From thuumo at UTU.FI Fri Apr 5 11:00:29 2002 From: thuumo at UTU.FI (Tuomas Huumo) Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 14:00:29 +0300 Subject: Second call for papers Message-ID: Second call for papers Cognitive Linguistics East of Eden A joint conference organized by the Finnish Cognitive Linguistics Association (FiCLA) and the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association (SCLA) will take place in Turku, Finland, on September 13 to 15, 2002. Starring (as plenary speakers): Mirjam Fried (Princeton University) Marja-Liisa Helasvuo (University of Turku) Laura Janda (University of North Carolina) Helena Leheckova (University of Helsinki) Ekaterina Rakhilina (Moscow State University) The aim of the conference is to bring together cognitive linguists from the East and the West, and to offer a forum for collaboration and discussion on current developments in Cognitive Linguistics. We welcome abstracts for oral presentations (20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion) and for posters on all cognitive linguistic topics, including syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology, metaphor, pragmatics, discourse, etc. We especially welcome papers on Slavic and/or Finno-Ugric languages. The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2002. Please submit a one-page abstract (max. 500 words), with an additional page for tabels, graphs and references, if necessary. We strongly encourage e-mail submissions. For speakers with topics related to the Slavic languages: Please send your abstract to janda at unc.edu. For speakers with topics related to other languages: Please send your abstract as an attachment file (plain text or rtf) to aairola at ling.helsinki.fi, with your name, affiliation, e-mail address and the title of your paper included in the message. If you wish to submit a paper version, then please send 5 anonymous copies of your abstract, and your author information on a separate sheet of paper. In this case, please use the following address: Anu Airola Department of General Linguistics P.O.Box 9 (Siltavuorenpenger 20 A) FIN-00014 University of Helsinki Finland The participation fee will be 70 euros (35 euros for students, including graduate students), to be paid at the conference site in cash (please observe that we cannot accept credit cards). For members of the FiCLA, SCLA or ICLA the fee will be 50 euros (25 euros for students). Participants from economically disadvantaged countries may be allowed a free participation upon application. In such a case, please include an application for free participation in your abstract. The participation fee will cover the abstract booklet, other conference materials, coffee and a get-together with snacks. From NilAngel at AOL.COM Fri Apr 5 11:09:04 2002 From: NilAngel at AOL.COM (NilAngel at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 06:09:04 EST Subject: Remove me from this List Please Message-ID: I never subscribed to this list..... Please remove me... this is my 3rd request. From tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Sun Apr 7 00:56:17 2002 From: tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon) Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2002 16:56:17 -0800 Subject: "progress" in linguistics Message-ID: NOTE: THESE REFLECTIONS HAVE BEEN INSPIRED BY AN (ALAS BELATED) READING OF ESA ITKONEN'S "A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS" (1991; AMSTERDAM: J. BENJAMINS). OBVIOUSLY, I COULD NOT RECOMMEND THE BOOK MORE ENTHUSIASTICALLY. IT IS A RARE TOUR DE FORCE. WHAT FOLLOWS BEGAN AS COMMENTS DURING CORRESPONDENCE WITH ESA, WHO OF COURSE BEARS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAY I CHOSE TO INTERPRET HIS WORK. STILL, HE HAS MY THANKS. TG Dear Esa, I have now made a brave if incomplete stab at both your Panini section & the conclusions in ch. 6 . Panini has always been a rough going for me, so I am thrilled at your determination & erudition in attempting to decipher it for ignorami like myself. I wouldn't have been able to do it on my own, not having enough patience (not to mention being burdened with an atavistic recoil from obscurantism...). But I think I got the point. Panini was just as sophisticated as any descriptive linguist of the 19th Cent. tradition (yes, that includes us). Having benefited so much from your tour-de-force of Panini, the Greeks & Hermann Paul, I still wonder about your conclusions (ch. 6), in particular the discussion of progress in science and progress in linguistics. Let me dispense with philosophy first. To my mind, Kuhn--and especially a radical interpretation of Kuhn that foregrounds scientific revolutions and downgrades 'normal science' (and makes a huge deal about the radical difference between those two phases of science)--is univeresally accepted neither in philosophy of science nor in many disciplines of science itself. Most 'real' scientists I talk to (mostly chemists and biologists) are much more conscious of the gradual nature of their disciplines, the slow accretion of factual, methodological and theoretical knowledge--even when great leaps occur, as they undeniably do. It is not an accident that in Biology, Kuhn was embraced only by a small tho media-savvy & articulate fringe of Marxist anti-graduality ideologists--indeed, to my thinking, anti-evolutionary ideologists--like Gould & Lewontin. It is not an accident either, I think, that in Linguistics Kuhn was embraced in by the Chomskians (and other self-perceived great revolutionaries...). And it is not an accident either that most of the overblown 'revolutionary science' examples cited by Kuhn (or the Chomskians) come from Physics, the most mathematics-dependent and the most deductively-driven of all sciences. But I suspect that even in physics, Kuhn's sweeping taxonomy of the two kinds of science represents a vastly over-blown generalization (certainly Lakatos does not accept such a clean taxonomy). Tho admittedly, 'great revolutions' are easier to demonstrate in physics, and thus help sustain the revoilutionary philosophical biase. In linguistics, it is precisely the people who view deductivism & physics as the proper models for science that espouse the redical Kuhn-type view. Every time such a linguist farts, an inspired new theory is born. The philosophy of science articulated by pragmatists such as Peirce & Hanson does not make such a radical distinction between 'normal' and 'revolutionary' science. To begin with, it recognizes the fact-driven nature of hypothesis formation (not Popper's 'miracle'...)--tho not via induction but via abduction. What is more, such an approach also rejects the strict Positivist (Carnap, Russell) division between factual and theoretical statements. Rather, it concedes the theory-laden nature of 'facts' as well as their dynamic nature-- "Today's facts are yesterday's theories". Such an approach is much less likely to be swept off its feet by radical 'revolutions', not because it doesn't recognize the profundity of new abductive insights (hypotheses), but because it sees them as embedded in their historical & conteporary--often cross-disciplinary--context. The best way I can remind all of us of this is by quoting Peirce: "...Any philosophical doctrine that should be completely new could hardly fail to prove completely false..." (1940, p. 269). Now let us turn to your observation (ch. 6) that no 'real' progress occurred in linguistics between Panini and 1960. Let me first tell you why I am sympathetic to this rather sweeping generalization--up to a point. One thing that really marks the difference between a pre-scientific & a scientific investigation of the very same domain is a commitment to *methodology*. From such a commitment spring both new data-bases and new hypotheses. Here Panini represents the best of our "competence" methodology, thus the best of arm-chair linguistics, thus the best of Plato-cum- Aristotle. The facts in such a method are crystal clear and available to conscious reflection & analysis. Both intra-subject and inter-subject variation is ignored as either methodologically or theoretically irrelevant. The analytic method is heavily tipped toward deductivism. This is very similar to Physics and inorganic chemistry (you've seen one H2O atom, you've seen them all...). Now, descriptive grammarians from Panini to the end of the 18th Century (not 1960!) practiced this analytic "competence" methodology. They applied it to single languages, and the same *types* of facts were analyzed by the same types of method. Should one be surprised that at the lack of progress? Does one see much progress in philosophy over the same period? (or, for that matter, up to the present?) It is also good to remind ourselves that there was relatively modest *theoretical* progress in Biology between Aristotle and (ca.) the 16th Century--and for very similar reasons. Yes, people did very useful *taxonomy* work, vastly enriching Aristotle's initial *scala natura*. But the general thrust of the Linnaean taxonomy--the apex of that protracted effort--was really not all that different from Aristotle's. No insightful new explanations were forthcoming (except for the tried-and-true God, or His Romantic stand-in, *force vitale*...). Eventually, the conflation of new methods cum new data-bases did occur, and that's what (I think) stimulated the eventual theoretical 'revolution' (Darwin): The fossil record and the mothods of Geology; Microbiology. But still, it was the methodological/factual expansion to detailed micro-variation within species (Galapagos!), on the one hand, and the link to adaptive *behavior* (the birth of what eventually became ethology), borrowed from another discipline (Political Economy; Darwin was reading Malthus & Adam Smith) that eventually prompted the new theoretical perspective(adaptive selection; competition for limited resources). And it was the later merger of chemistry and biology into molecular genetics that finally clinched the rest of the mechanism (the site of mutations, thus the source of spontaneous variation). So from my perspective, there was a profound thoretical stasis in biology bewtween 300BC and 1600AD. Now, why do I think scientific progress in linguistics started in the 19th century (rather than in the 1960s)? Two reasons, both of them well known to you. (i) UNIVERSALS: Till the 19th century, all Panini-type descriptive grammarians may have *assumed* universals implicitly, but they did not systematically study cross-language (typological) variation. They described single language but did not systematically compare them. The advent of the expanded data-base in the 19th Century, first within IE and soon across-families, provided a much more realistic factual benchmark for raising the question of universals anew--beyond Plato & Aristotle. Whether the early answers by Schleicher, von Humboldt, Bloomfield, Sapir/Whorf etc. were successful theoretical manoeuvers is almost beside the point. We did not had enough cumulation of data-base- cum-methodology to raise this issue seriously before the 19th century. (ii) DIACHRONY & FUNCTIONALISM: Until the 19th century, change was not the focus of the study. But it is precisely the expansion of the data-base-cum-methodology in the 19th century to *diachrony* that allowed Hermann Paul to make his inspired generalizations about the real locus of the "causal nexus" in an explanatory theory of Language (rather than descriptions of languages)--the cognitively/adaptively-driven *process* of on-line communicative *behavior*. This is, surprisingly, a synchronic perspective, but a novel one--not of competence, but of *performance*. It is thus not only a shift from stasis to process thinking that made the difference, but also from competence-based to performance-based methodology. (In saying this, I merely interpreting your own description of H. Paul's work). Now, have we progressed far beyond H. Paul since 1960? First, I think Jespersen was already right there with Paul, I see no serious retreat (tho no advance either). Was Saussure progess? I don't see how. How about Bloomfield & Chomsky (or, for that matter, the European structuralist)? I am tempted to respond with *ditto* again. While one may have a lot of respect for Bloomfield the descriptivist (the Panin-type Bloomfield), as a theoretician he represents the same general retreat from H. Paul (his teacher?) as Saussure. So what actually started in the 1960s, really? Maybe two or three things that represent a more systematic--methodological--return to the prophetic vision of H. Paul. First, a much more broad-gaged expansion of the cross-linguistic (typological) data-base; albeit with an implicitly Bloomfieldian biase toward "inductive generalizations". Second, incompletely and haltingly, the realization that typology *is* diachrony, so that the locus of explanatory universals (Paul's "causal nexus") is in the process of grammaticalization. But here again, not many of the grammaticalization people understand the implications of this. Most of them are still looking for Bloomfieldian "inductive generalizations"--i.e. a taxonomy of grammaticalization types. And while "emergence" is a wonderful battle cry, it is not yet a clear research programme. And one of thesae days we'll need to moved on from methodology to theory. Taxonomy is very useful (hooray for Linnaeus!), but it is not exactly an ambitious theoretical agenda. Third, and again only dimly & haltingly, the beginning of some *cognitive* explanatory theory, at our interface with experimental psycholinguistics and neuroscience. This was, in essence, the third leg of Paul's research programme--the psychological "causal-nexus" hinging on processing *behavior* (performance). And in the 1960s it begand to--slowly, bashfully--rear its delicate head. But again, the majority of linguists who descroibe themselves as "cognitive" or "functionalist" are still dyed-in-the-wool *competence* philosophers. They expresse their Panini-like generalizations in cognitive-sounding terms. These terms have been either invented by inspired but still arm-chair linguist, or they are 100% isomorphic to structural categories and thus have no independent mtrhodological validity (except for our endearing faith in 100% iconicity...). So yes, the 1960s did represent a return to H. Paul's potentially-scientific theoretical agenda. But we are still at the very threshold of this process. Most of us are still--hopelessly, incurably--methodological humanists ('competence Platonists'?). Science is still an alien planet to us. So, has there been any progress? Will linguistics become, finally, a responsible science? Three moves could help us accelerate the shift from Panini/Chomsky: (a) Interaction with neighboring adaptively-based disciplines (like Darwin). (b) Commitment to a performance-based empirical methodology (like Labov; like psycholinguistics) (c) The conflation of diachrony, universals & performance (H. Paul's agenda). Best & many thanks, TG From weismann at FIBERTEL.COM.AR Sun Apr 7 13:59:27 2002 From: weismann at FIBERTEL.COM.AR (weismann) Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2002 10:59:27 -0300 Subject: "progress" in linguistics Message-ID: Hello and many thanks for your reflections : it is an important synthesis and truly I enjoyed it. Only one question: do you think that is it also possible to introduce or to deep in Linguistics and Sciences of Language in general a philosophical ( Plato, the Greeks, Ockham, etc, etc, Russell, Wittgenstein...) background, context or plainly, a "Grund" or foundational item? Many thanks. Yours, Francis J. Weismann weismann at fibertel.com.ar ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Givon" To: Sent: Saturday, April 06, 2002 9:56 PM Subject: Re: "progress" in linguistics > NOTE: > THESE REFLECTIONS HAVE BEEN INSPIRED BY AN (ALAS BELATED) > READING OF ESA ITKONEN'S "A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS" > (1991; AMSTERDAM: J. BENJAMINS). OBVIOUSLY, I COULD NOT RECOMMEND > THE BOOK MORE ENTHUSIASTICALLY. IT IS A RARE TOUR DE FORCE. WHAT > FOLLOWS BEGAN AS COMMENTS DURING CORRESPONDENCE WITH ESA, WHO OF > COURSE BEARS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAY I CHOSE TO INTERPRET > HIS WORK. STILL, HE HAS MY THANKS. TG > > > > Dear Esa, > > I have now made a brave if incomplete stab at both your Panini section & > the conclusions in ch. 6 . Panini has always been a rough going for me, > so I am thrilled at your determination & erudition in attempting to > decipher it for ignorami like myself. I wouldn't have been able to do it > on my own, not having enough patience (not to mention being burdened > with an atavistic recoil from obscurantism...). But I think I got the > point. Panini was just as sophisticated as any descriptive linguist of > the 19th Cent. tradition (yes, that includes us). > > Having benefited so much from your tour-de-force of Panini, the Greeks & > Hermann Paul, I still wonder about your conclusions (ch. 6), in > particular the > discussion of progress in science and progress in linguistics. > > Let me dispense with philosophy first. To my mind, Kuhn--and especially > a radical interpretation of Kuhn that foregrounds scientific revolutions > and downgrades 'normal science' (and makes a huge deal about the radical > difference between those two phases of science)--is univeresally > accepted neither in philosophy of science nor in many disciplines of > science itself. Most 'real' scientists I talk to (mostly chemists and > biologists) are much more conscious of the gradual nature of their > disciplines, the slow accretion of factual, methodological and > theoretical knowledge--even when great leaps occur, as they undeniably > do. It is not an accident that in Biology, Kuhn was embraced only by a > small tho media-savvy & articulate fringe of Marxist anti-graduality > ideologists--indeed, to my thinking, anti-evolutionary ideologists--like > Gould & Lewontin. > > It is not an accident either, I think, that in Linguistics Kuhn was > embraced in by the Chomskians (and other self-perceived great > revolutionaries...). And it is not an accident either that most of the > overblown 'revolutionary > science' examples cited by Kuhn (or the Chomskians) come from Physics, > the most mathematics-dependent and the most deductively-driven of all > sciences. But I suspect that even in physics, Kuhn's sweeping taxonomy > of the two kinds of science represents a vastly over-blown > generalization (certainly Lakatos does not accept such a clean > taxonomy). Tho admittedly, 'great revolutions' are easier to > demonstrate in physics, and thus help sustain the revoilutionary > philosophical biase. > > In linguistics, it is precisely the people who view deductivism & > physics as the proper models for science that espouse the redical > Kuhn-type view. > Every time such a linguist farts, an inspired new theory is born. The > philosophy of science articulated by pragmatists such as Peirce & Hanson > does not make such a radical distinction between 'normal' and > 'revolutionary' science. To begin with, it recognizes the fact-driven > nature of hypothesis formation (not Popper's 'miracle'...)