From bischoff.st at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 17:36:55 2009 From: bischoff.st at gmail.com (s.t. bischoff) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 13:36:55 -0400 Subject: syntax: functional vs generative Message-ID: Hi all, This is similar to my earlier question regarding the development of a syntax course. The conversation has expanded into one that will help us define our department in terms of our curriculum. We are trying to decide if our introduction to syntax should be "functional" or "generative" (Chomskyan). For some the argument for the generative approach has been that it is the "mainstream" framework. However, it seems to others that it is "mainstream" only in the sense that a number of graduate programs pursue it. Some argue that if undergraduates are hoping to gain meaningful employment outside academia or pursue graduate programs in allied fields, "generative" doesn't seem to be mainstream in the slightest (personally I would like to know if this true...I suspect it may be). That is, for example, if they wanted to work for SIL, where it has been reported over a 1,000 languages are currently being worked on, or wanted to work with a community documenting a language then functionalism would serve them better. Also, if they wanted to work for e.g. Google, SAP, Xerox, a functional approach would translate much better to computational linguistics e.g. finite state grammars. In addition, some here have argued that functionalism is more applicable to forensic linguistics than generative. Also, it seems that if students do go on to graduate school the flavor of generativsit grammar will vary, so it isn't necessary to train them in it...perhaps that argument could be applied to a functional approach(?). Does anyone know how many graduate programs are actually generative vs functional? Which "major programs" are functional and which are generative? Or how much research is going on in the two areas? Any thoughts would be welcome. Thanks, Shannon From pyoung at uoregon.edu Mon Jun 1 18:10:55 2009 From: pyoung at uoregon.edu (Phil Young) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 11:10:55 -0700 Subject: syntax: functional vs generative In-Reply-To: <1c1f75a20906011036g3f3e8a32x9510b38f399a30fc@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Hi Shannon, I am a cultural anthropologist but with, I believe, a better than average knowledge of linguistics. The way I see it, an introductory course does not a department define. The question of how a department defines itself in terms of theoretical perspective and major course offerings is separate from the question of content for an introductory course. In my view an introductory syntax course should provide students with introductory exposure to both generative and functional approaches, their strengths, limitations, and some account of the major critiques proponents of each view have leveled at the other. Beyond this, an introductory syntax course should also expose students to some of the literature on the acquisition of language by children (which reveals a progression, to oversimplify, from single words to complex syntax), and also exposure to recent important work on the evolution of syntactic complexity (e.g., Heine & Kuteva (2007), Givon (2009)). My 2 cents worth. I'm sure Tomas will correct me if he thinks I'm off the mark here. Cheers, Phil Young pyoung at uoregon.edu From lesleyne at msu.edu Tue Jun 2 00:00:52 2009 From: lesleyne at msu.edu (Diane Frances Lesley-Neuman) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 20:00:52 -0400 Subject: syntax: functional vs generative Message-ID: Shannon,   There is more of a future in functionalism, although a knowledge of the generativist approach is also important.  Both types have computational linguistic applications, although major programs in computational linguistics, like the University of Texas, have switched over to LFG, at least for their syntax II.  My recommendation would be to be mainly functionalist, but teach generativism as an "additional theory" and ensure skill in basic tree-drawing and issues such as binding, raising, control an and WH-movement.   Functionalist programs are growing.  Mark Baker's Polysynthesis Parameter and Incorporation are good reads even for functionalists interested in minority languages.     I think that the constructionism offers a more unified approach -to bringing synchronic and diachronic analysis within one framework, and even from the perspective of language acquisition (see Michael Tomasello).  People switch from formal to functional as they evolve, rather than vice-versa.  Gert Booij, the morphologist at Leiden, is making the switch with his "constructional morphology".  Formal linguists interested in diachrony read Tom Givon.  There appear to be good reasons for it. Formal Programs: MIT, Maryland, Arizona, University of Washington, UCLA, Penn, Georgetown, UMass-Amherst, Cornell, Rutgers, CUNY, UC-San Diego, Ohio State, University of Chicago, UC Santa Cruz Functionalist Programs: Stanford (but they are eclectic), Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Oregon, Colorado, Rice, SUNY-Buffalo, University of New Mexico, Illinois-Carbondale the University of Hawaii teaches both. Of course, there are more departments than these. And departments also collaborate: right now, Buffalo (functionalist) and the University of Rochester (mainly formal) are working together in psycholinguistic experimentation in field linguistics. You will find people with formal training in functionalist departments, and a few with functionalist training in formal departments, although usually outside of syntax. University of Texas teaches Chomskyian in syntax I,and LFG in Syntax II.  Urbana Champaign teaches HPSG mainly, and these departments simply see themselves as scientific, although they are formal in spirit and in origin.   However, for people to go to grad school and have reasonable chances, they should be grounded in both frameworks. Hope this helps.   ______________________________ Diane Lesley-Neuman Linguistics Program Wells A-614 Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824 Quoting "s.t. bischoff" : > Hi all, > >   This is similar to my earlier question regarding the development of a >    syntax course. The conversation has expanded into one that will help >    us define our department in terms of our curriculum.   We are trying >    to decide if our introduction to syntax should be "functional" or >    "generative" (Chomskyan). For some the argument for the generative >    approach has been that it is the "mainstream" framework. However, it >    seems to others that it is "mainstream" only in the sense that a >    number of graduate programs pursue it. Some argue that if >    undergraduates are hoping to gain meaningful employment outside >    academia or pursue graduate programs in allied fields, "generative" >    doesn't seem to be mainstream in the slightest (personally I would >    like to know if this true...I suspect it may be). That is, for >    example, if they wanted to work for SIL, where it has been reported >    over a 1,000 languages are currently being worked on,  or wanted to >    work with a community documenting a language then functionalism would >    serve them better. Also, if they wanted to work for e.g. Google, SAP, >    Xerox, a functional approach would translate much better to >    computational linguistics e.g. finite state grammars. In addition, some >    here have argued that functionalism is more applicable to forensic >    linguistics than generative. Also, it seems that if students do go on >    to graduate school the flavor of generativsit grammar will vary, so it >    isn't necessary to train them in it...perhaps that argument could > be applied >    to a functional approach(?). > > >    Does anyone know how many graduate programs are actually generative vs >    functional? Which "major programs" are functional and which are >    generative? Or how much research is going on in the two areas? > >    Any thoughts would be welcome. > >    Thanks, >    Shannon > > From Salinas17 at aol.com Tue Jun 2 02:28:03 2009 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 22:28:03 EDT Subject: syntax: functional vs generative Message-ID: In a message dated 6/1/09 1:37:24 PM, bischoff.st at gmail.com writes: <> Oh, my. "Computational linguistics" doesn't really have much to do these days with that old Chomskayan contrivance, finite state grammars. Though the field has a lot of variety, the matters of artificial language and artificial language tend to underline the insufficiencies of syntax in natural language, not the other way around. Although knowing generative formalism is probably mandatory to credentials, it is becoming less and less useful to imitating human language in computers. regards, steve long ************** An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222377040x1201454360/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=62& bcd=JuneExcfooterNO62) From lesleyne at msu.edu Thu Jun 4 21:05:24 2009 From: lesleyne at msu.edu (Diane Frances Lesley-Neuman) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 17:05:24 -0400 Subject: formal vs. functionalist Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, My apologies to all for missing a number of departments in my formal vs. functionalist listing.  It was not meant to be an exhaustive list, and I was doing my best to help Shannon out quickly. in my haste, I left out even some major departments.  I will post some further information soon. If you like, I would be happy to receive from members of the list information regarding departments that they know so that we can provide information to our community.  We can then update the list--especially of our functionalist department friends.  Also, we need the picture from Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa.  We need to be able to provide information to help out those interested in determining the research orientations of different departments for study or other business.  I am willing to work on this, so if you have any information to offer, please send it along. Cheers, Diane   ______________________________ Diane Lesley-Neuman Linguistics Program Wells A-614 Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824 From macw at cmu.edu Fri Jun 5 22:59:15 2009 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 00:59:15 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into a construction in English for which we can't find anything even in otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive Grammar of English. I am hoping some of you have some ideas. The construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases such as "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out." What would help immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this beast. After that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be very much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than a preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to be aspectual, whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem locative or directional. Naïvely yours, -- Brian MacWhinney From amnfn at well.com Fri Jun 5 23:38:22 2009 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 16:38:22 -0700 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Brian, I found a reference to this a- prefix here: http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/prefixes.htm They seem to think that it means "to/toward", which is then grammaticalized to being in a particular state or process. Best, --Aya P.S. My guess is that it might be related to the French preposition 'a'. On Sat, 6 Jun 2009, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into a > construction in English for which we can't find anything even in otherwise > great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive Grammar of English. I > am hoping some of you have some ideas. The construction is the preposed form > "a" that occurs in phrases such as "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart > out." What would help immensely, first off, would be to have a name for > this beast. After that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also > be very much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I > wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of speech > tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it seems to pattern > more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than a preposition and, on the > other hand, the meaning seems to be aspectual, whereas the other prefixed > forms of "a" seem locative or directional. > > Naïvely yours, > > -- Brian MacWhinney From lgorbet at unm.edu Fri Jun 5 23:48:23 2009 From: lgorbet at unm.edu (Larry Gorbet) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 17:48:23 -0600 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Jun 5, 2009, at 5:38 PM, A. Katz wrote: > Brian, > > I found a reference to this a- prefix here: > > http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/prefixes.htm > > They seem to think that it means "to/toward", which is then > grammaticalized to being in a particular state or process. > > Best, > > --Aya > > P.S. My guess is that it might be related to the French preposition > 'a'. Isn't this just a reduced form of the English preposition "at", as found etymologically in the earlier forms of English progressive constructions? - Larry Gorbet -- University of New Mexico lgorbet at unm.edu Anthropology and Linguistics Departments Albuquerque, NM 87131 From kemmer at rice.edu Fri Jun 5 23:56:48 2009 From: kemmer at rice.edu (Suzanne Kemmer) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 18:56:48 -0500 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: It's from late OE/early Mid. Eng. _on V+ing_ 'in the process of V +ing'; both this construction and one based on root adjectives and prepositions _on-live_--> _alive_ show similar semantic grammaticalization of _on_ to the meaning 'in the process / state of'. These _a-_ prefix constructions are older than more recent and semantically similar grammaticalizations of _on_ as in mod. English _ongoing_, _going on and on__ The verbal construction on-V+ing_ is still productive dialectally in Amer. and Brit. English (_a-rockin' and a-rollin' around the clock tonight_) and also survives in certain expressions (Time's a-wastin'). Check the OED under prefix a-; also any good history of English. On Jun 5, 2009, at 5:59 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into > a construction in English for which we can't find anything even in > otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive > Grammar of English. I am hoping some of you have some ideas. The > construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases such as > "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out." What would help > immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this beast. After > that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be very > much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I > wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of > speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it > seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than > a preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to be > aspectual, whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem locative or > directional. > > Naïvely yours, > > -- Brian MacWhinney From andrew.pawley at anu.edu.au Sat Jun 6 00:55:24 2009 From: andrew.pawley at anu.edu.au (Andrew Pawley) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 10:55:24 +1000 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <7F3A3B9E-1269-44D8-BF39-8C2D8093D7BC@rice.edu> Message-ID: Just to add to Suzanne's reply to Brian's query, the frequent use of a-dancin' and -a-singin' constructions in Appalachian English was first described in some detail in Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian's book /Appalachian Speech/ (Arlington: Virginia, Center for Applied Linguistics 1976).  There's a sizeable literature on Appal. English. It's interesting that "on" figures in another semi-productive construction that expresses progressive action: "be on the N", where N is the nominal use of a verb, as in on the take, on the run,  on the slide/decline/rise, on the burst (in Rugby football, to be bursting through a gap in the defence).  But here "on" normally carries full stress; at least I've not noticed it with a reduced variant. Cheers Andy Pawley --- From: Suzanne Kemmer Date: Saturday, June 6, 2009 9:57 am Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] a-dancing and a-singing To: Funknet > It's from  late OE/early Mid. Eng.   _on > V+ing_    'in the process of V > +ing'; both this construction and > one based on root adjectives and prepositions >   _on-live_--> _alive_  show similar semantic > grammaticalization of _on_ > to the meaning  'in the process / state of'.   > These  _a-_ prefix   > constructions are older than more > recent and semantically similar grammaticalizations of _on_ as > in mod.  > English >   _ongoing_, _going on and on__ > > The verbal construction on-V+ing_ is still productive > dialectally  in  > Amer. and Brit. English > (_a-rockin' and a-rollin' around the clock tonight_) > and also survives  in certain expressions (Time's a-wastin'). > > Check the OED under prefix a-; >   also any good history of English. > > > > > > > On Jun 5, 2009, at 5:59 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > > > Dear Funknetters, > > > >    During some of our grammatical tagging work, > we have bumped into  > > a construction in English for which we can't find anything > even in  > > otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. > Comprehensive  > > Grammar of English.  I am hoping some of you have some > ideas.  The  > > construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases > such as  > > "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out."   > What would help  > > immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this > beast.  After  > > that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be > very  > > much appreciated.  Can this be found in other Germanic > languages, I  > > wonder?   Then, I suppose I would like to christen > it with a part of  > > speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, > since it  > > seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or > "adrift") than  > > a preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to > be  > > aspectual, whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem > locative or  > > directional. > > > > Naïvely yours, > > > > -- Brian MacWhinney > From oesten at ling.su.se Sat Jun 6 06:06:56 2009 From: oesten at ling.su.se (=?UTF-8?Q?=C3=96sten_Dahl?=) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 08:06:56 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Concerning the origin of the a-construction, I recommend the paper below which can be found at http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/c.degroot/bestanden/Huntunge%20paper%20final%20version.pdf - Östen --------------------- The king is on huntunge: on the relation between progressive and absentive in Old and Early Modern English (In: M. Hannay and G. Steen eds. The English clause: Usage and structure., 175-190, Amsterdam: Benjamins 2007) Casper de Groot University of Amsterdam Abstract This paper addresses the diachronic development of two periphrastic constructions in Old and Middle English, He wæs huntende and He wæs on huntunge, into the progressive in Modern English. The literature on the origin of the progressive offers several hypotheses for explaining the coalescence of the two constructions. This paper offers a new hypothesis based on the consideration that the first construction, consisting of be + present participle, developed into the progressive, and that the second construction, consisting of be + on + verbal noun, was originally a construction denoting absence. The evidence for the coalescence comes from a partial overlap in the semantics of the progressive and the absentive, and the fact that progressives often originate from spatial constructions. 1 From m.norde at rug.nl Sat Jun 6 11:33:04 2009 From: m.norde at rug.nl (Muriel Norde) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 13:33:04 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Brian MacWhinney schreef: > Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I wonder? Yes, there is a cognate, and very productive, progressive construction in Dutch, consisting of the preposition /aan/ 'on' + the neuter definite article /het/ + the infinitive of a verb: /Zij is aan het zwemmen/ (she is on the swim-INF) 'she is swimming' The construction may also include a direct object as in: /Hij is aan het aardappels schillen/ (he is at the potatoes peel-INF) 'he's peeling potatoes'. There is a recent paper about this by Geert Booij: Constructional idioms as products of linguistic change: the aan het + infinitive construction in Dutch. In Alexander Bergs and Gabriele Diewald (eds.), /Constructions and language change/. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 79-104 (2008) Best, Muriel -- Prof. dr. Muriel Norde Scandinavian Languages and Cultures University of Groningen P.O. Box 716 9700 AS Groningen The Netherlands http://www.let.rug.nl/~norde/ From macw at cmu.edu Sat Jun 6 11:49:14 2009 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 13:49:14 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <4A2A53F0.8020608@rug.nl> Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, Thanks to all of you (Andrew Pawley, Aya Katz, Chris Cléirigh, Larry Gorbet, Martin Haspelmath, Dan Slobin, Östen Dahl, Tom Givon, Muriel Norde, Eve Sweetser, and Suzanne Kemmer) for clarifying this construction. De Groot shows clearly that the source of this particular form is “on/an” rather than “at”. Reading this and related comments in FunkNet letters reminded me of my son’s favorite phrases when I nag him about something. It is “Dad, I’m on it.” I don’t know if this is a Pittsburgh (Appalachian) remnant of the king being out “on hunting” or not, and I am not sure I would use the term absentive for this, but I can definitely can see the conceptual link between this use of the locative “on” and the progressive. It appears that this link has worked for others across the last millennium or so and continues to work even more productively in Dutch and German. In terms of how to treat this in tagger/parser technology, I think it better to treat this as a preposition, rather than a prefix. Treating it like a prefix would require transcribers to actually join it to the verb. If, on the other hand, the tagger finds a rather unique subtype of preposition before a present participle, it will surely know not to treat it as an article. At least, the tagger will know this if we can put a few such examples into its training set. Tom politely pointed out to me that I could have just checked the OED. However, the library here in Kolding is very small, so I didn’t even try that. But, then it occurred to me that maybe the OED has gone online. So, I checked and indeed it is now online at dictionary.oed.com. My goodness, what a remarkably rich resource! There are, in fact six listings for “a-“ as prefix and two for “a” as preposition. The one we have been discussing is a- prefix 2. There are others coming from “of” and “at”, as well as lots of other related forms, all sharing the common reduction to “a”. The online OED is particularly nice because you can follow all the hot links directly. So, I was a-thinking to myself, how could Oxford University Press make this freely available in this way? Then, I read the little message down at the bottom of the screen that said “Subscriber: University of Southern Denmark” and I have to now take back what I said about the SDU Library. They, Oxford, and my FunkNet colleagues have certainly been a great help to me in seeing the scope of this remarkable form and its relatives. -- Brian MacWhinney From hartmut at ruc.dk Sat Jun 6 11:56:23 2009 From: hartmut at ruc.dk (Hartmut Haberland) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 13:56:23 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing Message-ID: Muriel Norde wrote: > > > Brian MacWhinney schreef: >> Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I wonder? German has, of course /er ist am Essen, er ist am Zeitunglesen/ and even /er ist das Haus am Saubermachen/ (but the latter is substandard - which is, of course proof that it is a living part of the language, otherwise there would be no need to declare it substandard) North Frisian (Fering) has examples of the second type (with Noun Incorporation), and I understand that the third type (with Object NP) is common in Dutch: /Ze zit aan haar proefschrift te werken/. See Karen H. Ebert 2000, Progressive markers in Germanic languages, in Östen Dahl ed., Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 605-653 (with a long list of different constructions in many Germanic languages). I think that Irish has something similar, too. /Hartmut From ocls at madisoncounty.net Sat Jun 6 12:32:11 2009 From: ocls at madisoncounty.net (Suzette Haden Elgin) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 07:32:11 -0500 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing Message-ID: Just FYI, the "a-dancing and a-singing" construction is still live and well in Rural Ozark English here where I live, although it's far more likely to be "a-dancin' and a-singin'," without its gs. You hear it even from youngsters, especially in "I'm a-fixin' to [X]." Suzette From hopper at cmu.edu Sat Jun 6 13:10:43 2009 From: hopper at cmu.edu (Paul Hopper) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 09:10:43 -0400 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <994C7167-FAA4-4BA2-960D-2595FCBC17E0@cmu.edu> Message-ID: Brian, The OED has been available free through your own Hunt Library at CMU for years. I use it frequently. Paul On Sat, June 6, 2009 7:49 am, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > > Thanks to all of you (Andrew Pawley, Aya Katz, Chris Cléirigh, Larry > Gorbet, Martin Haspelmath, Dan Slobin, Östen Dahl, Tom Givon, Muriel > Norde, Eve Sweetser, and Suzanne Kemmer) for clarifying this > construction. De Groot shows clearly that the source of this particular > form is “on/an” rather than “at”. Reading this and related comments in > FunkNet letters reminded me of my son’s favorite > phrases when I nag him about something. It is “Dad, I’m on it.” I don’t > know if this is a Pittsburgh (Appalachian) remnant of the king being out > “on hunting” or not, and I am not sure I would use the term > absentive for this, but I can definitely can see the conceptual link > between this use of the locative “on” and the progressive. It appears that > this link has worked for others across the last millennium or so and > continues to work even more productively in Dutch and German. > > In terms of how to treat this in tagger/parser technology, I think it > better to treat this as a preposition, rather than a prefix. Treating it > like a prefix would require transcribers to actually join it to the verb. > If, on the other hand, the tagger finds a rather unique subtype > of preposition before a present participle, it will surely know not to > treat it as an article. At least, the tagger will know this if we can put > a few such examples into its training set. > > Tom politely pointed out to me that I could have just checked the > OED. However, the library here in Kolding is very small, so I didn’t > even try that. But, then it occurred to me that maybe the OED has gone > online. So, I checked and indeed it is now online at dictionary.oed.com. > My goodness, what a remarkably rich resource! > There are, in fact six listings for “a-“ as prefix and two for “a” as > preposition. The one we have been discussing is a- prefix 2. There are > others coming from “of” and “at”, as well as lots of other related forms, > all sharing the common reduction to “a”. The online OED is particularly > nice because you can follow all the hot links directly. So, I was > a-thinking to myself, how could Oxford University Press make this freely > available in this way? Then, I read the little message down at the bottom > of the screen that said “Subscriber: University of Southern Denmark” and I > have to now take back what I said about the SDU Library. They, Oxford, > and my FunkNet colleagues have certainly been a great help to me in seeing > the scope of this remarkable form and its relatives. > > -- Brian MacWhinney > > > > > -- Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper Senior Fellow Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Albertstr. 