Resources for Independent Scholars

[Paul Hopper]

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