From bmize at email.unc.edu Thu Aug 10 23:10:52 2000 From: bmize at email.unc.edu (Britt Mize) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:10:52 EDT Subject: History of the English Language at Kalamazoo Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- (Please excuse cross-posting.) The Carolina Association for Medieval Studies is sponsoring a session on the History of the English Language at the next International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 3-6, 2001) in Kalamazoo. Papers on any aspect of the history of the English language are invited for this session. Proposals treating any period of the history or prehistory of English are eligible for consideration, as are proposals with an emphasis on HEL pedagogy, and approaches to the subject matter may be diachronic or synchronic. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) these: sociolinguistic factors in the history of English; morphological or syntactical change; phonological developments; lexical borrowing; orthography; the relationship between spoken and written English; semantics; dialect; the emergence of English from the West Germanic dialect continuum; gender representation; grammatical gender; the sociohistorical relationship of English to other languages; and the development of standardized forms of English. Abstracts should be directed to Britt Mize at the following address: CAMS, c/o Department of English Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520 or via email at bmize at email.unc.edu. If you send an abstract by surface mail, please include your email address so we can confirm receipt of your submission. (This message is being posted to HEL-L, ANSAX-L, MEDTEXTL, CHAUCER, HISTLING, GERLINGL, and ONN.) From B.blake at latrobe.edu.au Thu Aug 24 13:27:06 2000 From: B.blake at latrobe.edu.au (Barry Blake) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 09:27:06 EDT Subject: First circular ICHL 2001 Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- First circular August 2000 The XVth International Conference on Historical Linguistics will be held in Melbourne, August 13-17, 2001. The Department of Linguistics at La Trobe University will host the conference, and it will be held at the Hotel Ibis, 15 Therry St, Melbourne. This is on the northern edge of the Central Business District, close to the University of Melbourne and the restaurants of Lygon Street. Plenary speakers Alexandra Aikhenvald Cynthia Allen Lyle Campbell R.M.W.Dixon Susan Herring Nigel Vincent Workshops Offers of workshops, which will be held on Friday 17 August, are welcome immediately. Abstracts The deadline for abstracts for papers (20 min) is Easter 2001, but if you require earlier acceptance, you can send your abstract at any time and we will review it within a few days. Abstracts (of no more than 250 words) should be submitted in the body of an email message to B.Blake at latrobe.edu.au alternatively in Word 6 or as an ASCII (text) or rtf attachment. Luddites can send a hard copy to: Professor Barry J. Blake Director ICHL 2001 Department of Linguistics La Trobe University Bundoora, VIC 3083 Australia. Fees Conference registration is $264 ($240 + $24 GST) until I June 2001. Late registration is $286 ($260 + $26 GST). Student registration (full time student or unemployed) $132 ($120 + $12 GST) Note that these figures are in Australian dollars. $1 Australian is about 39 pence sterling and 60 cents US. Accommodation Accommodation has been reserved at the Hotel Ibis. Participants should book directly. Tel 61 (03) 9639 2399 Fax 61 (03) 9662 9263 Current room rates at the Ibis Hotel: Standard Twin One double bed & one single bed (1,2,3 pax using existing bedding) @ $105.00 nett, room only, incld. GST (no rollaways available in room) Standard Queen One queen bed 1-2 pax @ $105.00 nett, room only, incld. GST (rollaway extra @ $27.00) One Bedroom apartment One queen bed (1-2 pax @ $135.00 nett, room only, incld. GST (sofa for 1 pax - extra @ $27.00) Two Bedroom apartment One queen bed & two single beds 3-4 pax using existing bedding @ $185.00 nett, room only, incld. GST (sofa for 1 pax - extra @ $27.00) Buffet breakfast @ $13.00pp Above rates include GST Above rates are Room Only. Climate August is the last month of winter, but don't be put off. The weather is mainly sunny and the maximum temperature is usually around 15 Celsius and occasionally higher. Travel The Skybus runs from Melbourne Airport (Tullamarine) every half hour to the bus station in Franklin St, which is just a few metres from the Hotel Ibis. International Quantas Airways has been appointed the Official Airline for the ICHL 2001. Under this arrangement Qantas offices in all parts of the world will be pleased to discuss with you or your travel agent any special travel requirements and itineraries, and will explain airfare structure for the most economical travel