--tho not via > induction but via abduction. What is more, such an approach also rejects > the strict Positivist (Carnap, Russell) division between factual and > theoretical statements. Rather, it concedes the theory-laden nature of > 'facts' as well as their dynamic nature-- "Today's facts are yesterday's > theories". Such an approach is much less likely to be swept off its feet > by radical 'revolutions', not because it doesn't recognize the > profundity of new abductive insights (hypotheses), but because it sees > them as embedded in their historical & conteporary--often > cross-disciplinary--context. The best way I can remind all of us of this > is by quoting Peirce: "...Any philosophical doctrine that should be > completely new could hardly fail to prove completely false..." (1940, p. > 269). > > Now let us turn to your observation (ch. 6) that no 'real' progress > occurred in linguistics between Panini and 1960. Let me first tell you > why I am > sympathetic to this rather sweeping generalization--up to a point. One > thing that really marks the difference between a pre-scientific & a > scientific investigation of the very same domain is a commitment to > *methodology*. From such a commitment spring > both new data-bases and new hypotheses. Here Panini represents the best > of our > "competence" methodology, thus the best of arm-chair linguistics, thus > the best of > Plato-cum- Aristotle. The facts in such a method are crystal clear and > available to conscious reflection & analysis. Both intra-subject and > inter-subject variation is ignored as either methodologically or > theoretically irrelevant. The analytic method is heavily tipped toward > deductivism. This is very similar to Physics and inorganic chemistry > (you've seen one H2O atom, you've seen them all...). > > Now, descriptive grammarians from Panini to the end of the 18th Century > (not 1960!) practiced this analytic "competence" methodology. They > applied it to > single languages, and the same *types* of facts were analyzed by the > same types of method. Should one be surprised that at the lack of > progress? Does one see much progress in philosophy over the same period? > (or, for that matter, up to the present?) > > It is also good to remind ourselves that there was relatively modest > *theoretical* progress in Biology between Aristotle and (ca.) the 16th > Century--and for very similar reasons. Yes, people did very useful > *taxonomy* work, vastly enriching Aristotle's initial *scala natura*. > But the general thrust of the Linnaean taxonomy--the apex of that > protracted effort--was really not all that different from Aristotle's. > No insightful new explanations were forthcoming (except for the > tried-and-true God, or His Romantic stand-in, *force vitale*...). > > Eventually, the conflation of new methods cum new data-bases did occur, > and that's what (I think) stimulated the eventual theoretical > 'revolution' (Darwin): The fossil record and the mothods of Geology; > Microbiology. But still, it was the methodological/factual expansion to > detailed micro-variation within species (Galapagos!), on the one hand, > and the link to adaptive *behavior* (the birth of what eventually became > ethology), borrowed from another discipline (Political Economy; Darwin > was reading Malthus & Adam Smith) that eventually prompted the new > theoretical perspective(adaptive selection; competition for limited > resources). And it was the later merger of chemistry and biology into > molecular genetics that finally clinched the rest of the mechanism (the > site of mutations, thus the source of spontaneous variation). So from my > perspective, there was a profound thoretical stasis in biology > bewtween 300BC and 1600AD. > > Now, why do I think scientific progress in linguistics started in the > 19th century (rather than in the 1960s)? Two reasons, both of them well > known to you. > > (i) UNIVERSALS: Till the 19th century, all Panini-type descriptive > grammarians may have *assumed* universals implicitly, but they did not > systematically study cross-language (typological) variation. They > described single language but did not systematically compare them. The > advent of the expanded data-base in the 19th Century, first within IE > and soon across-families, provided a much more realistic factual > benchmark for raising the question of universals anew--beyond Plato & > Aristotle. Whether the early answers by Schleicher, von Humboldt, > Bloomfield, Sapir/Whorf etc. were successful theoretical manoeuvers is > almost beside the point. We did not had enough cumulation of data-base- > cum-methodology to raise this issue seriously before the 19th century. > > (ii) DIACHRONY & FUNCTIONALISM: Until the 19th century, change was not > the focus of the study. But it is precisely the expansion of the > data-base-cum-methodology in the 19th century to *diachrony* that > allowed Hermann Paul to make his inspired generalizations about the > real locus of the "causal nexus" in an explanatory theory of Language > (rather than descriptions of languages)--the > cognitively/adaptively-driven *process* of on-line communicative > *behavior*. This is, surprisingly, a synchronic perspective, but a novel > one--not of competence, but of *performance*. It is thus not only a > shift from stasis to process thinking that made the difference, but also > from competence-based to performance-based methodology. (In saying this, > I merely interpreting your own description of H. Paul's work). > > Now, have we progressed far beyond H. Paul since 1960? First, I think > Jespersen was already right there with Paul, I see no serious retreat > (tho no advance > either). Was Saussure progess? I don't see how. How about Bloomfield & > Chomsky (or, > for that matter, the European structuralist)? I am tempted to respond > with > *ditto* again. While one may have a lot of respect for Bloomfield the > descriptivist (the Panin-type Bloomfield), as a theoretician he > represents the same general retreat from H. Paul (his teacher?) as > Saussure. > > So what actually started in the 1960s, really? Maybe two or three things > that represent a more systematic--methodological--return to the > prophetic vision of H. Paul. First, a much more broad-gaged expansion of > the cross-linguistic (typological) data-base; albeit with an implicitly > Bloomfieldian biase toward "inductive generalizations". > > Second, incompletely and haltingly, the realization that typology *is* > diachrony, so that the locus of explanatory universals (Paul's "causal > nexus") is in the process of grammaticalization. But here again, not > many of the grammaticalization people understand the implications of > this. Most of them are still looking for Bloomfieldian "inductive > generalizations"--i.e. a taxonomy of grammaticalization types. And while > "emergence" is a wonderful battle cry, it is not yet a clear research > programme. And one of thesae days we'll need to moved on from > methodology to theory. Taxonomy is very useful (hooray for Linnaeus!), > but it is not exactly an ambitious theoretical agenda. > > Third, and again only dimly & haltingly, the beginning of some > *cognitive* explanatory theory, at our interface with experimental > psycholinguistics > and neuroscience. This was, in essence, the third leg of Paul's research > programme--the psychological "causal-nexus" hinging on processing > *behavior* (performance). And in the 1960s it begand to--slowly, > bashfully--rear its delicate head. But again, the majority of linguists > who descroibe themselves as "cognitive" or "functionalist" are still > dyed-in-the-wool *competence* philosophers. They expresse their > Panini-like generalizations in cognitive-sounding terms. These terms > have been either invented by inspired but still arm-chair linguist, or > they are 100% isomorphic to structural categories and thus have no > independent mtrhodological validity (except for our endearing faith in > 100% iconicity...). > > So yes, the 1960s did represent a return to H. Paul's > potentially-scientific theoretical agenda. But we are still at the very > threshold of this process. Most > of us are still--hopelessly, incurably--methodological humanists > ('competence Platonists'?). Science is still an alien planet to us. > > So, has there been any progress? Will linguistics become, finally, a > responsible science? Three moves could help us accelerate the shift from > Panini/Chomsky: > (a) Interaction with neighboring adaptively-based disciplines > (like Darwin). > (b) Commitment to a performance-based empirical methodology > (like Labov; like psycholinguistics) > (c) The conflation of diachrony, universals & performance > (H. Paul's agenda). > > > Best & many thanks, TG From eitkonen at UTU.FI Mon Apr 8 12:14:13 2002 From: eitkonen at UTU.FI (Esa Itkonen) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2002 15:14:13 +0300 Subject: progress Message-ID: Just two simple comments on the very complicated issues that are involved: 1) I have always emphasized that on most areas of linguistics Panini has nothing, or very little, to say (i.e. areas like psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, diachronic linguistics, linguistic typology). Where he does excel, is the formal description of a SINGLE language (in his case, Sanskrit). But in this area, I would like to meet the man or woman who, knowing Panini's achievement, would dare to claim to have surpassed him. 2) I do NOT accept, on the whole, Kuhn'n 'non-cumulative' view of change in natural science. But my point is that, in the field of study exemplified by Panini (but also Sibawaihi, Apollonius, and others), the history is so 'short' that the question whether the Kuhnian scenario applies or not, does not even arise. 3) Thanks to Tom Givon for creating discussion, once again. Esa From fortesq at HUM.KU.DK Thu Apr 11 08:56:18 2002 From: fortesq at HUM.KU.DK (mike) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 10:56:18 +0200 Subject: Fw: The Domain of Language Message-ID: BOOK NOTICE The Domain of Language by Michael Fortescue Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen 2002 392 pages, hardbound. ISBN 87-7289-706-6. £30, $49, € 59 This book is intended as counter-evidence to the perception that Linguistics is a matter of dusty schoolroom grammar. The discipline may appear to outsiders as fragmented and – worse still – lacking in relevance to the real world outside its gates. This book demonstrates that Linguistics, in all its varied branches, can be entertaining as well as thought-provoking, and that its domain is indeed a coherent one despite all the internecine squabbling. In an unconventional way Michael Fortescue introduces his subject as a kind of fable with a historical moral that professional linguists, as well as students, should enjoy as a commentary on the state of the discipline today. A sample chapter of the book can be read at the following website: http://www.cphling.dk/pers/mf/dom.sample.htm Michael Fortescue is Professor of Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Language relations across Bering Strait: reappraising the archeological and linguistic evidence (London, 1998), and Pattern and Process: A Whitehedian Perspective on Linguistics (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2001) For further information, please contact: Marius Hansteen Museum Tusculanum Press University of Copenhagen Phone: +45 35 32 91 Fax: +45 35 32 91 13 E marius at mtp.dk Web: www.mtp.dk Books from Museum Tusculanum Press can be ordered directly from www.mtp.dk from our distributors: USA & Canada: ISBS International Specialized Book Services 5824 N.E. Hassalo St. Portland, Oregon 97213-3644 Fax: +1 503 280 8832 Email: orders at isbs.com United Kingdom Gazelle Book Services Ltd. Falcon House, Queen Square GB - Lancaster LA1 1RN Fax: +44 1524 63232 Email: sales.gazelle at talk21.com France: Editions Picard 82, rue Bonaparte F - 75006 Paris Fax: +33 1 43 26 42 64 Email:info at librarie-picard.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrewkg at STANFORD.EDU Fri Apr 12 13:34:33 2002 From: andrewkg at STANFORD.EDU (Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 06:34:33 -0700 Subject: NWAV 31: General call for abstracts (deadline June 1) Message-ID: Please distribute widely. NWAV 31 October 10-13, 2002 Stanford University Stanford, California http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/nwav/ nwav at csli.stanford.edu Abstracts are invited for papers and posters at NWAV 31. Papers will be 20 minutes. We invite papers and posters in all areas of sociolinguistics. We invite papers and posters in all areas of sociolinguistics, but we especially encourage submissions on questions which, although fundamental to our field, are under-discussed, or even taboo -- issues we refer to as 'the elephants in the room'. A few examples are: * What is an authentic speaker? * Is there a critical age for dialect acquisition? * What effect does language in the media have on linguistic variation? ? * Does differential linguistic ability account for some patterns of * variation? Abstract specifications: Abstracts should include the full title of the submission, author name(s) and full contact information as well as the text of the abstract. The abstract text must be no longer than 400 words, not including references. Each person may submit at most one individual and one jointly authored abstract. Submissions should consist of the following: * Title * Abstract text (no longer than 400 words) * Up to 3 key words identifying the subject matter of the presentation * Name(s) of author(s) (which should not appear in text of the abstract) * Author affiliation(s), email, phone number, fax number, mailing address * Specify if you wish your abstract to be considered for: a paper, a paper OR poster, or a poster. * Please indicate on the abstract if you want it to be considered for sessions themed around debates we should be having - but aren't. Email abstracts to nwav at csli.stanford.edu. Abstracts should be submitted as a regular, single email message, in ASCII text. Please do not send any attachments or use any special formatting. If you do not receive email confirmation within 7 days of emailing your submission, please re-send. Faxed abstracts will not be accepted. If you do not have access to email, please send the abstract on a floppy diskette (Mac or PC) along with one hard copy to: NWAV 31 Department of Linguistics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2150 Deadline for receipt of abstracts: June 1, 2002 Notification date: June 30 Abstracts will be anonymously refereed. NB: There will be an overhead projector and screen in each room. If you have other AV needs, please indicate what they are at the bottom of your abstract. From sosa at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Apr 12 16:50:49 2002 From: sosa at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Christine Sosa) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 09:50:49 -0700 Subject: Announcing: PRESUPPOSITION AND ASSERTION IN DYNAMIC SEMANTICS Message-ID: CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of: PRESUPPOSITION AND ASSERTION IN DYNAMIC SEMANTICS; David I. Beaver;paper ISBN: 1-57586-120-8, $24.95, cloth ISBN: 1-57586-121-6, $64.95, 325 pages. CSLI Publications 2001. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubs at csli.stanford.edu. To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736 (U.S. & Canada only) or order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search feature to locate the book, then order). Book description: This book presents a comprehensive overview and discussion of the burgeoning field of presupposition theory, introducing a wealth of new data and critical commentary. Working within the recently developed framework of Dynamic Semantics, the author develops his own account of presupposition and solves some well-known problems of other accounts. According to the view developed, while semantics is concerned with information update, there is one part of the meaning of an utterance which requires no update: the utterance's presupposition. Although this book assumes general understanding of pragmatics and semantics, the reader needs no prior familiarity with presupposition theory or recent dynamic approaches to the study of meaning. "This book is an excellent up-to-date introduction to the study of presupposition and presupposition projection. Technically sophisticated, Beaver's work does justice to the empirical and conceptual complexities of its subject matter, along with presenting many original ideas. If you suspect that presupposition was exhausted by the work of linguists and philosophers in the 1970's, this book shows why the topic has become fresh and exciting again." -Irene Heim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "This book provides an excellent overview of the issues and controversies of the field. The dynamic semantics developed in the second half of the book follows the direction charted by Karttunen and Heim in their early work, and gives an elegant solution to many problems that have plagued previous theories. Many books about presupposition have been written. This is the book to read." -Lauri Karttunen, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center --------------- From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Fri Apr 12 17:47:33 2002 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (Funknet List Admin) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:47:33 -0500 Subject: 8th International Pragmatics Conference (fwd) Message-ID: Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 19:41:42 -0700 (PDT) From: Jef Verschueren To: cogling at ucsd.edu Subject: 8th International Pragmatics Conference 8th INTERNATIONAL PRAGMATICS CONFERENCE TORONTO, Canada 13-18 July 2003 The 8th International Pragmatics Conference will be held on 13-18 July 2003 at the University of Toronto. CONFERENCE CHAIR: Monica HELLER (Univ. of Toronto) LOCAL SITE COMMITTEE: Susan EHRLICH (York Univ.), Ruth KING (York Univ.), Normand LABRIE (Univ. of Toronto), Grit LIEBSCHER (Univ. of Waterloo), Bonnie McELHINNY (Univ. of Toronto) Donna PATRICK (Brock Univ.) INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE COMMITTEE: In addition to the members of the Local Site Committee, the International Conference Committee includes: Charles ANTAKI (Loughborough Univ.), Jenny COOK-GUMPERZ (Univ. of California at Santa Barbara), Susan ERVIN-TRIPP (Univ. of California at Berkeley; IPrA President), GU Yueguo (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Andreas JUCKER (Justus Liebig Univ. Giessen), Ferenc KIEFER (Hungarian Academy of Sciences; chair, 7th IPC), Eniko NEMETH (Univ of Szeged), Ben RAMPTON (King's College London), Eddy ROULET (Univ. of Geneva), Anna-Brita STENSTROM (Univ. of Bergen), Elizabeth TRAUGOTT (Stanford Univ.), Jef VERSCHUEREN (Univ. of Antwerp; IPrA Secretary General), Yorick WILKS (Univ. of Sheffield) THEMES: As always, the conference will be open to all themes relevant to the pragmatics of language in its widest sense as an interdisciplinary cognitive, social, and cultural perspective. Prospective participants should, however, pay attention to the distribution of topics across event types, as described