systemic Functional (SF) linguistics. After a discussion of the role and significance of context by three eminent SF linguists in section one, the influence of context on text is dealt with in section two 'From Context to Language'. Section three 'From Language to Context' considers textual features and their relationship to contextual factors. All the contributors base their analyses on data collected from a variety of spoken and written registers of contemporary English. Contributions by: M.A.K. Halliday; J.R. Martin; W. Bowcher; M. O'Donnell; R. Hasan; C. Cloran; G. Thompson; M. Ghadessy. The Prominence of Tense, Aspect and Mood. D.N.S. BHAT (Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore) Studies in Language Companion Series 49 US & Canada: 1 55619 935 X / USD 65.00 (Hardcover) Rest of world: 90 272 3052 8 / NLG 130.00 (Hardcover) The book puts forth an exciting hypothesis for the typologist. Its major claim is that languages can generally be regarded as belonging to a tense-prominent, aspect-prominent or mood-prominent language type. This grouping can be based upon the relative prominence that languages attach to one or the other of the three verbal categories, namely tense, aspect and mood, by grammaticalizing the chosen category to a greater degree than others, and by making it more obligatory, more systematic and more pervasive than others. The grouping, however, involves a gradation, as is indeed the case with other typological groupings, with some languages manifesting the relevant characteristic more strikingly than others. There are several characteristics that can be correlated with the relative prominence that languages attach to verbal categories. For example, tense-prominent languages tend to have mostly active but not stative verbs. They also tend to keep adjectives as a distinct category, or group them with nouns but not with verbs. Verbal forms used for foregrounding generally belong to the most prominent verbal category. These and other similar correlations make this typological classification worth pursuing. The book also contains a descriptive study of the three verbal categories. John Benjamins Publishing Co. Offices: Philadelphia Amsterdam: Websites: http://www.benjamins.com http://www.benjamins.nl E-mail: service at benjamins.com customer.services at benjamins.nl Phone: +215 836-1200 +31 20 6762325 Fax: +215 836-1204 +31 20 6739773 From gthomson at MAC.COM Fri Apr 28 03:10:37 2000 From: gthomson at MAC.COM (Greg Thomson) Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 21:10:37 -0600 Subject: Emily's List Message-ID: At 23:51 -0700 25/04/00, George Lakoff wrote: >A grammar of a language - including the lexicon - models the capacity of >native speakers to express ideas using the language and to understand >ideas expressed by others in discourse. In 1977 you and H. Thompson (BLS 3) suggested that "Grammars are just collections of strategies for understanding and producing sentences". I like that better than the above "model[of] the capacity to express ideas... and to understand ideas expressed by others..." For one thing, it puts understanding first. In learning his or her language, the child must first learn how the forms of the language determine/constrain understanding. We should never forget that functions of linguistic form are fundamentally comprehension functions. Comprehension first. I also like your 1977 formulation better because it seems more concrete. You went on to say in 1977 that "grammars do not have any separate mental reality; they are just convenient fictions for representing certain processing strategies". Actually, that may not be quite right either. What people have is strategies for reacting to elements of linguistic form. And on top of that, they learn to provide the elements that will cause analogous reactions in others. Grammars are perhaps best thought of as descriptions of the elements of form themselves. But a description of those processing triggers is not a description of the processing strategies you referred to (in 1977). Only the latter are inside of people. Right? Greg From W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Fri Apr 28 12:19:17 2000 From: W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 14:19:17 +0200 Subject: Reflexives and language acquisition Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, I currently prepare a course on the typology of reflexives. Apart from standard issues I want to raise the question whether the description of how reflexives structures are acquired by children can contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive foundations of reflexivity. Doing so, I allude to recent proposals to introduce aspects of language acquisition as another (important) parameter to explain linguistic (and functional) variation. My question now is whether there is any relevant literature on the acquisition of reflexive structure (both with respect to single languages and cross-linguistically) that I may have overlooked. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks! -- ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 München Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** From keith_slater at SIL.ORG Fri Apr 28 13:34:49 2000 From: keith_slater at SIL.ORG (Keith Slater) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 09:34:49 -0400 Subject: borrowing Message-ID: Fred Field addresses this claim in a 1999 article in the Southwest Journal of Linguistics (Vol. 18, No. 2). Although he provides only a couple of potential counter-examples, he suggests that there is no reason in principle that borrowed items could not constitute somewhere between 50-90% of a language's lexicon. It seems to depend to some extent on how one defines a mixed language. Bakker wants to limit the category to include languages which have their grammatical system from one source and their lexicon from another; so this means that 90% or more of the vocabulary is more or less by definition from a single source. But others define the category differently, and come up with different results. ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: borrowing Author: at Internet Date: 4/25/00 11:25 PM I have been reading about contact languages and I came across the claim that languages will borrow up to 45% of their vocabulary, which would usually be considered heavy borrowing, or 90-100% which would be the case in many bilingual mixtures/mixed languages (where the syntax remains that of the 'original language'). The claim is that no languages will borrow between 45% and 90% - that there is no continuum between extensive borrowing and mixed languages (Bakker+Mous, 1994 'Mixed Languages', pg 5). I was wondering if the members of this list could contribute examples or counterexamples of this. Also, does anyone have a functional explanation of why this might be? Thanks, Hilary Young Rice University From msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Fri Apr 28 14:24:38 2000 From: msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX (Ricardo Maldonado) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 16:24:38 +0200 Subject: Reflexives and language acquisition Message-ID: Dear Wolfgang: I hope this reference is of help for your course: 1998 Donna Jackson, Ricqrdo Mqldonqdo and Donna Thal. "Reflexive and Middle Markers in Early Child Language Acquisition: Evidence from Mexican Spanish". Yasushiro Shirai (ed.). First Language. The acquisition of tense-apsect morphology. 18.3,54: 403-429 Best regards Ricardo Maldonado At 14:19 28/04/2000 +0200, Wolfgang Schulze wrote: >Dear Funknetters, > >I currently prepare a course on the typology of reflexives. Apart from >standard issues I want to raise the question whether the description of >how reflexives structures are acquired by children can contribute to a >better understanding of the cognitive foundations of reflexivity. Doing >so, I allude to recent proposals to introduce aspects of language >acquisition as another (important) parameter to explain linguistic (and >functional) variation. My question now is whether there is any relevant >literature on the acquisition of reflexive structure (both with respect >to single languages and cross-linguistically) that I may have >overlooked. > >Any help will be appreciated. Thanks! > >-- >***************************** >Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze >Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft >Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München >Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 >D-80539 München >Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 >Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de >http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ >***************************** > > Ricardo Maldonado Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, UNAM 2a de Cedros 676, Jurica, Queretaro Mexico 76100 tel: (52) (4) 218 02 64 fax: (52) (4) 218 68 78 msoto at servidor.unam.mx From jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU Fri Apr 28 19:36:42 2000 From: jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 11:36:42 -0800 Subject: thanks - schema readings summary Message-ID: Thanks to a number of people (listed below -- forgive any omissions!) who responded with suggestions for readings on schema theory. Here's a list of full references of things recommended: F. Ungerer & H.J. Schmid. 1996. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. London & New York: Longman. Taylor, J. (1989). Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory. Oxford Press. Mike Tomasello, editor, "The New Psychology of Language," (1998, LEA), which includes articles by Langacker, Givon, Goldberg, Croft, Wierzbicka ... Fillmore, Charles J. 1982. Frame semantics. Linguistics in the morning calm, ed. The Linguistic Society of Korea, 111-137. Seoul: Hanshin.* Fillmore, Charles J. 1985. Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di semantica 6:222-54.* Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert (eds.) (1995). Handbook of pragmatics. Manual + Supplements. Amsterdam [etc.] : Benjamins. Thanks to: Michael Israel, Ken Hugoniot, Hans Peters, Elaine Francis, Gisela Redeker, Pamela Faber, W. Smith from CSUSB, Suzanne Kemmer, Barb Kelly. Jo Rubba ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics English Department, California Polytechnic State University One Grand Avenue • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 Tel. (805)-756-2184 • Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone. 756-259 • E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu • Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba ** "Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally" - Frank Oppenheimer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Sat Apr 29 23:06:41 2000 From: lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (George Lakoff) Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 16:06:41 -0700 Subject: reflexives Message-ID: Dear Prof. Schulze, While you are doing your typology of reflexives, I wonder if you and your students could check to see how reflexives in various languages adistributed aover the various metaphors for the self (see Ch. 13 of Philosophy in the Flesh). We have preliminary results for Japanese, but not much else besides English. George Lakoff From jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES Sat Apr 1 22:07:35 2000 From: jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES (Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro) Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 00:07:35 +0200 Subject: frequency and agreement In-Reply-To: <38E5219A.68D3887B@indiana.edu> Message-ID: At 17:07 -0500 31/3/00, Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden wrote: >Is anyone aware of work that has been done on grammatical agreement and >frequency? For example, if a verb agrees with an object (variably) by >(variably)adding some sort of verbal inflection, at what point is there >generally considered to be "agreement." Is it at 50%, 75%, 100% of the >time? >The particular phenomenon that I am working with is indirect object >clitic-doubling in Spanish. This has been called agreement by many >working in formalist and functionalist frameworks. I am interested in >at what point clitic-doubling ceases to be doubling and begins to be >grammatical agreement. Any references to relevant literature (perhaps >in the field of grammaticalization?) would be greatly appreciated. If >there is sufficent interest, I'll post a summary. > >Andrew I'm afraid I have no answer to your first question. But your second question has an interesting (for me at least ) 'implicature': doubling and agreement are different things in an example such as: _le di el bal?n a Peter_ . I think that, in this example, indirect object doubling and indirect object agreement with the clitic 'le' are two different analyses, and not two different grammatical processes. That is, if you consider 'le' a pronoun, there is doubling, and if you consider 'le' an agreement marker, there is agreement. It depends on the analysis, then. If what you mean is the historical process, there is an interesting work by Fontana Fontana, J. (1993): Phrase Structure and the Syntax of Clitics in the History of Spanish. Doctoral Dissertation, Pensilvania. and, of course, a classic you surely know: Giv?n, T (1976): "Topic, Pronoun, and Grammatical Agreement", in Li, C., Ed. (1976): Subject and Topic. Academic Press: New York: 149-188. The following may be useful too (both from synchronic and diachronic points of view): Authier, J.M. (1992): "Arbitrary Null Object Languages in a Parametric Theory of Linguistic Variation". In Lakarra, J.A. & J. Ortiz de Urbina (eds.) (1992): Syntactic Theory and Basque Syntax. San Sebasti?n: Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia/Diputaci?n Foral de Guip?zcoa: 37-52. Cartagena, N. (1972): Sentido y estructura de las construcciones pronominales en espa?ol, Concepcion (Chile): ICL Gu?ron, J. (1991): "Le clitique se et la grammaire des pronoms ind?finis". In J. Gu?ron y J-Y. Pollock (eds.): Grammaire g?n?rative et syntaxe compar?e. Par?s: ?ditions du CNRS:. 