19 D-79104 Freiburg and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 From rcameron at uic.edu Sat Jun 6 13:40:53 2009 From: rcameron at uic.edu (Cameron, Richard) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 08:40:53 -0500 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Walt Wolfram has written about this. See his book, American English, or contact Walt. On Fri, June 5, 2009 5:59 pm, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into > a construction in English for which we can't find anything even in > otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive > Grammar of English. I am hoping some of you have some ideas. The > construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases such as > "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out." What would help > immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this beast. After > that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be very > much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I > wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of > speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it > seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than a > preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to be aspectual, > whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem locative or directional. > > Naïvely yours, > > -- Brian MacWhinney > From amnfn at well.com Sat Jun 6 14:43:51 2009 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 07:43:51 -0700 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <22996d0d7c0ae77c4fcdef4a47ac875f.squirrel@webmail.andrew.cmu.edu> Message-ID: Paul, Is the OED free through the Hunt Library online to those not affiliated? I was wondering whether it might be a legitimate undertaking to form a sort of information co-op between those of us on Funknet who have institutional affiliations -- and hence free access to all sorts of books, resources and manuscripts -- and those who do not. In that context, if someone wished to look up a word in the OED, then they might ask someone who had access to do so. If someone without interlibrary loan privileges needed to have access to a certain page of a book, then someone with those privileges might provide a link... I'm sure this could be done without violating copyright, as it would not involve copying anything more than a minute portion of the information in any copyrighted work -- the same amount of information that we are allowed to quote in our articles without infringing on copyright. --Aya On Sat, 6 Jun 2009, Paul Hopper wrote: > Brian, > > The OED has been available free through your own Hunt Library at CMU for > years. I use it frequently. > > Paul > > > > On Sat, June 6, 2009 7:49 am, Brian MacWhinney wrote: >> Dear Funknetters, >> >> >> Thanks to all of you (Andrew Pawley, Aya Katz, Chris Cléirigh, Larry >> Gorbet, Martin Haspelmath, Dan Slobin, Östen Dahl, Tom Givon, Muriel >> Norde, Eve Sweetser, and Suzanne Kemmer) for clarifying this >> construction. De Groot shows clearly that the source of this particular >> form is “on/an” rather than “at”. Reading this and related comments in >> FunkNet letters reminded me of my son’s favorite >> phrases when I nag him about something. It is “Dad, I’m on it.” I don’t >> know if this is a Pittsburgh (Appalachian) remnant of the king being out >> “on hunting” or not, and I am not sure I would use the term >> absentive for this, but I can definitely can see the conceptual link >> between this use of the locative “on” and the progressive. It appears that >> this link has worked for others across the last millennium or so and >> continues to work even more productively in Dutch and German. >> >> In terms of how to treat this in tagger/parser technology, I think it >> better to treat this as a preposition, rather than a prefix. Treating it >> like a prefix would require transcribers to actually join it to the verb. >> If, on the other hand, the tagger finds a rather unique subtype >> of preposition before a present participle, it will surely know not to >> treat it as an article. At least, the tagger will know this if we can put >> a few such examples into its training set. >> >> Tom politely pointed out to me that I could have just checked the >> OED. However, the library here in Kolding is very small, so I didn’t >> even try that. But, then it occurred to me that maybe the OED has gone >> online. So, I checked and indeed it is now online at dictionary.oed.com. >> My goodness, what a remarkably rich resource! >> There are, in fact six listings for “a-“ as prefix and two for “a” as >> preposition. The one we have been discussing is a- prefix 2. There are >> others coming from “of” and “at”, as well as lots of other related forms, >> all sharing the common reduction to “a”. The online OED is particularly >> nice because you can follow all the hot links directly. So, I was >> a-thinking to myself, how could Oxford University Press make this freely >> available in this way? Then, I read the little message down at the bottom >> of the screen that said “Subscriber: University of Southern Denmark” and I >> have to now take back what I said about the SDU Library. They, Oxford, >> and my FunkNet colleagues have certainly been a great help to me in seeing >> the scope of this remarkable form and its relatives. >> >> -- Brian MacWhinney >> >> >> >> >> > > > -- > Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper > Senior Fellow > Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies > Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg > Albertstr. 19 > D-79104 Freiburg > and > Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities > Department of English > Carnegie Mellon University > Pittsburgh, PA 15213 > > > From hopper at cmu.edu Sat Jun 6 20:24:08 2009 From: hopper at cmu.edu (Paul Hopper) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 16:24:08 -0400 Subject: Resources for Independent Scholars In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Aya, No, these electronic resources are restricted to members of the university, and a password is necessary. You bring up a serious problem. I'm not sure the solution you suggest is feasible. There are potentially hundreds of independent scholars. It would need a rather large sign-up of volunteers to make sure that individuals weren't called on more than occasionally. If the resource is already available electronically, helping out would be a matter of a couple of clicks, but supplying pages of text would be quite a commitment, involving a trip to the library to retrieve the book, and then scanning in the page--if ILL were needed it would be still more complex. Copyright would be the least of our problems. Many people in your position are able to get some sort of affiliation with a local university, say by teaching a course or two as an adjunct. There may be other ways of getting library privileges. The MLA recognizes a category of Independent Scholar (they award an annual prize for the best book by such a person), and I believe they run a newsletter that would surely have some discussion of this important question. Does anyone have suggestions? Anyone know how many linguists might be affected? - Paul On Sat, June 6, 2009 10:43 am, A. Katz wrote: > Paul, > > > Is the OED free through the Hunt Library online to those not affiliated? > > > I was wondering whether it might be a legitimate undertaking to form a > sort of information co-op between those of us on Funknet who have > institutional affiliations -- and hence free access to all sorts of > books, resources and manuscripts -- and those who do not. > > In that context, if someone wished to look up a word in the OED, then > they might ask someone who had access to do so. If someone without > interlibrary loan privileges needed to have access to a certain page of a > book, then someone with those privileges might provide a link... > > I'm sure this could be done without violating copyright, as it would not > involve copying anything more than a minute portion of the information in > any copyrighted work -- the same amount of information that we are > allowed to quote in our articles without infringing on copyright. > > --Aya > > > On Sat, 6 Jun 2009, Paul Hopper wrote: > > >> Brian, >> >> >> The OED has been available free through your own Hunt Library at CMU >> for years. I use it frequently. >> >> Paul >> >> >> >> >> On Sat, June 6, 2009 7:49 am, Brian MacWhinney wrote: >> >>> Dear Funknetters, >>> >>> >>> >>> Thanks to all of you (Andrew Pawley, Aya Katz, Chris Cléirigh, Larry >>> Gorbet, Martin Haspelmath, Dan Slobin, Östen Dahl, Tom Givon, Muriel >>> Norde, Eve Sweetser, and Suzanne Kemmer) for clarifying this >>> construction. De Groot shows clearly that the source of this >>> particular form is “on/an” rather than “at”. Reading this and >>> related comments in FunkNet letters reminded me of my son’s favorite >>> phrases when I nag him about something. It is “Dad, I’m on it.” I >>> don’t know if this is a Pittsburgh (Appalachian) remnant of the king >>> being out “on hunting” or not, and I am not sure I would use the term >>> absentive for this, but I can definitely can see the conceptual link >>> between this use of the locative “on” and the progressive. It appears >>> that this link has worked for others across the last millennium or so >>> and continues to work even more productively in Dutch and German. >>> >>> In terms of how to treat this in tagger/parser technology, I think it >>> better to treat this as a preposition, rather than a prefix. >>> Treating it >>> like a prefix would require transcribers to actually join it to the >>> verb. If, on the other hand, the tagger finds a rather unique subtype >>> of preposition before a present participle, it will surely know not to >>> treat it as an article. At least, the tagger will know this if we >>> can put a few such examples into its training set. >>> >>> Tom politely pointed out to me that I could have just checked the >>> OED. However, the library here in Kolding is very small, so I didn’t >>> even try that. But, then it occurred to me that maybe the OED has >>> gone online. So, I checked and indeed it is now online at >>> dictionary.oed.com. My goodness, what a remarkably rich resource! >>> There are, in fact six listings for “a-“ as prefix and two for “a” as >>> preposition. The one we have been discussing is a- prefix 2. There >>> are others coming from “of” and “at”, as well as lots of other related >>> forms, all sharing the common reduction to “a”. The online OED is >>> particularly nice because you can follow all the hot links directly. >>> So, I was >>> a-thinking to myself, how could Oxford University Press make this >>> freely available in this way? Then, I read the little message down at >>> the bottom of the screen that said “Subscriber: University of Southern >>> Denmark” and I >>> have to now take back what I said about the SDU Library. They, >>> Oxford, >>> and my FunkNet colleagues have certainly been a great help to me in >>> seeing the scope of this remarkable form and its relatives. >>> >>> -- Brian MacWhinney >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper >> Senior Fellow >> Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies >> Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg >> Albertstr. 19 >> D-79104 Freiburg >> and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities >> Department of English >> Carnegie Mellon University >> Pittsburgh, PA 15213 >> >> >> >> -- Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper Senior Fellow Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Albertstr. 19 D-79104 Freiburg and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 From haspelmath at eva.mpg.de Sat Jun 6 20:40:00 2009 From: haspelmath at eva.mpg.de (Martin Haspelmath) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 22:40:00 +0200 Subject: Resources for Independent Scholars In-Reply-To: <72c0f25408c3d9b103d0f5dc25c44b29.squirrel@webmail.andrew.cmu.edu> Message-ID: The obvious solution is open-access publishing. Scientific resources should be available free of charge to anyone, with publiction costs borne directly by science organizations such as universities and funding bodies, rather than indirectly via subscriptions. This is not a solution for legacy resources, but for newly created resources, we should think each time we publish something whether publication in an open-access journal (such as "Linguistic Discovery", or "Constructions", or other journals of the eLanguage family) is not a better solution than publishing in a traditional edited volume or restricted-access journal. True, most of the prestigious journals have restricted access, but prestige is something that we as scholars create, and we could shift it gradually to open-access journals. There are also a few open-access dictionaries (e.g. http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/archi/linguists/index.aspx), and hopefully there will be more in the future. Martin P.S. Some URLs of open-access journals and resources: Linguistic Discovery: http://linguistic-discovery.dartmouth.edu/ Constructions: http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/constructions/index Journal of Language Contact: http://www.jlc-journal.org/ Journal of south Asian Linguistics: http://katze.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de/~jsal/ojs/index.php/jsal WALS Online: http://wals.info/ Paul Hopper schrieb: > Aya, > > No, these electronic resources are restricted to members of the > university, and a password is necessary. > > You bring up a serious problem. I'm not sure the solution you suggest is > feasible. There are potentially hundreds of independent scholars. It would > need a rather large sign-up of volunteers to make sure that individuals > weren't called on more than occasionally. If the resource is already > available electronically, helping out would be a matter of a couple of > clicks, but supplying pages of text would be quite a commitment, involving > a trip to the library to retrieve the book, and then scanning in the > page--if ILL were needed it would be still more complex. Copyright would > be the least of our problems. > > Many people in your position are able to get some sort of affiliation with > a local university, say by teaching a course or two as an adjunct. There > may be other ways of getting library privileges. The MLA recognizes a > category of Independent Scholar (they award an annual prize for the best > book by such a person), and I believe they run a newsletter that would > surely have some discussion of this important question. > > Does anyone have suggestions? Anyone know how many linguists might be > affected? > > - Paul > > > > > > On Sat, June 6, 2009 10:43 am, A. Katz wrote: > >> Paul, >> >> >> Is the OED free through the Hunt Library online to those not affiliated? >> >> >> I was wondering whether it might be a legitimate undertaking to form a >> sort of information co-op between those of us on Funknet who have >> institutional affiliations -- and hence free access to all sorts of >> books, resources and manuscripts -- and those who do not. >> >> In that context, if someone wished to look up a word in the OED, then >> they might ask someone who had access to do so. If someone without >> interlibrary loan privileges needed to have access to a certain page of a >> book, then someone with those privileges might provide a link... >> >> I'm sure this could be done without violating copyright, as it would not >> involve copying anything more than a minute portion of the information in >> any copyrighted work -- the same amount of information that we are >> allowed to quote in our articles without infringing on copyright. >> >> --Aya >> >> >> On Sat, 6 Jun 2009, Paul Hopper wrote: >> >> >> >>> Brian, >>> >>> >>> The OED has been available free through your own Hunt Library at CMU >>> for years. I use it frequently. >>> >>> Paul >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> On Sat, June 6, 2009 7:49 am, Brian MacWhinney wrote: >>> >>> >>>> Dear Funknetters, >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> Thanks to all of you (Andrew Pawley, Aya Katz, Chris Cléirigh, Larry >>>> Gorbet, Martin Haspelmath, Dan Slobin, Östen Dahl, Tom Givon, Muriel >>>> Norde, Eve Sweetser, and Suzanne Kemmer) for clarifying this >>>> construction. De Groot shows clearly that the source of this >>>> particular form is “on/an” rather than “at”. Reading this and >>>> related comments in FunkNet letters reminded me of my son’s favorite >>>> phrases when I nag him about something. It is “Dad, I’m on it.” I >>>> don’t know if this is a Pittsburgh (Appalachian) remnant of the king >>>> being out “on hunting” or not, and I am not sure I would use the term >>>> absentive for this, but I can definitely can see the conceptual link >>>> between this use of the locative “on” and the progressive. It appears >>>> that this link has worked for others across the last millennium or so >>>> and continues to work even more productively in Dutch and German. >>>> >>>> In terms of how to treat this in tagger/parser technology, I think it >>>> better to treat this as a preposition, rather than a prefix. >>>> Treating it >>>> like a prefix would require transcribers to actually join it to the >>>> verb. If, on the other hand, the tagger finds a rather unique subtype >>>> of preposition before a present participle, it will surely know not to >>>> treat it as an article. At least, the tagger will know this if we >>>> can put a few such examples into its training set. >>>> >>>> Tom politely pointed out to me that I could have just checked the >>>> OED. However, the library here in Kolding is very small, so I didn’t >>>> even try that. But, then it occurred to me that maybe the OED has >>>> gone online. So, I checked and indeed it is now online at >>>> dictionary.oed.com. My goodness, what a remarkably rich resource! >>>> There are, in fact six listings for “a-“ as prefix and two for “a” as >>>> preposition. The one we have been discussing is a- prefix 2. There >>>> are others coming from “of” and “at”, as well as lots of other related >>>> forms, all sharing the common reduction to “a”. The online OED is >>>> particularly nice because you can follow all the hot links directly. >>>> So, I was >>>> a-thinking to myself, how could Oxford University Press make this >>>> freely available in this way? Then, I read the little message down at >>>> the bottom of the screen that said “Subscriber: University of Southern >>>> Denmark” and I >>>> have to now take back what I said about the SDU Library. They, >>>> Oxford, >>>> and my FunkNet colleagues have certainly been a great help to me in >>>> seeing the scope of this remarkable form and its relatives. >>>> >>>> -- Brian MacWhinney >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>> -- >>> Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper >>> Senior Fellow >>> Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies >>> Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg >>> Albertstr. 19 >>> D-79104 Freiburg >>> and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities >>> Department of English >>> Carnegie Mellon University >>> Pittsburgh, PA 15213 >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> > > > From Salinas17 at aol.com Sun Jun 7 05:36:25 2009 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 01:36:25 EDT Subject: a-dancing and a-singing Message-ID: In a message dated 6/6/09 7:49:34 AM, macw at cmu.edu writes: <> Brian - some quick comments Casper de Groot's article makes it clear that the absentive was -- in English -- and is -- in Dutch -- often a likely way to interpret the use of both "on" and "a" before the participle. de Groot's point was that in narrative it was likely progressive, but in dialogue it was perhaps likely absentive -- the evidence being uneven because dialogue was less recorded in that period of English. The mild irony is that we would these day say: the king is OFF hunting. In context, it might well still likely be abstentive, if context is something you can "tag". I make the point because that difference -- between narrative and dialogue -- is one according to de Groot that involves a shift of "deitic center" in Dutch -- somewhat related to the recent discussion of deixis here. Another point about "tags" -- plainly this usage is also imitative, for a dialect "feel," or just supplies meter and functions completely without regard to any real progressive or abstentive sense. After all we're also talking about songs like Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" or "Froggy went a-courting" or "Heigh ho, the dairy-o, a-hunting we will go". How would you tag that - a-gonna? Also there's something about this usage that feels like an article -- the examples that de Groot uses in this connection from ME (owt a hawking, king him rod an huntinge) could also become a single "a" as the product of a double re-analysis since "hunting" was then interpreted a substantive noun standing alone and would also eventually require an article -- as one would go on a hunting (trip), give a whipping or take a reading or have a wedding. In fact, I'm pretty sure Mencken in his books on American Language took the a- before the verbal noun in his way as "bad language" where a-dancing would just be a ill-chosen substitute for "a dance." As to “Dad, I’m on it.” -- it's military in my experience and short-form for "on top of it" or "on that detail." And normally I believe the Pittsburgh dialect is not called Appalachian. regards steve long ************** An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222377042x1201454362/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=62& bcd=JuneExcfooterNO62) From kemmer at rice.edu Sun Jun 7 22:55:34 2009 From: kemmer at rice.edu (Suzanne Kemmer) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 17:55:34 -0500 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing Message-ID: Brian, further comments: 1. "Dad, I'm on it!" Very different construction--does not mean 'be in process of doing something' (except by inference), but rather 'have something taken care of, have accomplishment of a desired/needed action in view". The metaphor is the idea of being on top of something in the sense of 'be in control of what needs to be done and ready to do it/have it done." Recently subordinates have emphasized their eagerness with "I'm all over it" , cf. conceptually similar "I'm on top of it" and "I've got it covered". I agree with Steve Long that "I'm on it" is a widespread military expression and may have spread into business and other domains from there. (Steve Long wrote: "As to “Dad, I’m on it.” -- it's military in my experience and short-form for "on top of it" or "on that detail." ") 2. Re: the so-called "absentive": I think the sense of 'absence' is restricted to a more complex and specific variant of the plain vanilla progressive with aux _be_ (_be V-ing_/ _be a-V- ing_), namely b. below. a. In 1st special case, progressive _-ing_ verb form combines with _go_ instead of _be_, and V is (I think always) an intransitive action verb: _to go a-V-ing_ e.g. "a-hunting we will go" V without prefix is now the standard variant: _go V-ing_ "go swimming" (productive with all tenses, incl. with progressive, e.g. I went swimming, I am going swimming, etc. ). b. The second, "absentive" construction extension is one form of a. above, specifically with past participle form of _go_ (which historically always took auxiliary _be_ instead of _have_). Here's where the extra-specific sense of "absence" comes in: _to be gone a-V-ing_ e.g. "Daddy's gone a-hunting" (from song "Bye-bye baby bunting") I've haven't read de Groot article so don't know how the quasi- auxiliary _go_ is taken into account in his history of _a-V-ing_ . But I don't think _a-V-ing_ by itself has any "absentive" sense without that past part. form of _go_, at least in present day English. The "absence" idea seems to be mainly due to the _go_; the construction also occurs without the prefix as in "He's gone fishing". That's why I wouldn't connect the 'absentive' meaning with the _a- _ prefix specifically, but perhaps de Groot's historical account deals with this. c. _ a-V-ing_ can also be combined with the futurative _be going to_ construction -- here, _go_ fits in the V slot after _a-_, and then we get another, complement inf. V: _be a-going to V / be a-gonna V _ (the Dylan "a hard rain's a- gonna fall" example fits here). _Going to /gonna V_ was originally progressive in sense, but in the futurative gonna construction the present is backgrounded in favor of (orig. immediate) future meaning. The idea of immediacy of planned action is what diachronically links presents /progressives with futures more generally in languages, as speakers use present to indicate what they're about to do (as also in "I'm on it" above) and gradually use it only to SUGGEST soonness even if they aren't immediately intending to act. Eventually ' soonness' can fade entirely and leave general future. 3. Finally, a note on tagging: The a- is a prefix in mod. English, and treating it as a preposition might give other problems. That progressive -ing form is not a noun anymore. We would want to search those forms as verbs, and the prefixed and non- prefixed forms should be parallel. Suzanne From emriddle at bsu.edu Mon Jun 8 00:41:58 2009 From: emriddle at bsu.edu (Riddle, Elizabeth M.) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 20:41:58 -0400 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <7F3A3B9E-1269-44D8-BF39-8C2D8093D7BC@rice.edu> Message-ID: Walt Wolfram has called this a-prefixing and written about its occurrence in Appalachian English. Sorry--I don't have the specific references at hand. Elizabeth Riddle ________________________________________ From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Suzanne Kemmer [kemmer at rice.edu] Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 7:56 PM To: Funknet Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] a-dancing and a-singing It's from late OE/early Mid. Eng. _on V+ing_ 'in the process of V +ing'; both this construction and one based on root adjectives and prepositions _on-live_--> _alive_ show similar semantic grammaticalization of _on_ to the meaning 'in the process / state of'. These _a-_ prefix constructions are older than more recent and semantically similar grammaticalizations of _on_ as in mod. English _ongoing_, _going on and on__ The verbal construction on-V+ing_ is still productive dialectally in Amer. and Brit. English (_a-rockin' and a-rollin' around the clock tonight_) and also survives in certain expressions (Time's a-wastin'). Check the OED under prefix a-; also any good history of English. On Jun 5, 2009, at 5:59 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into > a construction in English for which we can't find anything even in > otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive > Grammar of English. I am hoping some of you have some ideas. The > construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases such as > "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out." What would help > immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this beast. After > that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be very > much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I > wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of > speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it > seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than > a preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to be > aspectual, whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem locative or > directional. > > Naïvely yours, > > -- Brian MacWhinney From emriddle at bsu.edu Mon Jun 8 00:48:55 2009 From: emriddle at bsu.edu (Riddle, Elizabeth M.) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 20:48:55 -0400 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <5E5837BDE86A234D8A43D92A81D2759D2661DAD455@EMAILBACKEND03.bsu.edu> Message-ID: Sorry, everyone. My email had piled up and I replied before I saw that others had given the same information earlier, and more fully. Liz Riddle ________________________________________ From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Riddle, Elizabeth M. [emriddle at bsu.edu] Sent: Sunday, June 07, 2009 8:41 PM To: Suzanne Kemmer; Funknet Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] a-dancing and a-singing Walt Wolfram has called this a-prefixing and written about its occurrence in Appalachian English. Sorry--I don't have the specific references at hand. Elizabeth Riddle ________________________________________ From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Suzanne Kemmer [kemmer at rice.edu] Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 7:56 PM To: Funknet Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] a-dancing and a-singing It's from late OE/early Mid. Eng. _on V+ing_ 'in the process of V +ing'; both this construction and one based on root adjectives and prepositions _on-live_--> _alive_ show similar semantic grammaticalization of _on_ to the meaning 'in the process / state of'. These _a-_ prefix constructions are older than more recent and semantically similar grammaticalizations of _on_ as in mod. English _ongoing_, _going on and on__ The verbal construction on-V+ing_ is still productive dialectally in Amer. and Brit. English (_a-rockin' and a-rollin' around the clock tonight_) and also survives in certain expressions (Time's a-wastin'). Check the OED under prefix a-; also any good history of English. On Jun 5, 2009, at 5:59 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into > a construction in English for which we can't find anything even in > otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive > Grammar of English. I am hoping some of you have some ideas. The > construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases such as > "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out." What would help > immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this beast. After > that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be very > much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I > wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of > speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it > seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than > a preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to be > aspectual, whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem locative or > directional. > > Naïvely yours, > > -- Brian MacWhinney From twood at uwc.ac.za Mon Jun 8 07:46:50 2009 From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 09:46:50 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>> 06/07/09 7:36 AM >>> I'm pretty sure Mencken in his books on American Language took the a- before the verbal noun in his way as "bad language" where a-dancing would just be a ill-chosen substitute for "a dance." The point that people who focus on the "bad" in "bad language" forget is that sometimes there are finer grained distinctions of meaning possible in such language that are missing from the standard. You find this both in grammar and phonolgy. The classic example is the occurrence of "yous" in many lects in different parts of the world to express second person plural. Now in the case of the a- expressions mentioned, it seems to me that they have a nuance of meaning that is not available in modern standard Eng except by means of a longer or clumsier locution. The closest in my own lect to the meaning I am thinking of is the participle with "busy" in front of it, as in "busy cleaning", or "I was too busy enjoying myself to notice", or "he was busy admiring himself in the mirror", etc. First point, this seems to be a kind of mode of the verb where "busy" indicates something with which one is completely occupied or preoccupied. I think the a-examples by and large have this meaning (I don't think the a-gonna example is the same phenomenon). Second point, there does seem to be a kind of analogy between such verbal constructions and the a- with adjectives, which one finds in slightly archaic Eng, in "all awash" or "all agog", etc., and an example that I think I remember from a Raymond Chandler novel, "all a-flutter". In each of these cases there also seems to be the sense of something being all-encompassing or overwhelming in some way. Well them's me hunches anyways. Tahir From tgivon at uoregon.edu Tue Jun 9 01:40:59 2009 From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 19:40:59 -0600 Subject: book review Message-ID: Dear FUNK people, In continuation of the tradition started last year by Esa Itkonen, I am enclosing a review of a recently- published book by the evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy. While not treating linguistics directly, Hrdy has nonetheless written a book that is supremely relevant to the evolution of human language. What is more, it is a joy to read. Enjoy, TG ============= MOTHERS AND OTHERS (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) by Sarah B. Hrdy Professor Emerita of Evolutionary Anthropology U.C. at Davis Sarah Hrdy's stature in the fields of primatology, ethology and human evolution has been firmly established with her many publication on comparative primate social behavior, including her acclaimed previous book on the evolution of motherhood (or mothering) "Mother Nature" (NY: Ballantine, 1999). "Mothers and Others", building on the foundations of Hrdy's previous work, takes on one of the most vexing core issues in human evolution--the adaptive impetus that led to the evolution of *mind reading*; that is, of so-called *Theory of Mind*, *inter-subjectivity*, or as pertaining to language, our capacity to mentally represent *other minds* during on-going communication. Evolutionary primatologists had long come to a near consensus that this capacity, first ascribed to non-human primates by Premack and Woodruff (1978), is the key to the special evolutionary adaptation of the hominid line, with its big brain, complex problem-solving skills, complex representation of the physical, mental and social world, sophisticated systems of social organization and cooperation, cultural learning and, eventually, language. Till recently, the dominant theories about the evolution of ?mind reading' have focused, almost exclusively, on male-oriented social activities such as warfare, aggressive-defensive coalition formation and cooperative hunting, i.e. what has been called the *Machiavellian Intelligence* (Byrne and Whiten eds. 1988). The problem with this hypothesis, as Sarah Hrdy notes in her new book, is that it does not explain why our closest relatives, the Chimps, haven't gone the same evolutionary route as the genus Homo, given that they are surely a notorious Machiavellian, scheming, aggressive/defensive coalition-building (de Waal 1982), cooperative-hunting (Boesch 2005) species. Hrdy thus poses the key question--why us and not them? By painstakingly collating and comparing the complex evidence on the reproductive and child-rearing behavior and neonate development of social vertebrate and pre-vertebrate species, of social birds and mammals, of social primate, and lastly of hunting-and-gathering human societies, and by lining it all up against the hominid archaeological and paleontological record, Hrdy is able to come up with the unique answer that best fits the diverse multi-disciplinary data: *cooperative breeding* (?cooperative child-care') that required mothers to read reliably the intentions and emotional disposition of--and then trust their newborn babies to the care of--potential allo-mothers (?allo-parents'), be they grandmothers, aunts or nieces, siblings, fathers or other kin and ultimately even benevolent non-kin. The complement of the mother's--and allo-mothers'--behavioral and neurological evolution is, of course, the neuro-behavioral evolution of human neonates themselves. Born helpless, slow to mature and expensive to maintain, human neonates depend, from the moment of birth, on securing the emotional attachment and nurturing benevolence of potential care-givers, and on learning to accurately assess--and then manipulate--the intentions and emotional dispositions of care-givers, gradually becoming, from an incredibly young age, mind-reading experts. Of the many attractive features of Hrdy's allo-motherhood hypothesis, I will single out here but a few. First, by pointing to a selectional pressure that operates during the highly-flexible early stages of developmental (ontogeny), the evolutionary plausibility of the hypothesis is greatly enhanced. The role of behavior as ?the pace-maker of evolution' (Mayr 1982), i.e. the so-called *Baldwin Effect* and the process of* genetic assimilation*, is even more plausible in early stages of development, where* ontogeny* actually partakes in phylogeny (Gould 1977). In this, the contrasts of Hrdy's proposal with the strictly-adult, strictly-male Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis is indeed striking. Second, the focus on mind-reading during early child development makes Hrdy's work that much more relevant to the evolution of human communication. As her fellow primatologists D. Cheney and R. Seyfarth have noted, "mind reading pervades language" (2007, p. 244). Indeed, the entire Gricean research program on the pragmatics of communication is, transparently, an elaboration of how speakers take account, systematically and rapidly, of their interlocutor's rapidly shifting states of intention (deontics) and belief (epistemics) during communication. No real understanding of the adaptive role of grammar, for example, is possible without reference to our mental representation of other minds (see my "Context as Other Minds", 2005). By identifying the likely adaptive impetus to the evolution of the human mind-reading capacity, Sarah Hrdy has, implicitly but unerringly, also pot her finger on the core prerequisite to the evolution of human communication. Not surprisingly, her book also dovetails nicely with the study of early child language development, most conspicuously with the 1970's classic *interactionist* work of Sue Ervin-Tripp, Eli Ochs, Liz Bates and Ron Scollon. Lastly, Hrdy is a terrific, lively, scintillating writer and down-to-earth stylist, with the ability to be both dead-scholarly-serious and highly entertaining. An obvious fringe benefits of reading her book is that it makes learning pleasurable. And her findings are applicable to a wide range of contemporary social issues: the history and current state of the family, our schooling and child-care practices, and the potential future evolution of Homo sapiens. From bischoff.st at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 13:04:49 2009 From: bischoff.st at gmail.com (s.t. bischoff) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:04:49 -0400 Subject: language in the news Message-ID: thought some might find this of interest: *Millionth English word' declared* A US web monitoring firm has declared the millionth English word to be Web 2.0, a term for the latest generation of web products and services. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8092549.stm From hopper at cmu.edu Wed Jun 10 14:34:29 2009 From: hopper at cmu.edu (Paul Hopper) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:34:29 -0400 Subject: language in the news In-Reply-To: <1c1f75a20906100604k1ed0b15bsd69d51841e058d05@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Interesting. Now what we all want to know is; which English word was the first? ;-) - Paul Hopper On Wed, June 10, 2009 9:04 am, s.t. bischoff wrote: > thought some might find this of interest: > > *Millionth English word' declared* > > > A US web monitoring firm has declared the millionth English word to be > Web > 2.0, a term for the latest generation of web products and services. > > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8092549.stm > > > -- Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper Senior Fellow Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Albertstr. 19 D-79104 Freiburg and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 From elc9j at virginia.edu Wed Jun 10 14:42:32 2009 From: elc9j at virginia.edu (Ellen Contini-Morava) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:42:32 -0400 Subject: Post-Doctoral position in anthropological linguistics/language documentation Message-ID: From a colleague who is not on this list: > From: Jeff Good ----------- Post-Doctoral position in anthropological linguistics/language documentation Applications are invited for a two-year postdoctoral research position in the Department of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, in conjunction with the NSF-funded project "Towards an Areal grammar of Lower Fungom", directed by Jeff Good. The project involves gathering both (i) basic documentary and descriptive materials on the languages of the Lower Fungom region of Northwest Cameroon and (ii) collecting ethnographic information relevant to understanding the sociolinguistics of the region. The focus of the work for the person to be hired for this position will be on the ethnographic and sociolinguistic aspects of the project. Applicants should have previous fieldwork experience and be willing to engage in fieldwork under difficult conditions in Subsaharan Africa. Ability to speak French will be helpful but is not required as the primary contact languages will be English and Cameroonian Pidgin (which can be learned in the field). Candidates should have demonstrated expertise in anthropological linguistics or the sociolinguistics of non-Western languages. Applicants with previous fieldwork experience in Subsaharan Africa and some background in comparative and historical linguistics will be preferred. This is a research position, and there is no teaching obligation. Starting salary is US $40,000, with a subsequent annual increase. Planned start date for the work is Fall 2009, but this is negotiable. Project description The Lower Fungom region of Cameroon is one of the most linguistically fragmented areas of one of the most linguistically diverse countries on the planet. In an area around half the size of Chicago, one finds at least seven indigenous languages, five of which are not spoken elsewhere. The region's languages are not well studied, and their names--Abar [mij], Fang [fak], Koshin [kid], Kung [kfl], Mbu' [muc], Mundabli [boe], and Naki [mff]--are virtually unknown, even to other linguists working in Cameroon. These languages are clearly related to the Bantu languages that dominate Subsaharan Africa, but the details of their genetic affiliations otherwise remain largely obscure. Based on the results of fieldwork conducted since 2004, it has become clear that an important feature of the Lower Fungom region is the nature of the communicative network holding among its thirteen villages that has allowed such extensive linguistic diversity to flourish. Thus, in addition to the traditional issues encountered when doing grammatical description and comparative work on any group of understudied languages, a second set of questions is raised when conducting fieldwork in Lower Fungom regarding the sociolinguistic and historical forces that have created such extreme diversity within such a small area. This project will, therefore, continue the research already begun on the grammar and lexicon of the languages of Lower Fungom and extend it by adding a sociolinguistic and anthropological component to the work. The project will result in the creation of a sociolinguistic survey of the region as well as detailed documentation and description of three of its speech varieties that are only minimally described. Application Applicants are encouraged to discuss their application with the project director prior to submission. Applications will be accepted online only beginning June 9 at the University at Buffalo jobs site: https://www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/ For the posting for this particular job, go to: https://www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/applicants/jsp/shared/position/JobDetails_css.jsp?postingId=152224 Information about what to include with an application can be found on the UB Jobs website. Review of applications will begin on 1 July, and applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Questions can be addressed to: Jeff Good, University at Buffalo, Department of Linguistics Email: jcgood at buffalo.edu Phone: +1-716-645-0126 From tgivon at uoregon.edu Thu Jun 11 17:12:50 2009 From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:12:50 -0600 Subject: David Watters, RIP In-Reply-To: <60C30ADE-487E-49E8-A783-3C473AAEC1BC@sil.org> Message-ID: DAVID WATTERS R.I.P. It is with profound sorrow that I pass on the news that David Watters, a well known linguist of Tibeto-Burman and Nepal, has departed unexpectedly on May 18th. I first met David when he enrolled in our PhD program in Oregon in the early 1990s. It rapidly became clear he was not an ordinary student. He didn't need to be taught, he already knew, intuitively, all I had to teach him, and had much to teach his teachers. Before he came to us, David had already spent a lifetime in Nepal, working with the Kham people, whose existence and unique language he was the first to note and described. He and his wife Nancy raised their two boys in the village, where David's commitment to the people and their language and culture became legendary. When the Maoist guerillas established their early base in the Kham region, they seized David and threatened to execute him as a foreign spy. He was saved by the determined intervention of the Kham villagers, who insisted that this stranger was not to be harmed, for he belonged to them. When a few years ago the new Nepalese government concluded a peace treaty with the Maoists, David was honored as the true mediator of the treaty, and was seated at the dais during the peace ceremony, bedecked in colorful native regalia and turban and looking, to judge by the framed picture hung on my study wall, like a serene if slightly bewildered pasha. About 10 years ago, David hosted me for a Himalayas hike in western Nepal. It was an experience of a lifetime, not only because of the incredible terrain and the linguistic diversity of rural people, but most of all listening to David's stories of a lifetime of adventures in.Nepal. David was a talented, profound, theoretically-aware natural-born linguist. In the group that worked with us on Tolowa Athabaskan in Oregon in the early 1990s, he was a beacon of descriptive common sense. His monumental grammar of Kham, stemming from his Oregon dissertation, remain a benchmark of linguistic description.In the last ten years, David dedicated his time, increasingly, to the cause of Nepalese linguistics, teaching and training local linguists at Tribhuvan university in Kathmandu, editing a monumental encyclopedia of Nepalese linguistics, and forging ahead with new descriptive projects. Linguistics of Nepal and the Himalayas have lost a unique colleague, mentor and friend. David was raised near the Mojave desert town of Barstow, California, along the railroad tracks and old Highway 66. He was a lifelong member of SIL, something many academics consider three strikes against you. But even in SIL, he stood out for his unwaivering commitment to the cause of 'his' people, the Kham, their language, culture and material well being. Indeed, this commitment to the indigenous often put him on a collision course with both the royal Nepalese government and the SIL establishment.While a devout Christian, David never lost sight of the beauty and legitimacy of local cultures and religions, and of the need--indeed our overriding obligation--to cherish preserve them. We will miss you, David. Rest in peace. From paul at benjamins.com Thu Jun 11 19:55:22 2009 From: paul at benjamins.com (Paul Peranteau) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:55:22 -0400 Subject: New Benjamins title-Corrigan et al.: Formulaic Language. Vol. 2. Message-ID: Formulaic Language, Volume 2 Acquisition, loss, psychological reality, and functional explanations Edited by Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Typological Studies in Language 83 2009. xxiv, 361 pp. Publishing status: Available Hardbound 978 90 272 2996 0 / EUR 105.00 / USD 158.00 [] e-Book ­ Not yet available 978 90 272 9016 8 / EUR 105.00 / USD 158.00 Part of the set: Corrigan, Roberta, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley (eds.), Formulaic Language: Volume 1: Distribution and historical change, Volume 2: Acquisition, loss, psychological reality, and functional explanations. 2 vols. set. This book is the second of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first in the field. The authors of the papers in this volume represent a diverse group of international scholars in linguistics and psychology. The language data analyzed come from a variety of languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and include analyses of styles and genres within these languages. While the first volume focuses on the very definition of linguistic formulae and on their grammatical, semantic, stylistic, and historical aspects, the second volume explores how formulae are acquired and lost by speakers of a language, in what way they are psychologically real, and what their functions in discourse are. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research. ---------- Table of contents Preface ix Introduction. Approaches to the study of formulae Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley xi­xxiv Part I. Acquisition and loss Repetition and reuse in child language learning Colin Bannard and Elena Lieven 297 Formulaic language from a learner perspective: What the learner needs to know Britt Erman 323 The acquisition and development of the topic marker wa in L1 Japanese: The role of NP-wa? in child-mother interaction Chigusa Kurumada 347 Formulaic expressions in intermediate EFL writing assessment Aaron Ohlrogge 375 Connecting the dots to unpack the language Ann M. Peters 387 The effect of awareness-raising on the use of formulaic constructions Susanne Rott 405 Can L2 learners productively use Japanese tense-aspect markers? A usage-based approach Natsue Sugaya and Yasuhiro Shirai 423 Formulaic and novel language in a 'dual process' model of language competence: Evidence from surveys, speech samples, and schemata Diana Van Lancker Sidtis 445 Part II. Psychological reality The psycholinguistic reality of collocation and semantic prosody(2): Affective priming Nick C. Ellis and Eric Frey 473 Frequency and the emergence of prefabs: Evidence from monitoring Vsevolod Kapatsinski and Joshua Radicke 499 Part III. Functional explanations Formulaic argumentation in scientific discourse Heidrun Dorgeloh and Anja Wanner 523 Accepting responsibility at defendants' sentencing hearings: No formulas for success M. Catherine Gruber 545 Decorative symmetry in ritual (and everyday) language John Haiman and Noeurng Ourn 567 Time management formulaic expressions in English and Thai Shoichi Iwasaki 589 Routinized uses of the first person expression for me in conversational discourse Joanne Scheibman 615 Author Index I-1­I-9 Subject index I-11­I-19 ---------- Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com) General Manager John Benjamins Publishing Company 763 N. 24th St. Philadelphia PA 19130 Phone: 215 769-3444 Fax: 215 769-3446 John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com) General Manager John Benjamins Publishing Company 763 N. 24th St. Philadelphia PA 19130 Phone: 215 769-3444 Fax: 215 769-3446 John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com From paul at benjamins.com Thu Jun 11 19:56:56 2009 From: paul at benjamins.com (Paul Peranteau) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:56:56 -0400 Subject: New Benjamins title- Corrigan et al.: Formulaic Language. Vol. 1 Message-ID: Formulaic Language, Volume 1. Distribution and historical change Edited by Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Typological Studies in Language 82 2009. xxiv, 315 pp. Hardbound 978 90 272 2995 3 / EUR 105.00 / USD 158.00 [] e-Book ­ Not yet available 978 90 272 9017 5 / EUR 105.00 / USD 158.00 Part of the set: Corrigan, Roberta, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley (eds.), Formulaic Language: Volume 1: Distribution and historical change, Volume 2: Acquisition, loss, psychological reality, and functional explanations. 2 vols. set. This book is the first of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first ones in the field. The book draws attention to the ritualized, repetitive side of language, which to some estimates make up over 50% of spoken and written text. While in the linguistic literature, the creative and innovative aspects of language have been amply highlighted, conventionalized, pre-fabricated, "off-the-shelf" expressions have been paid less attention ­ an imbalance that this book attempts to remedy. The first of the two volumes addresses the very concept of formulaic language and provides studies that explore the grammatical and semantic properties of formulae, their stylistic distribution within languages, and their evolution in the course of language history. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, besides being a resource in linguistic research, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research. ---------- Table of contents Preface ix Introduction. Approaches to the study of formulae Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley xi­xxiv Part I. What is Formulaic Language Grammarians' languages versus humanists' languages and the place of speech act formulas in models of linguistic competence Andrew Pawley 3­26 Identifying formulaic language: Persistent challenges and new opportunities Alison Wray 27­52 Part II. Structure and distribution Formulaic tendencies of demonstrative clefts in spoken English Andreea S. Calude 55­76 Formulaic language and the relater category ­ the case of about Jean Hudson and Maria Wiktorsson 77­96 The aim is to analyze NP: The function of prefabricated chunks in academic texts Elma Kerz and Florian Haas 97­116 Fixedness in Japanese adjectives in conversation: Toward a new understanding of a lexical ('part-of-speech') category Tsuyoshi Ono and Sandra A. Thompson 117­146 Genre-controlled constructions in written language quotatives: A case study of English quotatives from two major genres Jessie Sams 147­170 Some remarks on the evaluative connotations of toponymic idioms in a contrastive perspective Joanna Szerszunowicz 171­184 Part III. Historical change The role of prefabs in grammaticization: How the particular and the general interact in language change Joan Bybee and Rena Torres Cacoullos 187­218 Formulaic models and formulaicity in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic Giuliano Lancioni 219­238 A corpus study of lexicalized formulaic sequences with preposition + hand Hans Lindquist 239­256 The embodiment/culture continuum: A historical study of conceptual metaphor James J. Mischler, III 257­272 From 'remaining' to 'becoming' in Spanish: The role of prefabs in the development of the construction quedar(se) + ADJECTIVE Damián Vergara Wilson 273­296 Author index I-1­I-9 Subject index I-11­I-19 Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com) General Manager John Benjamins Publishing Company 763 N. 24th St. Philadelphia PA 19130 Phone: 215 769-3444 Fax: 215 769-3446 John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com From hallowel at ohio.edu Mon Jun 15 18:06:54 2009 From: hallowel at ohio.edu (hallowel at ohio.edu) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:06:54 -0400 Subject: Postdoctoral position in neurogenic language disorders Message-ID: Dear colleague: I would appreciate your sharing the attached flyer with anyone you know who may be seeking a postdoctoral research position in the area of acquired neurogenic language disorders in adults. The position entails personalized mentorship in scholarly career development and exceptional opportunities for hands-on experience in technology transfer and commercialization of research using eye-tracking technology. The position requires a Ph.D. and strong interests in aphasia and other acquired neurogenic language disorders in adults. Applicants may be from any disciplinary background. Thank you. Brooke Hallowell (hallowel at ohio.edu) Brooke Hallowell, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, F-ASHA Director, School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences College of Health and Human Services W218 Grover Center Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 From autotype at uni-leipzig.de Tue Jun 16 08:17:14 2009 From: autotype at uni-leipzig.de (Balthasar Bickel) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:17:14 +0200 Subject: Post-Doc position available (EuroBABEL project) Message-ID: The EuroBABEL project 'Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax' (RHIM) is seeking a Research Associate in Linguistic Typology. The successful candidate should have a PhD degree or equivalent in Linguistic Typology or related field, experience in carrying out large scale cross-linguistic grammar based research, familiarity with current database technologies and corpus based methodologies and preferably some experience in fieldwork on endangered languages. The candidate must have a good record of disseminating research findings in both written and oral form and be prepared to work as part of an international team of researchers The first two years of the project will be based at the department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University (Professor Anna Siewierska), the third year at the Department of Linguistics, University of Leipzig (Professor Balthasar Bickel). The post will require a good deal of travel within these places and within the RHIM network in general. Essential requirements - A PhD in Linguistic Typology or related field. - A thorough understanding of cross-linguistic language data collection and storage. - Experience in analysis and interpretation of cross-linguistic morpho- syntactic and discopurse data. - Effective computer software and hardware skills. - Experience of quantitative research such as study design, managing projects, quality assuring and analysing data. - Effective interpersonal and communication skills, including writing to a high standard, working effectively within a team, document preparation for collaboration technical notes and journal papers. - Ability and willingness to be involved in regular international travel. Desirable requirements - Preparation of new studies including submissions for grants, obtaining external agreements such as ethical approval. - Good publications record i.e. including research publications in peer-reviewed journals. - Some experience in carrying out fieldwork on endangered languages. Closing Date: 27 June Interviews: week of 13 July Expected start date: 1 September To apply or request further information online, please visit http://www.personnel.lancs.ac.uk/vacancydets.aspx?jobid=AA19 For further information, you can also contact Anna Siewierska From francisco.ruizdemendoza at unirioja.es Tue Jun 16 16:46:51 2009 From: francisco.ruizdemendoza at unirioja.es (=?iso-8859-1?Q?