below. In addition, there is a special theme. SPECIAL THEME: Linguistic pluralism : policies, practices and pragmatics This is a theme that was chosen by the Local Site Committee and approved by the Consultation Board. It corresponds to the interests of a large number of IPrA members, and permits us to link cognitive, linguistic, social and political approaches to a phenomenon of long-standing interest in pragmatics and of current theoretical, as well as social and policy importance. The intention will be to focus the conference on making those links in a number of ways, ranging from choice of plenary speakers and special panels, to invitations to interested and relevant Canadians outside the academy. The theme is one which also fits the venue, given Canada's historical involvement in debates on such issues, and Toronto's profile as a major centre of new globalized urban multilingualism. However, it is meant here to go beyond traditional ideas about "multilingualism" understood as connecting linguistic difference primarily to ethnic or national distinctions, and rather to extend that concept to the links between language and all forms of social difference and social inequality. The theme is also appropriate to the expertise of the members of the Local Site Committee which is committed to tying academic approaches to broader public debates. PLENARY LECTURES: Plenary speakers will include Susan GAL (Dept. of Anthropology, Univ. of Chicago), Language ideologies and the practices of power: "Reading between the lines" during the Cold War Jocelyn LETOURNEAU (D�partement d'histoire, Univ. Laval, Qu�bec), La langue comme lieu de m�moire et lieu de passage / Language as realm of memory and passage Lorenza MONDADA (Sciences du Langage, Univ. Lumi�re, Lyon, France), Scientific knowledge as an interactional accomplishment: On the analysis of research groups in international networks Eni ORLANDI (Univ. Estadual de Campinas, Brazil), Le Discours en tant qu�objet sp�cifique dans l�histoire des Sciences du Langage / Discourse as a specific object in the history of Language Sciences Dan SPERBER (CNRS, Paris, France) Relevance theory: Pragmatics and beyond Ruth WODAK (Inst. f�r Sprachwissenschaft, Univ. of Vienna, Austria), European language policies and European identities PANELS: * Oeuvre panels Jan BLOMMAERT (University of Ghent), Pierre Bourdieu: The ethnographic turn This panel is devoted to the work of Pierre BOURDIEU and its relevance for pragmatics. Charles BRIGGS (University of California at San Diego), Pragmatics of institutional discourse This panel is devoted to the work of Aaron CICOUREL and its relevance for pragmatics. Jenny COOK-GUMPERZ (Univ. of California at Santa Barbara), Basil Bernstein and pragmatics: class, code and language This panel is devoted to the work of Basil BERNSTEIN and its relevance for pragmatics. * Special topic panels Peter AUER (Univ. Freiburg), Acts of identity: Language indexing social membership Adriana BOLIVAR & Paola BENTIVOGLIO (Univ. Central de Venezuela), Changing attitudes to lesser languages in Latin America James COLLINS (State Univ. of New York - Albany), Class, Identity, and Literacy: Ethnographic and Discourse-Analytic Perspectives Werner KALLMEYER & Inken KEIM (Inst. f�r Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim), Sociostylistic perspectives on language and identity Normand LABRIE (Univ. of Toronto), Enjeux de sant� dans des soci�t�s plurilingues Yaron MATRAS (Univ. of Manchester), The mixed language debate: Natural evolution and structural manipulation Donna PATRICK (Brock Univ.), Indigenous language stability and change Kanavillil RAJAGOPALAN (Univ. Estadual de Campinas) & Marilyn MARTIN-JONES (Univ. of Wales), Politics of language and the linguist Tomek STRZALKOWSKI (State Univ. of New York - Albany), Building automated multilingual call centers * General interest panels Jean-Paul BRONCKART & Laurent FILLIETTAZ (Univ. de Gen�ve), L'analyse des actions et des discours en situation de travail Robyn CARSTON (Univ. College London), Relevance theory and word meaning Yrjo ENGESTROM (Univ. of California at San Diego), Activity theory, pragmatics and the study of language at work Katarzyna JASZCZOLT (Cambridge Univ.), Temporality and post-Gricean pragmatics Asa KASHER (Tel Aviv Univ.), Revisiting philosophical pragmatics: Implicatures and speech act theory Michael PERKINS (Univ. of Sheffield), Pragmatics and language pathology Corinne ROSSARI & Eddy ROULET (Univ. de Gen�ve), Les nouveaux d�veloppements dans les recherches sur les relations de discours et leurs marqueurs Scott SCHWENTER (Ohio State Univ.), Current issues in the diachronic micropragmatics of Romance languages Anna-Brita STENSTROM & Karin AIJMER (Univ. of Bergen & Univ. of Gothenburg), Conversation analysis: Different approaches to spoken interaction CALL FOR PAPERS There is one submission deadline for paper and panel proposals: 1 November 2002 A call for papers with complete instructions is to be found on the IPrA website (address below). Paper versions can be requested from Ann Verhaert (ann.verhaert at ipra.be) GO TO: http://ipra-www.uia.ac.be/ipra/ Jef Verschueren IPrA Research Center University of Antwerp Universiteitsplein 1 B-2610 Wilrijk Belgium tel. +32-3-8202773, fax & tel. +32-3-2305574 jef.verschueren at ua.ac.be also visit the IPrA website at http://ipra-www.uia.ac.be/ipra/ From sepkit at UTU.FI Tue Apr 16 03:38:31 2002 From: sepkit at UTU.FI (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Seppo_Kittil=E4?=) Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 06:38:31 +0300 Subject: Call for Papers: Symposium on Historical Syntax Message-ID: Apologies for multiple postings. CALL FOR PAPERS The Linguistic Association of Finland is organizing a symposium on APPROACHES TO HISTORICAL SYNTAX to be held at the University of Joensuu Mekrijärvi Research Station, September 19-22, 2002. The symposium will bring together scholars interested in problems relating to historical syntax. We invite papers and posters dealing with particular language(s) as well as papers taking a crosslinguistic perspective. Suggested themes include changes in argument structure, grammaticalization in historical syntax, and the role of corpora and quantitative analysis in the study of historical syntax. Other topics relating to historical syntax are also welcome. Invited speakers: * Alice C. Harris (Vanderbilt University) * Anthony Warner (University of York) Activities: * lectures by invited speakers * presentations by other participants (20 min + 10 min for discussion) * poster session Abstracts: The deadline for submission of abstracts (in English; max 500 words) is May 30, 2002. Please indicate on the abstract whether your presentation is intended as a paper or a poster. Please submit your abstract by e-mail to the following address mekri-organizers at utu.fi. 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 14, 2002. The accepted abstracts will be published on the web page of the symposium. Registration: The deadline for registration for all participants is June 30, 2002. Register by e-mail to the address mekri-organizers at utu.fi. Registration fees: * general: EUR 40 * members of the association: EUR 20 * undergraduate and MA students free Send your payment by giro account no 800013-1424850 to The Linguistic Association of Finland (SKY)/Symposium. For participants coming from abroad we recommend payment in cash upon arrival. However, it is possible to pay via Eurogiro or SWIFT to our account (International Bank Account Number FI808000131424850) with Sampo Bank plc, Helsinki, Finland. SWIFT-address: PSPBFIHH; Telex 121 698 pgiro sf. Location: The symposium takes place at the University of Joensuu Mekrijärvi Research Station in North Karelia, close to the Russian border. For more information about the Mekrijärvi Research Station and its surroundings, please visit the Station's web pages. Transportation from Joensuu to Mekrijärvi and back will be arranged by the organizers. Accommodation: An accommodation fee of EUR 117 will cover 3 nights' full board and lodging at Mekrijärvi from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon (accommodation fee to be paid upon arrival). The academic programme of the symposium will run from Friday morning till Sunday afternoon. For further information, please contact . The organizing committee: Juhani Klemola (chair), Department of English, P.O. Box 4, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland, e-mail: Juhani.Klemola at Helsinki.fi and Pentti Haddington (English, U of Oulu), pentti.haddington at oulu.fi Arja Hamari (Finno-Ugric languages, U of Turku), arja.hamari at utu.fi Seppo Kittilä (General Linguistics, U of Turku), seppo.kittila at utu.fi Leena Kolehmainen (German, U of Helsinki), leena.kolehmainen at helsinki.fi Marja Nenonen (General Linguistics, U of Joensuu), marja.nenonen at joensuu.fi Esa Penttilä (English, U of Joensuu), esa.penttila at joensuu.fi Heli Pitkänen (English, U of Joensuu), heli.pitkanen at joensuu.fi Marja Pälsi (General Linguistics, U of Helsinki), marja.palsi at ling.helsinki.fi Jouni Rostila (German, U of Tampere), jouni.rostila at uta.fi Jari Sivonen (Finnish, U of Oulu), jari.sivonen at oulu.fi From sepkit at UTU.FI Mon Apr 22 04:16:32 2002 From: sepkit at UTU.FI (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Seppo_Kittil=E4?=) Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 07:16:32 +0300 Subject: Corrected CFP: Approaches to Historical Syntax Message-ID: Apologies for multiple postings CORRECTED CALL FOR PAPERS (with web addresses that were missing in the first call) The Linguistic Association of Finland is organizing a symposium on APPROACHES TO HISTORICAL SYNTAX to be held at the University of Joensuu Mekrijärvi Research Station, September 19-22, 2002. The symposium will bring together scholars interested in problems relating to historical syntax. We invite papers and posters dealing with particular language(s) as well as papers taking a crosslinguistic perspective. Suggested themes include changes in argument structure, grammaticalization in historical syntax, and the role of corpora and quantitative analysis in the study of historical syntax. Other topics relating to historical syntax are also welcome. Invited speakers: * Alice C. Harris (Vanderbilt University) * Anthony Warner (University of York) Activities: * lectures by invited speakers * presentations by other participants (20 min + 10 min for discussion) * poster session Abstracts: The deadline for submission of abstracts (in English; max 500 words) is May 30, 2002. Please indicate on the abstract whether your presentation is intended as a paper or a poster. 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 14, 2002. The accepted abstracts will be published on the web page of the symposium . Registration: The deadline for registration for all participants is June 30, 2002. Register by e-mail to the address . Registration fees: * general: EUR 40 * members of the association: EUR 20 * undergraduate and MA students free Send your payment by giro account no 800013-1424850 to The Linguistic Association of Finland (SKY)/Symposium. For participants coming from abroad we recommend payment in cash upon arrival. However, it is possible to pay via Eurogiro or SWIFT to our account (International Bank Account Number FI808000131424850) with Sampo Bank plc, Helsinki, Finland. SWIFT-address: PSPBFIHH; Telex 121 698 pgiro sf. Location: The symposium takes place at the University of Joensuu Mekrijärvi Research Station in North Karelia, close to the Russian border. For more information about the Mekrijärvi Research Station and its surroundings, please visit the Station's web pages . Transportation from Joensuu to Mekrijärvi and back will be arranged by the organizers. Accommodation: An accommodation fee of EUR 117 will cover 3 nights' full board and lodging at Mekrijärvi from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon (accommodation fee to be paid upon arrival). The academic programme of the symposium will run from Friday morning till Sunday afternoon. For further information, please visit our web pages or contact the organizers . The organizing committee: Juhani Klemola (chair), Department of English, P.O. Box 4, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland, e-mail: Juhani.Klemola at Helsinki.fi and Pentti Haddington (English, U of Oulu), pentti.haddington at oulu.fi Arja Hamari (Finno-Ugric languages, U of Turku), arja.hamari at utu.fi Seppo Kittilä (General Linguistics, U of Turku), seppo.kittila at utu.fi Leena Kolehmainen (German, U of Helsinki), leena.kolehmainen at helsinki.fi Marja Nenonen (General Linguistics, U of Joensuu), marja.nenonen at joensuu.fi Esa Penttilä (English, U of Joensuu), esa.penttila at joensuu.fi Heli Pitkänen (English, U of Joensuu), heli.pitkanen at joensuu.fi Marja Pälsi (General Linguistics, U of Helsinki), marja.palsi at ling.helsinki.fi Jouni Rostila (German, U of Tampere), jouni.rostila at uta.fi Jari Sivonen (Finnish, U of Oulu), jari.sivonen at oulu.fi From stefan.grondelaers at ARTS.KULEUVEN.AC.BE Tue Apr 23 18:17:24 2002 From: stefan.grondelaers at ARTS.KULEUVEN.AC.BE (Stefan Grondelaers) Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 20:17:24 +0200 Subject: Call for papers for MEASURING LEXICAL VARIATION AND CHANGE - A Symposium on Quantitative Sociolexicology Message-ID: Apologies for multiple postings Call for papers MEASURING LEXICAL VARIATION AND CHANGE A Symposium on Quantitative Sociolexicology University of Leuven, Belgium October 24-25, 2002 Organised by the research unit “Quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics” of the University of Leuven Made possible by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (FWO) (Onderzoeksgemeenschap Cognitieve Linguïstiek) Aim This workshop intends to bring together those researchers in the field of variational lexicology and diachronic vocabulary studies that use quantitative methods. Although such methods have been used less intensively in the study of lexical variation and change than they have been employed in the field of phonetics, morphology, or other linguistic variables, there is a growing body of quantitative research on the distribution of words over language varieties and the diffusion of lexical changes over time. The symposium intends to create a forum for the confrontation and the comparison of the different approaches involved. Structure & schedule The workshop will take place on Thursday October 24 and Friday October 25, and it will consist of 5 plenary sessions (1 hour) and a limited number of regular sessions (40’). Invited speakers include: Nigel Armstrong (University of Leeds) Harald Baayen (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen & University of Nijmegen) John Nerbonne (University of Groningen) Terttu Nevalainen (University of Helsinki) In order to ensure a highly focused event with maximal interaction between the participants, the number of regular presentations will be limited to 15 at most, and there will be no parallel sessions. Submission If you are interested in presenting a lecture at the symposium, please submit a one page abstract by June 1 at the latest. Notification of acceptance will follow by June 15. Abstracts should be submitted electronically to Dirk Geeraerts, Stefan Grondelaers & Dirk Speelman at the following address: sociolex at listserv.cc.kuleuven.ac.be Topics Relevant topics include: 1. Lexical standardization and the diffusion of standard vocabularies 2. The lexicon in pluricentric languages 3. Lexical innovation, lexical loss, and the rate of vocabulary change 4. Lexical dialectometry and stylometry 5. The relationship between lexical and non-lexical variables as markers of language varieties 6. Empirical methods (corpus analysis, statistical techniques) for studying lexical variation and change You may focus either on past research in connection with the workshop theme, or introduce new data or methodologies pertaining to the theme. Observe that the topic of the conference is to be taken in a prototypical sense. We are primarily interested in studies that combine three features: a lexical focus, a quantitative method, and a variational or diachronic perspective. Time permitting, however, we may accommodate papers that combine just a few of these features, like quantitative studies of variation and change that are not primarily lexical, or diachronic and variational lexical studies that do not employ quantitative methods. Additional information Information about the organisers, the conference venue, and accommodation & fees can be found at our conference website http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/sociolex Dirk Geeraerts - Stefan Grondelaers - Dirk Speelman Research unit “Quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics” Department of Linguistics University of Leuven Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 B-3000 Leuven Belgium -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefan.grondelaers at ARTS.KULEUVEN.AC.BE Wed Apr 24 08:02:54 2002 From: stefan.grondelaers at ARTS.KULEUVEN.AC.BE (Stefan Grondelaers) Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 10:02:54 +0200 Subject: Call for papers for MEASURING LEXICAL VARIATION AND CHANGE - A Symposium on Quantitative Sociolexicology Message-ID: Apologies for multiple postings Call for papers MEASURING LEXICAL VARIATION AND CHANGE A Symposium on Quantitative Sociolexicology University of Leuven, Belgium October 24-25, 2002 Organised by the research unit “Quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics” of the University of Leuven Made possible by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (FWO) (Onderzoeksgemeenschap Cognitieve Linguïstiek) Aim This workshop intends to bring together those researchers in the field of variational lexicology and diachronic vocabulary studies that use quantitative methods. Although such methods have been used less intensively in the study of lexical variation and change than they have been employed in the field of phonetics, morphology, or other linguistic variables, there is a growing body of quantitative research on the distribution of words over language varieties and the diffusion of lexical changes over time. The symposium intends to create a forum for the confrontation and the comparison of the different approaches involved. Structure & schedule The workshop will take place on Thursday October 24 and Friday October 25, and it will consist of 5 plenary sessions (1 hour) and a limited number of regular sessions (40’). Invited speakers include: Nigel Armstrong (University of Leeds) Harald Baayen (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen & University of Nijmegen) John Nerbonne (University of Groningen) Terttu Nevalainen (University of Helsinki) In order to ensure a highly focused event with maximal interaction between the participants, the number of regular presentations will be limited to 15 at most, and there will be no parallel sessions. Submission If you are interested in presenting a lecture at the symposium, please submit a one page abstract by June 1 at the latest. Notification of acceptance will follow by June 15. Abstracts should be submitted electronically to Dirk Geeraerts, Stefan Grondelaers & Dirk Speelman at the following address: sociolex at listserv.cc.kuleuven.ac.be Topics Relevant topics include: 1. Lexical standardization and the diffusion of standard vocabularies 2. The lexicon in pluricentric languages 3. Lexical innovation, lexical loss, and the rate of vocabulary change 4. Lexical dialectometry and stylometry 5. The relationship between lexical and non-lexical variables as markers of language varieties 6. Empirical methods (corpus analysis, statistical techniques) for studying lexical variation and change You may focus either on past research in connection with the workshop theme, or introduce new data or methodologies pertaining to the theme. Observe that the topic of the conference is to be taken in a prototypical sense. We are primarily interested in studies that combine three features: a lexical focus, a quantitative method, and a variational or diachronic perspective. Time permitting, however, we may accommodate papers that combine just a few of these features, like quantitative studies of variation and change that are not primarily lexical, or diachronic and variational lexical studies that do not employ quantitative methods. Additional information Information about the organisers, the conference venue, and accommodation & fees can be found at our conference website http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/sociolex Dirk Geeraerts - Stefan Grondelaers - Dirk Speelman Research unit “Quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics” Department of Linguistics University of Leuven Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 B-3000 Leuven Belgium -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fortesq at HUM.KU.DK Wed Apr 24 08:24:01 2002 From: fortesq at HUM.KU.DK (mike) Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 10:24:01 +0200 Subject: book notice Message-ID: BOOK NOTICE The Domain of Language by Michael Fortescue Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen 2002 392 pages, hardbound. ISBN 87-7289-706-6. £30, $49 This book is intended as counter-evidence to the perception that Linguistics is a matter of dusty schoolroom grammar. The discipline may appear to outsiders as fragmented and - worse still - lacking in relevance to the real world outside its gates. This book demonstrates that Linguistics, in all its varied branches, can be entertaining as well as thought-provoking, and that its domain is indeed a coherent one despite all the internecine squabbling. In an unconventional way Michael Fortescue introduces his subject as a kind of fable with a historical moral that professional linguists, as well as students, should enjoy as a commentary on the state of the discipline today. A sample chapter of the book can be read at the following website: http://www.cphling.dk/pers/mf/dom.sample.