191-213. Lehamnn, Ch. (1995): Thougts on Grammaticalization. Lincom Europa, M?nchen. Mendikoetxea, A. (1992): "Some Speculations on the Nature of Agreement". In Lakarra & Ortiz de Urbina, Eds. (1992): 233-264. Monge, F. (1955): "Las frases pronominales con sentido impersonal en espa?ol". In Archivo de Filolog?a Aragonesa, 7, pp.: 7-102. Su?er, M. (1988): "The Role of Agreement in Clitic-Doubled Constructions". In Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 6/3: 391-434. Best regards, Jose-Luis. From W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Mon Apr 3 12:36:00 2000 From: W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 14:36:00 +0200 Subject: frequency and agreement Message-ID: Andrew asked: > Is anyone aware of work that has been done on grammatical agreement and > frequency? For example, if a verb agrees with an object (variably) by > (variably)adding some sort of verbal inflection, at what point is there > generally considered to be "agreement." Is it at 50%, 75%, 100% of the > time? > > The particular phenomenon that I am working with is indirect object > clitic-doubling in Spanish. This has been called agreement by many > working in formalist and functionalist frameworks. I am interested in > at what point clitic-doubling ceases to be doubling and begins to be > grammatical agreement. > In this context, statistics appears to be a rather problematic indicator, at least to me. The grammaticalization of clitics (or what-so-ever) as agreement markers has a high functional value (e.g., focus, anaphoric or cataphoric (pragmatic) reference (clefting), assignment of syntactic functions (grounding)...). In case a language system is 'on the way' to develop agreement techniques we should expect that the occurence or 'missing' of agreement elements correponds to the activation degree of such functional properties. Consider the following example from Udi (South East Caucasian): (1) chowal-ay tur-e sa cac baIq'-ec-e sparrow-gen foot-dat one thorn stick-intrans-perf 'In the sparrow's foot there was stuck a thorn.' (2) chowal sa karna-n-a-ne tac-i sparrow:abs one old=woman-sa-dat-3sg:s go:past-aor 'The sparrow went ('flew') to an old woman.' (3) chowal t'ia ar-i p-i-ne s^o-t'-u sparrow:abs there come:past-aor say-aor-3sg:a dist-sa-dat 'The sparrow came there [and] said to her...' In (1) AGR is mssing, in (2) it is present, and in (3) it is missing with the first verb, but present with the second one. The distribution of both patterns is conditioned by functional aspects: In (1) we have a stative construction without a distinct focus constituent, in (2) the 'old woman' is focused (constituent focusing) [note that we have floating agreement clitics in Udi!], in (3) _ari_ and _pine_ are chained which conditions that only the last part of such a chain is marked by a clitic. If we count all occurences of agreement elements in an Udi text, we would arrive at perhaps 60% (depending on the kind of text you choose, some text go up to 95%). This figure would tell us that agreement techniques in Udi have strong functional properties in a synchronic perspective (which can also be inferred from the 'floating' technique). The problem Andrew addresses is associated with the presence or absence of pronominal referents (that is agreement is trigerred by personal pronouns or something like that). Only in such instances we can describe 'doubling' techniques, scugh as Udi (4) zu kala-zu I big-1sg:s 'I [am] big (foc).' (5) zu-zu kala I-1sg:s big 'I (foc) am big' It sounds logical (to me) to call such a technique an 'agreement' technique if the pronominal constituent can be deleted, cf. (6) kala-zu big-1sg:s 'I am big' (no constituent focus here) In such cases, the clitic does not have an overt (textual) antecedent but serves to identify a given actant on the verb. But I do not think that this assumption is adequate in the opposite sense. A language has (pronoun based) agrement if the clitic in question can appear without its antecedent (but not necessarily does). A language has a system of pronominal doubling, if the antecedent can appear without the clitic (but not necessarily does). [Note that I superficially use 'antecedent' for any kind of pronominal trigger ('ante-cedent' (anaphoric) as well as 'post-cedent' (cataphoric)] Wolfgang -- ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet M?nchen Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 M?nchen Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU Tue Apr 4 03:22:28 2000 From: jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 19:22:28 -0800 Subject: Need Quechua translation Message-ID: Hello all, I am looking for someone who can translate (morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, plus idiomatic translation, and verification of phonemic transcription) of a song in Quechua (don't know which dialect). If there is anyone out there who can help with this, please get in touch with me. The song is not terribly long. It's called 'Tinku'. I'm using it in an intro linguistics class, and would like to be able to say what the words mean!! Thanks in advance. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics English Department, California Polytechnic State University One Grand Avenue ? San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 Tel. (805)-756-2184 ? Fax: (805)-756-6374 ? Dept. Phone. 756-259 ? E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu ? Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba ** "Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally" - Frank Oppenheimer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From agarbode at indiana.edu Tue Apr 4 10:03:18 2000 From: agarbode at indiana.edu (Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 05:03:18 -0500 Subject: frequency and agreement Message-ID: Wolfgang Schulze wrote: > In such cases, the clitic does not have an overt (textual) antecedent > but serves to identify a given actant on the verb. But I do not think > that this assumption is adequate in the opposite sense. > A language has (pronoun based) agrement if the clitic in question > can appear without its antecedent (but not necessarily does). > A language has a system of pronominal doubling, if the antecedent > can appear without the clitic (but not necessarily does). > [Note that I superficially use 'antecedent' for any kind of > pronominal trigger ('ante-cedent' (anaphoric) as well as 'post-cedent' > (cataphoric)] And if a language has both, then it is possibly on the way from one type to another? All three types occurs in Spanish (I have been looking at the Madrid and Buenos Aires dialects as represented in journalism). They following are constructed, but possible, examples. Juan le envio el libro a su madre. JUAN CLITIC-SEND-PAST DET BOOK BEN POSS MOTHER. 'Juan sent the book to his mother.' Juan envio el libro a su madre. 'Juan sent the book to his bother.' Juan le envio el libro. 'Juan sent her/him the book.' Andrew > > Wolfgang > -- > ***************************** > Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze > Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft > Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet M?nchen > Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 > D-80539 M?nchen > Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 > Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de > http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ > ***************************** > -- Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden Department of Linguistics and Department of Spanish and Portuguese Indiana University Ballantine Hall 848 Bloomington, IN 47405 U.S.A. From msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Tue Apr 4 15:36:00 2000 From: msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX (Ricardo Maldonado) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 10:36:00 -0500 Subject: frequency and agreement In-Reply-To: <38E9BDE6.B9A35C47@indiana.edu> Message-ID: A minor comment on Andrew's observation on clitic doubling in Spanish. The cases where the NP does not have the clitic in Spanish are highly marked and most probably correspond to an recent development in the language. While example 2)repeated here: 2) Juan envio el libro a su madre. 'Juan sent the book to his bother.' is possible, it is highly marked in several dialects of Latin American Spanish. Examples 1) and 3) below are the most natural outputs. Even in mre conservative dialects structure 2) corresponds to literary and formal uses. Only in the last Century however 2) was the normal way to code indirect objects (benfactives do not take clitic doubling). This suggests, I beleive, a recent historical development in Spanish towards clitic doubling. I hope this helps Best regards Ricardo >> A language has (pronoun based) agrement if the clitic in question >> can appear without its antecedent (but not necessarily does). >> A language has a system of pronominal doubling, if the antecedent >> can appear without the clitic (but not necessarily does). >> [Note that I superficially use 'antecedent' for any kind of >> pronominal trigger ('ante-cedent' (anaphoric) as well as 'post-cedent' >> (cataphoric)] > >And if a language has both, then it is possibly on the way from one type >to another? All three types occurs in Spanish (I have been looking at >the Madrid and Buenos Aires dialects as represented in journalism). >They following are constructed, but possible, examples. > 1) Juan le envio el libro a su madre. JUAN CLITIC-SEND-PAST DET BOOK BEN POSS MOTHER. 'Juan sent the book to his mother.' 2) Juan envio el libro a su madre. 'Juan sent the book to his bother.' 3) Juan le envio el libro. 'Juan sent her/him the book.' >Andrew > > >> >> Wolfgang >> -- >> ***************************** >> Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze >> Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft >> Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet M?nchen >> Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 >> D-80539 M?nchen >> Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 >> Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de >> http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ >> ***************************** >> > >-- > >Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden >Department of Linguistics and >Department of Spanish and Portuguese >Indiana University >Ballantine Hall 848 >Bloomington, IN 47405 >U.S.A. > > From hartmut at RUC.DK Tue Apr 4 18:44:16 2000 From: hartmut at RUC.DK (Hartmut Haberland) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 20:44:16 +0200 Subject: frequency and agreement Message-ID: Cases of 'clitic doubling' in Modern Greek are clearly not optional since clitic doubling in this language has a pragmatic function (roughly Topic marking, although this interacts in an intricate way with VS/SV word order). This doesn't mean you cannot do statistics on this phenomenon; but it is not a case of (socio)linguistic variation, rather it codes (pragmatic) meaning. The following two articles which I wrote with Johan van der Auwera mainly deal with clitic resumption in relative clauses, but contain ample references to the general discussion on clitic doubling: 1987. Doubling and Resumption in Modern Greek. In: Mel?tes gia tin ellinik? gl?ssa/Studies in Greek Linguistics. Proceedings of the 8th annual meeting of the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, 27-29 April 1987 (A Festschrift for John Chadwick), 323-334 1990. Topics and Clitics in Greek Relatives, Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 22:127-157 (The latter reference is probably more easily accessible.) Regards, Hartmut Haberland From tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Wed Apr 5 09:39:13 2000 From: tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 02:39:13 -0700 Subject: frequency and agreement Message-ID: Maybe it is time to mention (I may have missed it) that the kind of "pragmatic variation" that one finds in Greek & Spanish (& many Bantu lgs too, for that matter; there was a nice article on Zulu by Sr. Euphrasia Kunene in the mid 1970's in Studies in African Linguistics that described some of the early, non-obligatory ["pragmatic"] stages of this) -- is but a diachronic stage in the rise of obligatory object agreement. The frequencies creep slowly up the old "topicality hierarchies", gradually inching toward 100% for some categories. So as Ricardo Maldonado has pointed out, for several Latin-American varieties of Spanish, Dative agreement is approaching obligatory status. So nobody should be disturbed by finding less than 100% in any particular language. In parenthesis, also, I think the term "clitic doubling" is a bit funny. All these things begin rather innocently with L-dislocation or R-dislocation constructions. Only within some very ancient versions generative theory that perceive the contrast of PRO vs. NP as a totally exclusive one (and does not recognize grammatical agreement as a pronominal phenomenon, thus leading to the further hilarity of "pro-drop"...) does this appear remarkable. TG ======================== Hartmut Haberland wrote: > > Cases of 'clitic doubling' in Modern Greek are clearly not optional > since clitic doubling in this language has a pragmatic function (roughly > Topic marking, although this interacts in an intricate way with VS/SV > word order). This doesn't mean you cannot do statistics on this > phenomenon; but it is not a case of (socio)linguistic variation, rather > it codes (pragmatic) meaning. > > The following two articles which I wrote with Johan van der Auwera > mainly deal with clitic resumption in relative clauses, but contain > ample references to the general discussion on clitic doubling: > > 1987. Doubling and Resumption in Modern Greek. In: Mel?tes gia tin > ellinik? gl?ssa/Studies in Greek Linguistics. Proceedings of the 8th > annual meeting of the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philosophy, > Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, 27-29 April 1987 (A Festschrift > for John Chadwick), 323-334 > > 1990. Topics and Clitics in Greek Relatives, Acta Linguistica Hafniensia > 22:127-157 > > (The latter reference is probably more easily accessible.) > > Regards, Hartmut Haberland From iwasaki at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Wed Apr 5 07:42:29 2000 From: iwasaki at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (Shoichi Iwasaki) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 00:42:29 -0700 Subject: Thai and Vietnamese positions at UCLA Message-ID: Job Openings The Program in South and Southeast Asian Languages and Cultures (SSEALC) at UCLA seeks applicants for one lecturer position each in Thai and Vietnamese for the academic year 2000-2001 with possibility of renewal. Thai Language Position The lecturer in Thai will be responsible for two (or three) levels of instruction (pending funding). Demonstrated excellence in teaching at all levels of Thai. The lecturer will work collaboratively with other language lecturers in the program, participate in curriculum development, including establishing rigorous programs for both "heritage" and "non-heritage" students. Candidates must have native or near-native fluency in Thai, advanced degrees (Ph.D. preferred), background in Linguistics, and previous experience in language teaching in an English-speaking educational setting. Vietnamese Language Position The demand for Vietnamese language has grown rapidly, and this is the first time the position is being advertised as a full-time one. The lecturer will be responsible for coordinating all instruction in Vietnamese and teaching two or three levels (pending funding). The lecturer will work collaboratively with other language lectures in the program, and work toward establishing rigorous programs for both "heritage" and "non- heritage" students. Candidates must have native or near-native fluency in Vietnamese, familiarity with both northern and southern dialects, advanced degrees (Ph.D. preferred), a background in Linguistics, and previous experience in language teaching in an English-speaking educational setting. SSEALC is part of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures [http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/ealc/], and works closely with the newly established Center for Southeast Asian Studies [http:// www.isop.ucla.edu/cseas]. Review of candidates will begin May 1, 2000. Applications should include a letter of interest, CV, and three letters of recommendation. Applications should be sent to: Shoichi Iwasaki, Director of South and Southeast Asian Languages Program, c/o Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, 290 Royce Hall, Box 951540, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1540. UCLA is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply. AA/EOE. From kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU Wed Apr 5 19:23:13 2000 From: kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Keith Johnson) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 15:23:13 -0400 Subject: Summer School - Ohio State University Message-ID: Second Notice Updated information available on the website. --------------------------- Summer 2000 at Ohio State University Spoken Language in Context: Methods and Models During July of 2000, the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University will be offering a unique combination of short courses aimed at exploring spoken language, with a particular focus on the empirical study of naturally-occurring speech through various instrumental, quantitative, and analytic