=22Francisco_Jos=E9_Ruiz_De_Mendoza_Ib=E1=F1ez=22?=) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:46:51 +0200 Subject: CRAL-2009 Conference CFP October 29-31 Message-ID: [We apologize for cross postings] The Center for Research on the Applications of Language (CRAL), based at the University of La Rioja, Spain, solicits papers for the International Conference on Figurative Language Learning and Figurative Language Use: Theory and Applications. An International Conference in Honor of Professor Paul Meara, to be held on October 29-31, 2009, at the  University of La Rioja. The conference is open to presentations on a range of topics related to Cognitive Linguistics and compatible approaches to language, both from a theoretical and an applied perspective. We invite proposals on subjects including but not limited to: metaphor theory; metonymy theory; cognitive models; cognitive stylistics; figurative language use in L1 and in additional languages including foreign languages and multilingual acquisition; figurative language acquisition and development; vocabulary and figurative language in foreign languages; applications of figurative language (to lexicography, translation, language teaching and methodology, etc.).  General Session: Abstracts for 20-minute presentations (plus ten-minute discussion) should be no more than 500 words (plus references, tables, and figures), and should also include 5 keywords. Abstracts should be sent by 1-September-2009 through the CRAL webpage at cral09.cilap.es Round Tables last a maximum of 90 minutes. The proposal should include not more than 5 presentations of ten minutes each; round tables should have a discussant that will act as debate moderator; debate time should take at least 40 minutes. Round Table proposals should have a general description of the aims of the session, and one abstract for each of the presentations. All abstracts should comply with the same specifications as the abstracts for the General Session. Laudatio: We intend to hold this Conference in honor of Professor Paul Meara (University of Swansea) on occasion of his retirement. The closing ceremony will feature a plenary lecture by Professor Meara and a laudatio. Publication: A selection of contributions will be edited by the organizers and submitted to a major international press. Chair: Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez Co-chair: Rosa María Jiménez Catalán Plenary Speakers Paul Meara (Swansea, UK): title pending confirmation Elena Semino (Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, United Kingdom): "Figurative language in expert publications and educational materials" Frank Boers (Erasmus University College Brussels, Belgium): "Ways of teaching L2 figurative phrases: an assessment" Zoltan Kövecses (Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary): "Recent findings in metaphor theory and their application to foreign language teaching." David Singleton (Center for Language and Communication Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland): "Figurative aspects of the taboo lexicon" Other plenary speakers to be announced in due time Call Deadline: September 1, 2009 Acceptance notification: September 10 Registration deadline: October 15 Date: October, 29-31, 2009 Conference fee: 60 euros Special fee for undergraduate students: 20 euros Questions and correspondence may be addressed to www.cilap.es From rene at punksinscience.org Wed Jun 17 12:43:35 2009 From: rene at punksinscience.org (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Ren=E9_Schiering?=) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:43:35 +0200 Subject: CfP: Prosodic Typology, February 24-26, 2010, Berlin Message-ID: Prosodic Typology: State of the Art and Future Prospects The study of prosody is traditionally concerned with suprasegmental features such as stress, tone, intonation and quantity. More recently, its scope has been expanded to include any phonological phenomenon sensitive to the domains of the prosodic hierarchy (ranging from the syllable to the utterance). In the course of this development, a number of theoretical frameworks have been developed which make strong claims about possible prosodic systems and their architecture. While the predictions are clear, the cross-linguistic evidence is often less so, especially since too often generalizations are based on a narrow language sample from better-known European languages. Call for Papers We invite phonologists, typologists, and experts on individual languages to submit abstracts addressing, among others, the following key questions in prosodic typology: 1) Which phenomena should be subsumed under the term ‘prosodic’? E.g. is it reasonable to treat stress domains on a par with segmental assimilation processes? (cf. Bickel et al. 2009) 2) Can existing descriptive frameworks capture the attested diversity in prosodic systems? E.g. does ToBI provide an adequate means for cross-linguistic comparison? (cf. Jun 2005) 3) Are phonological theories capable of handling typological variation? E.g. can derivational approaches which assign metrical grids before intonational pitch-accents account for cases like Kuot? (cf. Lindström & Remijsen 2005) Abstracts should be anonymous and should not exceed 1 page in length (an additional page for data and/or references can be added). Please send your abstracts electronically in pdf- and doc- or rtf-format to rene at punksinscience.org. Include your name, affiliation and the title of the abstract in the body of the e-mail. Submission deadline: August 31st, 2009. The workshop is organized by Gabriele Müller and René Schiering (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster). It takes place as part of the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (German Linguistic Society, DGfS) in Berlin between February 24th and 26th, 2010: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/dgfs/. Presentations at multiple workshops during DGfS are generally not approved of. References Bickel, Balthasar, Kristine A. Hildebrandt & René Schiering (2009). The distribution of phonological word domains: A probabilistic typology. In Phonological Domains. Universals and Deviations, Janet Grijzenhout & Baris Kabak (eds.), 47-74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Jun, Sun-Ah (ed.) (2005). Prosodic Typology. The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindström, Eva and Bert Remijsen (2005). Aspects of the prosody of Kuot, a language where intonation ignores stress. Linguistics 43: 839-870. **************** Dr. phil. René Schiering, M.A. Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster Institut für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Aegidiistr. 5 48143 Münster Tel.: (49) 251 83 244 90 Fax: (49) 251 83 298 78 E-mail: rene at punksinscience.org Internet: www.rene.punksinscience.org From tpayne at uoregon.edu Fri Jun 19 14:32:14 2009 From: tpayne at uoregon.edu (Thomas E. Payne) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:32:14 -0700 Subject: Subject-complement inversion Message-ID: Can someone please remind me of research on the discourse functions of "subject-complement inversion" constructions in English? These are clauses like the following: Behind the counter crouched the thief. Up jumped the rabbit. Around the corner came the train. Under the bed scurried the cat. The best rider on the team is Marilyn. Great is thy faithfulness. In the kitchen is Mrs. Jones. On the wall hangs a portrait of Churchill. I don't mean "subject-object inversion" in utterance predicates. Neither existential/presentational constructions with "existential 'there'". Thanks so much for references to relevant (preferably recent) literature. Tom Payne From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Fri Jun 19 14:40:55 2009 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:40:55 -0400 Subject: Mirativity vs. Evidentiality? Message-ID: I've been reading Dixon/Aikhenvald's first volume of papers on evidentiality and have just learned of the existance of mirativity- so now I have a name I can put on the Yahgan suffix -ara with that function. However, it seems there is some issue over whether mirativity is properly part of the system of evidentiality generally. Has any consensus begun to form yet as to the relation here? Thanks. Jess Tauber phonosemantics at earthlink.net From smalamud at brandeis.edu Fri Jun 19 17:07:12 2009 From: smalamud at brandeis.edu (Sophia A. Malamud) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:07:12 -0400 Subject: Subject-complement inversion Message-ID: The first thing that comes to mind is Betty Birner's work: 1996. Birner, B. *The Discourse Function of Inversion in English.*Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics. NY: Garland Publishing. Betty's subsequent work is also quite relevant and very good; it's listed in her CV at http://www.engl.niu.edu/bbirner/vita.html Best, Sophia Malamud On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 1:00 PM, wrote: > Send FUNKNET mailing list submissions to > funknet at mailman.rice.edu > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/funknet > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > funknet-request at mailman.rice.edu > > You can reach the person managing the list at > funknet-owner at mailman.rice.edu > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of FUNKNET digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Subject-complement inversion (Thomas E. Payne) > 2. Mirativity vs. Evidentiality? (jess tauber) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:32:14 -0700 > From: "Thomas E. Payne" > Subject: [FUNKNET] Subject-complement inversion > To: "FUNKNET" > Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > Can someone please remind me of research on the discourse functions of > "subject-complement inversion" constructions in English? These are clauses > like the following: > > Behind the counter crouched the thief. > Up jumped the rabbit. > Around the corner came the train. > Under the bed scurried the cat. > The best rider on the team is Marilyn. > Great is thy faithfulness. > In the kitchen is Mrs. Jones. > On the wall hangs a portrait of Churchill. > > I don't mean "subject-object inversion" in utterance predicates. Neither > existential/presentational constructions with "existential 'there'". > > Thanks so much for references to relevant (preferably recent) literature. > > Tom Payne > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:40:55 -0400 (GMT-04:00) > From: jess tauber > Subject: [FUNKNET] Mirativity vs. Evidentiality? > To: FUNKNET at mailman.rice.edu > Message-ID: > < > 9529414.1245422456270.JavaMail.root at elwamui-polski.atl.sa.earthlink.net> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > I've been reading Dixon/Aikhenvald's first volume of papers on > evidentiality and have just learned of the existance of mirativity- so now I > have a name I can put on the Yahgan suffix -ara with that function. However, > it seems there is some issue over whether mirativity is properly part of the > system of evidentiality generally. > > Has any consensus begun to form yet as to the relation here? Thanks. > > Jess Tauber > phonosemantics at earthlink.net > > > End of FUNKNET Digest, Vol 69, Issue 11 > *************************************** > From brachan at post.tau.ac.il Fri Jun 19 17:25:15 2009 From: brachan at post.tau.ac.il (Bracha Nir-Sagiv) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:25:15 +0300 Subject: Subject-complement inversion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There's also Rong Chen's book from 2003, English Inversion: A Ground-before-Figure Construction. Mouton de Gruyter. I hope this helps! Bracha Thomas E. Payne wrote: >Can someone please remind me of research on the discourse functions of >"subject-complement inversion" constructions in English? These are clauses >like the following: > >Behind the counter crouched the thief. >Up jumped the rabbit. >Around the corner came the train. >Under the bed scurried the cat. >The best rider on the team is Marilyn. >Great is thy faithfulness. >In the kitchen is Mrs. Jones. >On the wall hangs a portrait of Churchill. > >I don't mean "subject-object inversion" in utterance predicates. Neither >existential/presentational constructions with "existential 'there'". > >Thanks so much for references to relevant (preferably recent) literature. > >Tom Payne > > > From brachan at post.tau.ac.il Fri Jun 19 17:25:31 2009 From: brachan at post.tau.ac.il (Bracha Nir-Sagiv) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:25:31 +0300 Subject: Subject-complement inversion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There's Rong Chen's book from 2003, English Inversion: A Ground-before-Figure Construction. Mouton de Gruyter. I hope this helps! Bracha Thomas E. Payne wrote: >Can someone please remind me of research on the discourse functions of >"subject-complement inversion" constructions in English? These are clauses >like the following: > >Behind the counter crouched the thief. >Up jumped the rabbit. >Around the corner came the train. >Under the bed scurried the cat. >The best rider on the team is Marilyn. >Great is thy faithfulness. >In the kitchen is Mrs. Jones. >On the wall hangs a portrait of Churchill. > >I don't mean "subject-object inversion" in utterance predicates. Neither >existential/presentational constructions with "existential 'there'". > >Thanks so much for references to relevant (preferably recent) literature. > >Tom Payne > > > From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Tue Jun 23 15:23:45 2009 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:23:45 -0400 Subject: Instruments as temporary bodyparts- study in Current Biology Message-ID: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090622121232.htm Hmm- fans of 'bipartite' constructions and embodied cognition take note. So my questions is whether pathways are thought of as extensions of feet? Jess Tauber From d.brown at surrey.ac.uk Wed Jun 24 10:34:44 2009 From: d.brown at surrey.ac.uk (Dunstan Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:34:44 +0100 Subject: Job Opportunity: Research Fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group (Alor-Pantar Languages) - Ref 7108 In-Reply-To: <0906F7848AFD844B97A0DE4C9EEE6897045B9163@EVS-EC1-NODE2.surrey.ac.uk> Message-ID: [With apologies for cross-postings ­ Advertisement and Role Description attached] University of Surrey Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences Surrey Morphology Group Department of English Research Fellow - ref 7108 Salary from £28,839 to £32,458 per annum (depending on experience) Applications are invited for a research post in the Surrey Morphology Group, for three years, available from 1 October 2009. This post is for the project ŒAlor and Pantar Languages: Origins and Theoretical Impacts¹, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of European Science Foundation¹s EuroBABEL scheme, and involves coordinated projects in Surrey, Leiden and Fairbanks (Alaska). The Surrey project directors are Professor Greville Corbett, Dr Matthew Baerman and Dr Dunstan Brown. The job will involve working collaboratively with linguists gathering data in the field on constructing a typology of word classes and morphosyntactic categories in the Alor-Pantar languages, maintaining a database and contributing to joint papers. Some fieldwork in conjunction with the collaborating project teams is also foreseen. Applicants should have Ph.D. in hand or expect to complete all requirements for the Ph.D. prior to appointment. Applicants should have a solid background in one or more of the following areas: linguistic typology, morphological theory, and the languages of New Guinea and/or Indonesia. Candidates must have the ability to work independently while functioning as part of a research team. The Project The Alor-Pantar (AP) languages are a group of 15-20 non-Austronesian (ŒPapuan¹) languages spoken on several islands in eastern Indonesia. They are of special interest because they have no established genetic relatives. A relationship to the Trans New Guinea family has been proposed, but remains highly disputed, due to the lack of language documentation. Documentation of these languages has recently begun, but the material has yet to be analyzed in a rigorous fashion, and the theoretical linguistic community is largely unaware of these data. The implications for language classification, migration patterns, and morphosyntactic and semantic typology remain largely unexplored. The project aims to document and analyze the AP languages, collecting high quality archival data to deepen our understanding of human language. It is divided into three Individual Projects: Extended Documentation (Leiden), Word Class Typology (Surrey) and Linguistic Prehistory (Fairbanks). The aims of the Surrey project are to investigate (i) the continuum between word classes and grammatical features; (ii) how morphosyntactic categories evolve from diffuse pragmatic and syntactic conditions; (iii) several particularly unusual morphosyntactic phenomena of the AP languages. Now is a crucial time for this work: the AP languages are severely endangered but still have sufficient vitality to provide additional supporting documentation without difficulty. The quality of AP language data is likely to decline significantly over the next two decades as language shift progresses. Details about the EuroBABEL project can be found at: http://www.alor-pantar.org/ Details of the Surrey Morphology Group can be found at: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/ Informal enquiries may be made to Dr Matthew Baerman (m.baerman at surrey.ac.uk) or to Dr Dunstan Brown (d.brown at surrey.ac.uk). To apply on line, please visit www.surrey.ac.uk/vacancies . Alternatively please contact Louise Ellesley via email on l.ellesley at surrey.ac.uk or by telephone on 01483 689646 quoting reference number 7108. To send an application, please post to Louise Ellesley, HR Assistant, Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH. Closing date for applications: 10th August 2009 Provisional date for Interview board: 28th August 2009 The University is committed to an Equal Opportunities Policy From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Wed Jun 24 21:23:14 2009 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:23:14 -0400 Subject: empathy- waiting for the other's shoe to drop? Message-ID: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623120837.htm POV/Vantage, path/position related to ability to empathize- the flip side to the bodypart/instrument model? Jess Tauber From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Sun Jun 28 19:57:38 2009 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:57:38 -0400 Subject: unusual (?) passive/possessive Message-ID: Another long hot day... In Yahgan there is a construction I find a bit unusual, but my lack of experience with other languages makes me a bit hesitant here, so I'm wondering if list-lurkers can help. Ex. hame:amana:nude: shuganiki:pa < ha-m-yamana:n-ude: = 1st sbj-pass/refl-live/survive/recover-past; shugani-ki:pa ?-female/woman = daughter 'My daughter is getting better'. This type of construction works for all three bound person pronoun prefixes. Ex. kvme:ipvnude: bix < kv-m-yipvn-ude: = 3rd sbj-pass/refl-catch-past; bix bird 'His bird was caught/someone hit is bird'. Possession of the nominal is unexpressed in these sentences, where normally it would have another possessing nominal preceding it, and in other constructions one can have the expressed possessor. Here the possessed NP seems always to follow the verb, and is zero-marked for case. With the expressed possessor neither of these conditions seem to be true. Is this sort of thing normal for some kinds of languages? Thanks. Jess Tauber phonosemantics at earthlink.net From hallowel at ohio.edu Mon Jun 29 19:25:02 2009 From: hallowel at ohio.edu (hallowel at ohio.edu) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:25:02 -0400 Subject: Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Neurogenic Language Disorders Message-ID: I apologize for a repeat mailing about this possibility. I did not realize that the flyer I had sent to the list as an attachment did not go through on Funknet. The information is now pasted below in this email. Feel free to forward this to others who may be interested. Thanks. Brooke Hallowell Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Neurogenic Language Disorders School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences, College of Health and Human Services, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA Position Description: Postdoctoral scholars are invited to apply for a twelve-month appointment in a thriving research laboratory group dedicated to acquired neurogenic language disorders in adults. The position is funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the Ohio University Technology Gap Fund. Responsibilities include: (a) coordination, recruitment and scheduling of research participants (controls and adults with aphasia) for experiments, (b) coordination of data collection involving people with and without aphasia, (c) development of research databases, (d) assistance with data analysis, and (e) contribution to scholarly manuscripts for publications based on results. Strong teamwork is essential. The successful applicant will be encouraged to take advantage of personalized mentorship in scholarly career development, including research processes, publication, and grant writing. Additionally, the position entails exceptional opportunities for hands-on experience in technology transfer and commercialization of research. The Ohio University Neurolinguistics Laboratory: Directed by Dr. Brooke Hallowell, the Ohio University Neurolinguistics Laboratory is dedicated to the study of acquired neurogenic language disorders in adults. Disorders under study include aphasia and aspects of brain injury, dementia, stroke, and diabetes that affect people's cognitive and communicative abilities. New technologies are under development to address problems of assessment of language comprehension, working memory, attention, and other areas of linguistic and cognitive processing. In addition to its on-campus research space in Grover Center, the Neurolinguistics Laboratory has multiple affiliated clinical research sites, including the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center (Cleveland, OH), the Ohio University Clinical Research Site in Columbus (Columbus, OH), the University of West Virginia School of Medicine (Morgantown, VA), the Stroke Comeback Center (Oakton, VA), and the Moscow Federal Center of Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation (Moscow, Russia). Research is also active with collaborators in the United Kingdom, India, China, and Korea. Current extramural funding sources include the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Neurolinguistics Laboratory members demonstrate ongoing excellent success with research awards and peer-reviewed research publications and conference presentations. The School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences (HSLS): The School is one of the oldest and largest academic programs in communication sciences and disorders in the world. HSLS offers five degree programs: BS in Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences, MA in Speech-Language Pathology, AuD (Clinical Doctorate in Audiology), PhD in Speech and Language Science, and PhD in Hearing Science. The School has a solid commitment to international collaboration and ample external clinical research sites throughout the US and internationally. The School has a rich track record of active interdisciplinary engagement. Faculty, graduate student and postdoctoral scholar backgrounds represent a rich array of credentials, education and experience in diverse areas. The School is one of six schools in the College of Health and Human Services. The College is housed in Grover Center, a recently remodeled academic facility housing offices and research laboratories for faculty, "smart" classrooms, a fitness/wellness center, and a spacious state-of-the-art Hearing, Speech and Language Clinic. The clinic includes ample diagnostic and treatment materials and clinical technology. Additional information about the school and community may be accessed at: http://www.hhs.ohiou.edu/hsls/. Ohio University is a state-assisted Doctoral Research-Extensive university with 20,000 students on its picturesque Athens campus and 8,500 students on five regional campuses. Qualifications: A Ph.D. and strong interests in aphasia and other neurogenic communication disorders in adults are required. Demonstrated educational and research background in one or more of the following areas is desired: communication sciences and disorders, speech-language pathology, cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, and/or biomedical engineering. Starting Date: Negotiable. Desired start date is September 1, 2009. Salary and Benefits: Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience. The position is for a twelve-month appointment, with possible renewal. Postdoctoral scholars are provided office space and access to the Ohio University Neurolinguistics Laboratory. University benefits include tuition for employee plus qualified dependents, a comprehensive insurance package (prescription plan, vision benefits, dental plan, and life insurance), and a retirement program. Application: A completed application includes: a curriculum vitae, a letter specifically describing how qualifications and accomplishments fit the requirements of the position, and the names, titles, addresses, and telephone numbers of three current references. Candidates from underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply. All applicants must complete the on-line Quick Application at: www.ohiouniversityjobs.