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU Fri Apr 26 19:57:50 2002 From: fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU (Frederick Newmeyer) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 12:57:50 -0700 Subject: frequency of person/number Message-ID: I'm interested in knowing what the relative frequency is in conversation (and possibly other genres) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person forms (singular and plural, pronominal or non-pronominal). Could somebody please tell me where to look for an answer? Thanks! --fritz newmeyer From kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL Fri Apr 26 20:15:00 2002 From: kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL (Kees Hengeveld) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 22:15:00 +0200 Subject: frequency of person/number In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Fritz, I can give you the facts for Dutch. The frequency dictionary shows remarkable differences in the distribution of pronouns for the written and oral varieties of Dutch. The facts are like this: written -----Original Message----- From: FUNKNET -- Discussion of issues in Functional Linguistics [mailto:FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU]On Behalf Of Frederick Newmeyer Sent: vrijdag 26 april 2002 21:58 To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU Subject: frequency of person/number I'm interested in knowing what the relative frequency is in conversation (and possibly other genres) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person forms (singular and plural, pronominal or non-pronominal). Could somebody please tell me where to look for an answer? Thanks! --fritz newmeyer From kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL Fri Apr 26 21:00:51 2002 From: kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL (Kees Hengeveld) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 23:00:51 +0200 Subject: frequency of person/number Message-ID: Dear Fritz, I can give you the facts for Dutch. The frequency dictionary, based on a 800,000 word corpus, shows remarkable differences in the distribution of pronouns for the written and oral varieties of Dutch. The absolute facts are like this for the 75 highest ranking words in both subparts of the corpus: written oral 1 07042 04163 2 00440 00796 3 16146 01610 In relative terms, the distribution is as follows: 1 2 1 2 3 3 3 1 2 The predominance of intrinsically deictic pronouns in oral texts is not surprising. If I split up the figures for speech act participants (1 and 2) and non-speech act participants the result is as follows: 1/2 07482 (2) 04959 (1) 3 16146 (1) 01610 (2) What is remarkable is the fact that the second peron pronouns come last in both subparts of the corpus. In the figures above I have excluded the impersonal use of the second person pronoun. I have included adnominal (genitive) and other case forms. For morphological reasons it is impossible to split up the figures for singular and plural. More generally, I think that frequency dictionaries can provide the information you are looking for. Best, Kees Hengeveld -----Original Message----- From: FUNKNET -- Discussion of issues in Functional Linguistics [mailto:FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU]On Behalf Of Frederick Newmeyer Sent: vrijdag 26 april 2002 21:58 To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU Subject: frequency of person/number I'm interested in knowing what the relative frequency is in conversation (and possibly other genres) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person forms (singular and plural, pronominal or non-pronominal). Could somebody please tell me where to look for an answer? Thanks! --fritz newmeyer From hstahlke at BSU.EDU Fri Apr 26 22:00:22 2002 From: hstahlke at BSU.EDU (Stahlke, Herbert F.W.) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 17:00:22 -0500 Subject: frequency of person/number Message-ID: I know of two studies that should have this for English: Frequency analysis of English vocabulary and grammar : based on the LOB corpus Johansson, Stig 1989 and Frequency analysis of English usage : lexicon and grammar Francis, W. Nelson (Winthrop Nelson), 1982 Francis&Kucera is based on the Brown Corpus. Herb Stahlke Ball State University -----Original Message----- From: Frederick Newmeyer [mailto:fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU] Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 2:58 PM To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu Subject: frequency of person/number I'm interested in knowing what the relative frequency is in conversation (and possibly other genres) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person forms (singular and plural, pronominal or non-pronominal). Could somebody please tell me where to look for an answer? Thanks! --fritz newmeyer From fdehaan at UNM.EDU Fri Apr 26 22:14:52 2002 From: fdehaan at UNM.EDU (Ferdinand de Haan) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 16:14:52 -0600 Subject: frequency of person/number Message-ID: There is also a large discussion in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Douglas Biber et al., 1999), starting on page 333. Ferdinand de Haan University of New Mexico > I know of two studies that should have this for English: > > Frequency analysis of English vocabulary and grammar : based on the LOB corpus > Johansson, Stig > 1989 > > and > > Frequency analysis of English usage : lexicon and grammar > Francis, W. Nelson (Winthrop Nelson), > 1982 > > Francis&Kucera is based on the Brown Corpus. > > Herb Stahlke > Ball State University > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Frederick Newmeyer [mailto:fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU] > Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 2:58 PM > To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu > Subject: frequency of person/number > > > I'm interested in knowing what the relative frequency is in conversation > (and possibly other genres) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person forms (singular > and plural, pronominal or non-pronominal). Could somebody please tell me > where to look for an answer? > > Thanks! > > --fritz newmeyer From amnfn at WELL.COM Fri Apr 26 22:28:01 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 15:28:01 -0700 Subject: reversal of 1st and second person Message-ID: Does anyone know of any case studies in first language acquisition where a child reverses first and second person, referring to himself in second person and to his interlocutor in first person? (Such a practice dispenses with the deictic element and allows second person to be an absolute designation for this particular child.) --Aya Katz From G.Redeker at let.rug.nl Sat Apr 27 09:03:35 2002 From: G.Redeker at let.rug.nl (Gisela Redeker) Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 11:03:35 +0200 Subject: frequency of person/number -- Dutch In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On 26 Apr 2002, at 23:00, Kees Hengeveld wrote: > I can give you the facts for Dutch. The frequency dictionary, based on a > 800,000 word corpus, shows remarkable differences in the distribution of > pronouns for the written and oral varieties of Dutch. The absolute facts are.. [snip] > What is remarkable is the fact that the second peron pronouns come last in > both subparts of the corpus. Which corpus are you using, Kees? Leiden? Especially important: how is the distribution of interactive/non-interactive, formal/informal, etc. genres in that corpus? As Biber c.s. (also Redeker 1984) have shown, these factors are at least as important in register variation as the oral/written distinction; that goes of course a fortiori for 2nd person references. Fritz Newmeyer's question concerned mainly conversations, so he must need the separate figures for (informal?) interactive talk (spoken? how about emails?). For large amounts of interactive and non-interactive spoken Dutch, coded (i.a.) for genre, the CGN is the most valuable source. Maybe someone out there (e.g. from the CGN project?) has or could produce relevant figures from that? Gisela Redeker Gisela Redeker, Professor, Dept. of Language and Communication University of Groningen, P.O.Box 716, NL-9700 AS Groningen tel: +31-50-3635973/-5858 fax: +31-50-3636855 e-mail: G.Redeker at let.rug.nl http://www.let.rug.nl/~redeker/ From kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL Sat Apr 27 10:48:49 2002 From: kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL (Kees Hengeveld) Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 12:48:49 +0200 Subject: frequency of person/number -- Dutch In-Reply-To: <3CCA8587.5348.293527@localhost> Message-ID: My figures are from what is, I think, the only published frequency distionary of Dutch, which is based on the so-called 'Eindhovens corpus': P.C. Uit den Boogaart ed. (1975), Woordfrequenties. Utrecht: Oosthoek, Scheltema & Holkema. I have given the rough figures only, since the subparts of the corpus of spoken language are too small to give reliable indications. As far as I know the CGN Corpus of spoken Dutch is not fully operational yet, but maybe someone can correct me. Kees Hengeveld -----Original Message----- From: Gisela Redeker [mailto:G.Redeker at let.rug.nl] Sent: zaterdag 27 april 2002 11:04 To: Kees Hengeveld; FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU Subject: Re: frequency of person/number -- Dutch On 26 Apr 2002, at 23:00, Kees Hengeveld wrote: > I can give you the facts for Dutch. The frequency dictionary, based on a > 800,000 word corpus, shows remarkable differences in the distribution of > pronouns for the written and oral varieties of Dutch. The absolute facts are.. [snip] > What is remarkable is the fact that the second peron pronouns come last in > both subparts of the corpus. Which corpus are you using, Kees? Leiden? Especially important: how is the distribution of interactive/non-interactive, formal/informal, etc. genres in that corpus? As Biber c.s. (also Redeker 1984) have shown, these factors are at least as important in register variation as the oral/written distinction; that goes of course a fortiori for 2nd person references. Fritz Newmeyer's question concerned mainly conversations, so he must need the separate figures for (informal?) interactive talk (spoken? how about emails?). For large amounts of interactive and non-interactive spoken Dutch, coded (i.a.) for genre, the CGN is the most valuable source. Maybe someone out there (e.g. from the CGN project?) has or could produce relevant figures from that? Gisela Redeker Gisela Redeker, Professor, Dept. of Language and Communication University of Groningen, P.O.Box 716, NL-9700 AS Groningen tel: +31-50-3635973/-5858 fax: +31-50-3636855 e-mail: G.Redeker at let.rug.nl http://www.let.rug.nl/~redeker/ From kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL Sat Apr 27 21:49:29 2002 From: kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL (Kees Hengeveld) Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 23:49:29 +0200 Subject: FW: frequency of person/number -- Dutch (fwd) Message-ID: Dear all, I send you the message below on behalf of Ton van der Wouden. Best, Kees Hengeveld -----Original Message----- From: Wouden A. van der [mailto:A.van.der.Wouden at let.rug.nl] Sent: zaterdag 27 april 2002 23:13 To: funknet at listserv.rice.edu; kees.hengeveld at hum.uva.nl; g.redeker at let.rug.nl Subject: Re: frequency of person/number -- Dutch (fwd) Those interested in the distribution of personal pronouns in Dutch may want to take a look at the very drafty paper On certain syntactic properties of spoken Dutch which we presented at Computational linguistics in the Netherlands 2001, Enschede, November 30 2001. Among other things, we give (on page 11) some counts of (1st, 2nd. 3rd) pronouns in four subcorpora of the October 2001 version of the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN). The paper can be found via http://odur.let.rug.nl/~vdwouden/docs/ Hope this helps, Ton van der Wouden CGN From M-Hoseini at ARAKU.AC.IR Sun Apr 28 11:38:13 2002 From: M-Hoseini at ARAKU.AC.IR (Mohammad Hoseini) Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 16:08:13 +0430 Subject: Q:TV and Radio Reports Message-ID: Dear linguists, I'm interested in the study of the similarities and differences between the language of TV and radio reports of the same sport events. As you know,In a TV report, the listener has the advantage of viewing the scene, but in a report on the radio s/he must rely on the descriptions of the reporter and use his imagination. I would like to know if: i) anyone out there knows of any work on this subject; ii) which linguistic theory, semantic, discourse or pragmatic, can be of more help? Best regards S. M. Hoseini From nealjw at YAHOO.COM Sun Apr 28 14:51:33 2002 From: nealjw at YAHOO.COM (John Neal) Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 07:51:33 -0700 Subject: No subject Message-ID: help --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From marefat at CHAMRAN.UT.AC.IR Sun Apr 28 16:56:23 2002 From: marefat at CHAMRAN.UT.AC.IR (hamideh marefat) Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 21:26:23 +0430 Subject: Q:TV and Radio Reports Message-ID: Dear Mr Hoseini, i wonder if you have checked Mohsen Ghadessi's works. he has analysed the language of the sports news in one of his works from a discourse point of view. hope you find it helpful. cheers marefat ----- Original Message ----- From: Mohammad Hoseini To: Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2002 4:08 PM Subject: Q:TV and Radio Reports > Dear linguists, > I'm interested in the study of the similarities and differences between > the language of TV and radio reports of the same sport events. > As you know,In a TV report, the listener has the advantage of viewing the > scene, but in a report on the radio s/he must rely on the descriptions of > the reporter and use his imagination. > > I would like to know if: > > i) anyone out there knows of any work on this subject; > > ii) which linguistic theory, semantic, discourse or pragmatic, can be of > more help? > > Best regards > S. M. Hoseini From oesten at LING.SU.SE Mon Apr 29 08:09:30 2002 From: oesten at LING.SU.SE (=?iso-8859-1?Q?=D6sten_Dahl?=) Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 10:09:30 +0200 Subject: Frequency of person/number Message-ID: Another hopefully relevant reference: Dahl, Östen. Egophoricity in Discourse and Syntax. Functions of Language 7.1: 37-77. Abstract: Egophoricity in discourse and syntax Östen Dahl Egophoric reference is defined as reference to speech act participants and generic reference. As shown by adult conversational data from Swedish, English, and Spanish, and longitudinal data from one Swedish child, the majority of all animate arguments of verbs in conversation are egophoric. This percentage varies quite considerably between different types of subject and between subjects and objects. Positions representing essentially animate roles — agents, experiencers, and recipients — have a high incidence of egophoric reference and a high egophoric/animate ratio. Positions allowing both animate and inanimate reference have relatively low egophoric percentages, absolutely and relative to animates. The explanation of these patterns is not to be found not so much in the way in which information is presented but rather in the intrinsic content of the information that is conveyed. The presence/absence of an essentially animate argument may be a more fundamental distinction for a taxonomy of predication types than transitivity. - Östen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From srpskijezik at narod.ru Mon Apr 29 11:54:24 2002 From: srpskijezik at narod.ru (Skola Srpskog Jezika i Kulture) Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 15:54:24 +0400 Subject: announcement Message-ID: Dear friends allow me to inform you about the project of young assistent teachers from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade (www.fil.bg.ac.yu) called the School of Serbian Language and Culture. For more datails please visit our web page www.srpskijezik.edu.yu We will appreciate if you pass this info to the people who may consider it useful.Thank you in advance Predrag Obucina The School of Serbian Language and Culture From thuumo at UTU.FI Fri Apr 5 11:00:29 2002 From: thuumo at UTU.FI (Tuomas Huumo) Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 14:00:29 +0300 Subject: Second call for papers Message-ID: Second call for papers Cognitive Linguistics East of Eden A joint conference organized by the Finnish Cognitive Linguistics Association (FiCLA) and the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association (SCLA) will take place in Turku, Finland, on September 13 to 15, 2002. Starring (as plenary speakers): Mirjam Fried (Princeton University) Marja-Liisa Helasvuo (University of Turku) Laura Janda (University of North Carolina) Helena Leheckova (University of Helsinki) Ekaterina Rakhilina (Moscow State University) The aim of the conference is to bring together cognitive linguists from the East and the West, and to offer a forum for collaboration and discussion on current developments in Cognitive Linguistics. We welcome abstracts for oral presentations (20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion) and for posters on all cognitive linguistic topics, including syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology, metaphor, pragmatics, discourse, etc. We especially welcome papers on Slavic and/or Finno-Ugric languages. The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2002. Please submit a one-page abstract (max. 500 words), with an additional page for tabels, graphs and references, if necessary. We strongly encourage e-mail submissions. For speakers with topics related to the Slavic languages: Please send your abstract to janda at unc.edu. For speakers with topics related to other languages: Please send your abstract as an attachment file (plain text or rtf) to aairola at ling.helsinki.fi, with your name, affiliation, e-mail address and the title of your paper included in the message. If you wish to submit a paper version, then please send 5 anonymous copies of your abstract, and your author information on a separate sheet of paper. In this case, please use the following address: Anu Airola Department of General Linguistics P.O.Box 9 (Siltavuorenpenger 20 A) FIN-00014 University of Helsinki Finland The participation fee will be 70 euros (35 euros for students, including graduate students), to be paid at the conference site in cash (please observe that we cannot accept credit cards). For members of the FiCLA, SCLA or ICLA the fee will be 50 euros (25 euros for students). Participants from economically disadvantaged countries may be allowed a free participation upon application. In such a case, please include an application for free participation in your abstract. The participation fee will cover the abstract booklet, other conference materials, coffee and a get-together with snacks. From NilAngel at AOL.COM Fri Apr 5 11:09:04 2002 From: NilAngel at AOL.COM (NilAngel at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 06:09:04 EST Subject: Remove me from this List Please Message-ID: I never subscribed to this list..... Please remove me... this is my 3rd request. From tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Sun Apr 7 00:56:17 2002 From: tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Givon) Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2002 16:56:17 -0800 Subject: "progress" in linguistics Message-ID: NOTE: THESE REFLECTIONS HAVE BEEN INSPIRED BY AN (ALAS BELATED) READING OF ESA ITKONEN'S "A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS" (1991; AMSTERDAM: J. BENJAMINS). OBVIOUSLY, I COULD NOT RECOMMEND THE BOOK MORE ENTHUSIASTICALLY. IT IS A RARE TOUR DE FORCE. WHAT FOLLOWS BEGAN AS COMMENTS DURING CORRESPONDENCE WITH ESA, WHO OF COURSE BEARS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAY I CHOSE TO INTERPRET HIS WORK. STILL, HE HAS MY THANKS. TG Dear Esa, I have now made a brave if incomplete stab at both your Panini section & the conclusions in ch. 6 . Panini has always been a rough going for me, so I am thrilled at your determination & erudition in attempting to decipher it for ignorami like myself. I wouldn't have been able to do it on my own, not having enough patience (not to mention being burdened with an atavistic recoil from obscurantism...). But I think I got the point. Panini was just as sophisticated as any descriptive linguist of the 19th Cent. tradition (yes, that includes us). Having benefited so much from your tour-de-force of Panini, the Greeks & Hermann Paul, I still wonder about your conclusions (ch. 6), in particular the discussion of progress in science and progress in linguistics. Let me dispense with philosophy first. To my mind, Kuhn--and especially a radical interpretation of Kuhn that foregrounds scientific revolutions and downgrades 'normal science' (and makes a huge deal about the radical difference between those two phases of science)--is univeresally accepted neither in philosophy of science nor in many disciplines of science itself. Most 'real' scientists I talk to (mostly chemists and biologists) are much more conscious of the gradual nature of their disciplines, the slow accretion of factual, methodological and theoretical knowledge--even when great leaps occur, as they undeniably do. It is not an accident that in Biology, Kuhn was embraced only by a small tho media-savvy & articulate fringe of Marxist anti-graduality ideologists--indeed, to my thinking, anti-evolutionary ideologists--like Gould & Lewontin. It is not an accident either, I think, that in Linguistics Kuhn was embraced in by the Chomskians (and other self-perceived great revolutionaries...). And it is not an accident either that most of the overblown 'revolutionary science' examples cited by Kuhn (or the Chomskians) come from Physics, the most mathematics-dependent and the most deductively-driven of all sciences. But I suspect that even in physics, Kuhn's sweeping taxonomy of the two kinds of science represents a vastly over-blown generalization (certainly Lakatos does not accept such a clean taxonomy). Tho admittedly, 'great revolutions' are easier to demonstrate in physics, and thus help sustain the revoilutionary philosophical biase. In linguistics, it is precisely the people who view deductivism & physics as the proper models for science that espouse the redical Kuhn-type view. Every time such a linguist farts, an inspired new theory is born. The philosophy of science articulated by pragmatists such as Peirce & Hanson does not make such a radical distinction between 'normal' and 'revolutionary' science. To begin with, it recognizes the fact-driven nature of hypothesis formation (not Popper's 'miracle'...)--tho not via induction but via abduction. What is more, such an approach also rejects the strict Positivist (Carnap, Russell) division between factual and theoretical statements. Rather, it concedes the theory-laden nature of 'facts' as well as their dynamic nature-- "Today's facts are yesterday's theories". Such an approach is much less likely to be swept off its feet by radical 'revolutions', not because it doesn't recognize the profundity of new abductive insights (hypotheses), but because it sees them as embedded in their historical & conteporary--often cross-disciplinary--context. The best way I can remind all of us of this is by quoting Peirce: "...Any philosophical doctrine that should be completely new could hardly fail to prove completely false..." (1940, p. 269). Now let us turn to your observation (ch. 6) that no 'real' progress occurred in linguistics between Panini and 1960. Let me first tell you why I am sympathetic to this rather sweeping generalization--up to a point. One thing that really marks the difference between a pre-scientific & a scientific investigation of the very same domain is a commitment to *methodology*. From such a commitment spring both new data-bases and new hypotheses. Here Panini represents the best of our "competence" methodology, thus the best of arm-chair linguistics, thus the best of Plato-cum- Aristotle. The facts in such a method are crystal clear and available to conscious reflection & analysis. Both intra-subject and inter-subject variation is ignored as either methodologically or theoretically irrelevant. The analytic method is heavily tipped toward deductivism. This is very similar to Physics and inorganic chemistry (you've seen one H2O atom, you've seen them all...). Now, descriptive grammarians from Panini to the end of the 18th Century (not 1960!) practiced this analytic "competence" methodology. They applied it to single languages, and the same *types* of facts were analyzed by the same types of method. Should one be surprised that at the lack of progress? Does one see much progress in philosophy over the same period? (or, for that matter, up to the present?) It is also good to remind ourselves that there was relatively modest *theoretical* progress in Biology between Aristotle and (ca.) the 16th Century--and for very similar reasons. Yes, people did very useful *taxonomy* work, vastly enriching Aristotle's initial *scala natura*. But the general thrust of the Linnaean taxonomy--the apex of that protracted effort--was really not all that different from Aristotle's. No insightful new explanations were forthcoming (except for the tried-and-true God, or His Romantic stand-in, *force vitale*...). Eventually, the conflation of new methods cum new data-bases did occur, and that's what (I think) stimulated the eventual theoretical 'revolution' (Darwin): The fossil record and the mothods of Geology; Microbiology. But still, it was the methodological/factual expansion to detailed micro-variation within species (Galapagos!), on the one hand, and the link to adaptive *behavior* (the birth of what eventually became ethology), borrowed from another discipline (Political Economy; Darwin was reading Malthus & Adam Smith) that eventually prompted the new theoretical perspective(adaptive selection; competition for limited resources). And it was the later merger of chemistry and biology into molecular genetics that finally clinched the rest of the mechanism (the site of mutations, thus the source of spontaneous variation). So from my perspective, there was a profound thoretical stasis in biology bewtween 300BC and 1600AD. Now, why do I think scientific progress in linguistics started in the 19th century (rather than in the 1960s)? Two reasons, both of them well known to you. (i) UNIVERSALS: Till the 19th century, all Panini-type descriptive grammarians may have *assumed* universals implicitly, but they did not systematically study cross-language (typological) variation. They described single language but did not systematically compare them. The advent of the expanded data-base in the 19th Century, first within IE and soon across-families, provided a much more realistic factual benchmark for raising the question of universals anew--beyond Plato & Aristotle. Whether the early answers by Schleicher, von Humboldt, Bloomfield, Sapir/Whorf etc. were successful theoretical manoeuvers is almost beside the point. We did not had enough cumulation of data-base- cum-methodology to raise this issue seriously before the 19th century. (ii) DIACHRONY & FUNCTIONALISM: Until the 19th century, change was not the focus of the study. But it is precisely the expansion of the data-base-cum-methodology in the 19th century to *diachrony* that allowed Hermann Paul to make his inspired generalizations about the real locus of the "causal nexus" in an explanatory theory of Language (rather than descriptions of languages)--the cognitively/adaptively-driven *process* of on-line communicative *behavior*. This is, surprisingly, a synchronic perspective, but a novel one--not of competence, but of *performance*. It is thus not only a shift from stasis to process thinking that made the difference, but also from competence-based to performance-based methodology. (In saying this, I merely interpreting your own description of H. Paul's work). Now, have we progressed far beyond H. Paul since 1960? First, I think Jespersen was already right there with Paul, I see no serious retreat (tho no advance either). Was Saussure progess? I don't see how. How about Bloomfield & Chomsky (or, for that matter, the European structuralist)? I am tempted to respond with *ditto* again. While one may have a lot of respect for Bloomfield the descriptivist (the Panin-type Bloomfield), as a theoretician he represents the same general retreat from H. Paul (his teacher?) as Saussure. So what actually started in the 1960s, really? Maybe two or three things that represent a more systematic--methodological--return to the prophetic vision of H. Paul. First, a much more broad-gaged expansion of the cross-linguistic (typological) data-base; albeit with an implicitly Bloomfieldian biase toward "inductive generalizations". Second, incompletely and haltingly, the realization that typology *is* diachrony, so that the locus of explanatory universals (Paul's "causal nexus") is in the process of grammaticalization. But here again, not many of the grammaticalization people understand the implications of this. Most of them are still looking for Bloomfieldian "inductive generalizations"--i.e. a taxonomy of grammaticalization types. And while "emergence" is a wonderful battle cry, it is not yet a clear research programme. And one of thesae days we'll need to moved on from methodology to theory. Taxonomy is very useful (hooray for Linnaeus!), but it is not exactly an ambitious theoretical agenda. Third, and again only dimly & haltingly, the beginning of some *cognitive* explanatory theory, at our interface with experimental psycholinguistics and neuroscience. This was, in essence, the third leg of Paul's research programme--the psychological "causal-nexus" hinging on processing *behavior* (performance). And in the 1960s it begand to--slowly, bashfully--rear its delicate head. But again, the majority of linguists who descroibe themselves as "cognitive" or "functionalist" are still dyed-in-the-wool *competence* philosophers. They expresse their Panini-like generalizations in cognitive-sounding terms. These terms have been either invented by inspired but still arm-chair linguist, or they are 100% isomorphic to structural categories and thus have no independent mtrhodological validity (except for our endearing faith in 100% iconicity...). So yes, the 1960s did represent a return to H. Paul's potentially-scientific theoretical agenda. But we are still at the very threshold of this process. Most of us are still--hopelessly, incurably--methodological humanists ('competence Platonists'?). Science is still an alien planet to us. So, has there been any progress? Will linguistics become, finally, a responsible science? Three moves could help us accelerate the shift from Panini/Chomsky: (a) Interaction with neighboring adaptively-based disciplines (like Darwin). (b) Commitment to a performance-based empirical methodology (like Labov; like psycholinguistics) (c) The conflation of diachrony, universals & performance (H. Paul's agenda). Best & many thanks, TG From weismann at FIBERTEL.COM.AR Sun Apr 7 13:59:27 2002 From: weismann at FIBERTEL.COM.AR (weismann) Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2002 10:59:27 -0300 Subject: "progress" in linguistics Message-ID: Hello and many thanks for your reflections : it is an important synthesis and truly I enjoyed it. Only one question: do you think that is it also possible to introduce or to deep in Linguistics and Sciences of Language in general a philosophical ( Plato, the Greeks, Ockham, etc, etc, Russell, Wittgenstein...) background, context or plainly, a "Grund" or foundational item? Many thanks. Yours, Francis J. Weismann weismann at fibertel.com.ar ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Givon" To: Sent: Saturday, April 06, 2002 9:56 PM Subject: Re: "progress" in linguistics > NOTE: > THESE REFLECTIONS HAVE BEEN INSPIRED BY AN (ALAS BELATED) > READING OF ESA ITKONEN'S "A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS" > (1991; AMSTERDAM: J. BENJAMINS). OBVIOUSLY, I COULD NOT RECOMMEND > THE BOOK MORE ENTHUSIASTICALLY. IT IS A RARE TOUR DE FORCE. WHAT > FOLLOWS BEGAN AS COMMENTS DURING CORRESPONDENCE WITH ESA, WHO OF > COURSE BEARS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAY I CHOSE TO INTERPRET > HIS WORK. STILL, HE HAS MY THANKS. TG > > > > Dear Esa, > > I have now made a brave if incomplete stab at both your Panini section & > the conclusions in ch. 6 . Panini has always been a rough going for me, > so I am thrilled at your determination & erudition in attempting to > decipher it for ignorami like myself. I wouldn't have been able to do it > on my own, not having enough patience (not to mention being burdened > with an atavistic recoil from obscurantism...). But I think I got the > point. Panini was just as sophisticated as any descriptive linguist of > the 19th Cent. tradition (yes, that includes us). > > Having benefited so much from your tour-de-force of Panini, the Greeks & > Hermann Paul, I still wonder about your conclusions (ch. 6), in > particular the > discussion of progress in science and progress in linguistics. > > Let me dispense with philosophy first. To my mind, Kuhn--and especially > a radical interpretation of Kuhn that foregrounds scientific revolutions > and downgrades 'normal science' (and makes a huge deal about the radical > difference between those two phases of science)--is univeresally > accepted neither in philosophy of science nor in many disciplines of > science itself. Most 'real' scientists I talk to (mostly chemists and > biologists) are much more conscious of the gradual nature of their > disciplines, the slow accretion of factual, methodological and > theoretical knowledge--even when great leaps occur, as they undeniably > do. It is not an accident that in Biology, Kuhn was embraced only by a > small tho media-savvy & articulate fringe of Marxist anti-graduality > ideologists--indeed, to my thinking, anti-evolutionary ideologists--like > Gould & Lewontin. > > It is not an accident either, I think, that in Linguistics Kuhn was > embraced in by the Chomskians (and other self-perceived great > revolutionaries...). And it is not an accident either that most of the > overblown 'revolutionary > science' examples cited by Kuhn (or the Chomskians) come from Physics, > the most mathematics-dependent and the most deductively-driven of all > sciences. But I suspect that even in physics, Kuhn's sweeping taxonomy > of the two kinds of science represents a vastly over-blown > generalization (certainly Lakatos does not accept such a clean > taxonomy). Tho admittedly, 'great revolutions' are easier to > demonstrate in physics, and thus help sustain the revoilutionary > philosophical biase. > > In linguistics, it is precisely the people who view deductivism & > physics as the proper models for science that espouse the redical > Kuhn-type view. > Every time such a linguist farts, an inspired new theory is born. The > philosophy of science articulated by pragmatists such as Peirce & Hanson > does not make such a radical distinction between 'normal' and > 'revolutionary' science. To begin with, it recognizes the fact-driven > nature of hypothesis formation (not Popper's 'miracle'...)