means. Scholars, researchers (industry or academic), and students are invited to join us for an intense and rewarding summer session. Course offerings: Laboratory Phonology - Mary Beckman Quantitative Methods - Michael Broe Field Phonetics - Keith Johnson Historical Phonology - Brian Joseph & Richard Janda Practicum in English Intonation - Julia McGory The Pragmatics of Focus - Craige Roberts For more information see the website: http://ling.ohio-state.edu/SU2000 From dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu Wed Apr 5 20:18:09 2000 From: dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu (John W. Du Bois) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 13:18:09 -0700 Subject: Language and Spatial Information; CSDL registration deadlines Message-ID: Please note the there will be a special pre-conference session on: "Language and Spatial Information" at the conference on "Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language" (May 11-14, 2000, at UC Santa Barbara) Details of the program for this session are given below. The program for the entire conference will be posted within a week. Please note that the deadline for early registration for the CSDL conference is fast approaching: your check made out to "UC Regents" in the appropriate amount ($50 general, $30 student), in US dollars drawn on a US bank, should be *postmarked* by April 15, and sent to: CSDL Registration Linguistics Department UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, California 93106 Please make your arrangements for lodging soon too: the rooms we have reserved for the conference will be held only until April 20, and are first-come, first-serve. For full information on lodging and registration, consult our web site at: http://linguistics.ucsb.edu/events/CSDL/CSDL.htm Or contact me at: dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu John Du Bois Patricia Clancy Dan Montello ================================== Session Program for "Language and Spatial Information" Session time: Thursday, May 11, 7:00-9:30pm 7-7:25 pm "Describing Routes and Events" Barbara Tversky Dept. of Psychology, Stanford University 7:30-7:55 pm "Environmental Influences on Route Descriptions: A Component Analysis" Gary Allen Dept. of Psychology, University of South Carolina 8-8:25 pm "Natural Language in a GIS" Helen Couclelis Dept. of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara 8:30-8:55 pm "Where Do Basic (Geo)Spatial Relations Between Lines and Regions Come From?" David M. Mark Dept. of Geography, State University of New York at Buffalo 9-9:25 pm "A Formalism of Metaphorical Transfer -- From Spatial to Non-Spatial" Andrew Frank Dept. of Geoinformation, Technical University, Vienna, Austria From bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sat Apr 8 13:30:21 2000 From: bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Emily Bender) Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2000 06:30:21 -0700 Subject: Request for references Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, In my dissertation, I have come to the question of what a linguist's grammar is a model of. I am writing to this list in the hopes that you might be able to provide references to places in the functionalist literature where this question has been addressed. Thank you, Emily Bender From edith at CSD.UWM.EDU Tue Apr 11 19:55:46 2000 From: edith at CSD.UWM.EDU (Edith A Moravcsik) Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 14:55:46 -0500 Subject: Sixth Himalayan Languages Symposium Message-ID: The Sixth Himalayan Languages Symposium will be held June 15-17 2000 on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. The program is given below. For program updates and information on registration and accommodations, consult Mickey Noonan's webpage at http://www.uwm.edu/~noonan or e-mail either Mickey (noonan at uwm.edu) or Edith Moravcsik (edith at uwm.edu). ***************************************************************************** SIXTH HIMALAYAN LANGUAGES SYMPOSIUM JUNE 15-17 2000 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE CURTIN HALL #175A (3243 N. DOWNER AVENUE, MILWAUKEE, WI) PROGRAM THURSDAY, JUNE 15 THURSDAY MORNING: 8:00-8:30 /TITLE TO BE ANNOUNCED/ Michael Noonan, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee 8:30-9:00 ONE LANGUAGE, TWO SYSTEMS. NEPAL BHASHA VERB MORPHOLOGY Daya R. Shakya, A Center for Nepalese Language and Culture, Portland, OR 9:00-9:30 A TYPOLOGY OF VERB AGREEMENT IN BURUSHASKI Gregory D. S. Anderson and Randall H. Eggert, University of Chicago 9:30-10:00 THE IRREALIS CATEGORY IN CAODENG rGYALRONG Jackson T.-S. Sun, Academia Sinica, Taiwan * * * * * * 10:00-10:30 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 10:30-11:00 REFLEXIVE VERBS IN KOITS (SUNWAR) Dvrte Borchers, Himalayan Languages Project, Leiden University 11:00-11:30 A COMPARATIVE SKETCH OF TWO MAGAR DIALECTS Karen Grunow-Harsta, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee 11:30-12:00 REFLEXIVES IN OMBULE Jean Robert M.L. Opgenort, Himalayan Languages Project, Leiden University * * * * * * 12:00-2:00 LUNCH * * * * * * THURSDAY AFTERNOON: 2:00-2:30 LEXICAL ANAPHORS IN KHASI AND LONG-DISTANCE BINDING Saralin A. Lyngdoh and K.V. Subbarao, University of Delhi 2:30-3:00 DEICTIC CATEGORIES IN THE WEST BODISH LANGUAGES OF NEPAL. A TYPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Tej R. Kansakar, Tribhuvan University 3:00-3:30 A DIMENSION MISSED: EAST AND WEST IN SITU rGYLARONG ORIENTATION-MARKING You-Jing Lin, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan 3:30-4:00 MOTION EXPRESSIONS IN GHALE Holly Smith, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 4:00-4:30 PRONOUNS AND PROFORMS D.N.S. Bhat, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore * * * * * * 4:30-5:00 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 5:00-6:30 WORKSHOP /TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED/ David Gil, Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig FRIDAY, JUNE 16 FRIDAY MORNING: 8:00-8:30 SYNTACTIC ERGATIVITY AND PRAGMATICS: RAISING AND CONTROL IN BELHARE Balthasar Bickel, University of California at Berkeley and University of Z|rich 8:30-9:00 OBJECT MARKING IN CENTRAL TIBETAN Ellen Bartee, University of California at Santa Barbara 9:00-9:30 /TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED/ Cassandra Stephens, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee 9:30-10:00 CASE MARKING AND GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS IN SOME INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES OF NEPAL C.M. Bandhu, Tribhuvan University * * * * * * 10:00-10:30 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 10:30-11:00 THANGMI TIME CONCEPTS OF THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE Mark Turin, Himalayan Languages Project, Leiden University 11:00-11:30 RELATIVE CLAUSES IN KHOWAR Elena Bashir, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 11:30-12:00 THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELATIVE CLAUSES IN THE TIBETAN DIALECTS OF LENDE (KYIRONG) Brigitte Huber, University of Berne * * * * * * 12:00-2:00 LUNCH * * * * * * FRIDAY AFTERNOON: 2:00-2:30 THE CULTURAL ASPECTS OF BORROWING "CULTURE": CIRCULATION OF "SAMKRTI" IN BHAKTAPUR, NEPAL Gregory Price Grieve, University of Chicago 2:30-3:00 PATTERNINGS OF VOCALIC SEQUENCES: EVIDENCE FROM TIBETO-BURMAN LANGUAGES Kathy L. Sands, University of California at Santa Barbara 3:00-3:30 AN ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF TONE IN MANANGE Kristine A. Hildebrandt, University of California at Santa Barbara 3:30-4:00 COMPARATIVE PHONOLOGY OF MANCHAD AND BUNAN Suhnu Ram Sharma, Deccan College, Pune and Himalayan Language Project, Leiden * * * * * * 4-4:30 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 4:30-6 WORKSHOP /TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED/ Ian Maddieson, University of California in Los Angeles SATURDAY, JUNE 17 SATURDAY MORNING: 8:00-8:30 ON FINITE CLAUSES IN KINNAURI NARRATIVES Anju Saxena, Uppsala University 8:30-9:00 INDEXICAL CATEGORIES IN KHAM AND CENTRAL TIBETAN Krisadawan Hongladarom, Chulalongkorn University 9:00-9:30 ON TAMANGIC IMPERATIVES Isao Honda, Nagoya College 9:30-10:00 HONORIFICS IN BARAGAUNLE Mary Brehm, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee * * * * * * 10:00-10:30 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 10:30-11:00 INFLECTIONAL TENSE CATEGORIES IN DOLAKH. NEW.R Carol Genetti, University of California at Santa Barbara 11:00-11:30 TYPES OF VERBS AND FUNCTIONS OF THE CAUSATIVE SUFFIX -K IN NEWARI Kazuyuki Kiryu, Mimasaka Women's College 11:30-12:00 A UNIFIED ACCOUNT OF NEPALI VERB INFLECTION Gilles Boyi, University of Paris 7 * * * * * * 12:00-2:00 LUNCH * * * * * * SATURDAY AFTERNOON: 2:00-2:30 /TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED/ Werner Winter, University of Kiel 2:30-3:00 THE TIBETAN TRANSLATION OF THE PANINI-SUTRA: A STUDY Narendra Kumar Dash, Visva-Bharati University 3:00-3:30 THE FOCUSING FUNCTIONS OF "YIN" AND "YV" IN IMIGRI DOKPA TIBETAN Nancy J. Caplow, University 3:30-4:00 THE GONGDUK LANGUAGE OF CENTRAL BHUTAN George van Driem, Himalayan Language Project, Leiden * * * * * * 4:00-4:30 COFFEE BREAK * * * * * * 4:30-6:00 WORKSHOP /TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED/ Matthew Dryer, State University of New York in Buffalo ************************************************************************ Edith A. Moravcsik Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413 USA E-mail: edith at uwm.edu Telephone: (414) 229-6794 /office/ (414) 332-0141 /home/ Fax: (414) 229-2741 From jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU Wed Apr 12 04:20:44 2000 From: jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 20:20:44 -0800 Subject: share room at CSDL? Message-ID: Hi folks, I hope you don't consider this an inappropriate use of the listserv ... I'm looking for someone who would like to share a hotel room at CSDL (yes, I live in San Luis Obispo, but that is still 1.5 hrs' drive away). I would probably want to stay Friday and Sat. nights. Looking for a female non-smoker. Oh, I'll have transportation, so you'll have rides! Cheers, Jo ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics English Department, California Polytechnic State University One Grand Avenue ? San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 Tel. (805)-756-2184 ? Fax: (805)-756-6374 ? Dept. Phone. 756-259 ? E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu ? Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba ** "Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally" - Frank Oppenheimer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu Thu Apr 13 22:28:48 2000 From: dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu (John W. Du Bois) Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 15:28:48 -0700 Subject: CSDL 2000 Conference Program Message-ID: Following is the preliminary program for the conference on "Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language" (CSDL 2000), to be held at UC Santa Barbara May 11-14, 2000. Please note that the postmark deadline for early registration is April 15. Also, special rates on conference hotels are available only until April 20, so please make your hotel reservations now. For program update, registration, lodging, and other conference information please see our web site at: http://linguistics.ucsb.edu/events/CSDL/CSDL.htm John Du Bois CSDL 2000 Organizing Committee dubois at humanitas.ucsb.edu Preliminary Program: Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language 2000 [Revised April 12, 2000] Note: All CSDL events (except the banquet) take place in the University Center (UCen, pronounced U-Cen) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. All plenary sessions are in Corwin Pavilion East (excluding the two Thursday afternoon workshops, which are in the Santa Barbara Harbor Room). Other rooms are indicated in the program version posted on the web. Thursday May 11 (afternoon) 12-8:00 PM Registration 1:30-3:00 Gilles Fauconnier (San Diego), Mark Turner (Maryland) and Eve Sweetser (Berkeley) Workshop: Topics in Blending Theory 3:00-3:30 Coffee Break 3:30-5:00 John Du Bois (Santa Barbara) and Patricia Clancy (Santa Barbara), Organizers Workshop: Topics in Discourse, Grammar, and Interaction 5:00-7:00 Dinner Break 7:00-9:30 Dan Montello (Santa Barbara), Organizer Pre-Conference Session: Language and Spatial Information 7:00-7:30 Barbara Tversky (Stanford) "Describing Routes and Events" 7:30-8:00 Gary Allen (South Carolina) "Environmental Influences on Route Descriptions: A Component Analysis" 8:00-8:30 Helen Couclelis (Santa Barbara) "Natural Language in a Geographic Information System" 8:30-9:00 David M. Mark (SUNY Buffalo) "Where Do Basic (Geo) Spatial Relations Between Lines and Regions Come From?" 9:00-9:30 Andrew Frank (Technical University, Vienna) "A Formalism of Metaphorical Transfer: From Spatial to Non-Spatial" Friday May 12 (morning) 8:30-8:45 Welcome and Opening Remarks 8:45-9:45 George Lakoff (Berkeley) The Neural Theory of Language (Plenary Lecture) 9:45-10:15 Coffee Break 10:15-12:15 Acquisition of Grammar 10:15-10:45 Patricia Clancy "Exceptional Casemarking in Korean Acquisition: A Discourse-Functional Account" 10:45-11:15 Nancy Budwig & Bhuvana Narasimhan "Transitive and Intransitive Constructions in Hindi-Speaking Caregiver-Child Discourse" 11:15-11:45 Holger Diessel & Michael Tomasello "The Emergence of Relative Constructions in Early Child Language" 11:45-12:15 Michael Israel "How Children Get Constructions" 10:15-12:15 Grammar of Pre-/Postpositions & Particles 10:15-10:45 Nancy Chang & Benjamin Bergen "Spatial Schematicity of Prepositions in Neural Grammar" 10:45-11:15 Stefan Gries "Particle Placement in English: A Cognitive and Multifactorial Investigation" 11:15-11:45 David Zubin & Klaus-Michael Koepcke "Experiencer in the Landscape: Gender in the Geographic Lexicon of German" 11:45-12:15 Kyoko Masuda "The Evidence from Conversation for a Usage-Based Model: The Occurrence and Non-Occurrence of Japanese Locative Particles in Conversation" 10:15-12:15 Metaphor 10:15-10:45 Eleni Koutsomitopoulos "The Role of Conceptual Metaphor in Knowledge Engineering: Metaphor-Based Ontologies" 10:45-11:15 Mary Helen Immordino "Metaphor Use in a Seventh-Grade Science Lesson: Implications for Students' Understandings" 11:15-11:45 Mari Takada, Kazuko Shinohara & Fumi Morizumi "Socio-Cultural Values as Motivation of Mapping: An Analysis of Daughter-as-Commodity Metaphor in Japanese" 11:45-12:15 Kevin Moore "More vs. Less Language-Specific Temporal Concepts" 12:15-1:30 Lunch Break Friday May 12 (afternoon) 1:30-2:30 Rachel Giora (Tel Aviv) Salience and Context Effects: The Case of Humor (Plenary Lecture) 2:30-3:30 Literal & Nonliteral Meaning 2:30-3:00 Mira Ariel "Salient, Linguistic, and Interactional Meanings: The Demise of a Unique Literal Meaning" 3:00-3:30 Balthasar Bickel "Conversational Relativity: An Aspect of Irony and Reproach in Belhare" 2:30-3:30 Argument Structure + 2:30-3:00 Ki-Sun Hong "Thematic Roles and Cognition: A Case of Korean Idioms" 3:00-3:30 Tsuyoshi Ono "Japanese (W)Atashi 'I': It's Not Just a Pronoun" 2:30-3:30 Prosody 2:30-3:00 Scott Liddell "Suprasegmentals at the Core of an English Construction" 3:00-3:30 [TBA] 3:30-4:00 Coffee Break 4:00-5:00 Literal & Nonliteral Meaning 4:00-4:30 Paula Lima, Raymond Gibbs, & E. Francozo "DESIRE IS HUNGER: New Ideas About Old Conceptual Metaphors" 4:30-5:00 Barbara Holder &Seana Coulson "Hints on How to Drink from a Fire Hose: Conceptual Blending in the Wild Blue Yonder" 4:00-5:00 Argument Structure 4:00-4:30 Jean-Pierre Koenig "Class Selectivity and the Participant/Setting Distinction" 4:30-5:00 Patrick Farrell "The Conceptual Structure of "Agentive" -er" 4:00-5:00 Interactionally Distributed Cognition 4:00-4:30 Gene Lerner "Finding 'Interactionally Distributed' and 'Shared' Cognition in Searching for a Word" 4:30-5:00 Monica Turk "Discontinuity and Conversational Uses of 'and'" 5:00-7:00 Dinner Break 7:00-8:00 Sandra Thompson (Santa Barbara) Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Object Complements (Plenary Lecture) 8:00-9:00 Wallace Chafe (Santa Barbara) Discourse Appreciation (Plenary Lecture) Saturday May 13 (morning) 9-10 Dedre Gentner (Northwestern) Analogy (Plenary Lecture) 10-10:30 Coffee Break 10:30-12:30 Analogy 10:30-11:00 Jeffrey Loewenstein & Dedre Gentner "Spatial Relational Language Facilitates Preschoolers' Understanding of Relations" 11:00-11:30 Esther Kim "Analogy as Discourse Process" 11:30-12:00 David Uttal & Jeffrey Loewenstein "On the Relation Between Maps and Analogies" 12:00-12:30 Lindsey Engle "Analogy in US Classrooms: Pedagogical Processes Structuring the Acquisition of Abstract Mathematical Concepts" 10:30-12:30 Form, Meaning, and Mapping 10:30-11:00 Mark Lee & John Brandon "Metaphor, Pretence and Counterfactuals" 11:00-11:30 Michael Hanson "The Importance of Being Ironic: Uses of Irony in A Group Discussion about Race, Gender and Adulthood" 11:30-12:00 Haldur Oim "STRAIGHT in Estonian" 12:00-12:30 Pilar Duran & Stacy Kingler "Positive and Negative Evidence Provided to Hispanic Women by Children and Teachers" 10:30-12:30 Syntax Across Clauses 10:30-11:00 Beaumont Brush "Force, Time, and Predicate Structure in Interclausal Relations" 11:00-11:30 Cristiano Broccias "A Cognitive Account of English Resultative Constructions" 11:30-12:00 Joseph Park "The Intonation Unit as a Cognitive Unit: Evidence from Korean Complex Sentences" 12:00-12:30 Mirna Pit "Subjectivity in Causal Coherence Relations" 12:30-1:30 Lunch Break Saturday May 13 (afternoon) 1:30-2:30 Kathryn Bock (Illinois) The Persistence of Structural Priming in Language Production (Plenary Lecture) 2:30-3:30 Priming in Discourse 2:30-3:00 John Du Bois "Reusable Syntax: Socially Distributed Cognition in Dialogic Interaction" 3:00-3:30 Michele Emanatian "Metaphor Clustering in Discourse" 2:30-3:30 Sound and Meaning 2:30-3:00 Tim Rohrer "Conceptual Integration Networks in Political Thought: Visual and Phonemic Blends" 3:00-3:30 Benjamin Bergen "Probabilistic Associations Between Sound and Meaning: Belief Networks for Modeling Phonaesthemes" 2:30-3:30 Non-Literal Meaning Across Languages 2:30-3:00 Heather Bortfield "Comprehending Idioms Cross-Linguistically" 3:00-3:30 Ashlee Bailey "On the Non-Existence of Blue-Yellow and Red-Green Color Terms: The Case of Semantic Extension" 3:30-4:00 Coffee Break 4:00-5:30 Phonology: Sound and Use 4:00-4:30 Joan Bybee "Phonological Clues to the Size of Storage and Processing Units" 4:30-5:00 Liang Tao "Transnumerality and Classifier: Do They Come as a Package Deal?" 5:00-5:30 Marilyn Vihmann "The Role of Vocal Production in the Ontogeny of Language: Theoretical and Experimental Evidence" 4:00-5:30 Grammaticization and Language Use 4:00-4:30 Shoichi Iwasaki "Structural Reanalysis in Discourse" 4:30-5:00 Kaoru Horie & Debra Occhi "Borrowing for 'Thinking For Speaking': A Case Study from Japanese" 5:00-5:30 Ritva Laury "The Definite Article in Interlanguage and Grammaticization: A Comparison" 4:00-5:30 Metaphor, Blending, and Change 4:00-4:30 Hilary Young & Anatol Stefanowitsch "Domain Blending in English: The adj-and-adj Construction" 4:30-5:00 Mei-Chung Liu "Categorical Structure and Semantic Representation of Mandarin Verbs of Communication" 5:00-5:30 Josef Ruppenhofer & Esther J. Wood "Pragmatic Inferencing and Metaphor in Semantic Change" 5:30-5:40 Break 5:40-6:40 Charles Li (Santa Barbara) The Evolutionary Origin of Language (Plenary Lecture) 6:40-7:30 Cash Bar (Faculty Club) 7:30-9:30 Banquet (Faculty Club) Sunday May 14 9:30-10:30 Mark Turner (Maryland) Compression in Thought and Language (Plenary Lecture) 10:30-45 Coffee Break 10:45-12:15 Cognition in Gesture & Sign 10:45-11:15 Alan Cienki "Gesture, Metaphor, and Thinking for Speaking" 11:15-11:45 Paul Dudis "Visible Tokens in Signed Languages" 11:45-12:15 Sarah Taub "Description of Motion in ASL: Cognitive Strategies Rather Than Arbitrary Rules" 10:45-12:15 Syntax Within the Clause 10:45-11:15 Terry Klahfen "Cognitive Processing of Japanese Inflectional Morphology" 11:15-11:45 Victor Balaban "I Was Blessed by the Virgin Mary: Use of Passive Constructions to Reduce Agency in Naturally Occurring Religious Discourse" 11:45-12:15 Todd McDaniels "Deictic Shift as a Function of Preposing in Comanche Narrative" 10:45-12:15 Acquisition of Narrative 10:45-11:15 Molly Losh "Affective and Social-Cognitive Underpinnings of Narrative: Insights from Autism" 11:15-11:45 Anita Zamora, Sarah Kriz & Judy Reilley "The Linguistic Encoding of Stance in Written and Spoken Texts: A Developmental Study" 11:45-12:15 Ravid Abramson "The Distribution of Non-Imageable Predicates: A Developmental Perspective" 12:15-1:15 Lunch Break 1:15-2:15 Metaphor & Personification/ Objectification 1:15-1:45 Joe Grady "Personification and the Typology of Conceptual Metaphors" 1:45-2:15 Melinda Chen "A Cognitive-Linguistic View of Linguistic (Human) Objectification" 1:15-2:15 Origins of Relational Meaning: Cognitive Influences and Cross-Linguistic Evidence 1:15-1:45 Lorraine McCune "Relational Meaning: Sources in Infant Perception, Motion and Cognition" 1:45-2:15 Marilyn Vihmann & Lorraine McCune "Relational Words: Cross-Linguistic Evidence" Soonja Choi [Discussant] 1:15-2:15 Meaning in Discourse 1:15-1:45 Kingkarn Thepkanjana "Semantic Variations of the Verb in Context: A Case Study in Thai" 1:45-2:15 Masahiko Minami "Establishing Viewpoint: Wrapping-up Devices in Japanese Oral Narrative Discourse" 2:15-3:15 Ron Langacker (San Diego) Viewing Arrangements and Experiential Reporting (Plenary Lecture) 3:15-3:30 Closing: John Du Bois, Patricia Clancy, Dan Montello From vanvalin at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Mon Apr 17 15:42:25 2000 From: vanvalin at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (vanvalin at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 11:42:25 -0400 Subject: Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik Message-ID: New Theoretical Perspectives on Syntax and Semantics in Cognitive Science September 2-10, 2000 Dubrovnik, Croatia ORGANIZERS University of Zagreb ? Center for Technology Transfer State University of New York at Buffalo, USA International Center of Croatian Universities, Dubrovnik, Croatia COMMITTEE Zrinka Jelaska, University of Zagreb, Croatia Melita Kovacevic, University of Zagreb, Croatia Ranko Matasovic, University of Zagreb, Croatia Robert D. Van Valin Jr., State University of New York at Buffalo, USA David Wilkins, Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, the Netherlands Milena Zic Fuchs, University of Zagreb, Croatia CONFERENCE SECRETARIES Nina Tudjman, University of Zagreb, Croatia Irena Zovko, University of Zagreb, Croatia CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS Cognitive Syntax and Semantics Conference ? CSSCC 2000 Center for Technology Transfer Ivana Lucica 5 10000 Zagreb CROATIA phone:+385 1 6168530 fax: +385 1 6118710 e-mail: ctt.cogsci at fsb.hr http://www.ffzg.hr/oling/tekst/eng/conf.html The webpage will be updated regularly. LOCATION The conference will be held at the International Center of Croatian Universities in Dubrovnik, Croatia. LANGUAGE English COURSES (September 3-7) A five-day working week of courses will be held by: Melissa Bowerman (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) Language Acquisition; title tba Dan Everett (SIL International Brazil) ?Lexical Integrity and Word-formation in Optimality Theory? Ranko Matasovic (University of Zagreb) ?Synchronic and Diachronic Typology of Syntactic Structures? (tentative) James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University, Massachussets) ?Generative Lexicon and semantic theory? Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (State University of New York, Buffalo) ?Syntactic Theory? David Wilkins (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) ?Diachronic Semantics? Courses will be held from Sunday, September 3 until Thursday, September 7. Participants are expected to arrive on Saturday, September 2. All participants will receive a certificate of attendance. CONFERENCE The five-day course week will be followed by a three-day conference, from Friday, Sept. 8 until Sunday, Sept. 10. DEADLINES Preregistration for both Courses and Conference: May 1, 2000 Abstracts submission (for the 3 day conference): June 1, 2000 ABSTRACTS Abstracts should not be more than 300 words in length. Also include Name(s) of Author(s), Affiliation, Address, E-mail and Phone and Fax numbers. Abstracts should be preferably submitted by E-mail. If sent by surface mail, please include disk. REGISTRATION The registration fee is US$ 150 for the courses and US$ 150 for the conference. For both events, the fee is US$ 250. The fee will include use of conference materials, opening reception, coffee, refreshments and lunches. There will be a limited number of grants for students (please contact conference secretaries for more information). An online preregistration form is available on the Conference website. ACCOMODATION Dubrovnik offers a wide range of hotels, most of which are within walking distance from the conference site. More information including prices will be given in the second announcement. OTHER USEFUL INFORMATION About Croatia: http://www.hr About Dubrovnik: http://www.hr/dubrovnik Croatia Airlines: http://www.ctn.tel.hr/ctn Dubrovnik Hotels: http://www.dubrovnikhotels.hr *************** Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. Tel 716 645-2177, ext. 713 Professor & Chair Fax 716 645-3825 Department of Linguistics 609 Baldy Hall State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260-1030 USA VANVALIN at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU From kiekhoef at EVA.MPG.DE Mon Apr 17 16:30:40 2000 From: kiekhoef at EVA.MPG.DE (Kai Kiekhoefer) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 18:30:40 +0200 Subject: Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik Message-ID: New Theoretical Perspectives on Syntax and Semantics in Cognitive Science September 2-10, 2000 Dubrovnik, Croatia ORGANIZERS University of Zagreb ? Center for Technology Transfer State University of New York at Buffalo, USA International Center of Croatian Universities, Dubrovnik, Croatia COMMITTEE Zrinka Jelaska, University of Zagreb, Croatia Melita Kovacevic, University of Zagreb, Croatia Ranko Matasovic, University of Zagreb, Croatia Robert D. Van Valin Jr., State University of New York at Buffalo, USA David Wilkins, Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, the Netherlands Milena Zic Fuchs, University of Zagreb, Croatia CONFERENCE SECRETARIES Nina Tudjman, University of Zagreb, Croatia Irena Zovko, University of Zagreb, Croatia CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS Cognitive Syntax and Semantics Conference ? CSSCC 2000 Center for Technology Transfer Ivana Lucica 5 10000 Zagreb CROATIA phone:+385 1 6168530 fax: +385 1 6118710 e-mail: ctt.cogsci at fsb.hr http://www.ffzg.hr/oling/tekst/eng/conf.html The webpage will be updated regularly. LOCATION The conference will be held at the International Center of Croatian Universities in Dubrovnik, Croatia. LANGUAGE English COURSES (September 3-7) A five-day working week of courses will be held by: Melissa Bowerman (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) Language Acquisition; title tba Dan Everett (SIL International Brazil) ?Lexical Integrity and Word-formation in Optimality Theory? Ranko Matasovic (University of Zagreb) ?Synchronic and Diachronic Typology of Syntactic Structures? (tentative) James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University, Massachussets) ?Generative Lexicon and semantic theory? Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (State University of New York, Buffalo) ?Syntactic Theory? David Wilkins (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) ?Diachronic Semantics? Courses will be held from Sunday, September 3 until Thursday, September 7. Participants are expected to arrive on Saturday, September 2. All participants will receive a certificate of attendance. CONFERENCE The five-day course week will be followed by a three-day conference, from Friday, Sept. 8 until Sunday, Sept. 10. DEADLINES Preregistration for both Courses and Conference: May 1, 2000 Abstracts submission (for the 3 day conference): June 1, 2000 ABSTRACTS Abstracts should not be more than 300 words in length. Also include Name(s) of Author(s), Affiliation, Address, E-mail and Phone and Fax numbers. Abstracts should be preferably submitted by E-mail. If sent by surface mail, please include disk. REGISTRATION The registration fee is US$ 150 for the courses and US$ 150 for the conference. For both events, the fee is US$ 250. The fee will include use of conference materials, opening reception, coffee, refreshments and lunches. There will be a limited number of grants for students (please contact conference secretaries for more information). An online preregistration form is available on the Conference website. ACCOMODATION Dubrovnik offers a wide range of hotels, most of which are within walking distance from the conference site. More information including prices will be given in the second announcement. OTHER USEFUL INFORMATION About Croatia: http://www.hr About Dubrovnik: http://www.hr/dubrovnik Croatia Airlines: http://www.ctn.tel.hr/ctn Dubrovnik Hotels: http://www.dubrovnikhotels.hr *************** Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. Tel 716 645-2177, ext. 713 Professor & Chair Fax 716 645-3825 Department of Linguistics 609 Baldy Hall State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260-1030 USA VANVALIN at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU From matmies at ling.helsinki.fi Thu Apr 20 11:10:15 2000 From: matmies at ling.helsinki.fi (Matti Miestamo) Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 14:10:15 +0300 Subject: Calls: Parts of Speech - 2nd Call Message-ID: (Apologies for any cross-postings) 2nd CALL FOR PAPERS The Linguistic Association of Finland is organizing a symposium on *** PARTS OF SPEECH IN AND ACROSS LANGUAGES *** to be held at the University of Helsinki, August 17-19, 2000. The symposium will bring together linguists interested in problems relating to parts of speech. We invite papers addressing general typological questions as well as papers taking the viewpoint of one (or more) particular language(s). Possible themes include the universality of the noun/verb distinction, (the grammaticalization of) adpositions, the status of particles and interjections in grammar and discourse. Other topics relating to parts of speech are equally welcome. Invited speakers: Leon Stassen (University of Nijmegen) Anneli Pajunen (University of Turku) Activities: Lectures by invited speakers Presentations by other participants (20 min + 10 min for discussion) Theme sessions Abstracts: The deadline for submission of abstracts (in English; max 500 words) is May 15, 2000. Please submit your abstract by e-mail to the following address: . The abstract should be included in the body of the message. E-mail submissions are strongly recommended. If, however, you send your abstract by ordinary mail, please provide an e-mail address as a contact address. Participants will be notified about acceptance by June 5, 2000. Registration: The deadline for registration and payment for all participants (with or without paper) is June 21, 2000. Register by e-mail to the address above. Registration fees: -general: FIM 200 -members of the association: FIM 100 -undergraduate and MA students free -send by giro account no 800013-1424850 to The Linguistic Association of Finland (SKY)/Symposium. When paying from abroad, please pay via Eurogiro or SWIFT to our account (number 800013-1424850) with Leonia Bank plc, Helsinki, Finland. SWIFT-address: PSPBFIHH; Telex 121 698 pgiro sf -In case of technical difficulty, payment in cash upon arrival is also accepted. Accommodation: A list of hotels is to be found at For further information, please contact , or visit the home page of the symposium at The organizing committee: Marja-Liisa Helasvuo Matti Miestamo Marja P?lsi Marja-Leena Sorjonen From kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU Thu Apr 20 20:56:02 2000 From: kjohnson at LING.