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=55481 For additional information, contact Brooke Hallowell, Ph.D., Director, School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences. E-mail: hallowel at ohio.edu Address: W218 Grover Center, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701 USA Telephone: 740-593-1356 Fax: 740-593-0287 Application Timeframe: Apply by July 20, 2009 for optimal consideration. Review begins immediately and continues until position is filled. Ohio University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer Brooke Hallowell, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, F-ASHA Director, School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences W218 Grover Center Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 USA From bischoff.st at gmail.com Mon Jun 1 17:36:55 2009 From: bischoff.st at gmail.com (s.t. bischoff) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 13:36:55 -0400 Subject: syntax: functional vs generative Message-ID: Hi all, This is similar to my earlier question regarding the development of a syntax course. The conversation has expanded into one that will help us define our department in terms of our curriculum. We are trying to decide if our introduction to syntax should be "functional" or "generative" (Chomskyan). For some the argument for the generative approach has been that it is the "mainstream" framework. However, it seems to others that it is "mainstream" only in the sense that a number of graduate programs pursue it. Some argue that if undergraduates are hoping to gain meaningful employment outside academia or pursue graduate programs in allied fields, "generative" doesn't seem to be mainstream in the slightest (personally I would like to know if this true...I suspect it may be). That is, for example, if they wanted to work for SIL, where it has been reported over a 1,000 languages are currently being worked on, or wanted to work with a community documenting a language then functionalism would serve them better. Also, if they wanted to work for e.g. Google, SAP, Xerox, a functional approach would translate much better to computational linguistics e.g. finite state grammars. In addition, some here have argued that functionalism is more applicable to forensic linguistics than generative. Also, it seems that if students do go on to graduate school the flavor of generativsit grammar will vary, so it isn't necessary to train them in it...perhaps that argument could be applied to a functional approach(?). Does anyone know how many graduate programs are actually generative vs functional? Which "major programs" are functional and which are generative? Or how much research is going on in the two areas? Any thoughts would be welcome. Thanks, Shannon From pyoung at uoregon.edu Mon Jun 1 18:10:55 2009 From: pyoung at uoregon.edu (Phil Young) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 11:10:55 -0700 Subject: syntax: functional vs generative In-Reply-To: <1c1f75a20906011036g3f3e8a32x9510b38f399a30fc@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Hi Shannon, I am a cultural anthropologist but with, I believe, a better than average knowledge of linguistics. The way I see it, an introductory course does not a department define. The question of how a department defines itself in terms of theoretical perspective and major course offerings is separate from the question of content for an introductory course. In my view an introductory syntax course should provide students with introductory exposure to both generative and functional approaches, their strengths, limitations, and some account of the major critiques proponents of each view have leveled at the other. Beyond this, an introductory syntax course should also expose students to some of the literature on the acquisition of language by children (which reveals a progression, to oversimplify, from single words to complex syntax), and also exposure to recent important work on the evolution of syntactic complexity (e.g., Heine & Kuteva (2007), Givon (2009)). My 2 cents worth. I'm sure Tomas will correct me if he thinks I'm off the mark here. Cheers, Phil Young pyoung at uoregon.edu From lesleyne at msu.edu Tue Jun 2 00:00:52 2009 From: lesleyne at msu.edu (Diane Frances Lesley-Neuman) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 20:00:52 -0400 Subject: syntax: functional vs generative Message-ID: Shannon, ??There is more of a future in functionalism, although a knowledge of the generativist approach is also important. ?Both types have computational linguistic applications, although major programs in computational linguistics, like the University of Texas, have switched over to LFG, at least for their syntax II. ?My recommendation would be to be mainly functionalist, but teach generativism as an "additional theory" and ensure skill in basic tree-drawing and issues such as binding, raising, control an and WH-movement. ? Functionalist programs are growing. ?Mark Baker's Polysynthesis Parameter and Incorporation are good reads even for functionalists interested in minority languages. ? ??I think that the constructionism offers a more unified approach -to bringing synchronic and diachronic analysis within one framework, and even from the perspective of language acquisition (see Michael Tomasello). ?People switch from formal to functional as they evolve, rather than vice-versa. ?Gert Booij, the morphologist at Leiden, is making the switch with his "constructional morphology". ?Formal linguists interested in diachrony read Tom Givon. ?There appear to be good reasons for it. Formal Programs: MIT, Maryland, Arizona, University of Washington, UCLA, Penn, Georgetown, UMass-Amherst, Cornell, Rutgers, CUNY, UC-San Diego, Ohio State, University of Chicago, UC Santa Cruz Functionalist Programs: Stanford (but they are eclectic), Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Oregon, Colorado, Rice, SUNY-Buffalo, University of New Mexico, Illinois-Carbondale the University of Hawaii teaches both. Of course, there are more departments than these. And departments also collaborate: right now, Buffalo (functionalist) and the University of Rochester (mainly formal) are working together in psycholinguistic experimentation in field linguistics. You will find people with formal training in functionalist departments, and a few with functionalist training in formal departments, although usually outside of syntax. University of Texas teaches Chomskyian in syntax I,and LFG in Syntax II. ?Urbana Champaign teaches HPSG mainly, and these departments simply see themselves as scientific, although they are formal in spirit and in origin. ? However, for people to go to grad school and have reasonable chances, they should be grounded in both frameworks. Hope this helps. ? ______________________________ Diane Lesley-Neuman Linguistics Program Wells A-614 Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824 Quoting "s.t. bischoff" : > Hi all, > >? ?This is similar to my earlier question regarding the development of a >? ? syntax course. The conversation has expanded into one that will help >? ? us define our department in terms of our curriculum.? ?We are trying >? ? to decide if our introduction to syntax should be "functional" or >? ? "generative" (Chomskyan). For some the argument for the generative >? ? approach has been that it is the "mainstream" framework. However, it >? ? seems to others that it is "mainstream" only in the sense that a >? ? number of graduate programs pursue it. Some argue that if >? ? undergraduates are hoping to gain meaningful employment outside >? ? academia or pursue graduate programs in allied fields, "generative" >? ? doesn't seem to be mainstream in the slightest (personally I would >? ? like to know if this true...I suspect it may be). That is, for >? ? example, if they wanted to work for SIL, where it has been reported >? ? over a 1,000 languages are currently being worked on,? or wanted to >? ? work with a community documenting a language then functionalism would >? ? serve them better. Also, if they wanted to work for e.g. Google, SAP, >? ? Xerox, a functional approach would translate much better to >? ? computational linguistics e.g. finite state grammars. In addition, some >? ? here have argued that functionalism is more applicable to forensic >? ? linguistics than generative. Also, it seems that if students do go on >? ? to graduate school the flavor of generativsit grammar will vary, so it >? ? isn't necessary to train them in it...perhaps that argument could > be applied >? ? to a functional approach(?). > > >? ? Does anyone know how many graduate programs are actually generative vs >? ? functional? Which "major programs" are functional and which are >? ? generative? Or how much research is going on in the two areas? > >? ? Any thoughts would be welcome. > >? ? Thanks, >? ? Shannon > > From Salinas17 at aol.com Tue Jun 2 02:28:03 2009 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 22:28:03 EDT Subject: syntax: functional vs generative Message-ID: In a message dated 6/1/09 1:37:24 PM, bischoff.st at gmail.com writes: <> Oh, my. "Computational linguistics" doesn't really have much to do these days with that old Chomskayan contrivance, finite state grammars. Though the field has a lot of variety, the matters of artificial language and artificial language tend to underline the insufficiencies of syntax in natural language, not the other way around. Although knowing generative formalism is probably mandatory to credentials, it is becoming less and less useful to imitating human language in computers. regards, steve long ************** An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222377040x1201454360/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=62& bcd=JuneExcfooterNO62) From lesleyne at msu.edu Thu Jun 4 21:05:24 2009 From: lesleyne at msu.edu (Diane Frances Lesley-Neuman) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 17:05:24 -0400 Subject: formal vs. functionalist Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, My apologies to all for missing a number of departments in my formal vs. functionalist listing. ?It was not meant to be an exhaustive list, and I was doing my best to help Shannon out quickly. in my haste, I left out even some major departments. ?I will post some further information soon. If you like, I would be happy to receive from members of the list information regarding departments that they know so that we can provide information to our community. ?We can then update the list--especially of our functionalist department friends. ?Also, we need the picture from Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa. ?We need to be able to provide information to help out those interested in determining the research orientations of different departments for study or other business.? I am willing to work on this, so if you have any information to offer, please send it along. Cheers, Diane ? ______________________________ Diane Lesley-Neuman Linguistics Program Wells A-614 Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824 From macw at cmu.edu Fri Jun 5 22:59:15 2009 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 00:59:15 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into a construction in English for which we can't find anything even in otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive Grammar of English. I am hoping some of you have some ideas. The construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases such as "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out." What would help immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this beast. After that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be very much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than a preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to be aspectual, whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem locative or directional. Na?vely yours, -- Brian MacWhinney From amnfn at well.com Fri Jun 5 23:38:22 2009 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 16:38:22 -0700 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Brian, I found a reference to this a- prefix here: http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/prefixes.htm They seem to think that it means "to/toward", which is then grammaticalized to being in a particular state or process. Best, --Aya P.S. My guess is that it might be related to the French preposition 'a'. On Sat, 6 Jun 2009, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into a > construction in English for which we can't find anything even in otherwise > great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive Grammar of English. I > am hoping some of you have some ideas. The construction is the preposed form > "a" that occurs in phrases such as "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart > out." What would help immensely, first off, would be to have a name for > this beast. After that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also > be very much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I > wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of speech > tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it seems to pattern > more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than a preposition and, on the > other hand, the meaning seems to be aspectual, whereas the other prefixed > forms of "a" seem locative or directional. > > Na?vely yours, > > -- Brian MacWhinney From lgorbet at unm.edu Fri Jun 5 23:48:23 2009 From: lgorbet at unm.edu (Larry Gorbet) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 17:48:23 -0600 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Jun 5, 2009, at 5:38 PM, A. Katz wrote: > Brian, > > I found a reference to this a- prefix here: > > http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/prefixes.htm > > They seem to think that it means "to/toward", which is then > grammaticalized to being in a particular state or process. > > Best, > > --Aya > > P.S. My guess is that it might be related to the French preposition > 'a'. Isn't this just a reduced form of the English preposition "at", as found etymologically in the earlier forms of English progressive constructions? - Larry Gorbet -- University of New Mexico lgorbet at unm.edu Anthropology and Linguistics Departments Albuquerque, NM 87131 From kemmer at rice.edu Fri Jun 5 23:56:48 2009 From: kemmer at rice.edu (Suzanne Kemmer) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 18:56:48 -0500 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: It's from late OE/early Mid. Eng. _on V+ing_ 'in the process of V +ing'; both this construction and one based on root adjectives and prepositions _on-live_--> _alive_ show similar semantic grammaticalization of _on_ to the meaning 'in the process / state of'. These _a-_ prefix constructions are older than more recent and semantically similar grammaticalizations of _on_ as in mod. English _ongoing_, _going on and on__ The verbal construction on-V+ing_ is still productive dialectally in Amer. and Brit. English (_a-rockin' and a-rollin' around the clock tonight_) and also survives in certain expressions (Time's a-wastin'). Check the OED under prefix a-; also any good history of English. On Jun 5, 2009, at 5:59 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into > a construction in English for which we can't find anything even in > otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive > Grammar of English. I am hoping some of you have some ideas. The > construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases such as > "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out." What would help > immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this beast. After > that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be very > much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I > wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of > speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it > seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than > a preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to be > aspectual, whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem locative or > directional. > > Na?vely yours, > > -- Brian MacWhinney From andrew.pawley at anu.edu.au Sat Jun 6 00:55:24 2009 From: andrew.pawley at anu.edu.au (Andrew Pawley) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 10:55:24 +1000 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <7F3A3B9E-1269-44D8-BF39-8C2D8093D7BC@rice.edu> Message-ID: Just to add to Suzanne's reply to Brian's query, the frequent use of a-dancin' and -a-singin' constructions in Appalachian English?was first described in some detail in Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian's book /Appalachian Speech/ (Arlington: Virginia, Center for Applied Linguistics 1976). ?There's a sizeable literature on Appal. English. It's interesting that "on" figures in another semi-productive construction that expresses progressive action: "be on the N", where N is the nominal use of a verb, as in?on the take, on the run, ?on the slide/decline/rise, on the burst (in Rugby football,?to be bursting through a gap in the defence). ?But here "on" normally carries full stress; at least I've not noticed it with a reduced variant. Cheers Andy Pawley --- From: Suzanne Kemmer Date: Saturday, June 6, 2009 9:57 am Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] a-dancing and a-singing To: Funknet > It's from? late OE/early Mid. Eng.?? _on > V+ing_??? 'in the process of V > +ing'; both this construction and > one based on root adjectives and prepositions > ? _on-live_--> _alive_? show similar semantic > grammaticalization of _on_ > to the meaning? 'in the process / state of'.?? > These? _a-_ prefix?? > constructions are older than more > recent and semantically similar grammaticalizations of _on_ as > in mod.? > English > ? _ongoing_, _going on and on__ > > The verbal construction on-V+ing_ is still productive > dialectally? in? > Amer. and Brit. English > (_a-rockin' and a-rollin' around the clock tonight_) > and also survives? in certain expressions (Time's a-wastin'). > > Check the OED under prefix a-; > ? also any good history of English. > > > > > > > On Jun 5, 2009, at 5:59 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > > > Dear Funknetters, > > > >??? During some of our grammatical tagging work, > we have bumped into? > > a construction in English for which we can't find anything > even in? > > otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. > Comprehensive? > > Grammar of English.? I am hoping some of you have some > ideas.? The? > > construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases > such as? > > "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out."?? > What would help? > > immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this > beast.? After? > > that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be > very? > > much appreciated.? Can this be found in other Germanic > languages, I? > > wonder??? Then, I suppose I would like to christen > it with a part of? > > speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, > since it? > > seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or > "adrift") than? > > a preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to > be? > > aspectual, whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem > locative or? > > directional. > > > > Na?vely yours, > > > > -- Brian MacWhinney > From oesten at ling.su.se Sat Jun 6 06:06:56 2009 From: oesten at ling.su.se (=?UTF-8?Q?=C3=96sten_Dahl?=) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 08:06:56 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Concerning the origin of the a-construction, I recommend the paper below which can be found at http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/c.degroot/bestanden/Huntunge%20paper%20final%20version.pdf - ?sten --------------------- The king is on huntunge: on the relation between progressive and absentive in Old and Early Modern English (In: M. Hannay and G. Steen eds. The English clause: Usage and structure., 175-190, Amsterdam: Benjamins 2007) Casper de Groot University of Amsterdam Abstract This paper addresses the diachronic development of two periphrastic constructions in Old and Middle English, He w?s huntende and He w?s on huntunge, into the progressive in Modern English. The literature on the origin of the progressive offers several hypotheses for explaining the coalescence of the two constructions. This paper offers a new hypothesis based on the consideration that the first construction, consisting of be + present participle, developed into the progressive, and that the second construction, consisting of be + on + verbal noun, was originally a construction denoting absence. The evidence for the coalescence comes from a partial overlap in the semantics of the progressive and the absentive, and the fact that progressives often originate from spatial constructions. 1 From m.norde at rug.nl Sat Jun 6 11:33:04 2009 From: m.norde at rug.nl (Muriel Norde) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 13:33:04 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Brian MacWhinney schreef: > Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I wonder? Yes, there is a cognate, and very productive, progressive construction in Dutch, consisting of the preposition /aan/ 'on' + the neuter definite article /het/ + the infinitive of a verb: /Zij is aan het zwemmen/ (she is on the swim-INF) 'she is swimming' The construction may also include a direct object as in: /Hij is aan het aardappels schillen/ (he is at the potatoes peel-INF) 'he's peeling potatoes'. There is a recent paper about this by Geert Booij: Constructional idioms as products of linguistic change: the aan het + infinitive construction in Dutch. In Alexander Bergs and Gabriele Diewald (eds.), /Constructions and language change/. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 79-104 (2008) Best, Muriel -- Prof. dr. Muriel Norde Scandinavian Languages and Cultures University of Groningen P.O. Box 716 9700 AS Groningen The Netherlands http://www.let.rug.nl/~norde/ From macw at cmu.edu Sat Jun 6 11:49:14 2009 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 13:49:14 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <4A2A53F0.8020608@rug.nl> Message-ID: Dear Funknetters, Thanks to all of you (Andrew Pawley, Aya Katz, Chris Cl?irigh, Larry Gorbet, Martin Haspelmath, Dan Slobin, ?sten Dahl, Tom Givon, Muriel Norde, Eve Sweetser, and Suzanne Kemmer) for clarifying this construction. De Groot shows clearly that the source of this particular form is ?on/an? rather than ?at?. Reading this and related comments in FunkNet letters reminded me of my son?s favorite phrases when I nag him about something. It is ?Dad, I?m on it.? I don?t know if this is a Pittsburgh (Appalachian) remnant of the king being out ?on hunting? or not, and I am not sure I would use the term absentive for this, but I can definitely can see the conceptual link between this use of the locative ?on? and the progressive. It appears that this link has worked for others across the last millennium or so and continues to work even more productively in Dutch and German. In terms of how to treat this in tagger/parser technology, I think it better to treat this as a preposition, rather than a prefix. Treating it like a prefix would require transcribers to actually join it to the verb. If, on the other hand, the tagger finds a rather unique subtype of preposition before a present participle, it will surely know not to treat it as an article. At least, the tagger will know this if we can put a few such examples into its training set. Tom politely pointed out to me that I could have just checked the OED. However, the library here in Kolding is very small, so I didn?t even try that. But, then it occurred to me that maybe the OED has gone online. So, I checked and indeed it is now online at dictionary.oed.com. My goodness, what a remarkably rich resource! There are, in fact six listings for ?a-? as prefix and two for ?a? as preposition. The one we have been discussing is a- prefix 2. There are others coming from ?of? and ?at?, as well as lots of other related forms, all sharing the common reduction to ?a?. The online OED is particularly nice because you can follow all the hot links directly. So, I was a-thinking to myself, how could Oxford University Press make this freely available in this way? Then, I read the little message down at the bottom of the screen that said ?Subscriber: University of Southern Denmark? and I have to now take back what I said about the SDU Library. They, Oxford, and my FunkNet colleagues have certainly been a great help to me in seeing the scope of this remarkable form and its relatives. -- Brian MacWhinney From hartmut at ruc.dk Sat Jun 6 11:56:23 2009 From: hartmut at ruc.dk (Hartmut Haberland) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 13:56:23 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing Message-ID: Muriel Norde wrote: > > > Brian MacWhinney schreef: >> Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I wonder? German has, of course /er ist am Essen, er ist am Zeitunglesen/ and even /er ist das Haus am Saubermachen/ (but the latter is substandard - which is, of course proof that it is a living part of the language, otherwise there would be no need to declare it substandard) North Frisian (Fering) has examples of the second type (with Noun Incorporation), and I understand that the third type (with Object NP) is common in Dutch: /Ze zit aan haar proefschrift te werken/. See Karen H. Ebert 2000, Progressive markers in Germanic languages, in ?sten Dahl ed., Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 605-653 (with a long list of different constructions in many Germanic languages). I think that Irish has something similar, too. /Hartmut From ocls at madisoncounty.net Sat Jun 6 12:32:11 2009 From: ocls at madisoncounty.net (Suzette Haden Elgin) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 07:32:11 -0500 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing Message-ID: Just FYI, the "a-dancing and a-singing" construction is still live and well in Rural Ozark English here where I live, although it's far more likely to be "a-dancin' and a-singin'," without its gs. You hear it even from youngsters, especially in "I'm a-fixin' to [X]." Suzette From hopper at cmu.edu Sat Jun 6 13:10:43 2009 From: hopper at cmu.edu (Paul Hopper) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 09:10:43 -0400 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <994C7167-FAA4-4BA2-960D-2595FCBC17E0@cmu.edu> Message-ID: Brian, The OED has been available free through your own Hunt Library at CMU for years. I use it frequently. Paul On Sat, June 6, 2009 7:49 am, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > > Thanks to all of you (Andrew Pawley, Aya Katz, Chris Cl?irigh, Larry > Gorbet, Martin Haspelmath, Dan Slobin, ?sten Dahl, Tom Givon, Muriel > Norde, Eve Sweetser, and Suzanne Kemmer) for clarifying this > construction. De Groot shows clearly that the source of this particular > form is ?on/an? rather than ?at?. Reading this and related comments in > FunkNet letters reminded me of my son?s favorite > phrases when I nag him about something. It is ?Dad, I?m on it.? I don?t > know if this is a Pittsburgh (Appalachian) remnant of the king being out > ?on hunting? or not, and I am not sure I would use the term > absentive for this, but I can definitely can see the conceptual link > between this use of the locative ?on? and the progressive. It appears that > this link has worked for others across the last millennium or so and > continues to work even more productively in Dutch and German. > > In terms of how to treat this in tagger/parser technology, I think it > better to treat this as a preposition, rather than a prefix. Treating it > like a prefix would require transcribers to actually join it to the verb. > If, on the other hand, the tagger finds a rather unique subtype > of preposition before a present participle, it will surely know not to > treat it as an article. At least, the tagger will know this if we can put > a few such examples into its training set. > > Tom politely pointed out to me that I could have just checked the > OED. However, the library here in Kolding is very small, so I didn?t > even try that. But, then it occurred to me that maybe the OED has gone > online. So, I checked and indeed it is now online at dictionary.oed.com. > My goodness, what a remarkably rich resource! > There are, in fact six listings for ?a-? as prefix and two for ?a? as > preposition. The one we have been discussing is a- prefix 2. There are > others coming from ?of? and ?at?, as well as lots of other related forms, > all sharing the common reduction to ?a?. The online OED is particularly > nice because you can follow all the hot links directly. So, I was > a-thinking to myself, how could Oxford University Press make this freely > available in this way? Then, I read the little message down at the bottom > of the screen that said ?Subscriber: University of Southern Denmark? and I > have to now take back what I said about the SDU Library. They, Oxford, > and my FunkNet colleagues have certainly been a great help to me in seeing > the scope of this remarkable form and its relatives. > > -- Brian MacWhinney > > > > > -- Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper Senior Fellow Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t Freiburg Albertstr. 