--tho not via > induction but via abduction. What is more, such an approach also rejects > the strict Positivist (Carnap, Russell) division between factual and > theoretical statements. Rather, it concedes the theory-laden nature of > 'facts' as well as their dynamic nature-- "Today's facts are yesterday's > theories". Such an approach is much less likely to be swept off its feet > by radical 'revolutions', not because it doesn't recognize the > profundity of new abductive insights (hypotheses), but because it sees > them as embedded in their historical & conteporary--often > cross-disciplinary--context. The best way I can remind all of us of this > is by quoting Peirce: "...Any philosophical doctrine that should be > completely new could hardly fail to prove completely false..." (1940, p. > 269). > > Now let us turn to your observation (ch. 6) that no 'real' progress > occurred in linguistics between Panini and 1960. Let me first tell you > why I am > sympathetic to this rather sweeping generalization--up to a point. One > thing that really marks the difference between a pre-scientific & a > scientific investigation of the very same domain is a commitment to > *methodology*. From such a commitment spring > both new data-bases and new hypotheses. Here Panini represents the best > of our > "competence" methodology, thus the best of arm-chair linguistics, thus > the best of > Plato-cum- Aristotle. The facts in such a method are crystal clear and > available to conscious reflection & analysis. Both intra-subject and > inter-subject variation is ignored as either methodologically or > theoretically irrelevant. The analytic method is heavily tipped toward > deductivism. This is very similar to Physics and inorganic chemistry > (you've seen one H2O atom, you've seen them all...). > > Now, descriptive grammarians from Panini to the end of the 18th Century > (not 1960!) practiced this analytic "competence" methodology. They > applied it to > single languages, and the same *types* of facts were analyzed by the > same types of method. Should one be surprised that at the lack of > progress? Does one see much progress in philosophy over the same period? > (or, for that matter, up to the present?) > > It is also good to remind ourselves that there was relatively modest > *theoretical* progress in Biology between Aristotle and (ca.) the 16th > Century--and for very similar reasons. Yes, people did very useful > *taxonomy* work, vastly enriching Aristotle's initial *scala natura*. > But the general thrust of the Linnaean taxonomy--the apex of that > protracted effort--was really not all that different from Aristotle's. > No insightful new explanations were forthcoming (except for the > tried-and-true God, or His Romantic stand-in, *force vitale*...). > > Eventually, the conflation of new methods cum new data-bases did occur, > and that's what (I think) stimulated the eventual theoretical > 'revolution' (Darwin): The fossil record and the mothods of Geology; > Microbiology. But still, it was the methodological/factual expansion to > detailed micro-variation within species (Galapagos!), on the one hand, > and the link to adaptive *behavior* (the birth of what eventually became > ethology), borrowed from another discipline (Political Economy; Darwin > was reading Malthus & Adam Smith) that eventually prompted the new > theoretical perspective(adaptive selection; competition for limited > resources). And it was the later merger of chemistry and biology into > molecular genetics that finally clinched the rest of the mechanism (the > site of mutations, thus the source of spontaneous variation). So from my > perspective, there was a profound thoretical stasis in biology > bewtween 300BC and 1600AD. > > Now, why do I think scientific progress in linguistics started in the > 19th century (rather than in the 1960s)? Two reasons, both of them well > known to you. > > (i) UNIVERSALS: Till the 19th century, all Panini-type descriptive > grammarians may have *assumed* universals implicitly, but they did not > systematically study cross-language (typological) variation. They > described single language but did not systematically compare them. The > advent of the expanded data-base in the 19th Century, first within IE > and soon across-families, provided a much more realistic factual > benchmark for raising the question of universals anew--beyond Plato & > Aristotle. Whether the early answers by Schleicher, von Humboldt, > Bloomfield, Sapir/Whorf etc. were successful theoretical manoeuvers is > almost beside the point. We did not had enough cumulation of data-base- > cum-methodology to raise this issue seriously before the 19th century. > > (ii) DIACHRONY & FUNCTIONALISM: Until the 19th century, change was not > the focus of the study. But it is precisely the expansion of the > data-base-cum-methodology in the 19th century to *diachrony* that > allowed Hermann Paul to make his inspired generalizations about the > real locus of the "causal nexus" in an explanatory theory of Language > (rather than descriptions of languages)--the > cognitively/adaptively-driven *process* of on-line communicative > *behavior*. This is, surprisingly, a synchronic perspective, but a novel > one--not of competence, but of *performance*. It is thus not only a > shift from stasis to process thinking that made the difference, but also > from competence-based to performance-based methodology. (In saying this, > I merely interpreting your own description of H. Paul's work). > > Now, have we progressed far beyond H. Paul since 1960? First, I think > Jespersen was already right there with Paul, I see no serious retreat > (tho no advance > either). Was Saussure progess? I don't see how. How about Bloomfield & > Chomsky (or, > for that matter, the European structuralist)? I am tempted to respond > with > *ditto* again. While one may have a lot of respect for Bloomfield the > descriptivist (the Panin-type Bloomfield), as a theoretician he > represents the same general retreat from H. Paul (his teacher?) as > Saussure. > > So what actually started in the 1960s, really? Maybe two or three things > that represent a more systematic--methodological--return to the > prophetic vision of H. Paul. First, a much more broad-gaged expansion of > the cross-linguistic (typological) data-base; albeit with an implicitly > Bloomfieldian biase toward "inductive generalizations". > > Second, incompletely and haltingly, the realization that typology *is* > diachrony, so that the locus of explanatory universals (Paul's "causal > nexus") is in the process of grammaticalization. But here again, not > many of the grammaticalization people understand the implications of > this. Most of them are still looking for Bloomfieldian "inductive > generalizations"--i.e. a taxonomy of grammaticalization types. And while > "emergence" is a wonderful battle cry, it is not yet a clear research > programme. And one of thesae days we'll need to moved on from > methodology to theory. Taxonomy is very useful (hooray for Linnaeus!), > but it is not exactly an ambitious theoretical agenda. > > Third, and again only dimly & haltingly, the beginning of some > *cognitive* explanatory theory, at our interface with experimental > psycholinguistics > and neuroscience. This was, in essence, the third leg of Paul's research > programme--the psychological "causal-nexus" hinging on processing > *behavior* (performance). And in the 1960s it begand to--slowly, > bashfully--rear its delicate head. But again, the majority of linguists > who descroibe themselves as "cognitive" or "functionalist" are still > dyed-in-the-wool *competence* philosophers. They expresse their > Panini-like generalizations in cognitive-sounding terms. These terms > have been either invented by inspired but still arm-chair linguist, or > they are 100% isomorphic to structural categories and thus have no > independent mtrhodological validity (except for our endearing faith in > 100% iconicity...). > > So yes, the 1960s did represent a return to H. Paul's > potentially-scientific theoretical agenda. But we are still at the very > threshold of this process. Most > of us are still--hopelessly, incurably--methodological humanists > ('competence Platonists'?). Science is still an alien planet to us. > > So, has there been any progress? Will linguistics become, finally, a > responsible science? Three moves could help us accelerate the shift from > Panini/Chomsky: > (a) Interaction with neighboring adaptively-based disciplines > (like Darwin). > (b) Commitment to a performance-based empirical methodology > (like Labov; like psycholinguistics) > (c) The conflation of diachrony, universals & performance > (H. Paul's agenda). > > > Best & many thanks, TG From eitkonen at UTU.FI Mon Apr 8 12:14:13 2002 From: eitkonen at UTU.FI (Esa Itkonen) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2002 15:14:13 +0300 Subject: progress Message-ID: Just two simple comments on the very complicated issues that are involved: 1) I have always emphasized that on most areas of linguistics Panini has nothing, or very little, to say (i.e. areas like psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, diachronic linguistics, linguistic typology). Where he does excel, is the formal description of a SINGLE language (in his case, Sanskrit). But in this area, I would like to meet the man or woman who, knowing Panini's achievement, would dare to claim to have surpassed him. 2) I do NOT accept, on the whole, Kuhn'n 'non-cumulative' view of change in natural science. But my point is that, in the field of study exemplified by Panini (but also Sibawaihi, Apollonius, and others), the history is so 'short' that the question whether the Kuhnian scenario applies or not, does not even arise. 3) Thanks to Tom Givon for creating discussion, once again. Esa From fortesq at HUM.KU.DK Thu Apr 11 08:56:18 2002 From: fortesq at HUM.KU.DK (mike) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 10:56:18 +0200 Subject: Fw: The Domain of Language Message-ID: BOOK NOTICE The Domain of Language by Michael Fortescue Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen 2002 392 pages, hardbound. ISBN 87-7289-706-6. ?30, $49, ? 59 This book is intended as counter-evidence to the perception that Linguistics is a matter of dusty schoolroom grammar. The discipline may appear to outsiders as fragmented and ? worse still ? lacking in relevance to the real world outside its gates. This book demonstrates that Linguistics, in all its varied branches, can be entertaining as well as thought-provoking, and that its domain is indeed a coherent one despite all the internecine squabbling. In an unconventional way Michael Fortescue introduces his subject as a kind of fable with a historical moral that professional linguists, as well as students, should enjoy as a commentary on the state of the discipline today. A sample chapter of the book can be read at the following website: http://www.cphling.dk/pers/mf/dom.sample.htm Michael Fortescue is Professor of Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Language relations across Bering Strait: reappraising the archeological and linguistic evidence (London, 1998), and Pattern and Process: A Whitehedian Perspective on Linguistics (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2001) For further information, please contact: Marius Hansteen Museum Tusculanum Press University of Copenhagen Phone: +45 35 32 91 Fax: +45 35 32 91 13 E marius at mtp.dk Web: www.mtp.dk Books from Museum Tusculanum Press can be ordered directly from www.mtp.dk from our distributors: USA & Canada: ISBS International Specialized Book Services 5824 N.E. Hassalo St. Portland, Oregon 97213-3644 Fax: +1 503 280 8832 Email: orders at isbs.com United Kingdom Gazelle Book Services Ltd. Falcon House, Queen Square GB - Lancaster LA1 1RN Fax: +44 1524 63232 Email: sales.gazelle at talk21.com France: Editions Picard 82, rue Bonaparte F - 75006 Paris Fax: +33 1 43 26 42 64 Email:info at librarie-picard.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrewkg at STANFORD.EDU Fri Apr 12 13:34:33 2002 From: andrewkg at STANFORD.EDU (Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 06:34:33 -0700 Subject: NWAV 31: General call for abstracts (deadline June 1) Message-ID: Please distribute widely. NWAV 31 October 10-13, 2002 Stanford University Stanford, California http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/nwav/ nwav at csli.stanford.edu Abstracts are invited for papers and posters at NWAV 31. Papers will be 20 minutes. We invite papers and posters in all areas of sociolinguistics. We invite papers and posters in all areas of sociolinguistics, but we especially encourage submissions on questions which, although fundamental to our field, are under-discussed, or even taboo -- issues we refer to as 'the elephants in the room'. A few examples are: * What is an authentic speaker? * Is there a critical age for dialect acquisition? * What effect does language in the media have on linguistic variation? ? * Does differential linguistic ability account for some patterns of * variation? Abstract specifications: Abstracts should include the full title of the submission, author name(s) and full contact information as well as the text of the abstract. The abstract text must be no longer than 400 words, not including references. Each person may submit at most one individual and one jointly authored abstract. Submissions should consist of the following: * Title * Abstract text (no longer than 400 words) * Up to 3 key words identifying the subject matter of the presentation * Name(s) of author(s) (which should not appear in text of the abstract) * Author affiliation(s), email, phone number, fax number, mailing address * Specify if you wish your abstract to be considered for: a paper, a paper OR poster, or a poster. * Please indicate on the abstract if you want it to be considered for sessions themed around debates we should be having - but aren't. Email abstracts to nwav at csli.stanford.edu. Abstracts should be submitted as a regular, single email message, in ASCII text. Please do not send any attachments or use any special formatting. If you do not receive email confirmation within 7 days of emailing your submission, please re-send. Faxed abstracts will not be accepted. If you do not have access to email, please send the abstract on a floppy diskette (Mac or PC) along with one hard copy to: NWAV 31 Department of Linguistics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2150 Deadline for receipt of abstracts: June 1, 2002 Notification date: June 30 Abstracts will be anonymously refereed. NB: There will be an overhead projector and screen in each room. If you have other AV needs, please indicate what they are at the bottom of your abstract. From sosa at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Apr 12 16:50:49 2002 From: sosa at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Christine Sosa) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 09:50:49 -0700 Subject: Announcing: PRESUPPOSITION AND ASSERTION IN DYNAMIC SEMANTICS Message-ID: CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of: PRESUPPOSITION AND ASSERTION IN DYNAMIC SEMANTICS; David I. Beaver;paper ISBN: 1-57586-120-8, $24.95, cloth ISBN: 1-57586-121-6, $64.95, 325 pages. CSLI Publications 2001. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubs at csli.stanford.edu. To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736 (U.S. & Canada only) or order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search feature to locate the book, then order). Book description: This book presents a comprehensive overview and discussion of the burgeoning field of presupposition theory, introducing a wealth of new data and critical commentary. Working within the recently developed framework of Dynamic Semantics, the author develops his own account of presupposition and solves some well-known problems of other accounts. According to the view developed, while semantics is concerned with information update, there is one part of the meaning of an utterance which requires no update: the utterance's presupposition. Although this book assumes general understanding of pragmatics and semantics, the reader needs no prior familiarity with presupposition theory or recent dynamic approaches to the study of meaning. "This book is an excellent up-to-date introduction to the study of presupposition and presupposition projection. Technically sophisticated, Beaver's work does justice to the empirical and conceptual complexities of its subject matter, along with presenting many original ideas. If you suspect that presupposition was exhausted by the work of linguists and philosophers in the 1970's, this book shows why the topic has become fresh and exciting again." -Irene Heim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "This book provides an excellent overview of the issues and controversies of the field. The dynamic semantics developed in the second half of the book follows the direction charted by Karttunen and Heim in their early work, and gives an elegant solution to many problems that have plagued previous theories. Many books about presupposition have been written. This is the book to read." -Lauri Karttunen, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center --------------- From funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU Fri Apr 12 17:47:33 2002 From: funkadmn at RUF.RICE.EDU (Funknet List Admin) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:47:33 -0500 Subject: 8th International Pragmatics Conference (fwd) Message-ID: Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 19:41:42 -0700 (PDT) From: Jef Verschueren To: cogling at ucsd.edu Subject: 8th International Pragmatics Conference 8th INTERNATIONAL PRAGMATICS CONFERENCE TORONTO, Canada 13-18 July 2003 The 8th International Pragmatics Conference will be held on 13-18 July 2003 at the University of Toronto. CONFERENCE CHAIR: Monica HELLER (Univ. of Toronto) LOCAL SITE COMMITTEE: Susan EHRLICH (York Univ.), Ruth KING (York Univ.), Normand LABRIE (Univ. of Toronto), Grit LIEBSCHER (Univ. of Waterloo), Bonnie McELHINNY (Univ. of Toronto) Donna PATRICK (Brock Univ.) INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE COMMITTEE: In addition to the members of the Local Site Committee, the International Conference Committee includes: Charles ANTAKI (Loughborough Univ.), Jenny COOK-GUMPERZ (Univ. of California at Santa Barbara), Susan ERVIN-TRIPP (Univ. of California at Berkeley; IPrA President), GU Yueguo (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Andreas JUCKER (Justus Liebig Univ. Giessen), Ferenc KIEFER (Hungarian Academy of Sciences; chair, 7th IPC), Eniko NEMETH (Univ of Szeged), Ben RAMPTON (King's College London), Eddy ROULET (Univ. of Geneva), Anna-Brita STENSTROM (Univ. of Bergen), Elizabeth TRAUGOTT (Stanford Univ.), Jef VERSCHUEREN (Univ. of Antwerp; IPrA Secretary General), Yorick WILKS (Univ. of Sheffield) THEMES: As always, the conference will be open to all themes relevant to the pragmatics of language in its widest sense as an interdisciplinary cognitive, social, and cultural perspective. Prospective participants should, however, pay attention to the distribution of topics across event types, as described below. In