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Keith Johnson) Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 16:56:02 -0400 Subject: XML at OSU Message-ID: Announcing a 5-day workshop associated with "Spoken Language in Context: Methods and Models" July 3-7, 2000 (see http://ling.ohio-state.edu/SU2000 for further information) XML and Linguistic Annotation Chris Brew Department of Linguistics Ohio State University Corpora of spoken and written language are crucial to much of linguistics, providing both quantitive and qualitative data which informs and grounds our work. Much of the material which is available is raw text, but this is complemented by a substantial and increasing number of annotated corpora. It is important to ensure that such annotated corpora are reliable, re-usable and maximally informative, but it is not immediately obvious how this is to be achieved, not least because the corpus data often stimulates research which was not envisaged at the time that the data was collected. XML(the eXtensible Markup Language) provides a standardized vehicle for the generation, processing and exchange of arbitrary structured data, including, but not limited to, texts marked up with linguistic information. Many, but no means all, corpus creation initiatives have chosen to adopt the XML route. This means that researchers who want to use (and perhaps add to) the products of these efforts need to understand something of what XML is and how it can be used. Non-linguistic applications of XML will be covered only tangentially. This workshop introduces XML as a means for creating and using linguistic annotations, gives hands-on experience of both corpus annotation and corpus use, and discusses its strengths and weaknesses as a research tool. There will be five 105 minute sessions, one per day, spread over a week, along with practical sessions covering the use of text and speech data. Students should expect to spend approximately 60 minutes per day on the practicals. The only prerequisite is a very basic training in any of the language sciences. It should therefore be accessible to all participants in "Spoken Language in Context: Methods and Models". From bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Thu Apr 20 21:28:54 2000 From: bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Emily Bender) Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 14:28:54 -0700 Subject: Request for references---summary Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, I recently posted the following query: >In my dissertation, I have come to the question of what a linguist's >grammar is a model of. I am writing to this list in the hopes that >you might be able to provide references to places in the functionalist >literature where this question has been addressed. Here is a list of references compiled from the responses I've received so far: Dik, Simon. 1997. The Theory of Functional Grammar. [Ch. 1] Harder, Peter. 1996. Functional Semantics. [around p.164] Harder, Peter. 2000. The status of linguistic facts: Rethinking the relation between cognition, social institution and utterance from a functional point of view. University of Copenhagen ms. Haukioja, Jussi. Forthcoming. "Grammaticality, Response-Dependence and the Ontology of Linguistic Objects". Nordic Journal of Linguistics 23. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol 1. [Section 2.1, also chs 2-3 more generally] Maatta, Urho. 1994. Functional explanation in morphology. PhD Thesis. [In Finnish] Maatta, Urho. 1998. Rules of language as emerging phenomena. Paper presented at the International Multidisciplinary Colloquium on Rules Rule-Following: Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, Janus Pannonius University, Pecs, Hungary. Thanks to: Peter Harder, Jussi Haukioja, Ron Langacker, J.L. Mackenzie, Urho Maatta, and David Tuggy. -- Emily Bender From david_tuggy at SIL.ORG Mon Apr 24 02:09:12 2000 From: david_tuggy at SIL.ORG (David Tuggy) Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2000 22:09:12 -0400 Subject: Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik Message-ID: Friends, A phenomenon I find fascinating is relational predicates which do a diachronic flip-flop in meaning so that the subject becomes object and vice versa. Here are a few examples from English. (1) "In charge of" used to mean "in the charge of, under the responsibility of." (You find this usage in some 19th century English literature, like Jane Austen, anyway.) Thus children would be put in charge of the nanny. Now it's backwards; the nanny (or babysitter) is put in charge of the children. (2) "Comprised of/by" used to mean "included within"; the container or whole comprised the contents or parts. For some of us pedantically-minded types that still sounds right, but for the general populous (who mispell that word wrong too) "comprised of" is synonymous with "composed of", and the contents or parts comprise the container or the whole. (I suspect that this arose malapropistically, by people unfamiliar with such erudite words as "compose" and "comprise". But I am not sure of this.) (3) "Consult (with)" used to mean talk with a wiser person in order to receive his or her counsel. It still has that usage for many of us. But others seems to use it exclusively to mean "give counsel (to), act as consultant (for)". This seems to have arisen prototypically in situations of psychological counselling, but has spread far beyond there; generally the consultee is the one who goes to the expert for advice, not the one who is gone to for counsel. (Did the whole thing arise from giving the name "consultant" to the expert, extrapolating to "consultee", and then back-forming to "consult"? Was the change from "getting counsel" to "getting counselling" relevant?) My question is: How can such backwards meanings (a) arise, (b) survive and eventually prevail? Most languages make it possible to tell most of the time, in ways independent of wide-ranging context, who is doing what to whom, and I would suppose there is a strong functional pressure to do so. But these meaning changes seem to fly in the face of such tendencies. Most meaning changes "live by keeping out of each others' way", by not having many contexts where the old and new meanings could compete directly. But these pretty much in the nature of the case occur precisely where they can cause most confusion. #3 above in particular does so, in my experience. (I have gone along for multiple paragraphs in conversation or listening to a monologue, actively trying to confirm or disconfirm one or other of the meanings the speaker might have had in mind.) I'd be interested in any comments people might have on why these changes might happen, and how they happen. Also, good examples of parallel things in English (I know there are others) or other languages would be interesting to see. And comments on how people cope during the time when the old and new meanings are in competition. --David Tuggy From l.stassen at LET.KUN.NL Mon Apr 24 14:14:08 2000 From: l.stassen at LET.KUN.NL (stassen) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 16:14:08 +0200 Subject: flip-flop predicates Message-ID: David Tuggy calls attention to (relational) predicates for which the argument structure seems to have been reversed. Here's an example of a (non-relational) predicate in Dutch. The verb "mankeren" (a loan from the French "manquer") means more or less "to ail". It used to be the case that the ailment was the subject and the afflicted person the direct object, as in: Wat mankeer-t jou? What ail-3SG.PRES 2SG.OBL "What is ailing you?" Nowadays, however, the situation is reversed, n that the "ailee" is the subject, as is indicated by its nominative case, and by the fact that the verb has agreement with it: Wat mankeer-0 jij? what ail-2SG.PRES 2SG.NOM Just thought I'd mention it. Cheers, Leon Stassen. From edith at CSD.UWM.EDU Mon Apr 24 13:39:33 2000 From: edith at CSD.UWM.EDU (Edith A Moravcsik) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 08:39:33 -0500 Subject: Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik In-Reply-To: <0004249565.AA956574729@router-8.camnet.com> Message-ID: Some other examples of verbs (or words, more generally) that have converse meanings: - English "teach" and "learn" (in some varieties, "learn" is used for "teach"; compare the proverbial answer of a parent to the teacher who complained that the child was not kept clean enough: "You are there to learn 'em, not to smell 'em!") - English "borrow" and "lend" (some people use "borrow" for "lend") - Latin "altus" 'deep', 'high' - Hungarian "ural" 'to dominate' (etymological and original meaning now dying out I believe: 'to consider somebody one's lord') ************************************************************************ Edith A. Moravcsik Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413 USA E-mail: edith at uwm.edu Telephone: (414) 229-6794 /office/ (414) 332-0141 /home/ Fax: (414) 229-2741 From david_tuggy at SIL.ORG Mon Apr 24 12:46:25 2000 From: david_tuggy at SIL.ORG (David Tuggy) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 08:46:25 -0400 Subject: Apology; subject-object flip-flop Message-ID: Oy! I apparently hit the wrong button and got a half-baked message into my outbox instead of the drafts box. I apologize to you all, and particularly to the organizers of the "Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik", whose subject line wound up on my message even though the message had nothing to do with the conference. But, I am interested in the question (about structures that flip-flop their subject and object) and would be interested in you all's ideas about what functional pressures shape such anomalies. --David Tuggy From gthomson at GPU.SRV.UALBERTA.CA Mon Apr 24 16:23:41 2000 From: gthomson at GPU.SRV.UALBERTA.CA (Greg Thomson) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 10:23:41 -0600 Subject: Conference: Syntax & Semantics in Dubrovnik In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Some other examples of verbs (or words, more generally) that have converse >meanings: > > - English "teach" and "learn" (in some varieties, "learn" is used for > "teach"; compare the proverbial answer of a parent to the teacher > who complained that the child was not kept clean enough: "You are > there to learn 'em, not to smell 'em!") > - English "borrow" and "lend" (some people use "borrow" for "lend") > - Latin "altus" 'deep', 'high' > - Hungarian "ural" 'to dominate' (etymological and original meaning > now dying out I believe: 'to consider somebody one's lord') According to common anecdotal reports and my own observations, a fairly common error among second language users involves the substitution of antonyms. Why would an L2 effort to retrieve "happy" end up activating "sad"? In relation to Tuggy's question and Edith's response, I think that an answer could lie in the tendency of the language processor to use partial information in interpreting utterances. For example, "teach" and "learn" involve conceptual structures with all the same components. The grammatical relations signalled, and the argument structure of the verbs, can work together to constrain the interpretation. However, often these cues are not necessary, as the discourse context and world knowledge may adequately constrain the interpretation. If a listener frequently interprets the verb "learn" without relying on grammatical cues, s/he might also come to produce utterances in which the verb is used with indifference with to such cues. That wouldn't interfere with further listeners' comprehension for the same reason. If it happened enough it could affect the way the verb is treated when grammatical cues _are_ processed, so that "learn" becomes ambiguous with respect to it assignment of roles to its arguments. Greg Thomson From dkp at U.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Apr 24 17:00:12 2000 From: dkp at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Dianne K. Patterson) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 10:00:12 -0700 Subject: flip-flop predicates In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000424161408.007ae610@hooft.let.kun.nl> Message-ID: How about itch? ....as in...."that thing itched me"...at least children used to say that here in Arizona...perhaps it is a little different because it has gone from being an intransitive verb...to being transitive...but I wonder if these things share some feature like shifting toward a more "normal"?? (for English) thematic relation. The "learn" (He learned me to read) sort of structure seems similar...it is a simple agent- verb-patient sort of structure, whereas our standard use of the word "learn" is a bit more abstract (the object of the verb is not always a good example of a patient)... Just a thought. Humbly yours, Dianne Patterson From wi.vandeweghe at WORLDONLINE.BE Mon Apr 24 16:51:57 2000 From: wi.vandeweghe at WORLDONLINE.BE (Willy Vandeweghe) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 18:51:57 +0200 Subject: flip-flop Message-ID: David Tuggy draws attention to the phenomenon of (subject-object- flip-flop (nice name, by the way). His questions are: How can such backwards meanings (a) arise, (b) survive, and (c) eventually prevail? The whole phenomenon seems to have to do with what in lexicology is known as 'metonymy': meanings which are very close to each other might eventually replace one another. But they also can coexist. (a) Why there is such a thing as metonymy is hard to say, but is most probably has to do with the way in which lexical information is stored in the brain. The 'flip-flop' occurs when a particular form gets attached to the related meaning: - as a diachronic process: the 'in charge of' example A nice example is also represented in the evolution from 'me liketh' (Shakespeare) to modern English 'I like' (an evolution very similar to the one in the Dutch predicate given by Stassen) - two meanings side by side: in Dutch RUIKEN ('smell') and SMAKEN ('taste') may apply to the participant receiving the smell or taste, or the participant emitting it; I think the samen holds true for English as well Die bloem ruikt (lekker) That flower smells (good) Ik ruik die bloem niet I don't smell that flower In the case of relational predicates, the metonymy results in subject-object flip-flop, but in other cases the converse relationship may take another shape: Edith Moravcsik's Lat. ALTUS example. A striking case is again to be found in Dutch: the word WAL is related to the result of digging, in two ways: it can, at least in some Flemish dialects, refer to the cavity in the ground (the moat around a castle) or to the heap of earth, e.g. used as a defense (the normal meaning in standard Dutch); the same holds true for DIJK, which in some dialects is the equivalent of Eng. 'ditch' , but in standard Dutch is used for something erected, e.g. to keep the water out (Eng. 'dike') (b) How is survival possible? Couldn't it have to do with the saliency of participants? And case hierarchies? Eng. 