19 D-79104 Freiburg and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 From rcameron at uic.edu Sat Jun 6 13:40:53 2009 From: rcameron at uic.edu (Cameron, Richard) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 08:40:53 -0500 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Walt Wolfram has written about this. See his book, American English, or contact Walt. On Fri, June 5, 2009 5:59 pm, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into > a construction in English for which we can't find anything even in > otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive > Grammar of English. I am hoping some of you have some ideas. The > construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases such as > "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out." What would help > immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this beast. After > that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be very > much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I > wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of > speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it > seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than a > preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to be aspectual, > whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem locative or directional. > > Na?vely yours, > > -- Brian MacWhinney > From amnfn at well.com Sat Jun 6 14:43:51 2009 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 07:43:51 -0700 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <22996d0d7c0ae77c4fcdef4a47ac875f.squirrel@webmail.andrew.cmu.edu> Message-ID: Paul, Is the OED free through the Hunt Library online to those not affiliated? I was wondering whether it might be a legitimate undertaking to form a sort of information co-op between those of us on Funknet who have institutional affiliations -- and hence free access to all sorts of books, resources and manuscripts -- and those who do not. In that context, if someone wished to look up a word in the OED, then they might ask someone who had access to do so. If someone without interlibrary loan privileges needed to have access to a certain page of a book, then someone with those privileges might provide a link... I'm sure this could be done without violating copyright, as it would not involve copying anything more than a minute portion of the information in any copyrighted work -- the same amount of information that we are allowed to quote in our articles without infringing on copyright. --Aya On Sat, 6 Jun 2009, Paul Hopper wrote: > Brian, > > The OED has been available free through your own Hunt Library at CMU for > years. I use it frequently. > > Paul > > > > On Sat, June 6, 2009 7:49 am, Brian MacWhinney wrote: >> Dear Funknetters, >> >> >> Thanks to all of you (Andrew Pawley, Aya Katz, Chris Cl?irigh, Larry >> Gorbet, Martin Haspelmath, Dan Slobin, ?sten Dahl, Tom Givon, Muriel >> Norde, Eve Sweetser, and Suzanne Kemmer) for clarifying this >> construction. De Groot shows clearly that the source of this particular >> form is ?on/an? rather than ?at?. Reading this and related comments in >> FunkNet letters reminded me of my son?s favorite >> phrases when I nag him about something. It is ?Dad, I?m on it.? I don?t >> know if this is a Pittsburgh (Appalachian) remnant of the king being out >> ?on hunting? or not, and I am not sure I would use the term >> absentive for this, but I can definitely can see the conceptual link >> between this use of the locative ?on? and the progressive. It appears that >> this link has worked for others across the last millennium or so and >> continues to work even more productively in Dutch and German. >> >> In terms of how to treat this in tagger/parser technology, I think it >> better to treat this as a preposition, rather than a prefix. Treating it >> like a prefix would require transcribers to actually join it to the verb. >> If, on the other hand, the tagger finds a rather unique subtype >> of preposition before a present participle, it will surely know not to >> treat it as an article. At least, the tagger will know this if we can put >> a few such examples into its training set. >> >> Tom politely pointed out to me that I could have just checked the >> OED. However, the library here in Kolding is very small, so I didn?t >> even try that. But, then it occurred to me that maybe the OED has gone >> online. So, I checked and indeed it is now online at dictionary.oed.com. >> My goodness, what a remarkably rich resource! >> There are, in fact six listings for ?a-? as prefix and two for ?a? as >> preposition. The one we have been discussing is a- prefix 2. There are >> others coming from ?of? and ?at?, as well as lots of other related forms, >> all sharing the common reduction to ?a?. The online OED is particularly >> nice because you can follow all the hot links directly. So, I was >> a-thinking to myself, how could Oxford University Press make this freely >> available in this way? Then, I read the little message down at the bottom >> of the screen that said ?Subscriber: University of Southern Denmark? and I >> have to now take back what I said about the SDU Library. They, Oxford, >> and my FunkNet colleagues have certainly been a great help to me in seeing >> the scope of this remarkable form and its relatives. >> >> -- Brian MacWhinney >> >> >> >> >> > > > -- > Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper > Senior Fellow > Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies > Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t Freiburg > Albertstr. 19 > D-79104 Freiburg > and > Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities > Department of English > Carnegie Mellon University > Pittsburgh, PA 15213 > > > From hopper at cmu.edu Sat Jun 6 20:24:08 2009 From: hopper at cmu.edu (Paul Hopper) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 16:24:08 -0400 Subject: Resources for Independent Scholars In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Aya, No, these electronic resources are restricted to members of the university, and a password is necessary. You bring up a serious problem. I'm not sure the solution you suggest is feasible. There are potentially hundreds of independent scholars. It would need a rather large sign-up of volunteers to make sure that individuals weren't called on more than occasionally. If the resource is already available electronically, helping out would be a matter of a couple of clicks, but supplying pages of text would be quite a commitment, involving a trip to the library to retrieve the book, and then scanning in the page--if ILL were needed it would be still more complex. Copyright would be the least of our problems. Many people in your position are able to get some sort of affiliation with a local university, say by teaching a course or two as an adjunct. There may be other ways of getting library privileges. The MLA recognizes a category of Independent Scholar (they award an annual prize for the best book by such a person), and I believe they run a newsletter that would surely have some discussion of this important question. Does anyone have suggestions? Anyone know how many linguists might be affected? - Paul On Sat, June 6, 2009 10:43 am, A. Katz wrote: > Paul, > > > Is the OED free through the Hunt Library online to those not affiliated? > > > I was wondering whether it might be a legitimate undertaking to form a > sort of information co-op between those of us on Funknet who have > institutional affiliations -- and hence free access to all sorts of > books, resources and manuscripts -- and those who do not. > > In that context, if someone wished to look up a word in the OED, then > they might ask someone who had access to do so. If someone without > interlibrary loan privileges needed to have access to a certain page of a > book, then someone with those privileges might provide a link... > > I'm sure this could be done without violating copyright, as it would not > involve copying anything more than a minute portion of the information in > any copyrighted work -- the same amount of information that we are > allowed to quote in our articles without infringing on copyright. > > --Aya > > > On Sat, 6 Jun 2009, Paul Hopper wrote: > > >> Brian, >> >> >> The OED has been available free through your own Hunt Library at CMU >> for years. I use it frequently. >> >> Paul >> >> >> >> >> On Sat, June 6, 2009 7:49 am, Brian MacWhinney wrote: >> >>> Dear Funknetters, >>> >>> >>> >>> Thanks to all of you (Andrew Pawley, Aya Katz, Chris Cl?irigh, Larry >>> Gorbet, Martin Haspelmath, Dan Slobin, ?sten Dahl, Tom Givon, Muriel >>> Norde, Eve Sweetser, and Suzanne Kemmer) for clarifying this >>> construction. De Groot shows clearly that the source of this >>> particular form is ?on/an? rather than ?at?. Reading this and >>> related comments in FunkNet letters reminded me of my son?s favorite >>> phrases when I nag him about something. It is ?Dad, I?m on it.? I >>> don?t know if this is a Pittsburgh (Appalachian) remnant of the king >>> being out ?on hunting? or not, and I am not sure I would use the term >>> absentive for this, but I can definitely can see the conceptual link >>> between this use of the locative ?on? and the progressive. It appears >>> that this link has worked for others across the last millennium or so >>> and continues to work even more productively in Dutch and German. >>> >>> In terms of how to treat this in tagger/parser technology, I think it >>> better to treat this as a preposition, rather than a prefix. >>> Treating it >>> like a prefix would require transcribers to actually join it to the >>> verb. If, on the other hand, the tagger finds a rather unique subtype >>> of preposition before a present participle, it will surely know not to >>> treat it as an article. At least, the tagger will know this if we >>> can put a few such examples into its training set. >>> >>> Tom politely pointed out to me that I could have just checked the >>> OED. However, the library here in Kolding is very small, so I didn?t >>> even try that. But, then it occurred to me that maybe the OED has >>> gone online. So, I checked and indeed it is now online at >>> dictionary.oed.com. My goodness, what a remarkably rich resource! >>> There are, in fact six listings for ?a-? as prefix and two for ?a? as >>> preposition. The one we have been discussing is a- prefix 2. There >>> are others coming from ?of? and ?at?, as well as lots of other related >>> forms, all sharing the common reduction to ?a?. The online OED is >>> particularly nice because you can follow all the hot links directly. >>> So, I was >>> a-thinking to myself, how could Oxford University Press make this >>> freely available in this way? Then, I read the little message down at >>> the bottom of the screen that said ?Subscriber: University of Southern >>> Denmark? and I >>> have to now take back what I said about the SDU Library. They, >>> Oxford, >>> and my FunkNet colleagues have certainly been a great help to me in >>> seeing the scope of this remarkable form and its relatives. >>> >>> -- Brian MacWhinney >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper >> Senior Fellow >> Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies >> Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t Freiburg >> Albertstr. 19 >> D-79104 Freiburg >> and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities >> Department of English >> Carnegie Mellon University >> Pittsburgh, PA 15213 >> >> >> >> -- Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper Senior Fellow Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t Freiburg Albertstr. 19 D-79104 Freiburg and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 From haspelmath at eva.mpg.de Sat Jun 6 20:40:00 2009 From: haspelmath at eva.mpg.de (Martin Haspelmath) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 22:40:00 +0200 Subject: Resources for Independent Scholars In-Reply-To: <72c0f25408c3d9b103d0f5dc25c44b29.squirrel@webmail.andrew.cmu.edu> Message-ID: The obvious solution is open-access publishing. Scientific resources should be available free of charge to anyone, with publiction costs borne directly by science organizations such as universities and funding bodies, rather than indirectly via subscriptions. This is not a solution for legacy resources, but for newly created resources, we should think each time we publish something whether publication in an open-access journal (such as "Linguistic Discovery", or "Constructions", or other journals of the eLanguage family) is not a better solution than publishing in a traditional edited volume or restricted-access journal. True, most of the prestigious journals have restricted access, but prestige is something that we as scholars create, and we could shift it gradually to open-access journals. There are also a few open-access dictionaries (e.g. http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/archi/linguists/index.aspx), and hopefully there will be more in the future. Martin P.S. Some URLs of open-access journals and resources: Linguistic Discovery: http://linguistic-discovery.dartmouth.edu/ Constructions: http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/constructions/index Journal of Language Contact: http://www.jlc-journal.org/ Journal of south Asian Linguistics: http://katze.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de/~jsal/ojs/index.php/jsal WALS Online: http://wals.info/ Paul Hopper schrieb: > Aya, > > No, these electronic resources are restricted to members of the > university, and a password is necessary. > > You bring up a serious problem. I'm not sure the solution you suggest is > feasible. There are potentially hundreds of independent scholars. It would > need a rather large sign-up of volunteers to make sure that individuals > weren't called on more than occasionally. If the resource is already > available electronically, helping out would be a matter of a couple of > clicks, but supplying pages of text would be quite a commitment, involving > a trip to the library to retrieve the book, and then scanning in the > page--if ILL were needed it would be still more complex. Copyright would > be the least of our problems. > > Many people in your position are able to get some sort of affiliation with > a local university, say by teaching a course or two as an adjunct. There > may be other ways of getting library privileges. The MLA recognizes a > category of Independent Scholar (they award an annual prize for the best > book by such a person), and I believe they run a newsletter that would > surely have some discussion of this important question. > > Does anyone have suggestions? Anyone know how many linguists might be > affected? > > - Paul > > > > > > On Sat, June 6, 2009 10:43 am, A. Katz wrote: > >> Paul, >> >> >> Is the OED free through the Hunt Library online to those not affiliated? >> >> >> I was wondering whether it might be a legitimate undertaking to form a >> sort of information co-op between those of us on Funknet who have >> institutional affiliations -- and hence free access to all sorts of >> books, resources and manuscripts -- and those who do not. >> >> In that context, if someone wished to look up a word in the OED, then >> they might ask someone who had access to do so. If someone without >> interlibrary loan privileges needed to have access to a certain page of a >> book, then someone with those privileges might provide a link... >> >> I'm sure this could be done without violating copyright, as it would not >> involve copying anything more than a minute portion of the information in >> any copyrighted work -- the same amount of information that we are >> allowed to quote in our articles without infringing on copyright. >> >> --Aya >> >> >> On Sat, 6 Jun 2009, Paul Hopper wrote: >> >> >> >>> Brian, >>> >>> >>> The OED has been available free through your own Hunt Library at CMU >>> for years. I use it frequently. >>> >>> Paul >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> On Sat, June 6, 2009 7:49 am, Brian MacWhinney wrote: >>> >>> >>>> Dear Funknetters, >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> Thanks to all of you (Andrew Pawley, Aya Katz, Chris Cl?irigh, Larry >>>> Gorbet, Martin Haspelmath, Dan Slobin, ?sten Dahl, Tom Givon, Muriel >>>> Norde, Eve Sweetser, and Suzanne Kemmer) for clarifying this >>>> construction. De Groot shows clearly that the source of this >>>> particular form is ?on/an? rather than ?at?. Reading this and >>>> related comments in FunkNet letters reminded me of my son?s favorite >>>> phrases when I nag him about something. It is ?Dad, I?m on it.? I >>>> don?t know if this is a Pittsburgh (Appalachian) remnant of the king >>>> being out ?on hunting? or not, and I am not sure I would use the term >>>> absentive for this, but I can definitely can see the conceptual link >>>> between this use of the locative ?on? and the progressive. It appears >>>> that this link has worked for others across the last millennium or so >>>> and continues to work even more productively in Dutch and German. >>>> >>>> In terms of how to treat this in tagger/parser technology, I think it >>>> better to treat this as a preposition, rather than a prefix. >>>> Treating it >>>> like a prefix would require transcribers to actually join it to the >>>> verb. If, on the other hand, the tagger finds a rather unique subtype >>>> of preposition before a present participle, it will surely know not to >>>> treat it as an article. At least, the tagger will know this if we >>>> can put a few such examples into its training set. >>>> >>>> Tom politely pointed out to me that I could have just checked the >>>> OED. However, the library here in Kolding is very small, so I didn?t >>>> even try that. But, then it occurred to me that maybe the OED has >>>> gone online. So, I checked and indeed it is now online at >>>> dictionary.oed.com. My goodness, what a remarkably rich resource! >>>> There are, in fact six listings for ?a-? as prefix and two for ?a? as >>>> preposition. The one we have been discussing is a- prefix 2. There >>>> are others coming from ?of? and ?at?, as well as lots of other related >>>> forms, all sharing the common reduction to ?a?. The online OED is >>>> particularly nice because you can follow all the hot links directly. >>>> So, I was >>>> a-thinking to myself, how could Oxford University Press make this >>>> freely available in this way? Then, I read the little message down at >>>> the bottom of the screen that said ?Subscriber: University of Southern >>>> Denmark? and I >>>> have to now take back what I said about the SDU Library. They, >>>> Oxford, >>>> and my FunkNet colleagues have certainly been a great help to me in >>>> seeing the scope of this remarkable form and its relatives. >>>> >>>> -- Brian MacWhinney >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>> -- >>> Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper >>> Senior Fellow >>> Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies >>> Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t Freiburg >>> Albertstr. 19 >>> D-79104 Freiburg >>> and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities >>> Department of English >>> Carnegie Mellon University >>> Pittsburgh, PA 15213 >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> > > > From Salinas17 at aol.com Sun Jun 7 05:36:25 2009 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 01:36:25 EDT Subject: a-dancing and a-singing Message-ID: In a message dated 6/6/09 7:49:34 AM, macw at cmu.edu writes: <> Brian - some quick comments Casper de Groot's article makes it clear that the absentive was -- in English -- and is -- in Dutch -- often a likely way to interpret the use of both "on" and "a" before the participle. de Groot's point was that in narrative it was likely progressive, but in dialogue it was perhaps likely absentive -- the evidence being uneven because dialogue was less recorded in that period of English. The mild irony is that we would these day say: the king is OFF hunting. In context, it might well still likely be abstentive, if context is something you can "tag". I make the point because that difference -- between narrative and dialogue -- is one according to de Groot that involves a shift of "deitic center" in Dutch -- somewhat related to the recent discussion of deixis here. Another point about "tags" -- plainly this usage is also imitative, for a dialect "feel," or just supplies meter and functions completely without regard to any real progressive or abstentive sense. After all we're also talking about songs like Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" or "Froggy went a-courting" or "Heigh ho, the dairy-o, a-hunting we will go". How would you tag that - a-gonna? Also there's something about this usage that feels like an article -- the examples that de Groot uses in this connection from ME (owt a hawking, king him rod an huntinge) could also become a single "a" as the product of a double re-analysis since "hunting" was then interpreted a substantive noun standing alone and would also eventually require an article -- as one would go on a hunting (trip), give a whipping or take a reading or have a wedding. In fact, I'm pretty sure Mencken in his books on American Language took the a- before the verbal noun in his way as "bad language" where a-dancing would just be a ill-chosen substitute for "a dance." As to ?Dad, I?m on it.? -- it's military in my experience and short-form for "on top of it" or "on that detail." And normally I believe the Pittsburgh dialect is not called Appalachian. regards steve long ************** An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222377042x1201454362/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=62& bcd=JuneExcfooterNO62) From kemmer at rice.edu Sun Jun 7 22:55:34 2009 From: kemmer at rice.edu (Suzanne Kemmer) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 17:55:34 -0500 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing Message-ID: Brian, further comments: 1. "Dad, I'm on it!" Very different construction--does not mean 'be in process of doing something' (except by inference), but rather 'have something taken care of, have accomplishment of a desired/needed action in view". The metaphor is the idea of being on top of something in the sense of 'be in control of what needs to be done and ready to do it/have it done." Recently subordinates have emphasized their eagerness with "I'm all over it" , cf. conceptually similar "I'm on top of it" and "I've got it covered". I agree with Steve Long that "I'm on it" is a widespread military expression and may have spread into business and other domains from there. (Steve Long wrote: "As to ?Dad, I?m on it.? -- it's military in my experience and short-form for "on top of it" or "on that detail." ") 2. Re: the so-called "absentive": I think the sense of 'absence' is restricted to a more complex and specific variant of the plain vanilla progressive with aux _be_ (_be V-ing_/ _be a-V- ing_), namely b. below. a. In 1st special case, progressive _-ing_ verb form combines with _go_ instead of _be_, and V is (I think always) an intransitive action verb: _to go a-V-ing_ e.g. "a-hunting we will go" V without prefix is now the standard variant: _go V-ing_ "go swimming" (productive with all tenses, incl. with progressive, e.g. I went swimming, I am going swimming, etc. ). b. The second, "absentive" construction extension is one form of a. above, specifically with past participle form of _go_ (which historically always took auxiliary _be_ instead of _have_). Here's where the extra-specific sense of "absence" comes in: _to be gone a-V-ing_ e.g. "Daddy's gone a-hunting" (from song "Bye-bye baby bunting") I've haven't read de Groot article so don't know how the quasi- auxiliary _go_ is taken into account in his history of _a-V-ing_ . But I don't think _a-V-ing_ by itself has any "absentive" sense without that past part. form of _go_, at least in present day English. The "absence" idea seems to be mainly due to the _go_; the construction also occurs without the prefix as in "He's gone fishing". That's why I wouldn't connect the 'absentive' meaning with the _a- _ prefix specifically, but perhaps de Groot's historical account deals with this. c. _ a-V-ing_ can also be combined with the futurative _be going to_ construction -- here, _go_ fits in the V slot after _a-_, and then we get another, complement inf. V: _be a-going to V / be a-gonna V _ (the Dylan "a hard rain's a- gonna fall" example fits here). _Going to /gonna V_ was originally progressive in sense, but in the futurative gonna construction the present is backgrounded in favor of (orig. immediate) future meaning. The idea of immediacy of planned action is what diachronically links presents /progressives with futures more generally in languages, as speakers use present to indicate what they're about to do (as also in "I'm on it" above) and gradually use it only to SUGGEST soonness even if they aren't immediately intending to act. Eventually ' soonness' can fade entirely and leave general future. 3. Finally, a note on tagging: The a- is a prefix in mod. English, and treating it as a preposition might give other problems. That progressive -ing form is not a noun anymore. We would want to search those forms as verbs, and the prefixed and non- prefixed forms should be parallel. Suzanne From emriddle at bsu.edu Mon Jun 8 00:41:58 2009 From: emriddle at bsu.edu (Riddle, Elizabeth M.) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 20:41:58 -0400 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <7F3A3B9E-1269-44D8-BF39-8C2D8093D7BC@rice.edu> Message-ID: Walt Wolfram has called this a-prefixing and written about its occurrence in Appalachian English. Sorry--I don't have the specific references at hand. Elizabeth Riddle ________________________________________ From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Suzanne Kemmer [kemmer at rice.edu] Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 7:56 PM To: Funknet Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] a-dancing and a-singing It's from late OE/early Mid. Eng. _on V+ing_ 'in the process of V +ing'; both this construction and one based on root adjectives and prepositions _on-live_--> _alive_ show similar semantic grammaticalization of _on_ to the meaning 'in the process / state of'. These _a-_ prefix constructions are older than more recent and semantically similar grammaticalizations of _on_ as in mod. English _ongoing_, _going on and on__ The verbal construction on-V+ing_ is still productive dialectally in Amer. and Brit. English (_a-rockin' and a-rollin' around the clock tonight_) and also survives in certain expressions (Time's a-wastin'). Check the OED under prefix a-; also any good history of English. On Jun 5, 2009, at 5:59 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into > a construction in English for which we can't find anything even in > otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive > Grammar of English. I am hoping some of you have some ideas. The > construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases such as > "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out." What would help > immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this beast. After > that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be very > much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I > wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of > speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it > seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than > a preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to be > aspectual, whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem locative or > directional. > > Na?vely yours, > > -- Brian MacWhinney From emriddle at bsu.edu Mon Jun 8 00:48:55 2009 From: emriddle at bsu.edu (Riddle, Elizabeth M.) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 20:48:55 -0400 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: <5E5837BDE86A234D8A43D92A81D2759D2661DAD455@EMAILBACKEND03.bsu.edu> Message-ID: Sorry, everyone. My email had piled up and I replied before I saw that others had given the same information earlier, and more fully. Liz Riddle ________________________________________ From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Riddle, Elizabeth M. [emriddle at bsu.edu] Sent: Sunday, June 07, 2009 8:41 PM To: Suzanne Kemmer; Funknet Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] a-dancing and a-singing Walt Wolfram has called this a-prefixing and written about its occurrence in Appalachian English. Sorry--I don't have the specific references at hand. Elizabeth Riddle ________________________________________ From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Suzanne Kemmer [kemmer at rice.edu] Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 7:56 PM To: Funknet Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] a-dancing and a-singing It's from late OE/early Mid. Eng. _on V+ing_ 'in the process of V +ing'; both this construction and one based on root adjectives and prepositions _on-live_--> _alive_ show similar semantic grammaticalization of _on_ to the meaning 'in the process / state of'. These _a-_ prefix constructions are older than more recent and semantically similar grammaticalizations of _on_ as in mod. English _ongoing_, _going on and on__ The verbal construction on-V+ing_ is still productive dialectally in Amer. and Brit. English (_a-rockin' and a-rollin' around the clock tonight_) and also survives in certain expressions (Time's a-wastin'). Check the OED under prefix a-; also any good history of English. On Jun 5, 2009, at 5:59 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Funknetters, > > During some of our grammatical tagging work, we have bumped into > a construction in English for which we can't find anything even in > otherwise great grammars such as the Quirk et al. Comprehensive > Grammar of English. I am hoping some of you have some ideas. The > construction is the preposed form "a" that occurs in phrases such as > "He was a-dancing and a-singing his heart out." What would help > immensely, first off, would be to have a name for this beast. After > that, some history, etymology, and dialectology would also be very > much appreciated. Can this be found in other Germanic languages, I > wonder? Then, I suppose I would like to christen it with a part of > speech tag, although I can already see the dangers there, since it > seems to pattern more like a prefix (as in "aback" or "adrift") than > a preposition and, on the other hand, the meaning seems to be > aspectual, whereas the other prefixed forms of "a" seem locative or > directional. > > Na?vely yours, > > -- Brian MacWhinney From twood at uwc.ac.za Mon Jun 8 07:46:50 2009 From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 09:46:50 +0200 Subject: a-dancing and a-singing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>> 06/07/09 7:36 AM >>> I'm pretty sure Mencken in his books on American Language took the a- before the verbal noun in his way as "bad language" where a-dancing would just be a ill-chosen substitute for "a dance." The point that people who focus on the "bad" in "bad language" forget is that sometimes there are finer grained distinctions of meaning possible in such language that are missing from the standard. You find this both in grammar and phonolgy. The classic example is the occurrence of "yous" in many lects in different parts of the world to express second person plural. Now in the case of the a- expressions mentioned, it seems to me that they have a nuance of meaning that is not available in modern standard Eng except by means of a longer or clumsier locution. The closest in my own lect to the meaning I am thinking of is the participle with "busy" in front of it, as in "busy cleaning", or "I was too busy enjoying myself to notice", or "he was busy admiring himself in the mirror", etc. First point, this seems to be a kind of mode of the verb where "busy" indicates something with which one is completely occupied or preoccupied. I think the a-examples by and large have this meaning (I don't think the a-gonna example is the same phenomenon). Second point, there does seem to be a kind of analogy between such verbal constructions and the a- with adjectives, which one finds in slightly archaic Eng, in "all awash" or "all agog", etc., and an example that I think I remember from a Raymond Chandler novel, "all a-flutter". In each of these cases there also seems to be the sense of something being all-encompassing or overwhelming in some way. Well them's me hunches anyways. Tahir From tgivon at uoregon.edu Tue Jun 9 01:40:59 2009 From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 19:40:59 -0600 Subject: book review Message-ID: Dear FUNK people, In continuation of the tradition started last year by Esa Itkonen, I am enclosing a review of a recently- published book by the evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy. While not treating linguistics directly, Hrdy has nonetheless written a book that is supremely relevant to the evolution of human language. What is more, it is a joy to read. Enjoy, TG ============= MOTHERS AND OTHERS (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) by Sarah B. Hrdy Professor Emerita of Evolutionary Anthropology U.C. at Davis Sarah Hrdy's stature in the fields of primatology, ethology and human evolution has been firmly established with her many publication on comparative primate social behavior, including her acclaimed previous book on the evolution of motherhood (or mothering) "Mother Nature" (NY: Ballantine, 1999). "Mothers and Others", building on the foundations of Hrdy's previous work, takes on one of the most vexing core issues in human evolution--the adaptive impetus that led to the evolution of *mind reading*; that is, of so-called *Theory of Mind*, *inter-subjectivity*, or as pertaining to language, our capacity to mentally represent *other minds* during on-going communication. Evolutionary primatologists had long come to a near consensus that this capacity, first ascribed to non-human primates by Premack and Woodruff (1978), is the key to the special evolutionary adaptation of the hominid line, with its big brain, complex problem-solving skills, complex representation of the physical, mental and social world, sophisticated systems of social organization and cooperation, cultural learning and, eventually, language. Till recently, the dominant theories about the evolution of ?mind reading' have focused, almost exclusively, on male-oriented social activities such as warfare, aggressive-defensive coalition formation and cooperative hunting, i.e. what has been called the *Machiavellian Intelligence* (Byrne and Whiten eds. 1988). The problem with this hypothesis, as Sarah Hrdy notes in her new book, is that it does not explain why our closest relatives, the Chimps, haven't gone the same evolutionary route as the genus Homo, given that they are surely a notorious Machiavellian, scheming, aggressive/defensive coalition-building (de Waal 1982), cooperative-hunting (Boesch 2005) species. Hrdy thus poses the key question--why us and not them? By painstakingly collating and comparing the complex evidence on the reproductive and child-rearing behavior and neonate development of social vertebrate and pre-vertebrate species, of social birds and mammals, of social primate, and lastly of hunting-and-gathering human societies, and by lining it all up against the hominid archaeological and paleontological record, Hrdy is able to come up with the unique answer that best fits the diverse multi-disciplinary data: *cooperative breeding* (?cooperative child-care') that required mothers to read reliably the intentions and emotional disposition of--and then trust their newborn babies to the care of--potential allo-mothers (?allo-parents'), be they grandmothers, aunts or nieces, siblings, fathers or other kin and ultimately even benevolent non-kin. The complement of the mother's--and allo-mothers'--behavioral and neurological evolution is, of course, the neuro-behavioral evolution of human neonates themselves. Born helpless, slow to mature and expensive to maintain, human neonates depend, from the moment of birth, on securing the emotional attachment and nurturing benevolence of potential care-givers, and on learning to accurately assess--and then manipulate--the intentions and emotional dispositions of care-givers, gradually becoming, from an incredibly young age, mind-reading experts. Of the many attractive features of Hrdy's allo-motherhood hypothesis, I will single out here but a few. First, by pointing to a selectional pressure that operates during the highly-flexible early stages of developmental (ontogeny), the evolutionary plausibility of the hypothesis is greatly enhanced. The role of behavior as ?the pace-maker of evolution' (Mayr 1982), i.e. the so-called *Baldwin Effect* and the process of* genetic assimilation*, is even more plausible in early stages of development, where* ontogeny* actually partakes in phylogeny (Gould 1977). In this, the contrasts of Hrdy's proposal with the strictly-adult, strictly-male Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis is indeed striking. Second, the focus on mind-reading during early child development makes Hrdy's work that much more relevant to the evolution of human communication. As her fellow primatologists D. Cheney and R. Seyfarth have noted, "mind reading pervades language" (2007, p. 244). Indeed, the entire Gricean research program on the pragmatics of communication is, transparently, an elaboration of how speakers take account, systematically and rapidly, of their interlocutor's rapidly shifting states of intention (deontics) and belief (epistemics) during communication. No real understanding of the adaptive role of grammar, for example, is possible without reference to our mental representation of other minds (see my "Context as Other Minds", 2005). By identifying the likely adaptive impetus to the evolution of the human mind-reading capacity, Sarah Hrdy has, implicitly but unerringly, also pot her finger on the core prerequisite to the evolution of human communication. Not surprisingly, her book also dovetails nicely with the study of early child language development, most conspicuously with the 1970's classic *interactionist* work of Sue Ervin-Tripp, Eli Ochs, Liz Bates and Ron Scollon. Lastly, Hrdy is a terrific, lively, scintillating writer and down-to-earth stylist, with the ability to be both dead-scholarly-serious and highly entertaining. An obvious fringe benefits of reading her book is that it makes learning pleasurable. And her findings are applicable to a wide range of contemporary social issues: the history and current state of the family, our schooling and child-care practices, and the potential future evolution of Homo sapiens. From bischoff.st at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 13:04:49 2009 From: bischoff.st at gmail.com (s.t. bischoff) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:04:49 -0400 Subject: language in the news Message-ID: thought some might find this of interest: *Millionth English word' declared* A US web monitoring firm has declared the millionth English word to be Web 2.0, a term for the latest generation of web products and services. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8092549.stm From hopper at cmu.edu Wed Jun 10 14:34:29 2009 From: hopper at cmu.edu (Paul Hopper) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:34:29 -0400 Subject: language in the news In-Reply-To: <1c1f75a20906100604k1ed0b15bsd69d51841e058d05@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Interesting. Now what we all want to know is; which English word was the first? ;-) - Paul Hopper On Wed, June 10, 2009 9:04 am, s.t. bischoff wrote: > thought some might find this of interest: > > *Millionth English word' declared* > > > A US web monitoring firm has declared the millionth English word to be > Web > 2.0, a term for the latest generation of web products and services. > > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8092549.stm > > > -- Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper Senior Fellow Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t Freiburg Albertstr. 19 D-79104 Freiburg and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 From elc9j at virginia.edu Wed Jun 10 14:42:32 2009 From: elc9j at virginia.edu (Ellen Contini-Morava) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:42:32 -0400 Subject: Post-Doctoral position in anthropological linguistics/language documentation Message-ID: From a colleague who is not on this list: > From: Jeff Good ----------- Post-Doctoral position in anthropological linguistics/language documentation Applications are invited for a two-year postdoctoral research position in the Department of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, in conjunction with the NSF-funded project "Towards an Areal grammar of Lower Fungom", directed by Jeff Good. The project involves gathering both (i) basic documentary and descriptive materials on the languages of the Lower Fungom region of Northwest Cameroon and (ii) collecting ethnographic information relevant to understanding the sociolinguistics of the region. The focus of the work for the person to be hired for this position will be on the ethnographic and sociolinguistic aspects of the project. Applicants should have previous fieldwork experience and be willing to engage in fieldwork under difficult conditions in Subsaharan Africa. Ability to speak French will be helpful but is not required as the primary contact languages will be English and Cameroonian Pidgin (which can be learned in the field). Candidates should have demonstrated expertise in anthropological linguistics or the sociolinguistics of non-Western languages. Applicants with previous fieldwork experience in Subsaharan Africa and some background in comparative and historical linguistics will be preferred. This is a research position, and there is no teaching obligation. Starting salary is US $40,000, with a subsequent annual increase. Planned start date for the work is Fall 2009, but this is negotiable. Project description The Lower Fungom region of Cameroon is one of the most linguistically fragmented areas of one of the most linguistically diverse countries on the planet. In an area around half the size of Chicago, one finds at least seven indigenous languages, five of which are not spoken elsewhere. The region's languages are not well studied, and their names--Abar [mij], Fang [fak], Koshin [kid], Kung [kfl], Mbu' [muc], Mundabli [boe], and Naki [mff]--are virtually unknown, even to other linguists working in Cameroon. These languages are clearly related to the Bantu languages that dominate Subsaharan Africa, but the details of their genetic affiliations otherwise remain largely obscure. Based on the results of fieldwork conducted since 2004, it has become clear that an important feature of the Lower Fungom region is the nature of the communicative network holding among its thirteen villages that has allowed such extensive linguistic diversity to flourish. Thus, in addition to the traditional issues encountered when doing grammatical description and comparative work on any group of understudied languages, a second set of questions is raised when conducting fieldwork in Lower Fungom regarding the sociolinguistic and historical forces that have created such extreme diversity within such a small area. This project will, therefore, continue the research already begun on the grammar and lexicon of the languages of Lower Fungom and extend it by adding a sociolinguistic and anthropological component to the work. The project will result in the creation of a sociolinguistic survey of the region as well as detailed documentation and description of three of its speech varieties that are only minimally described. Application Applicants are encouraged to discuss their application with the project director prior to submission. Applications will be accepted online only beginning June 9 at the University at Buffalo jobs site: https://www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/ For the posting for this particular job, go to: https://www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/applicants/jsp/shared/position/JobDetails_css.jsp?postingId=152224 Information about what to include with an application can be found on the UB Jobs website. Review of applications will begin on 1 July, and applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Questions can be addressed to: Jeff Good, University at Buffalo, Department of Linguistics Email: jcgood at buffalo.edu Phone: +1-716-645-0126 From tgivon at uoregon.edu Thu Jun 11 17:12:50 2009 From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:12:50 -0600 Subject: David Watters, RIP In-Reply-To: <60C30ADE-487E-49E8-A783-3C473AAEC1BC@sil.org> Message-ID: DAVID WATTERS R.I.P. It is with profound sorrow that I pass on the news that David Watters, a well known linguist of Tibeto-Burman and Nepal, has departed unexpectedly on May 18th. I first met David when he enrolled in our PhD program in Oregon in the early 1990s. It rapidly became clear he was not an ordinary student. He didn't need to be taught, he already knew, intuitively, all I had to teach him, and had much to teach his teachers. Before he came to us, David had already spent a lifetime in Nepal, working with the Kham people, whose existence and unique language he was the first to note and described. He and his wife Nancy raised their two boys in the village, where David's commitment to the people and their language and culture became legendary. When the Maoist guerillas established their early base in the Kham region, they seized David and threatened to execute him as a foreign spy. He was saved by the determined intervention of the Kham villagers, who insisted that this stranger was not to be harmed, for he belonged to them. When a few years ago the new Nepalese government concluded a peace treaty with the Maoists, David was honored as the true mediator of the treaty, and was seated at the dais during the peace ceremony, bedecked in colorful native regalia and turban and looking, to judge by the framed picture hung on my study wall, like a serene if slightly bewildered pasha. About 10 years ago, David hosted me for a Himalayas hike in western Nepal. It was an experience of a lifetime, not only because of the incredible terrain and the linguistic diversity of rural people, but most of all listening to David's stories of a lifetime of adventures in.Nepal. David was a talented, profound, theoretically-aware natural-born linguist. In the group that worked with us on Tolowa Athabaskan in Oregon in the early 1990s, he was a beacon of descriptive common sense. His monumental grammar of Kham, stemming from his Oregon dissertation, remain a benchmark of linguistic description.In the last ten years, David dedicated his time, increasingly, to the cause of Nepalese linguistics, teaching and training local linguists at Tribhuvan university in Kathmandu, editing a monumental encyclopedia of Nepalese linguistics, and forging ahead with new descriptive projects. Linguistics of Nepal and the Himalayas have lost a unique colleague, mentor and friend. David was raised near the Mojave desert town of Barstow, California, along the railroad tracks and old Highway 66. He was a lifelong member of SIL, something many academics consider three strikes against you. But even in SIL, he stood out for his unwaivering commitment to the cause of 'his' people, the Kham, their language, culture and material well being. Indeed, this commitment to the indigenous often put him on a collision course with both the royal Nepalese government and the SIL establishment.While a devout Christian, David never lost sight of the beauty and legitimacy of local cultures and religions, and of the need--indeed our overriding obligation--to cherish preserve them. We will miss you, David. Rest in peace. From paul at benjamins.com Thu Jun 11 19:55:22 2009 From: paul at benjamins.com (Paul Peranteau) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:55:22 -0400 Subject: New Benjamins title-Corrigan et al.: Formulaic Language. Vol. 2. Message-ID: Formulaic Language, Volume 2 Acquisition, loss, psychological reality, and functional explanations Edited by Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Typological Studies in Language 83 2009. xxiv, 361 pp. Publishing status: Available Hardbound 978 90 272 2996 0 / EUR 105.00 / USD 158.00 [] e-Book ? Not yet available 978 90 272 9016 8 / EUR 105.00 / USD 158.00 Part of the set: Corrigan, Roberta, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley (eds.), Formulaic Language: Volume 1: Distribution and historical change, Volume 2: Acquisition, loss, psychological reality, and functional explanations. 2 vols. set. This book is the second of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first in the field. The authors of the papers in this volume represent a diverse group of international scholars in linguistics and psychology. The language data analyzed come from a variety of languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and include analyses of styles and genres within these languages. While the first volume focuses on the very definition of linguistic formulae and on their grammatical, semantic, stylistic, and historical aspects, the second volume explores how formulae are acquired and lost by speakers of a language, in what way they are psychologically real, and what their functions in discourse are. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research. ---------- Table of contents Preface ix Introduction. Approaches to the study of formulae Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley xi?xxiv Part I. Acquisition and loss Repetition and reuse in child language learning Colin Bannard and Elena Lieven 297 Formulaic language from a learner perspective: What the learner needs to know Britt Erman 323 The acquisition and development of the topic marker wa in L1 Japanese: The role of NP-wa? in child-mother interaction Chigusa Kurumada 347 Formulaic expressions in intermediate EFL writing assessment Aaron Ohlrogge 375 Connecting the dots to unpack the language Ann M. Peters 387 The effect of awareness-raising on the use of formulaic constructions Susanne Rott 405 Can L2 learners productively use Japanese tense-aspect markers? A usage-based approach Natsue Sugaya and Yasuhiro Shirai 423 Formulaic and novel language in a 'dual process' model of language competence: Evidence from surveys, speech samples, and schemata Diana Van Lancker Sidtis 445 Part II. Psychological reality The psycholinguistic reality of collocation and semantic prosody(2): Affective priming Nick C. Ellis and Eric Frey 473 Frequency and the emergence of prefabs: Evidence from monitoring Vsevolod Kapatsinski and Joshua Radicke 499 Part III. Functional explanations Formulaic argumentation in scientific discourse Heidrun Dorgeloh and Anja Wanner 523 Accepting responsibility at defendants' sentencing hearings: No formulas for success M. Catherine Gruber 545 Decorative symmetry in ritual (and everyday) language John Haiman and Noeurng Ourn 567 Time management formulaic expressions in English and Thai Shoichi Iwasaki 589 Routinized uses of the first person expression for me in conversational discourse Joanne Scheibman 615 Author Index I-1?I-9 Subject index I-11?I-19 ---------- Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com) General Manager John Benjamins Publishing Company 763 N. 24th St. Philadelphia PA 19130 Phone: 215 769-3444 Fax: 215 769-3446 John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com) General Manager John Benjamins Publishing Company 763 N. 24th St. Philadelphia PA 19130 Phone: 215 769-3444 Fax: 215 769-3446 John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com From paul at benjamins.com Thu Jun 11 19:56:56 2009 From: paul at benjamins.com (Paul Peranteau) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:56:56 -0400 Subject: New Benjamins title- Corrigan et al.: Formulaic Language. Vol. 1 Message-ID: Formulaic Language, Volume 1. Distribution and historical change Edited by Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Typological Studies in Language 82 2009. xxiv, 315 pp. Hardbound 978 90 272 2995 3 / EUR 105.00 / USD 158.00 [] e-Book ? Not yet available 978 90 272 9017 5 / EUR 105.00 / USD 158.00 Part of the set: Corrigan, Roberta, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley (eds.), Formulaic Language: Volume 1: Distribution and historical change, Volume 2: Acquisition, loss, psychological reality, and functional explanations. 2 vols. set. This book is the first of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first ones in the field. The book draws attention to the ritualized, repetitive side of language, which to some estimates make up over 50% of spoken and written text. While in the linguistic literature, the creative and innovative aspects of language have been amply highlighted, conventionalized, pre-fabricated, "off-the-shelf" expressions have been paid less attention ? an imbalance that this book attempts to remedy. The first of the two volumes addresses the very concept of formulaic language and provides studies that explore the grammatical and semantic properties of formulae, their stylistic distribution within languages, and their evolution in the course of language history. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, besides being a resource in linguistic research, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research. ---------- Table of contents Preface ix Introduction. Approaches to the study of formulae Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali and Kathleen M. Wheatley xi?xxiv Part I. What is Formulaic Language Grammarians' languages versus humanists' languages and the place of speech act formulas in models of linguistic competence Andrew Pawley 3?26 Identifying formulaic language: Persistent challenges and new opportunities Alison Wray 27?52 Part II. Structure and distribution Formulaic tendencies of demonstrative clefts in spoken English Andreea S. Calude 55?76 Formulaic language and the relater category ? the case of about Jean Hudson and Maria Wiktorsson 77?96 The aim is to analyze NP: The function of prefabricated chunks in academic texts Elma Kerz and Florian Haas 97?116 Fixedness in Japanese adjectives in conversation: Toward a new understanding of a lexical ('part-of-speech') category Tsuyoshi Ono and Sandra A. Thompson 117?146 Genre-controlled constructions in written language quotatives: A case study of English quotatives from two major genres Jessie Sams 147?170 Some remarks on the evaluative connotations of toponymic idioms in a contrastive perspective Joanna Szerszunowicz 171?184 Part III. Historical change The role of prefabs in grammaticization: How the particular and the general interact in language change Joan Bybee and Rena Torres Cacoullos 187?218 Formulaic models and formulaicity in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic Giuliano Lancioni 219?238 A corpus study of lexicalized formulaic sequences with preposition + hand Hans Lindquist 239?256 The embodiment/culture continuum: A historical study of conceptual metaphor James J. Mischler, III 257?272 From 'remaining' to 'becoming' in Spanish: The role of prefabs in the development of the construction quedar(se) + ADJECTIVE Dami?n Vergara Wilson 273?296 Author index I-1?I-9 Subject index I-11?I-19 Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com) General Manager John Benjamins Publishing Company 763 N. 24th St. Philadelphia PA 19130 Phone: 215 769-3444 Fax: 215 769-3446 John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com From hallowel at ohio.edu Mon Jun 15 18:06:54 2009 From: hallowel at ohio.edu (hallowel at ohio.edu) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:06:54 -0400 Subject: Postdoctoral position in neurogenic language disorders Message-ID: Dear colleague: I would appreciate your sharing the attached flyer with anyone you know who may be seeking a postdoctoral research position in the area of acquired neurogenic language disorders in adults. The position entails personalized mentorship in scholarly career development and exceptional opportunities for hands-on experience in technology transfer and commercialization of research using eye-tracking technology. The position requires a Ph.D. and strong interests in aphasia and other acquired neurogenic language disorders in adults. Applicants may be from any disciplinary background. Thank you. Brooke Hallowell (hallowel at ohio.edu) Brooke Hallowell, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, F-ASHA Director, School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences College of Health and Human Services W218 Grover Center Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 From autotype at uni-leipzig.de Tue Jun 16 08:17:14 2009 From: autotype at uni-leipzig.de (Balthasar Bickel) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:17:14 +0200 Subject: Post-Doc position available (EuroBABEL project) Message-ID: The EuroBABEL project 'Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax' (RHIM) is seeking a Research Associate in Linguistic Typology. The successful candidate should have a PhD degree or equivalent in Linguistic Typology or related field, experience in carrying out large scale cross-linguistic grammar based research, familiarity with current database technologies and corpus based methodologies and preferably some experience in fieldwork on endangered languages. The candidate must have a good record of disseminating research findings in both written and oral form and be prepared to work as part of an international team of researchers The first two years of the project will be based at the department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University (Professor Anna Siewierska), the third year at the Department of Linguistics, University of Leipzig (Professor Balthasar Bickel). The post will require a good deal of travel within these places and within the RHIM network in general. Essential requirements - A PhD in Linguistic Typology or related field. - A thorough understanding of cross-linguistic language data collection and storage. - Experience in analysis and interpretation of cross-linguistic morpho- syntactic and discopurse data. - Effective computer software and hardware skills. - Experience of quantitative research such as study design, managing projects, quality assuring and analysing data. - Effective interpersonal and communication skills, including writing to a high standard, working effectively within a team, document preparation for collaboration technical notes and journal papers. - Ability and willingness to be involved in regular international travel. Desirable requirements - Preparation of new studies including submissions for grants, obtaining external agreements such as ethical approval. - Good publications record i.e. including research publications in peer-reviewed journals. - Some experience in carrying out fieldwork on endangered languages. Closing Date: 27 June Interviews: week of 13 July Expected start date: 1 September To apply or request further information online, please visit http://www.personnel.lancs.ac.uk/vacancydets.aspx?jobid=AA19 For further information, you can also contact Anna Siewierska From francisco.ruizdemendoza at unirioja.es Tue Jun 16 16:46:51 2009 From: francisco.ruizdemendoza at unirioja.es (=?iso-8859-1?Q?