addition, there is a special theme. SPECIAL THEME: Linguistic pluralism : policies, practices and pragmatics This is a theme that was chosen by the Local Site Committee and approved by the Consultation Board. It corresponds to the interests of a large number of IPrA members, and permits us to link cognitive, linguistic, social and political approaches to a phenomenon of long-standing interest in pragmatics and of current theoretical, as well as social and policy importance. The intention will be to focus the conference on making those links in a number of ways, ranging from choice of plenary speakers and special panels, to invitations to interested and relevant Canadians outside the academy. The theme is one which also fits the venue, given Canada's historical involvement in debates on such issues, and Toronto's profile as a major centre of new globalized urban multilingualism. However, it is meant here to go beyond traditional ideas about "multilingualism" understood as connecting linguistic difference primarily to ethnic or national distinctions, and rather to extend that concept to the links between language and all forms of social difference and social inequality. The theme is also appropriate to the expertise of the members of the Local Site Committee which is committed to tying academic approaches to broader public debates. PLENARY LECTURES: Plenary speakers will include Susan GAL (Dept. of Anthropology, Univ. of Chicago), Language ideologies and the practices of power: "Reading between the lines" during the Cold War Jocelyn LETOURNEAU (D?partement d'histoire, Univ. Laval, Qu?bec), La langue comme lieu de m?moire et lieu de passage / Language as realm of memory and passage Lorenza MONDADA (Sciences du Langage, Univ. Lumi?re, Lyon, France), Scientific knowledge as an interactional accomplishment: On the analysis of research groups in international networks Eni ORLANDI (Univ. Estadual de Campinas, Brazil), Le Discours en tant qu?objet sp?cifique dans l?histoire des Sciences du Langage / Discourse as a specific object in the history of Language Sciences Dan SPERBER (CNRS, Paris, France) Relevance theory: Pragmatics and beyond Ruth WODAK (Inst. f?r Sprachwissenschaft, Univ. of Vienna, Austria), European language policies and European identities PANELS: * Oeuvre panels Jan BLOMMAERT (University of Ghent), Pierre Bourdieu: The ethnographic turn This panel is devoted to the work of Pierre BOURDIEU and its relevance for pragmatics. Charles BRIGGS (University of California at San Diego), Pragmatics of institutional discourse This panel is devoted to the work of Aaron CICOUREL and its relevance for pragmatics. Jenny COOK-GUMPERZ (Univ. of California at Santa Barbara), Basil Bernstein and pragmatics: class, code and language This panel is devoted to the work of Basil BERNSTEIN and its relevance for pragmatics. * Special topic panels Peter AUER (Univ. Freiburg), Acts of identity: Language indexing social membership Adriana BOLIVAR & Paola BENTIVOGLIO (Univ. Central de Venezuela), Changing attitudes to lesser languages in Latin America James COLLINS (State Univ. of New York - Albany), Class, Identity, and Literacy: Ethnographic and Discourse-Analytic Perspectives Werner KALLMEYER & Inken KEIM (Inst. f?r Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim), Sociostylistic perspectives on language and identity Normand LABRIE (Univ. of Toronto), Enjeux de sant? dans des soci?t?s plurilingues Yaron MATRAS (Univ. of Manchester), The mixed language debate: Natural evolution and structural manipulation Donna PATRICK (Brock Univ.), Indigenous language stability and change Kanavillil RAJAGOPALAN (Univ. Estadual de Campinas) & Marilyn MARTIN-JONES (Univ. of Wales), Politics of language and the linguist Tomek STRZALKOWSKI (State Univ. of New York - Albany), Building automated multilingual call centers * General interest panels Jean-Paul BRONCKART & Laurent FILLIETTAZ (Univ. de Gen?ve), L'analyse des actions et des discours en situation de travail Robyn CARSTON (Univ. College London), Relevance theory and word meaning Yrjo ENGESTROM (Univ. of California at San Diego), Activity theory, pragmatics and the study of language at work Katarzyna JASZCZOLT (Cambridge Univ.), Temporality and post-Gricean pragmatics Asa KASHER (Tel Aviv Univ.), Revisiting philosophical pragmatics: Implicatures and speech act theory Michael PERKINS (Univ. of Sheffield), Pragmatics and language pathology Corinne ROSSARI & Eddy ROULET (Univ. de Gen?ve), Les nouveaux d?veloppements dans les recherches sur les relations de discours et leurs marqueurs Scott SCHWENTER (Ohio State Univ.), Current issues in the diachronic micropragmatics of Romance languages Anna-Brita STENSTROM & Karin AIJMER (Univ. of Bergen & Univ. of Gothenburg), Conversation analysis: Different approaches to spoken interaction CALL FOR PAPERS There is one submission deadline for paper and panel proposals: 1 November 2002 A call for papers with complete instructions is to be found on the IPrA website (address below). Paper versions can be requested from Ann Verhaert (ann.verhaert at ipra.be) GO TO: http://ipra-www.uia.ac.be/ipra/ Jef Verschueren IPrA Research Center University of Antwerp Universiteitsplein 1 B-2610 Wilrijk Belgium tel. +32-3-8202773, fax & tel. +32-3-2305574 jef.verschueren at ua.ac.be also visit the IPrA website at http://ipra-www.uia.ac.be/ipra/ From sepkit at UTU.FI Tue Apr 16 03:38:31 2002 From: sepkit at UTU.FI (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Seppo_Kittil=E4?=) Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 06:38:31 +0300 Subject: Call for Papers: Symposium on Historical Syntax Message-ID: Apologies for multiple postings. CALL FOR PAPERS The Linguistic Association of Finland is organizing a symposium on APPROACHES TO HISTORICAL SYNTAX to be held at the University of Joensuu Mekrij?rvi Research Station, September 19-22, 2002. The symposium will bring together scholars interested in problems relating to historical syntax. We invite papers and posters dealing with particular language(s) as well as papers taking a crosslinguistic perspective. Suggested themes include changes in argument structure, grammaticalization in historical syntax, and the role of corpora and quantitative analysis in the study of historical syntax. Other topics relating to historical syntax are also welcome. Invited speakers: * Alice C. Harris (Vanderbilt University) * Anthony Warner (University of York) Activities: * lectures by invited speakers * presentations by other participants (20 min + 10 min for discussion) * poster session Abstracts: The deadline for submission of abstracts (in English; max 500 words) is May 30, 2002. Please indicate on the abstract whether your presentation is intended as a paper or a poster. Please submit your abstract by e-mail to the following address mekri-organizers at utu.fi. 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 14, 2002. The accepted abstracts will be published on the web page of the symposium. Registration: The deadline for registration for all participants is June 30, 2002. Register by e-mail to the address mekri-organizers at utu.fi. Registration fees: * general: EUR 40 * members of the association: EUR 20 * undergraduate and MA students free Send your payment by giro account no 800013-1424850 to The Linguistic Association of Finland (SKY)/Symposium. For participants coming from abroad we recommend payment in cash upon arrival. However, it is possible to pay via Eurogiro or SWIFT to our account (International Bank Account Number FI808000131424850) with Sampo Bank plc, Helsinki, Finland. SWIFT-address: PSPBFIHH; Telex 121 698 pgiro sf. Location: The symposium takes place at the University of Joensuu Mekrij?rvi Research Station in North Karelia, close to the Russian border. For more information about the Mekrij?rvi Research Station and its surroundings, please visit the Station's web pages. Transportation from Joensuu to Mekrij?rvi and back will be arranged by the organizers. Accommodation: An accommodation fee of EUR 117 will cover 3 nights' full board and lodging at Mekrij?rvi from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon (accommodation fee to be paid upon arrival). The academic programme of the symposium will run from Friday morning till Sunday afternoon. For further information, please contact . The organizing committee: Juhani Klemola (chair), Department of English, P.O. Box 4, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland, e-mail: Juhani.Klemola at Helsinki.fi and Pentti Haddington (English, U of Oulu), pentti.haddington at oulu.fi Arja Hamari (Finno-Ugric languages, U of Turku), arja.hamari at utu.fi Seppo Kittil? (General Linguistics, U of Turku), seppo.kittila at utu.fi Leena Kolehmainen (German, U of Helsinki), leena.kolehmainen at helsinki.fi Marja Nenonen (General Linguistics, U of Joensuu), marja.nenonen at joensuu.fi Esa Penttil? (English, U of Joensuu), esa.penttila at joensuu.fi Heli Pitk?nen (English, U of Joensuu), heli.pitkanen at joensuu.fi Marja P?lsi (General Linguistics, U of Helsinki), marja.palsi at ling.helsinki.fi Jouni Rostila (German, U of Tampere), jouni.rostila at uta.fi Jari Sivonen (Finnish, U of Oulu), jari.sivonen at oulu.fi From sepkit at UTU.FI Mon Apr 22 04:16:32 2002 From: sepkit at UTU.FI (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Seppo_Kittil=E4?=) Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 07:16:32 +0300 Subject: Corrected CFP: Approaches to Historical Syntax Message-ID: Apologies for multiple postings CORRECTED CALL FOR PAPERS (with web addresses that were missing in the first call) The Linguistic Association of Finland is organizing a symposium on APPROACHES TO HISTORICAL SYNTAX to be held at the University of Joensuu Mekrij?rvi Research Station, September 19-22, 2002. The symposium will bring together scholars interested in problems relating to historical syntax. We invite papers and posters dealing with particular language(s) as well as papers taking a crosslinguistic perspective. Suggested themes include changes in argument structure, grammaticalization in historical syntax, and the role of corpora and quantitative analysis in the study of historical syntax. Other topics relating to historical syntax are also welcome. Invited speakers: * Alice C. Harris (Vanderbilt University) * Anthony Warner (University of York) Activities: * lectures by invited speakers * presentations by other participants (20 min + 10 min for discussion) * poster session Abstracts: The deadline for submission of abstracts (in English; max 500 words) is May 30, 2002. Please indicate on the abstract whether your presentation is intended as a paper or a poster. 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 14, 2002. The accepted abstracts will be published on the web page of the symposium . Registration: The deadline for registration for all participants is June 30, 2002. Register by e-mail to the address . Registration fees: * general: EUR 40 * members of the association: EUR 20 * undergraduate and MA students free Send your payment by giro account no 800013-1424850 to The Linguistic Association of Finland (SKY)/Symposium. For participants coming from abroad we recommend payment in cash upon arrival. However, it is possible to pay via Eurogiro or SWIFT to our account (International Bank Account Number FI808000131424850) with Sampo Bank plc, Helsinki, Finland. SWIFT-address: PSPBFIHH; Telex 121 698 pgiro sf. Location: The symposium takes place at the University of Joensuu Mekrij?rvi Research Station in North Karelia, close to the Russian border. For more information about the Mekrij?rvi Research Station and its surroundings, please visit the Station's web pages . Transportation from Joensuu to Mekrij?rvi and back will be arranged by the organizers. Accommodation: An accommodation fee of EUR 117 will cover 3 nights' full board and lodging at Mekrij?rvi from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon (accommodation fee to be paid upon arrival). The academic programme of the symposium will run from Friday morning till Sunday afternoon. For further information, please visit our web pages or contact the organizers . The organizing committee: Juhani Klemola (chair), Department of English, P.O. Box 4, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland, e-mail: Juhani.Klemola at Helsinki.fi and Pentti Haddington (English, U of Oulu), pentti.haddington at oulu.fi Arja Hamari (Finno-Ugric languages, U of Turku), arja.hamari at utu.fi Seppo Kittil? (General Linguistics, U of Turku), seppo.kittila at utu.fi Leena Kolehmainen (German, U of Helsinki), leena.kolehmainen at helsinki.fi Marja Nenonen (General Linguistics, U of Joensuu), marja.nenonen at joensuu.fi Esa Penttil? (English, U of Joensuu), esa.penttila at joensuu.fi Heli Pitk?nen (English, U of Joensuu), heli.pitkanen at joensuu.fi Marja P?lsi (General Linguistics, U of Helsinki), marja.palsi at ling.helsinki.fi Jouni Rostila (German, U of Tampere), jouni.rostila at uta.fi Jari Sivonen (Finnish, U of Oulu), jari.sivonen at oulu.fi From stefan.grondelaers at ARTS.KULEUVEN.AC.BE Tue Apr 23 18:17:24 2002 From: stefan.grondelaers at ARTS.KULEUVEN.AC.BE (Stefan Grondelaers) Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 20:17:24 +0200 Subject: Call for papers for MEASURING LEXICAL VARIATION AND CHANGE - A Symposium on Quantitative Sociolexicology Message-ID: Apologies for multiple postings Call for papers MEASURING LEXICAL VARIATION AND CHANGE A Symposium on Quantitative Sociolexicology University of Leuven, Belgium October 24-25, 2002 Organised by the research unit ?Quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics? of the University of Leuven Made possible by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (FWO) (Onderzoeksgemeenschap Cognitieve Lingu?stiek) Aim This workshop intends to bring together those researchers in the field of variational lexicology and diachronic vocabulary studies that use quantitative methods. Although such methods have been used less intensively in the study of lexical variation and change than they have been employed in the field of phonetics, morphology, or other linguistic variables, there is a growing body of quantitative research on the distribution of words over language varieties and the diffusion of lexical changes over time. The symposium intends to create a forum for the confrontation and the comparison of the different approaches involved. Structure & schedule The workshop will take place on Thursday October 24 and Friday October 25, and it will consist of 5 plenary sessions (1 hour) and a limited number of regular sessions (40?). Invited speakers include: Nigel Armstrong (University of Leeds) Harald Baayen (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen & University of Nijmegen) John Nerbonne (University of Groningen) Terttu Nevalainen (University of Helsinki) In order to ensure a highly focused event with maximal interaction between the participants, the number of regular presentations will be limited to 15 at most, and there will be no parallel sessions. Submission If you are interested in presenting a lecture at the symposium, please submit a one page abstract by June 1 at the latest. Notification of acceptance will follow by June 15. Abstracts should be submitted electronically to Dirk Geeraerts, Stefan Grondelaers & Dirk Speelman at the following address: sociolex at listserv.cc.kuleuven.ac.be Topics Relevant topics include: 1. Lexical standardization and the diffusion of standard vocabularies 2. The lexicon in pluricentric languages 3. Lexical innovation, lexical loss, and the rate of vocabulary change 4. Lexical dialectometry and stylometry 5. The relationship between lexical and non-lexical variables as markers of language varieties 6. Empirical methods (corpus analysis, statistical techniques) for studying lexical variation and change You may focus either on past research in connection with the workshop theme, or introduce new data or methodologies pertaining to the theme. Observe that the topic of the conference is to be taken in a prototypical sense. We are primarily interested in studies that combine three features: a lexical focus, a quantitative method, and a variational or diachronic perspective. Time permitting, however, we may accommodate papers that combine just a few of these features, like quantitative studies of variation and change that are not primarily lexical, or diachronic and variational lexical studies that do not employ quantitative methods. Additional information Information about the organisers, the conference venue, and accommodation & fees can be found at our conference website http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/sociolex Dirk Geeraerts - Stefan Grondelaers - Dirk Speelman Research unit ?Quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics? Department of Linguistics University of Leuven Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 B-3000 Leuven Belgium -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefan.grondelaers at ARTS.KULEUVEN.AC.BE Wed Apr 24 08:02:54 2002 From: stefan.grondelaers at ARTS.KULEUVEN.AC.BE (Stefan Grondelaers) Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 10:02:54 +0200 Subject: Call for papers for MEASURING LEXICAL VARIATION AND CHANGE - A Symposium on Quantitative Sociolexicology Message-ID: Apologies for multiple postings Call for papers MEASURING LEXICAL VARIATION AND CHANGE A Symposium on Quantitative Sociolexicology University of Leuven, Belgium October 24-25, 2002 Organised by the research unit ?Quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics? of the University of Leuven Made possible by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (FWO) (Onderzoeksgemeenschap Cognitieve Lingu?stiek) Aim This workshop intends to bring together those researchers in the field of variational lexicology and diachronic vocabulary studies that use quantitative methods. Although such methods have been used less intensively in the study of lexical variation and change than they have been employed in the field of phonetics, morphology, or other linguistic variables, there is a growing body of quantitative research on the distribution of words over language varieties and the diffusion of lexical changes over time. The symposium intends to create a forum for the confrontation and the comparison of the different approaches involved. Structure & schedule The workshop will take place on Thursday October 24 and Friday October 25, and it will consist of 5 plenary sessions (1 hour) and a limited number of regular sessions (40?). Invited speakers include: Nigel Armstrong (University of Leeds) Harald Baayen (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen & University of Nijmegen) John Nerbonne (University of Groningen) Terttu Nevalainen (University of Helsinki) In order to ensure a highly focused event with maximal interaction between the participants, the number of regular presentations will be limited to 15 at most, and there will be no parallel sessions. Submission If you are interested in presenting a lecture at the symposium, please submit a one page abstract by June 1 at the latest. Notification of acceptance will follow by June 15. Abstracts should be submitted electronically to Dirk Geeraerts, Stefan Grondelaers & Dirk Speelman at the following address: sociolex at listserv.cc.kuleuven.ac.be Topics Relevant topics include: 1. Lexical standardization and the diffusion of standard vocabularies 2. The lexicon in pluricentric languages 3. Lexical innovation, lexical loss, and the rate of vocabulary change 4. Lexical dialectometry and stylometry 5. The relationship between lexical and non-lexical variables as markers of language varieties 6. Empirical methods (corpus analysis, statistical techniques) for studying lexical variation and change You may focus either on past research in connection with the workshop theme, or introduce new data or methodologies pertaining to the theme. Observe that the topic of the conference is to be taken in a prototypical sense. We are primarily interested in studies that combine three features: a lexical focus, a quantitative method, and a variational or diachronic perspective. Time permitting, however, we may accommodate papers that combine just a few of these features, like quantitative studies of variation and change that are not primarily lexical, or diachronic and variational lexical studies that do not employ quantitative methods. Additional information Information about the organisers, the conference venue, and accommodation & fees can be found at our conference website http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/sociolex Dirk Geeraerts - Stefan Grondelaers - Dirk Speelman Research unit ?Quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics? Department of Linguistics University of Leuven Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 B-3000 Leuven Belgium -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fortesq at HUM.KU.DK Wed Apr 24 08:24:01 2002 From: fortesq at HUM.KU.DK (mike) Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 10:24:01 +0200 Subject: book notice Message-ID: BOOK NOTICE The Domain of Language by Michael Fortescue Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen 2002 392 pages, hardbound. ISBN 87-7289-706-6. ?30, $49 This book is intended as counter-evidence to the perception that Linguistics is a matter of dusty schoolroom grammar. The discipline may appear to outsiders as fragmented and - worse still - lacking in relevance to the real world outside its gates. This book demonstrates that Linguistics, in all its varied branches, can be entertaining as well as thought-provoking, and that its domain is indeed a coherent one despite all the internecine squabbling. In an unconventional way Michael Fortescue introduces his subject as a kind of fable with a historical moral that professional linguists, as well as students, should enjoy as a commentary on the state of the discipline today. A sample chapter of the book can be read at the following website: http://www.cphling.dk/pers/mf/dom.sample.