'like' evolved into a predicate taking a [+ animate] [+ human] participant as a subject. In the case of the smell/taste example, the contexts are very similar, but still ambiguity is impossible as the subject participant is [+ animate] and [+human] in one case, [- animate] and [-human] in the other. (c) How does it prevail? I have no answer for why in some cases the flip-flop replaces the original, and in other cases continues to exist side by side to the original. I have the impression that I haven't done much more than rewording the original question rather than answering it. Still I hope this does contribute a little bit to a better understanding of the problem. Willy Vandeweghe Ghent -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aaghbar at GROVE.IUP.EDU Mon Apr 24 18:45:48 2000 From: aaghbar at GROVE.IUP.EDU (Ali Aghbar) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 14:45:48 -0400 Subject: Question: Language Awareness Course Message-ID: I teach a language awareness course to American undergraduate students from various disciplines. For them, this is the only course about language and its role in their lives. I include both topics that deal with language in its social context and topics that are more restrictively linguistic. I will tell you more when I provide a summary of responses. Here is my question. If you were to teach a language-awareness course provided this is the only such course) to undergraduates, what three topics would you feel you must include in it? Also, if you have taught such a course, I would love to hear how you have handled it. PLEASE RESPOND. For your information, my students get bored easily, so I would prefer to include topics, or present them in such a way, that I engage the students in discussion and discovery and rely less on lecturing. Also, students prefer topics with a practical application. Reading is not a problem. Please reply to ME. I will be using the responses (anonymously, of course) in actual revision of the course and in a conference presentation. I will summarize the results for this list. Ali A. Aghbar, Dept. of English, Indiana U. of PA, Indiana PA 15705 aaghbar at grove.iup.edu Phone: 724 357 4937 From wi.vandeweghe at WORLDONLINE.BE Mon Apr 24 21:19:53 2000 From: wi.vandeweghe at WORLDONLINE.BE (Willy Vandeweghe) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 23:19:53 +0200 Subject: Fw: flip-flop Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Willy Vandeweghe To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu Sent: Monday, April 24, 2000 6:51 PM Subject: flip-flop David Tuggy draws attention to the phenomenon of (subject-object- flip-flop (nice name, by the way). His questions are: How can such backwards meanings (a) arise, (b) survive, and (c) eventually prevail? The whole phenomenon seems to have to do with what in lexicology is known as 'metonymy': meanings which are very close to each other might eventually replace one another. But they also can coexist. (a) Why there is such a thing as metonymy is hard to say, but is most probably has to do with the way in which lexical information is stored in the brain. The 'flip-flop' occurs when a particular form gets attached to the related meaning: - as a diachronic process: the 'in charge of' example A nice example is also represented in the evolution from 'me liketh' (Shakespeare) to modern English 'I like' (an evolution very similar to the one in the Dutch predicate given by Stassen) - two meanings side by side: in Dutch RUIKEN ('smell') and SMAKEN ('taste') may apply to the participant receiving the smell or taste, or the participant emitting it; I think the samen holds true for English as well Die bloem ruikt (lekker) That flower smells (good) Ik ruik die bloem niet I don't smell that flower In the case of relational predicates, the metonymy results in subject-object flip-flop, but in other cases the converse relationship may take another shape: Edith Moravcsik's Lat. ALTUS example. A striking case is again to be found in Dutch: the word WAL is related to the result of digging, in two ways: it can, at least in some Flemish dialects, refer to the cavity in the ground (the moat around a castle) or to the heap of earth, e.g. used as a defense (the normal meaning in standard Dutch); the same holds true for DIJK, which in some dialects is the equivalent of Eng. 'ditch' , but in standard Dutch is used for something erected, e.g. to keep the water out (Eng. 'dike') (b) How is survival possible? Couldn't it have to do with the saliency of participants? And case hierarchies? Eng. 'like' evolved into a predicate taking a [+ animate] [+ human] participant as a subject. In the case of the smell/taste example, the contexts are very similar, but still ambiguity is impossible as the subject participant is [+ animate] and [+human] in one case, [- animate] and [-human] in the other. (c) How does it prevail? I have no answer for why in some cases the flip-flop replaces the original, and in other cases continues to exist side by side to the original. I have the impression that I haven't done much more than rewording the original question rather than answering it. Still I hope this does contribute a little bit to a better understanding of the problem. Willy Vandeweghe Ghent -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From david_tuggy at SIL.ORG Mon Apr 24 22:53:21 2000 From: david_tuggy at SIL.ORG (David Tuggy) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 18:53:21 -0400 Subject: flip-flop predicates Message-ID: That's cool. In order to be a complete flip-flop the erstwhile subject should now be a (direct?) object: does that happen? Would the ailment now be able to appear with the OBL marking? --DT ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: flip-flop predicates Author: at Internet Date: 4/24/2000 4:14 PM David Tuggy calls attention to (relational) predicates for which the argument structure seems to have been reversed. Here's an example of a (non-relational) predicate in Dutch. The verb "mankeren" (a loan from the French "manquer") means more or less "to ail". It used to be the case that the ailment was the subject and the afflicted person the direct object, as in: Wat mankeer-t jou? What ail-3SG.PRES 2SG.OBL "What is ailing you?" Nowadays, however, the situation is reversed, n that the "ailee" is the subject, as is indicated by its nominative case, and by the fact that the verb has agreement with it: Wat mankeer-0 jij? what ail-2SG.PRES 2SG.NOM Just thought I'd mention it. Cheers, Leon Stassen. From jaakko.leino at HELSINKI.FI Tue Apr 25 06:22:22 2000 From: jaakko.leino at HELSINKI.FI (Jaakko Leino) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 09:22:22 +0300 Subject: flip-flop Message-ID: I get the feeling that the following point must have something to it: > Willy Vandeweghe wrote: > [snip] > Couldn't it have to do with the saliency of participants? And case > hierarchies? Eng. 'like' evolved into a predicate taking a [+ animate] > [+ human] participant as a subject. In most, if not all, of the examples cited so far, the subject in the "new" meaning denotes a participant that could be seen as more salient, more active and/or more in control than the one denoted by the subject in the "old" meaning. In other words: - When there's a "putting in charge" that involves the nanny and the children, it is (hopefully) the nanny who's in control. - In consultation, the expert/consultant is probably more active than the one who receives the advice. - In classroom, the teacher is (again, hopefully) more active and more in control than the students. Thus, this looks like a unidirectional process, rather than arbitrary back-and-forth flipping and flopping. I'd assume that "teach" is not used for "learn", and "lend" is not used for "borrow", for example. But, on the other hand, I'd be surprised if this were a strict rule rather than just a tendency. There must be quite a few counterexamples available. One point about how or why such backwards meanings arise is influence from other languages. To stick with the "learn" vs. "teach" example, there are languages (e.g. French and Swedish) that don't make the distinction. French "apprendre" and Swedish "l?ra" (i.e. la"ra, umlaut on the first a) mean both "teach" and "learn", and there's not an equally common verb that only means either one of the two. I remember having heard someone use "borrow" for "lend" just once (outside English classes in Finland, that is), and the speaker was Japanese. I don't know whether Japanese has separate verbs for these two meanings, but I know I always had a hard time keeping them separate since Finnish doesn't. Thus, for me, "borrow" and "lend" are synonyms (they both mean the same as the Finnish verb "lainata"), they just "happen to have" different argument structures. I know this is all pretty vague, but I think it makes more sense than nonsense anyway. I'd like to raise a further question, however: what are the properties of the "more salient" participant that makes him/her/it more salient? [+ human] and [+ animate] are good candidates, of course, but there must be more (in the classroom, for example, everyone's [+ human, + animate]). How do we know who's the most salient guy in the sentence? +----+----+ +----+----+ / /| |\ Jaakko Leino /| |\ \ +----+ | | + PhD student + | | +----+ | | +----+ | | +----+ | | | |/ \ \| University of Helsinki |/ / \| | +----+ +----+ Department of General +----+ +----+ |\ \ /| | linguistics | |\ / /| | +----+ | | www.helsinki.fi/~jaaleino/ | | +----+ | + | | +----+ jaakko.leino at helsinki.fi +----+ | | + \| |/ / +358-9-191 23327 \ \| |/ +----+----+ +----+----+ From eitkonen at UTU.FI Tue Apr 25 08:08:06 2000 From: eitkonen at UTU.FI (Esa Itkonen) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 11:08:06 +0300 Subject: Form Message-ID: How did 'formalism' get started, in the first place? It got started when Chomsky claimed in the early 60's that the basic terms of syntax (= S, NP, VP, N, V, etc.) need not be defined as long as 'the system works'. This was claimed in ANALOGY with the axiomatization of Newtonian physics (popularized at the time by Nagel, Hempel, and others). However, this ANALOGY was misconceived from the start. In reality, the cross-linguistic framework required all the time an implicit reliance on such NON-formal notions as thing vs. action, reference vs. predication, agent vs. patient, human vs. non-human, etc. 'Functionalism' has 'only' made explicit what had previously been implicit. 'Functionalism' has 'only' done this, but to me it seems a lot. I may be mistaken, but it seems at least possible that, in the opinion of those who disagree with me, some additional obscurity will be shed on the issue in my forthcoming book 'Analogy inside linguistics and outside'. Esa Itkonen From dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK Tue Apr 25 07:52:05 2000 From: dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK (Dick Hudson) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 08:52:05 +0100 Subject: subject-object flip-flop In-Reply-To: <0004249565.AA956584635@router-8.camnet.com> Message-ID: Dear David, An interesting message. Of course RENT is 'correctly' used for both directions: I can rent a bike either to or from you. I don't think there's anything very surprising about these flip-flop cases - the verb refers to the whole situation, the choice of subject is at least partly arbitrary, and the verbs concerned are all pretty rare so learners don't have that much chance to check against their models. What's interesting about such cases, from the point of view of general theory, is that they demonstrate rather clearly that our choice of subject and object is NOT so constrained by universal principles that our choice of subject candidate is guaranteed to reduce to one. Dick At 08:46 24/04/2000 -0400, you wrote: > Oy! > > I apparently hit the wrong button and got a half-baked message into my > outbox instead of the drafts box. I apologize to you all, and > particularly to the organizers of the "Conference: Syntax & Semantics > in Dubrovnik", whose subject line wound up on my message even though > the message had nothing to do with the conference. > > But, I am interested in the question (about structures that flip-flop > their subject and object) and would be interested in you all's ideas > about what functional pressures shape such anomalies. > > --David Tuggy > > Richard (= Dick) Hudson Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. +44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108; http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm From jtang at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Tue Apr 25 15:59:16 2000 From: jtang at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (Joyce Tang Boyland) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 08:59:16 -0700 Subject: flip-flop predicates Message-ID: Along lines similar to Greg Thomson's: My informal thought on how meanings can get and stay flipped is that there's a lot more uncertainty+indeterminacy going on when people use language than linguists often acknowledge. In on-line sentence production, people are having to choose something quickly that's in the right semantic neighborhood (syntactic too, for that matter), even if they don't quite "know" the "correct" form at that moment. I made that argument in my dissertation for why people sometimes say things like "Why would've you done that?". When you ask them in a survey whether they'd say "Why would you have?" or "Why would've you?" they are often puzzled, and say, Hm, I don't know. When people speak, though, they have to make these split-second decisions, and all sorts of cognitive (and social) factors start playing a part in what form gets selected. Anyway, then, once the heterogeneity starts, it propagates, (by frequency effects etc.), particularly when there is some uncertainty in the first place. If you think about the cognitive aspects of hypercorrection, you have some of the same features -- reversal of the originally sanctioned usage, arising (at least partly) from uncertainty and surviving (at least partly) because of continued flip-flopped input. I've recently finished a paper on this, and in the works is another paper giving empirical + computational evidence for cognitive factors in the propagation of arbitrary forms in general. ___________________________________________________________________ Joyce Tang Boyland Alverno College (Dept. of Psychology) & UW-Milwaukee (Dept. of Foreign Languages + Linguistics) From david_tuggy at SIL.ORG Tue Apr 25 11:56:49 2000 From: david_tuggy at SIL.ORG (David Tuggy) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 07:56:49 -0400 Subject: flip-flop predicates Message-ID: Bert.Peeters at utas.edu.anu writes: In my own usage of Dutch (Flemish, the Belgian variety), "wat mankeer je" is mos tly used not to enquire about a person's ailments, but about what (s)he appears to b e missing. For ailments, I'd rather say "wat mankeert er" (and I would translate i t as "what is it that ails"). Even so, the problem is the same verb would never be us ed in the answer, and I think Leon Stassen's usage wouldn't differ from mine in thi s respect. Therefore, oblique marking on the ailment is unverifiable and it's not a complete flip-flop. Bert -- Dr Bert Peeters Acting Head School of English & European Languages & Literatures University of Tasmania GPO Box 252-82 Hobart TAS 7001, Australia Tel.: +61 (0)3 6226 2344 Fax.: +61 (0)3 6226 7631 E-mail: Bert.Peeters at utas.edu.au www.arts.utas.edu.au/efgj/french/index.htm www.arts.utas.edu.au/efgj/french/staff/peeters/peeters.htm From Gary.Holton at UAF.EDU Tue Apr 25 18:08:39 2000 From: Gary.Holton at UAF.EDU (Gary Holton) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 10:08:39 -0800 Subject: Fellowship in Alaska Native Languages Message-ID: GRADUATE FELLOWSHIP IN ALASKA NATIVE LANGUAGES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ALAKSA The University of Alaska invites applications for a Graduate Fellowship in Linguistics and Alaska Native Languages. The fellowship is open to post-baccalaureate students who are actively engaged in learning an Alaska Native