=22Francisco_Jos=E9_Ruiz_De_Mendoza_Ib=E1=F1ez=22?=) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:46:51 +0200 Subject: CRAL-2009 Conference CFP October 29-31 Message-ID: [We apologize for cross postings] The Center for Research on the Applications of Language (CRAL), based at the University of La Rioja, Spain, solicits papers for the International Conference on Figurative Language Learning and Figurative Language Use: Theory and Applications. An International Conference in Honor of Professor Paul Meara, to be held on October 29-31, 2009, at the? University of La Rioja. The conference is open to presentations on a range of topics related to Cognitive Linguistics and compatible approaches to language, both from a theoretical and an applied perspective. We invite proposals on subjects including but not limited to: metaphor theory; metonymy theory; cognitive models; cognitive stylistics; figurative language use in L1 and in additional languages including foreign languages and multilingual acquisition; figurative language acquisition and development; vocabulary and figurative language in foreign languages; applications of figurative language (to lexicography, translation, language teaching and methodology, etc.).? General Session: Abstracts for 20-minute presentations (plus ten-minute discussion) should be no more than 500 words (plus references, tables, and figures), and should also include 5 keywords. Abstracts should be sent by 1-September-2009 through the CRAL webpage at cral09.cilap.es Round Tables last a maximum of 90 minutes. The proposal should include not more than 5 presentations of ten minutes each; round tables should have a discussant that will act as debate moderator; debate time should take at least 40 minutes. Round Table proposals should have a general description of the aims of the session, and one abstract for each of the presentations. All abstracts should comply with the same specifications as the abstracts for the General Session. Laudatio: We intend to hold this Conference in honor of Professor Paul Meara (University of Swansea) on occasion of his retirement. The closing ceremony will feature a plenary lecture by Professor Meara and a laudatio. Publication: A selection of contributions will be edited by the organizers and submitted to a major international press. Chair: Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ib??ez Co-chair: Rosa Mar?a Jim?nez Catal?n Plenary Speakers Paul Meara (Swansea, UK): title pending confirmation Elena Semino (Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, United Kingdom): "Figurative language in expert publications and educational materials" Frank Boers (Erasmus University College Brussels, Belgium): "Ways of teaching L2 figurative phrases: an assessment" Zoltan K?vecses (Faculty of Humanities, E?tv?s Lor?nd University, Budapest, Hungary): "Recent findings in metaphor theory and their application to foreign language teaching." David Singleton (Center for Language and Communication Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland): "Figurative aspects of the taboo lexicon" Other plenary speakers to be announced in due time Call Deadline: September 1, 2009 Acceptance notification: September 10 Registration deadline: October 15 Date: October, 29-31, 2009 Conference fee: 60 euros Special fee for undergraduate students: 20 euros Questions and correspondence may be addressed to www.cilap.es From rene at punksinscience.org Wed Jun 17 12:43:35 2009 From: rene at punksinscience.org (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Ren=E9_Schiering?=) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:43:35 +0200 Subject: CfP: Prosodic Typology, February 24-26, 2010, Berlin Message-ID: Prosodic Typology: State of the Art and Future Prospects The study of prosody is traditionally concerned with suprasegmental features such as stress, tone, intonation and quantity. More recently, its scope has been expanded to include any phonological phenomenon sensitive to the domains of the prosodic hierarchy (ranging from the syllable to the utterance). In the course of this development, a number of theoretical frameworks have been developed which make strong claims about possible prosodic systems and their architecture. While the predictions are clear, the cross-linguistic evidence is often less so, especially since too often generalizations are based on a narrow language sample from better-known European languages. Call for Papers We invite phonologists, typologists, and experts on individual languages to submit abstracts addressing, among others, the following key questions in prosodic typology: 1) Which phenomena should be subsumed under the term ?prosodic?? E.g. is it reasonable to treat stress domains on a par with segmental assimilation processes? (cf. Bickel et al. 2009) 2) Can existing descriptive frameworks capture the attested diversity in prosodic systems? E.g. does ToBI provide an adequate means for cross-linguistic comparison? (cf. Jun 2005) 3) Are phonological theories capable of handling typological variation? E.g. can derivational approaches which assign metrical grids before intonational pitch-accents account for cases like Kuot? (cf. Lindstr?m & Remijsen 2005) Abstracts should be anonymous and should not exceed 1 page in length (an additional page for data and/or references can be added). Please send your abstracts electronically in pdf- and doc- or rtf-format to rene at punksinscience.org. Include your name, affiliation and the title of the abstract in the body of the e-mail. Submission deadline: August 31st, 2009. The workshop is organized by Gabriele M?ller and Ren? Schiering (Westf?lische Wilhelms-Universit?t M?nster). It takes place as part of the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft f?r Sprachwissenschaft (German Linguistic Society, DGfS) in Berlin between February 24th and 26th, 2010: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/dgfs/. Presentations at multiple workshops during DGfS are generally not approved of. References Bickel, Balthasar, Kristine A. Hildebrandt & Ren? Schiering (2009). The distribution of phonological word domains: A probabilistic typology. In Phonological Domains. Universals and Deviations, Janet Grijzenhout & Baris Kabak (eds.), 47-74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Jun, Sun-Ah (ed.) (2005). Prosodic Typology. The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindstr?m, Eva and Bert Remijsen (2005). Aspects of the prosody of Kuot, a language where intonation ignores stress. Linguistics 43: 839-870. **************** Dr. phil. Ren? Schiering, M.A. Westf?lische Wilhelms-Universit?t M?nster Institut f?r Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Aegidiistr. 5 48143 M?nster Tel.: (49) 251 83 244 90 Fax: (49) 251 83 298 78 E-mail: rene at punksinscience.org Internet: www.rene.punksinscience.org From tpayne at uoregon.edu Fri Jun 19 14:32:14 2009 From: tpayne at uoregon.edu (Thomas E. Payne) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:32:14 -0700 Subject: Subject-complement inversion Message-ID: Can someone please remind me of research on the discourse functions of "subject-complement inversion" constructions in English? These are clauses like the following: Behind the counter crouched the thief. Up jumped the rabbit. Around the corner came the train. Under the bed scurried the cat. The best rider on the team is Marilyn. Great is thy faithfulness. In the kitchen is Mrs. Jones. On the wall hangs a portrait of Churchill. I don't mean "subject-object inversion" in utterance predicates. Neither existential/presentational constructions with "existential 'there'". Thanks so much for references to relevant (preferably recent) literature. Tom Payne From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Fri Jun 19 14:40:55 2009 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:40:55 -0400 Subject: Mirativity vs. Evidentiality? Message-ID: I've been reading Dixon/Aikhenvald's first volume of papers on evidentiality and have just learned of the existance of mirativity- so now I have a name I can put on the Yahgan suffix -ara with that function. However, it seems there is some issue over whether mirativity is properly part of the system of evidentiality generally. Has any consensus begun to form yet as to the relation here? Thanks. Jess Tauber phonosemantics at earthlink.net From smalamud at brandeis.edu Fri Jun 19 17:07:12 2009 From: smalamud at brandeis.edu (Sophia A. Malamud) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:07:12 -0400 Subject: Subject-complement inversion Message-ID: The first thing that comes to mind is Betty Birner's work: 1996. Birner, B. *The Discourse Function of Inversion in English.*Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics. NY: Garland Publishing. Betty's subsequent work is also quite relevant and very good; it's listed in her CV at http://www.engl.niu.edu/bbirner/vita.html Best, Sophia Malamud On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 1:00 PM, wrote: > Send FUNKNET mailing list submissions to > funknet at mailman.rice.edu > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/funknet > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > funknet-request at mailman.rice.edu > > You can reach the person managing the list at > funknet-owner at mailman.rice.edu > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of FUNKNET digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Subject-complement inversion (Thomas E. Payne) > 2. Mirativity vs. Evidentiality? (jess tauber) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:32:14 -0700 > From: "Thomas E. Payne" > Subject: [FUNKNET] Subject-complement inversion > To: "FUNKNET" > Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > Can someone please remind me of research on the discourse functions of > "subject-complement inversion" constructions in English? These are clauses > like the following: > > Behind the counter crouched the thief. > Up jumped the rabbit. > Around the corner came the train. > Under the bed scurried the cat. > The best rider on the team is Marilyn. > Great is thy faithfulness. > In the kitchen is Mrs. Jones. > On the wall hangs a portrait of Churchill. > > I don't mean "subject-object inversion" in utterance predicates. Neither > existential/presentational constructions with "existential 'there'". > > Thanks so much for references to relevant (preferably recent) literature. > > Tom Payne > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:40:55 -0400 (GMT-04:00) > From: jess tauber > Subject: [FUNKNET] Mirativity vs. Evidentiality? > To: FUNKNET at mailman.rice.edu > Message-ID: > < > 9529414.1245422456270.JavaMail.root at elwamui-polski.atl.sa.earthlink.net> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > I've been reading Dixon/Aikhenvald's first volume of papers on > evidentiality and have just learned of the existance of mirativity- so now I > have a name I can put on the Yahgan suffix -ara with that function. However, > it seems there is some issue over whether mirativity is properly part of the > system of evidentiality generally. > > Has any consensus begun to form yet as to the relation here? Thanks. > > Jess Tauber > phonosemantics at earthlink.net > > > End of FUNKNET Digest, Vol 69, Issue 11 > *************************************** > From brachan at post.tau.ac.il Fri Jun 19 17:25:15 2009 From: brachan at post.tau.ac.il (Bracha Nir-Sagiv) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:25:15 +0300 Subject: Subject-complement inversion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There's also Rong Chen's book from 2003, English Inversion: A Ground-before-Figure Construction. Mouton de Gruyter. I hope this helps! Bracha Thomas E. Payne wrote: >Can someone please remind me of research on the discourse functions of >"subject-complement inversion" constructions in English? These are clauses >like the following: > >Behind the counter crouched the thief. >Up jumped the rabbit. >Around the corner came the train. >Under the bed scurried the cat. >The best rider on the team is Marilyn. >Great is thy faithfulness. >In the kitchen is Mrs. Jones. >On the wall hangs a portrait of Churchill. > >I don't mean "subject-object inversion" in utterance predicates. Neither >existential/presentational constructions with "existential 'there'". > >Thanks so much for references to relevant (preferably recent) literature. > >Tom Payne > > > From brachan at post.tau.ac.il Fri Jun 19 17:25:31 2009 From: brachan at post.tau.ac.il (Bracha Nir-Sagiv) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:25:31 +0300 Subject: Subject-complement inversion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There's Rong Chen's book from 2003, English Inversion: A Ground-before-Figure Construction. Mouton de Gruyter. I hope this helps! Bracha Thomas E. Payne wrote: >Can someone please remind me of research on the discourse functions of >"subject-complement inversion" constructions in English? These are clauses >like the following: > >Behind the counter crouched the thief. >Up jumped the rabbit. >Around the corner came the train. >Under the bed scurried the cat. >The best rider on the team is Marilyn. >Great is thy faithfulness. >In the kitchen is Mrs. Jones. >On the wall hangs a portrait of Churchill. > >I don't mean "subject-object inversion" in utterance predicates. Neither >existential/presentational constructions with "existential 'there'". > >Thanks so much for references to relevant (preferably recent) literature. > >Tom Payne > > > From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Tue Jun 23 15:23:45 2009 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:23:45 -0400 Subject: Instruments as temporary bodyparts- study in Current Biology Message-ID: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090622121232.htm Hmm- fans of 'bipartite' constructions and embodied cognition take note. So my questions is whether pathways are thought of as extensions of feet? Jess Tauber From d.brown at surrey.ac.uk Wed Jun 24 10:34:44 2009 From: d.brown at surrey.ac.uk (Dunstan Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:34:44 +0100 Subject: Job Opportunity: Research Fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group (Alor-Pantar Languages) - Ref 7108 In-Reply-To: <0906F7848AFD844B97A0DE4C9EEE6897045B9163@EVS-EC1-NODE2.surrey.ac.uk> Message-ID: [With apologies for cross-postings ? Advertisement and Role Description attached] University of Surrey Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences Surrey Morphology Group Department of English Research Fellow - ref 7108 Salary from ?28,839 to ?32,458 per annum (depending on experience) Applications are invited for a research post in the Surrey Morphology Group, for three years, available from 1 October 2009. This post is for the project ?Alor and Pantar Languages: Origins and Theoretical Impacts?, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of European Science Foundation?s EuroBABEL scheme, and involves coordinated projects in Surrey, Leiden and Fairbanks (Alaska). The Surrey project directors are Professor Greville Corbett, Dr Matthew Baerman and Dr Dunstan Brown. The job will involve working collaboratively with linguists gathering data in the field on constructing a typology of word classes and morphosyntactic categories in the Alor-Pantar languages, maintaining a database and contributing to joint papers. Some fieldwork in conjunction with the collaborating project teams is also foreseen. Applicants should have Ph.D. in hand or expect to complete all requirements for the Ph.D. prior to appointment. Applicants should have a solid background in one or more of the following areas: linguistic typology, morphological theory, and the languages of New Guinea and/or Indonesia. Candidates must have the ability to work independently while functioning as part of a research team. The Project The Alor-Pantar (AP) languages are a group of 15-20 non-Austronesian (?Papuan?) languages spoken on several islands in eastern Indonesia. They are of special interest because they have no established genetic relatives. A relationship to the Trans New Guinea family has been proposed, but remains highly disputed, due to the lack of language documentation. Documentation of these languages has recently begun, but the material has yet to be analyzed in a rigorous fashion, and the theoretical linguistic community is largely unaware of these data. The implications for language classification, migration patterns, and morphosyntactic and semantic typology remain largely unexplored. The project aims to document and analyze the AP languages, collecting high quality archival data to deepen our understanding of human language. It is divided into three Individual Projects: Extended Documentation (Leiden), Word Class Typology (Surrey) and Linguistic Prehistory (Fairbanks). The aims of the Surrey project are to investigate (i) the continuum between word classes and grammatical features; (ii) how morphosyntactic categories evolve from diffuse pragmatic and syntactic conditions; (iii) several particularly unusual morphosyntactic phenomena of the AP languages. Now is a crucial time for this work: the AP languages are severely endangered but still have sufficient vitality to provide additional supporting documentation without difficulty. The quality of AP language data is likely to decline significantly over the next two decades as language shift progresses. Details about the EuroBABEL project can be found at: http://www.alor-pantar.org/ Details of the Surrey Morphology Group can be found at: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/ Informal enquiries may be made to Dr Matthew Baerman (m.baerman at surrey.ac.uk) or to Dr Dunstan Brown (d.brown at surrey.ac.uk). To apply on line, please visit www.surrey.ac.uk/vacancies . Alternatively please contact Louise Ellesley via email on l.ellesley at surrey.ac.uk or by telephone on 01483 689646 quoting reference number 7108. To send an application, please post to Louise Ellesley, HR Assistant, Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH. Closing date for applications: 10th August 2009 Provisional date for Interview board: 28th August 2009 The University is committed to an Equal Opportunities Policy From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Wed Jun 24 21:23:14 2009 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:23:14 -0400 Subject: empathy- waiting for the other's shoe to drop? Message-ID: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623120837.htm POV/Vantage, path/position related to ability to empathize- the flip side to the bodypart/instrument model? Jess Tauber From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Sun Jun 28 19:57:38 2009 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:57:38 -0400 Subject: unusual (?) passive/possessive Message-ID: Another long hot day... In Yahgan there is a construction I find a bit unusual, but my lack of experience with other languages makes me a bit hesitant here, so I'm wondering if list-lurkers can help. Ex. hame:amana:nude: shuganiki:pa < ha-m-yamana:n-ude: = 1st sbj-pass/refl-live/survive/recover-past; shugani-ki:pa ?-female/woman = daughter 'My daughter is getting better'. This type of construction works for all three bound person pronoun prefixes. Ex. kvme:ipvnude: bix < kv-m-yipvn-ude: = 3rd sbj-pass/refl-catch-past; bix bird 'His bird was caught/someone hit is bird'. Possession of the nominal is unexpressed in these sentences, where normally it would have another possessing nominal preceding it, and in other constructions one can have the expressed possessor. Here the possessed NP seems always to follow the verb, and is zero-marked for case. With the expressed possessor neither of these conditions seem to be true. Is this sort of thing normal for some kinds of languages? Thanks. Jess Tauber phonosemantics at earthlink.net From hallowel at ohio.edu Mon Jun 29 19:25:02 2009 From: hallowel at ohio.edu (hallowel at ohio.edu) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:25:02 -0400 Subject: Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Neurogenic Language Disorders Message-ID: I apologize for a repeat mailing about this possibility. I did not realize that the flyer I had sent to the list as an attachment did not go through on Funknet. The information is now pasted below in this email. Feel free to forward this to others who may be interested. Thanks. Brooke Hallowell Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Neurogenic Language Disorders School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences, College of Health and Human Services, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA Position Description: Postdoctoral scholars are invited to apply for a twelve-month appointment in a thriving research laboratory group dedicated to acquired neurogenic language disorders in adults. The position is funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the Ohio University Technology Gap Fund. Responsibilities include: (a) coordination, recruitment and scheduling of research participants (controls and adults with aphasia) for experiments, (b) coordination of data collection involving people with and without aphasia, (c) development of research databases, (d) assistance with data analysis, and (e) contribution to scholarly manuscripts for publications based on results. Strong teamwork is essential. The successful applicant will be encouraged to take advantage of personalized mentorship in scholarly career development, including research processes, publication, and grant writing. Additionally, the position entails exceptional opportunities for hands-on experience in technology transfer and commercialization of research. The Ohio University Neurolinguistics Laboratory: Directed by Dr. Brooke Hallowell, the Ohio University Neurolinguistics Laboratory is dedicated to the study of acquired neurogenic language disorders in adults. Disorders under study include aphasia and aspects of brain injury, dementia, stroke, and diabetes that affect people's cognitive and communicative abilities. New technologies are under development to address problems of assessment of language comprehension, working memory, attention, and other areas of linguistic and cognitive processing. In addition to its on-campus research space in Grover Center, the Neurolinguistics Laboratory has multiple affiliated clinical research sites, including the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center (Cleveland, OH), the Ohio University Clinical Research Site in Columbus (Columbus, OH), the University of West Virginia School of Medicine (Morgantown, VA), the Stroke Comeback Center (Oakton, VA), and the Moscow Federal Center of Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation (Moscow, Russia). Research is also active with collaborators in the United Kingdom, India, China, and Korea. Current extramural funding sources include the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Neurolinguistics Laboratory members demonstrate ongoing excellent success with research awards and peer-reviewed research publications and conference presentations. The School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences (HSLS): The School is one of the oldest and largest academic programs in communication sciences and disorders in the world. HSLS offers five degree programs: BS in Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences, MA in Speech-Language Pathology, AuD (Clinical Doctorate in Audiology), PhD in Speech and Language Science, and PhD in Hearing Science. The School has a solid commitment to international collaboration and ample external clinical research sites throughout the US and internationally. The School has a rich track record of active interdisciplinary engagement. Faculty, graduate student and postdoctoral scholar backgrounds represent a rich array of credentials, education and experience in diverse areas. The School is one of six schools in the College of Health and Human Services. The College is housed in Grover Center, a recently remodeled academic facility housing offices and research laboratories for faculty, "smart" classrooms, a fitness/wellness center, and a spacious state-of-the-art Hearing, Speech and Language Clinic. The clinic includes ample diagnostic and treatment materials and clinical technology. Additional information about the school and community may be accessed at: http://www.hhs.ohiou.edu/hsls/. Ohio University is a state-assisted Doctoral Research-Extensive university with 20,000 students on its picturesque Athens campus and 8,500 students on five regional campuses. Qualifications: A Ph.D. and strong interests in aphasia and other neurogenic communication disorders in adults are required. Demonstrated educational and research background in one or more of the following areas is desired: communication sciences and disorders, speech-language pathology, cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, and/or biomedical engineering. Starting Date: Negotiable. Desired start date is September 1, 2009. Salary and Benefits: Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience. The position is for a twelve-month appointment, with possible renewal. Postdoctoral scholars are provided office space and access to the Ohio University Neurolinguistics Laboratory. University benefits include tuition for employee plus qualified dependents, a comprehensive insurance package (prescription plan, vision benefits, dental plan, and life insurance), and a retirement program. Application: A completed application includes: a curriculum vitae, a letter specifically describing how qualifications and accomplishments fit the requirements of the position, and the names, titles, addresses, and telephone numbers of three current references. Candidates from underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply. All applicants must complete the on-line Quick Application at: www.ohiouniversityjobs.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=55481 For additional information, contact Brooke Hallowell, Ph.D., Director, School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences. E-mail: hallowel at ohio.edu Address: W218 Grover Center, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701 USA Telephone: 740-593-1356 Fax: 740-593-0287 Application Timeframe: Apply by July 20, 2009 for optimal consideration. Review begins immediately and continues until position is filled. Ohio University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer Brooke Hallowell, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, F-ASHA Director, School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences W218 Grover Center Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 USA