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU Fri Apr 26 19:57:50 2002 From: fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU (Frederick Newmeyer) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 12:57:50 -0700 Subject: frequency of person/number Message-ID: I'm interested in knowing what the relative frequency is in conversation (and possibly other genres) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person forms (singular and plural, pronominal or non-pronominal). Could somebody please tell me where to look for an answer? Thanks! --fritz newmeyer From kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL Fri Apr 26 20:15:00 2002 From: kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL (Kees Hengeveld) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 22:15:00 +0200 Subject: frequency of person/number In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Fritz, I can give you the facts for Dutch. The frequency dictionary shows remarkable differences in the distribution of pronouns for the written and oral varieties of Dutch. The facts are like this: written -----Original Message----- From: FUNKNET -- Discussion of issues in Functional Linguistics [mailto:FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU]On Behalf Of Frederick Newmeyer Sent: vrijdag 26 april 2002 21:58 To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU Subject: frequency of person/number I'm interested in knowing what the relative frequency is in conversation (and possibly other genres) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person forms (singular and plural, pronominal or non-pronominal). Could somebody please tell me where to look for an answer? Thanks! --fritz newmeyer From kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL Fri Apr 26 21:00:51 2002 From: kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL (Kees Hengeveld) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 23:00:51 +0200 Subject: frequency of person/number Message-ID: Dear Fritz, I can give you the facts for Dutch. The frequency dictionary, based on a 800,000 word corpus, shows remarkable differences in the distribution of pronouns for the written and oral varieties of Dutch. The absolute facts are like this for the 75 highest ranking words in both subparts of the corpus: written oral 1 07042 04163 2 00440 00796 3 16146 01610 In relative terms, the distribution is as follows: 1 2 1 2 3 3 3 1 2 The predominance of intrinsically deictic pronouns in oral texts is not surprising. If I split up the figures for speech act participants (1 and 2) and non-speech act participants the result is as follows: 1/2 07482 (2) 04959 (1) 3 16146 (1) 01610 (2) What is remarkable is the fact that the second peron pronouns come last in both subparts of the corpus. In the figures above I have excluded the impersonal use of the second person pronoun. I have included adnominal (genitive) and other case forms. For morphological reasons it is impossible to split up the figures for singular and plural. More generally, I think that frequency dictionaries can provide the information you are looking for. Best, Kees Hengeveld -----Original Message----- From: FUNKNET -- Discussion of issues in Functional Linguistics [mailto:FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU]On Behalf Of Frederick Newmeyer Sent: vrijdag 26 april 2002 21:58 To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU Subject: frequency of person/number I'm interested in knowing what the relative frequency is in conversation (and possibly other genres) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person forms (singular and plural, pronominal or non-pronominal). Could somebody please tell me where to look for an answer? Thanks! --fritz newmeyer From hstahlke at BSU.EDU Fri Apr 26 22:00:22 2002 From: hstahlke at BSU.EDU (Stahlke, Herbert F.W.) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 17:00:22 -0500 Subject: frequency of person/number Message-ID: I know of two studies that should have this for English: Frequency analysis of English vocabulary and grammar : based on the LOB corpus Johansson, Stig 1989 and Frequency analysis of English usage : lexicon and grammar Francis, W. Nelson (Winthrop Nelson), 1982 Francis&Kucera is based on the Brown Corpus. Herb Stahlke Ball State University -----Original Message----- From: Frederick Newmeyer [mailto:fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU] Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 2:58 PM To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu Subject: frequency of person/number I'm interested in knowing what the relative frequency is in conversation (and possibly other genres) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person forms (singular and plural, pronominal or non-pronominal). Could somebody please tell me where to look for an answer? Thanks! --fritz newmeyer From fdehaan at UNM.EDU Fri Apr 26 22:14:52 2002 From: fdehaan at UNM.EDU (Ferdinand de Haan) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 16:14:52 -0600 Subject: frequency of person/number Message-ID: There is also a large discussion in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Douglas Biber et al., 1999), starting on page 333. Ferdinand de Haan University of New Mexico > I know of two studies that should have this for English: > > Frequency analysis of English vocabulary and grammar : based on the LOB corpus > Johansson, Stig > 1989 > > and > > Frequency analysis of English usage : lexicon and grammar > Francis, W. Nelson (Winthrop Nelson), > 1982 > > Francis&Kucera is based on the Brown Corpus. > > Herb Stahlke > Ball State University > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Frederick Newmeyer [mailto:fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU] > Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 2:58 PM > To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu > Subject: frequency of person/number > > > I'm interested in knowing what the relative frequency is in conversation > (and possibly other genres) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person forms (singular > and plural, pronominal or non-pronominal). Could somebody please tell me > where to look for an answer? > > Thanks! > > --fritz newmeyer From amnfn at WELL.COM Fri Apr 26 22:28:01 2002 From: amnfn at WELL.COM (A. Katz) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 15:28:01 -0700 Subject: reversal of 1st and second person Message-ID: Does anyone know of any case studies in first language acquisition where a child reverses first and second person, referring to himself in second person and to his interlocutor in first person? (Such a practice dispenses with the deictic element and allows second person to be an absolute designation for this particular child.) --Aya Katz From G.Redeker at let.rug.nl Sat Apr 27 09:03:35 2002 From: G.Redeker at let.rug.nl (Gisela Redeker) Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 11:03:35 +0200 Subject: frequency of person/number -- Dutch In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On 26 Apr 2002, at 23:00, Kees Hengeveld wrote: > I can give you the facts for Dutch. The frequency dictionary, based on a > 800,000 word corpus, shows remarkable differences in the distribution of > pronouns for the written and oral varieties of Dutch. The absolute facts are.. [snip] > What is remarkable is the fact that the second peron pronouns come last in > both subparts of the corpus. Which corpus are you using, Kees? Leiden? Especially important: how is the distribution of interactive/non-interactive, formal/informal, etc. genres in that corpus? As Biber c.s. (also Redeker 1984) have shown, these factors are at least as important in register variation as the oral/written distinction; that goes of course a fortiori for 2nd person references. Fritz Newmeyer's question concerned mainly conversations, so he must need the separate figures for (informal?) interactive talk (spoken? how about emails?). For large amounts of interactive and non-interactive spoken Dutch, coded (i.a.) for genre, the CGN is the most valuable source. Maybe someone out there (e.g. from the CGN project?) has or could produce relevant figures from that? Gisela Redeker Gisela Redeker, Professor, Dept. of Language and Communication University of Groningen, P.O.Box 716, NL-9700 AS Groningen tel: +31-50-3635973/-5858 fax: +31-50-3636855 e-mail: G.Redeker at let.rug.nl http://www.let.rug.nl/~redeker/ From kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL Sat Apr 27 10:48:49 2002 From: kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL (Kees Hengeveld) Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 12:48:49 +0200 Subject: frequency of person/number -- Dutch In-Reply-To: <3CCA8587.5348.293527@localhost> Message-ID: My figures are from what is, I think, the only published frequency distionary of Dutch, which is based on the so-called 'Eindhovens corpus': P.C. Uit den Boogaart ed. (1975), Woordfrequenties. Utrecht: Oosthoek, Scheltema & Holkema. I have given the rough figures only, since the subparts of the corpus of spoken language are too small to give reliable indications. As far as I know the CGN Corpus of spoken Dutch is not fully operational yet, but maybe someone can correct me. Kees Hengeveld -----Original Message----- From: Gisela Redeker [mailto:G.Redeker at let.rug.nl] Sent: zaterdag 27 april 2002 11:04 To: Kees Hengeveld; FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU Subject: Re: frequency of person/number -- Dutch On 26 Apr 2002, at 23:00, Kees Hengeveld wrote: > I can give you the facts for Dutch. The frequency dictionary, based on a > 800,000 word corpus, shows remarkable differences in the distribution of > pronouns for the written and oral varieties of Dutch. The absolute facts are.. [snip] > What is remarkable is the fact that the second peron pronouns come last in > both subparts of the corpus. Which corpus are you using, Kees? Leiden? Especially important: how is the distribution of interactive/non-interactive, formal/informal, etc. genres in that corpus? As Biber c.s. (also Redeker 1984) have shown, these factors are at least as important in register variation as the oral/written distinction; that goes of course a fortiori for 2nd person references. Fritz Newmeyer's question concerned mainly conversations, so he must need the separate figures for (informal?) interactive talk (spoken? how about emails?). For large amounts of interactive and non-interactive spoken Dutch, coded (i.a.) for genre, the CGN is the most valuable source. Maybe someone out there (e.g. from the CGN project?) has or could produce relevant figures from that? Gisela Redeker Gisela Redeker, Professor, Dept. of Language and Communication University of Groningen, P.O.Box 716, NL-9700 AS Groningen tel: +31-50-3635973/-5858 fax: +31-50-3636855 e-mail: G.Redeker at let.rug.nl http://www.let.rug.nl/~redeker/ From kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL Sat Apr 27 21:49:29 2002 From: kees.hengeveld at HUM.UVA.NL (Kees Hengeveld) Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 23:49:29 +0200 Subject: FW: frequency of person/number -- Dutch (fwd) Message-ID: Dear all, I send you the message below on behalf of Ton van der Wouden. Best, Kees Hengeveld -----Original Message----- From: Wouden A. van der [mailto:A.van.der.Wouden at let.rug.nl] Sent: zaterdag 27 april 2002 23:13 To: funknet at listserv.rice.edu; kees.hengeveld at hum.uva.nl; g.redeker at let.rug.nl Subject: Re: frequency of person/number -- Dutch (fwd) Those interested in the distribution of personal pronouns in Dutch may want to take a look at the very drafty paper On certain syntactic properties of spoken Dutch which we presented at Computational linguistics in the Netherlands 2001, Enschede, November 30 2001. Among other things, we give (on page 11) some counts of (1st, 2nd. 3rd) pronouns in four subcorpora of the October 2001 version of the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN). The paper can be found via http://odur.let.rug.nl/~vdwouden/docs/ Hope this helps, Ton van der Wouden CGN From M-Hoseini at ARAKU.AC.IR Sun Apr 28 11:38:13 2002 From: M-Hoseini at ARAKU.AC.IR (Mohammad Hoseini) Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 16:08:13 +0430 Subject: Q:TV and Radio Reports Message-ID: Dear linguists, I'm interested in the study of the similarities and differences between the language of TV and radio reports of the same sport events. As you know,In a TV report, the listener has the advantage of viewing the scene, but in a report on the radio s/he must rely on the descriptions of the reporter and use his imagination. I would like to know if: i) anyone out there knows of any work on this subject; ii) which linguistic theory, semantic, discourse or pragmatic, can be of more help? Best regards S. M. Hoseini From nealjw at YAHOO.COM Sun Apr 28 14:51:33 2002 From: nealjw at YAHOO.COM (John Neal) Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 07:51:33 -0700 Subject: No subject Message-ID: help --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From marefat at CHAMRAN.UT.AC.IR Sun Apr 28 16:56:23 2002 From: marefat at CHAMRAN.UT.AC.IR (hamideh marefat) Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 21:26:23 +0430 Subject: Q:TV and Radio Reports Message-ID: Dear Mr Hoseini, i wonder if you have checked Mohsen Ghadessi's works. he has analysed the language of the sports news in one of his works from a discourse point of view. hope you find it helpful. cheers marefat ----- Original Message ----- From: Mohammad Hoseini To: Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2002 4:08 PM Subject: Q:TV and Radio Reports > Dear linguists, > I'm interested in the study of the similarities and differences between > the language of TV and radio reports of the same sport events. > As you know,In a TV report, the listener has the advantage of viewing the > scene, but in a report on the radio s/he must rely on the descriptions of > the reporter and use his imagination. > > I would like to know if: > > i) anyone out there knows of any work on this subject; > > ii) which linguistic theory, semantic, discourse or pragmatic, can be of > more help? > > Best regards > S. M. Hoseini From oesten at LING.SU.SE Mon Apr 29 08:09:30 2002 From: oesten at LING.SU.SE (=?iso-8859-1?Q?=D6sten_Dahl?=) Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 10:09:30 +0200 Subject: Frequency of person/number Message-ID: Another hopefully relevant reference: Dahl, ?sten. Egophoricity in Discourse and Syntax. Functions of Language 7.1: 37-77. Abstract: Egophoricity in discourse and syntax ?sten Dahl Egophoric reference is defined as reference to speech act participants and generic reference. As shown by adult conversational data from Swedish, English, and Spanish, and longitudinal data from one Swedish child, the majority of all animate arguments of verbs in conversation are egophoric. This percentage varies quite considerably between different types of subject and between subjects and objects. Positions representing essentially animate roles ? agents, experiencers, and recipients ? have a high incidence of egophoric reference and a high egophoric/animate ratio. Positions allowing both animate and inanimate reference have relatively low egophoric percentages, absolutely and relative to animates. The explanation of these patterns is not to be found not so much in the way in which information is presented but rather in the intrinsic content of the information that is conveyed. The presence/absence of an essentially animate argument may be a more fundamental distinction for a taxonomy of predication types than transitivity. - ?sten -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From srpskijezik at narod.ru Mon Apr 29 11:54:24 2002 From: srpskijezik at narod.ru (Skola Srpskog Jezika i Kulture) Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 15:54:24 +0400 Subject: announcement Message-ID: Dear friends allow me to inform you about the project of young assistent teachers from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade (www.fil.bg.ac.yu) called the School of Serbian Language and Culture. For more datails please visit our web page www.srpskijezik.edu.yu We will appreciate if you pass this info to the people who may consider it useful.Thank you in advance Predrag Obucina The School of Serbian Language and Culture