Language and who intend to pursue a career in teaching or researching that language. It is intended to provide students with the financial resources to devote full attention to completing a graduate degree. Students will work closely with a committee of faculty to determine appropriate coursework and research design. The student must be accepted for graduate work at UAF under one of the following options: 1) M.Ed. in Language and Literacy; 2) M.A. or Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology; 3) an interdisciplinary M.A. or Ph.D. (For more information on these degree programs, consult the UAF catalog or call the number below.) Terms of the award This award provides a $10,000 stipend in addition to tuition and fees. Recipients must maintain continuous full-time enrollment and good academic standing at UAF throughout the tenure of the award. Please note, award recipients may not be employed during the tenure of the award. Application Procedure For more information see our website at: http://www.uaf.edu/linguist/fellowship.html Or contact: Dr. Charlotte Basham Linguistics Program Box 757720 University of Alaska Fairbanks, AK 99775-7720 (907) 474-6884 [voice] (907) 474-7453 [fax] ffcsb at uaf.edu Application deadline: June 15, 2000 The University of Alaska Fairbanks is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and Educational Institution. -- ============================== Gary Holton Alaska Native Language Center P.O. Box 757680 University of Alaska Fairbanks, AK 99775-7680 (907) 474-6585 [voice] (907) 474-6586 [fax] gary.holton at uaf.edu http://www.uaf.edu/anlc From lise.menn at COLORADO.EDU Wed Apr 26 03:13:13 2000 From: lise.menn at COLORADO.EDU (Lise Menn) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 21:13:13 -0600 Subject: flip-flops Message-ID: The source for 'flip-flops' presumably has to be some point during language acquisition when the child is trying to solve the problem of how the participant roles for each verb are encoded. That's probably very early, to judge from the fact kids at the 1-word stage are reported as being able to distinguish whether a picture of transitive asymmetrical action fits better with 'Big Bird and Oscar are gorping' or 'Big Bird is gorping Oscar' (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, Origins of Grammar, 1997). A recent Colorado dissertation by Andrea Feldman reports her son's early use of 'carry' to mean 'ride in someone's arms, be carried by someone' - e.g. in demanding that he and not his baby sister be carried. So 'Laura carry Daddy' meant that Laura was being carried by their father. This fits in with Jaakko Leino's idea of the salience of the subject, if for Feldman's child, what was most salient (hence encoded as subject) was the fortunate child who got to be carried, the beneficiary of the action. Lise Menn Beware Procrustes bearing Occam's razor. Lise Menn's home page http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/ "Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia" http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf From hilaryy at RUF.RICE.EDU Wed Apr 26 04:25:18 2000 From: hilaryy at RUF.RICE.EDU (Hilary Young) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 23:25:18 -0500 Subject: borrowing Message-ID: I have been reading about contact languages and I came across the claim that languages will borrow up to 45% of their vocabulary, which would usually be considered heavy borrowing, or 90-100% which would be the case in many bilingual mixtures/mixed languages (where the syntax remains that of the ?original language?). The claim is that no languages will borrow between 45% and 90% - that there is no continuum between extensive borrowing and mixed languages (Bakker+Mous, 1994 'Mixed Languages', pg 5). I was wondering if the members of this list could contribute examples or counterexamples of this. Also, does anyone have a functional explanation of why this might be? Thanks, Hilary Young Rice University From lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Wed Apr 26 06:51:39 2000 From: lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (George Lakoff) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 23:51:39 -0700 Subject: Emily's List Message-ID: Emily Bender has been collecting answers to the question, "What is a grammar a model of?" Here's mine: A grammar of a language - including the lexicon - models the capacity of native speakers to express ideas using the language and to understand ideas expressed by others in discourse. This entails: (1) Since grammar is about speakers' capacities, it must take seriously what is know about the mind and brain, including our knowledge of the embodiment of mind. What is required is a cognitive grammar, consistent with knowledge of how the brain works (e.g., consistent with what we know about neural structure and neural computation) (2) Serious cognitive semantics. Linguists are responsible for giving an account of the ideas expressed - that is a theory of the conceptual systems of speakers and of the concepts expressible in the language. This will include what has been learned in cognitive semantics - Prototypes and basic-level categories, radial categories, image-schemas, force-dynamics, windowing of attention, frame semantics, conceptual metaphor and metonymy, mental spaces, and conceptual blending. (3) Dynamic simulation semantics: An account of dynamic mental simulation of what sentences mean in context using background knowledge, with inferences flowing from the simulation. This means that sentences must contain enough information to characterize the parameters needed for such a simulation. (4) Constructions: General mappings between surface phonological forms and meanings in such a form that they can be used in real time. This requires a construction grammar in which both form and meaning have a bodily grounding. And it must work probabilistically to account for the facts that: (1) certain psycholinguistic effects (like garden-path sentences) are dependent on frequency of lexical items, where frequency for a speaker is presumably reflected in strength of neural connections, and (2) change is in process, with constructions having various degrees of entrenchment, again presumably reflecting varying strengths of neural connections. (5) Grammars must be able to fit a theory of recruitment learning to mesh with Chris Johnson's discoveries about the role of conflation in the extension of constructions, polysemy, and metaphor. (6) Whatever is universal in grammar should come out of what is universal about the ideas expressed and the cognitive/neural capacities to express and understand them online and to have them govern mental simulations in context. George Lakoff -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 2669 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK Wed Apr 26 07:40:05 2000 From: dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK (Dick Hudson) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 08:40:05 +0100 Subject: borrowing In-Reply-To: <001901bfaf37$90765740$f4b02a80@rice> Message-ID: *English* is supposed to have about 60% borrowed vocabulary (mostly from French, Latin or Greek)! At 23:25 25/04/2000 -0500, you wrote: >I have been reading about contact languages and I came across the claim that >languages will borrow up to 45% of their vocabulary, which would usually be >considered heavy borrowing, or 90-100% which would be the case in many >bilingual mixtures/mixed languages (where the syntax remains that of the > original language ). The claim is that no languages will borrow between >45% and 90% - that there is no continuum between extensive borrowing and >mixed languages (Bakker+Mous, 1994 'Mixed Languages', pg 5). I was >wondering if the members of this list could contribute examples or >counterexamples of this. Also, does anyone have a functional explanation of >why this might be? > >Thanks, > >Hilary Young >Rice University > > Richard (= Dick) Hudson Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. +44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108; http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm From Zylogy at AOL.COM Wed Apr 26 16:32:51 2000 From: Zylogy at AOL.COM (Jess Tauber) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 12:32:51 EDT Subject: borrowing Message-ID: Vietnamese is supposed to be @60% borrowed Chinese vocabulary, heavily restructured phonologically to the point folks used to think it was related to Tai, though Thompson has demonstrated it's Austroasiatic origins. Jess Tauber zylogy at aol.com From parkvall at LING.SU.SE Wed Apr 26 16:41:07 2000 From: parkvall at LING.SU.SE (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 18:41:07 +0200 Subject: borrowing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hilary Young wrote: >I was wondering if the members of this list could contribute examples or >counterexamples of this. Also, does anyone have a functional explanation >of why this might be? It is not particularly difficult at to find exceptions to this generalisation -- the most obvious one being, as Dick Hudson pointed out, English, with its 60% or so of borrowed material. Until recently, I thought that was pretty exceptional, but I have now realised that it is more common that I originally thought. For instance, figures of borrowed vocabulary that have been suggested for some other languages include: Korean - at least more than half Swedish - 65-70% Vietnamese - 60-70% Breton - 60-80% (including 40% core vocab) Lolak (Austronesian) - 80% Vlax Romani - 90% (note that this is not a so-called Para-Romani variety!) Hungarian - 90% Albanian - 90% Clearly, then, such languages abound. I still think Bakker & Mous have a point, though, that there is a rather clear difference between languages such as the above, and what I would call truly mixed (aka "intertwined") languages. In the former case, borrowing goes, so to speak, from the periphery and towards the core. Presumably, the 10% of Fenno-Ugric lexical material in Hungarian is core vocabulary, whereas the core is mostly Spanish (ie from the "intruding" language in an intertwiner such as Media Lengua). Similarly, while English is 60% French, there are only six French items on the English version of the Swadesh 100 list. Secondly, it would probably be possible to divide those 90% borrowed items according to 1) different source languages, and/or 2) different diachronic layers (as manifested by different sound correspondences or the like). I would suspect that what I would call true intertwined languages (eg Media Lengua and Michif), on the other hand, typically derive the "borrowed" lexicon from one single source language to the virtual exclusion of others, and the "borrowed" component can not be demonstrated to have grown over time, but seems rather to have entered the language all at once. So, while it is not remarkable that most of a language's word stock gets replaced bit by bit over time, it is indeed remarkable that a large proportion (and in particular its core vocabulary) is replaced overnight, and this is what makes intertwined languages unique. I think that is what Bakker & Mous were after, although the expressed themselves somewhat awkwardly. As for Hilary Young's follow-up question "does anyone have a functional explanation of why this might be?", the way I see it (and I'm now deliberately oversimplifying) is that borrowing reflects one culture being impressed by another. There may then be a "critical mass" of how many borrowings can be received from one language at any one given time before the perceived cultural superiority of the other party would make you rather want to shift language altogether. In other words, there is a limit for how impressed you can be by somebody without giving in completely, and you want to become fully assimilated. So (if we for the sake of discussion) assume the Bakker & Mous quote to be true, 45% would reflect speakers of A being impressed by speakers of B, 100% would reflect a complete language shift to B, and 90%+ would represent the unique cases of language intertwining. 45% is then the threshold that represents the point where there is no longer any perceived use for the ethnic language as a symbol of identity -- this would then be (empirically, if the quote were true) how impressed you can be before being completely outcooled by the socioeconomically superior group. Again, I am of course deliberately oversimplifying here, but I hope you get the point. /MP * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Mikael Parkvall Institutionen f?r lingvistik Stockholms Universitet SE-10691 STOCKHOLM +46 (0)8 16 14 41, +46 (0)8 656 68 24 (home) Fax: +46 (0)8 15 53 89 parkvall at ling.su.se Creolist Archives: http://www.ling.su.se/Creole -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From susan at LING.UTA.EDU Wed Apr 26 17:55:17 2000 From: susan at LING.UTA.EDU (Susan Herring) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 12:55:17 -0500 Subject: language endangerment and universals Message-ID: For my Language Universals and Linguistic Typology course this semester, I would like to have my students read something about the consequences of global language endangerment and loss for the study of linguistic universals and typology. Ken Hale touches on this theme briefly in his 1992 article in Language, but does not develop it fully. Has anything been written recently that tackles this important issue head on? I am teaching the course from a Functional-Typological perspective, but would be receptive to using articles from any theoretical perspective, as long as they engage responsibly with issues that loss of linguistic diversity raises for the scholarly investigation of language universals. Thanks, Susan Herring From bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Apr 26 18:16:56 2000 From: bender at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Emily Bender) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:16:56 -0700 Subject: flip-flop predicates In-Reply-To: <200004251559.IAA21090@cogsci.berkeley.edu> from "Joyce Tang Boyland" at Apr 25, 2000 08:59:16 AM Message-ID: Another example of a flip-flop predicate: 'subcategorize', as in: This verb is subcategorized for a PP complement. This verb subcategorizes for a PP complement. -- Emily From jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU Wed Apr 26 19:52:58 2000 From: jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:52:58 -0800 Subject: schema reading Message-ID: Hi, I'm looking for a short (max. 30-40 pages) reading introducing schema/frame/cognitive model theory to students who are beginners at linguistics. I've cruised chapters of various books ('Women, Fire & Dangerous Things', 'Cultural Models of Language & thought'), but haven't found a straightforward introduction. Anybody have any tips? -- Thanks! Jo ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics English Department, California Polytechnic State University One Grand Avenue ? San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 Tel. (805)-756-2184 ? Fax: (805)-756-6374 ? Dept. Phone. 756-259 ? E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu ? Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba ** "Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally" - Frank Oppenheimer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From david_tuggy at SIL.ORG Wed Apr 26 19:49:04 2000 From: david_tuggy at SIL.ORG (David Tuggy) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 15:49:04 -0400 Subject: flip-flop predicates Message-ID: A number of examples people are sending in are interesting, and no doubt relevant, cases of something approaching a flip-flop, where something changes, say, from object to subject, but where the concomitant change of the erstwhile subject to object doesn't take place. I think this is such an example. I don't speak the dialect involved here with any confidence :-), but I don't think you can say A PP complement subcategorizes for this verb with the meaning that used to be/might still be phrased as This verb subcategorizes for a PP complement nor can you say A PP complement is subcategorized for this verb and mean This verb is subcategorized for a PP complement The other kinds of progression from one argument slot to another are indeed interesting, and probably relevant, but they are (1) more common and in that sense less noteworthy, and more importantly (2) they don't as blatantly violate the functional pressure to keep clear who's doing what to whom. Those two factors are what make the full flip-flops so striking. Generally linguistic changes are shiftings of place like at the Mad Hatter's tea party, where everybody moves down one space and only one gets a clean plate (i.e. where BC(DEF...) becomes AB(CDE...)). Reciprocal place-swapping (flip-flopping) is less normal. And of course things sometimes get jammed up at one end: AB(CDE...) becomes AA'(BCD...), and sometimes the thing at the end of the line gets thrown out (A becomes A-chomeur, so to speak). E.g. vowel shifts usually work like that, so it is striking to find a place in Utah (reported to me by Jeff Burnham, some of whose relatives speak the dialect) where "ar" and "or" have changed places, so that you would pork the cor in the born, but also you might eat park-link sausages, or have been barn during a parring rainstarm. That case is not just a shift, but what we've been calling a flip-flop. --David ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Re: flip-flop predicates Author: at Internet Date: 4/26/2000 11:16 AM Another example of a flip-flop predicate: 'subcategorize', as in: This verb is subcategorized for a PP complement. This verb subcategorizes for a PP complement. -- Emily From paul at BENJAMINS.COM Thu Apr 27 18:28:57 2000 From: paul at BENJAMINS.COM (Paul Peranteau) Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 14:28:57 -0400 Subject: Three New Books in of Functional Interest Message-ID: John Benjamins Publishing has published these three books which deal with Functional themes: Grammaticalization. Studies in Latin and Romance morphosyntax. Jurgen KLAUSENBURGER (University of Washington) Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 193 US & Canada: 1 55619 971 6 / USD 59.00 (Hardcover) Rest of world: 90 272 3700 X / NLG 118.00 (Hardcover) In this monograph, various aspects of the morphosyntactic evolution of the Romance languages are shown to interact in a theory of grammaticalization. The study argues for the incorporation and subordination of inflectional morphology within a grammaticalization continuum, constituting but a portion of the latter. Parameters of natural morphology are seen as principles of grammaticalization, but the reverse is also true, rendering grammaticalization and natural morphology indistinguishable. In the context of this theoretical framework, Chapter 2 deals with Latin, French, and Italian verbal inflection, focusing on universal and system-dependent parameters of natural morphology. In Chapter 3, a theory of grammaticalization is built on divergent elements, including not only grammaticalization studies proper, but also the perception/production line of inquiry, and typology and branching issues, permitting the phasing out of the traditional synthesis/analyis cycle. Chapter 4 touches on nominal inflection, in particular that of Old French and Rumanian, the most revealing histories in the Romance domain. Chapter 5, finally, thoroughly discusses extant theoretical questions in grammaticalization, prominently featuring the relevance of 'invisible hand' explanations and the crucial role played by unidirectionality. This study will be of interest to specialists in Romance and historical linguistics, as well as morphological theory. Text and Context in Functional Linguistics. Mohsen GHADESSY (University of Brunei Darussalam) (ed.) Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 169 US & Canada: 1 55619 885 X / USD 89.00 (Hardcover) Rest of world: 90 272 3674 7 / NLG 178.00 (Hardcover) The shift towards a sociolinguistic approach to the analysis of language in the last few decades has necessitated new definitions for a number of concepts that linguists have taken for granted for a long time. This volume attempts to demystify the important notions of 'text' and 'context' by providing clear definitions and examples within the assumptions of Systemic Functional (SF) linguistics. After a discussion of the role and significance of context by three eminent SF linguists in section one, the influence of context on text is dealt with in section two 'From Context to Language'. Section three 'From Language to Context' considers textual features and their relationship to contextual factors. All the contributors base their analyses on data collected from a variety of spoken and written registers of contemporary English. Contributions by: M.A.K. Halliday; J.R. Martin; W. Bowcher; M. O'Donnell; R. Hasan; C. Cloran; G. Thompson; M. Ghadessy. The Prominence of Tense, Aspect and Mood. D.N.S. BHAT (Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore) Studies in Language Companion Series 49 US & Canada: 1 55619 935 X / USD 65.00 (Hardcover) Rest of world: 90 272 3052 8 / NLG 130.00 (Hardcover) The book puts forth an exciting hypothesis for the typologist. Its major claim is that languages can generally be regarded as belonging to a tense-prominent, aspect-prominent or mood-prominent language type. This grouping can be based upon the relative prominence that languages attach to one or the other of the three verbal categories, namely tense, aspect and mood, by grammaticalizing the chosen category to a greater degree than others, and by making it more obligatory, more systematic and more pervasive than others. The grouping, however, involves a gradation, as is indeed the case with other typological groupings, with some languages manifesting the relevant characteristic more strikingly than others. There are several characteristics that can be correlated with the relative prominence that languages attach to verbal categories. For example, tense-prominent languages tend to have mostly active but not stative verbs. They also tend to keep adjectives as a distinct category, or group them with nouns but not with verbs. Verbal forms used for foregrounding generally belong to the most prominent verbal category. These and other similar correlations make this typological classification worth pursuing. The book also contains a descriptive study of the three verbal categories. John Benjamins Publishing Co. Offices: Philadelphia Amsterdam: Websites: http://www.benjamins.com http://www.benjamins.nl E-mail: service at benjamins.com customer.services at benjamins.nl Phone: +215 836-1200 +31 20 6762325 Fax: +215 836-1204 +31 20 6739773 From gthomson at MAC.COM Fri Apr 28 03:10:37 2000 From: gthomson at MAC.COM (Greg Thomson) Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 21:10:37 -0600 Subject: Emily's List Message-ID: At 23:51 -0700 25/04/00, George Lakoff wrote: >A grammar of a language - including the lexicon - models the capacity of >native speakers to express ideas using the language and to understand >ideas expressed by others in discourse. In 1977 you and H. Thompson (BLS 3) suggested that "Grammars are just collections of strategies for understanding and producing sentences". I like that better than the above "model[of] the capacity to express ideas... and to understand ideas expressed by others..." For one thing, it puts understanding first. In learning his or her language, the child must first learn how the forms of the language determine/constrain understanding. We should never forget that functions of linguistic form are fundamentally comprehension functions. Comprehension first. I also like your 1977 formulation better because it seems more concrete. You went on to say in 1977 that "grammars do not have any separate mental reality; they are just convenient fictions for representing certain processing strategies". Actually, that may not be quite right either. What people have is strategies for reacting to elements of linguistic form. And on top of that, they learn to provide the elements that will cause analogous reactions in others. Grammars are perhaps best thought of as descriptions of the elements of form themselves. But a description of those processing triggers is not a description of the processing strategies you referred to (in 1977). Only the latter are inside of people. Right? Greg From W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Fri Apr 28 12:19:17 2000 From: W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 14:19:17 +0200 Subject: Reflexives and language acquisition Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, I currently prepare a course on the typology of reflexives. Apart from standard issues I want to raise the question whether the description of how reflexives structures are acquired by children can contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive foundations of reflexivity. Doing so, I allude to recent proposals to introduce aspects of language acquisition as another (important) parameter to explain linguistic (and functional) variation. My question now is whether there is any relevant literature on the acquisition of reflexive structure (both with respect to single languages and cross-linguistically) that I may have overlooked. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks! -- ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet M?nchen Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 M?nchen Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** From keith_slater at SIL.ORG Fri Apr 28 13:34:49 2000 From: keith_slater at SIL.ORG (Keith Slater) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 09:34:49 -0400 Subject: borrowing Message-ID: Fred Field addresses this claim in a 1999 article in the Southwest Journal of Linguistics (Vol. 18, No. 2). Although he provides only a couple of potential counter-examples, he suggests that there is no reason in principle that borrowed items could not constitute somewhere between 50-90% of a language's lexicon. It seems to depend to some extent on how one defines a mixed language. Bakker wants to limit the category to include languages which have their grammatical system from one source and their lexicon from another; so this means that 90% or more of the vocabulary is more or less by definition from a single source. But others define the category differently, and come up with different results. ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: borrowing Author: at Internet Date: 4/25/00 11:25 PM I have been reading about contact languages and I came across the claim that languages will borrow up to 45% of their vocabulary, which would usually be considered heavy borrowing, or 90-100% which would be the case in many bilingual mixtures/mixed languages (where the syntax remains that of the 'original language'). The claim is that no languages will borrow between 45% and 90% - that there is no continuum between extensive borrowing and mixed languages (Bakker+Mous, 1994 'Mixed Languages', pg 5). I was wondering if the members of this list could contribute examples or counterexamples of this. Also, does anyone have a functional explanation of why this might be? Thanks, Hilary Young Rice University From msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Fri Apr 28 14:24:38 2000 From: msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX (Ricardo Maldonado) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 16:24:38 +0200 Subject: Reflexives and language acquisition Message-ID: Dear Wolfgang: I hope this reference is of help for your course: 1998 Donna Jackson, Ricqrdo Mqldonqdo and Donna Thal. "Reflexive and Middle Markers in Early Child Language Acquisition: Evidence from Mexican Spanish". Yasushiro Shirai (ed.). First Language. The acquisition of tense-apsect morphology. 18.3,54: 403-429 Best regards Ricardo Maldonado At 14:19 28/04/2000 +0200, Wolfgang Schulze wrote: >Dear Funknetters, > >I currently prepare a course on the typology of reflexives. Apart from >standard issues I want to raise the question whether the description of >how reflexives structures are acquired by children can contribute to a >better understanding of the cognitive foundations of reflexivity. Doing >so, I allude to recent proposals to introduce aspects of language >acquisition as another (important) parameter to explain linguistic (and >functional) variation. My question now is whether there is any relevant >literature on the acquisition of reflexive structure (both with respect >to single languages and cross-linguistically) that I may have >overlooked. > >Any help will be appreciated. Thanks! > >-- >***************************** >Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze >Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft >Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet M?nchen >Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 >D-80539 M?nchen >Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 >Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de >http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ >***************************** > > Ricardo Maldonado Instituto de Investigaciones Filol?gicas, UNAM 2a de Cedros 676, Jurica, Queretaro Mexico 76100 tel: (52) (4) 218 02 64 fax: (52) (4) 218 68 78 msoto at servidor.unam.mx From jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU Fri Apr 28 19:36:42 2000 From: jrubba at CALPOLY.EDU (Johanna Rubba) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 11:36:42 -0800 Subject: thanks - schema readings summary Message-ID: Thanks to a number of people (listed below -- forgive any omissions!) who responded with suggestions for readings on schema theory. Here's a list of full references of things recommended: F. Ungerer & H.J. Schmid. 1996. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. London & New York: Longman. Taylor, J. (1989). Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory. Oxford Press. Mike Tomasello, editor, "The New Psychology of Language," (1998, LEA), which includes articles by Langacker, Givon, Goldberg, Croft, Wierzbicka ... Fillmore, Charles J. 1982. Frame semantics. Linguistics in the morning calm, ed. The Linguistic Society of Korea, 111-137. Seoul: Hanshin.* Fillmore, Charles J. 1985. Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di semantica 6:222-54.* Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola ?stman, Jan Blommaert (eds.) (1995). Handbook of pragmatics. Manual + Supplements. Amsterdam [etc.] : Benjamins. Thanks to: Michael Israel, Ken Hugoniot, Hans Peters, Elaine Francis, Gisela Redeker, Pamela Faber, W. Smith from CSUSB, Suzanne Kemmer, Barb Kelly. Jo Rubba ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics English Department, California Polytechnic State University One Grand Avenue ? San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 Tel. (805)-756-2184 ? Fax: (805)-756-6374 ? Dept. Phone. 756-259 ? E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu ? Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba ** "Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally" - Frank Oppenheimer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU Sat Apr 29 23:06:41 2000 From: lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (George Lakoff) Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 16:06:41 -0700 Subject: reflexives Message-ID: Dear Prof. Schulze, While you are doing your typology of reflexives, I wonder if you and your students could check to see how reflexives in various languages adistributed aover the various metaphors for the self (see Ch. 13 of Philosophy in the Flesh). We have preliminary results for Japanese, but not much else besides English. George Lakoff