to suit your needs. Please quote the reference code CIC*461/199. Domestic Special discounted fares of up to 45% off the full normal economy class airfare, excluding taxes, have been negotiated for delegates (subject to class availability at time of booking and conditions apply) attendfing the ICHL 2001 in Melbourne. Please quote the following reference code and receive the applicable discount or any special fares at the time. Reference code: 1190521. Please call Qantas Association Sales on: 1800 684 880 (Australia-wide) and they will assist. For further information, see our website www.latrobe.edu.au/www/linguistics/conferences.html From sp20 at york.ac.uk Sun Aug 27 19:19:56 2000 From: sp20 at york.ac.uk (Susan Pintzuk) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 15:19:56 EDT Subject: Annotated Old English corpus now available Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The Brooklyn-Geneva-Amsterdam-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English The Brooklyn-Geneva-Amsterdam-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English (henceforth the Brooklyn Corpus) is a selection of texts from the Old English Section of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, annotated to facilitate searches on lexical items and syntactic structure. It is intended for the use of students and scholars of the history of the English language. The Brooklyn Corpus contains 106,210 words of Old English text; the samples from the longer texts are 5,000 to 10,000 words in length. The texts represent a range of dates of composition, authors, and genres. The texts in the Brooklyn Corpus are syntactically and morphologically annotated, and each word is glossed. The size of the corpus is approximately 12 megabytes. The syntactic annotations enable the users to pose and answer questions about word order, constituent order, abstract structure, and syntactic and morphological characteristics of the texts in the corpus. The annotations are general-purpose and as theory-neutral as possible, while still incorporating the insights of modern linguistic theory; they can be used by scholars with widely varying research interests. The syntactic annotations mark constituents, both clausal and non-clausal, by labelled brackets, with some relations marked by empty categories. The structure assigned to a sentence by the labelled bracketing can be quite complex, but it is not a complete syntactic analysis: the function of the bracketing is not to assign a structure to Old English sentences but rather to facilitate searches. The Brooklyn Corpus is available without fee for educational and research purposes, but it is not in the public domain. More information about the Brooklyn Corpus and how to access it is available at http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~sp20/corpus.html. Downloading the Brooklyn Corpus Manual is unrestricted, but the corpus texts and search scripts are available only to users who agree formally to the conditions of use. Susan Pintzuk Department of Language and Linguistic Science University of York Heslington, York YO1 5DD United Kingdom sp20 at york.ac.uk Telephone: +44 1904 432661 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 30 12:59:39 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 08:59:39 EDT Subject: Q: the 'only six' argument Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This is a very general question on comparative linguistics. Quite often, in my reading, I've come across a statement of the following type: "The presence of only six good matches between two languages is enough to show that the languages must be genetically related." I've seen this many times in various forms, but I've never been alert enough to take notes. Now, a couple of things strike me. First, the number is always different. Six is the smallest I've ever seen, but I've also seen 15, 50 and various other numbers. Second, the expression 'good matches' is never defined, and I have no idea if it means anything beyond 'matches that impress me personally'. So, my question: does anybody believe that any version of this statement is valid? More precisely, do we have a number N and a set of criteria C such that the existence between two languages of N matches satisfying criteria C is enough to guarantee that the languages must be related? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From bdbryant at mail.utexas.edu Thu Aug 31 16:17:07 2000 From: bdbryant at mail.utexas.edu (Bobby D. Bryant) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 12:17:07 EDT Subject: Q: the 'only six' argument Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: > So, my question: does anybody believe that any version of this > statement is valid? More precisely, do we have a number N and > a set of criteria C such that the existence between two languages > of N matches satisfying criteria C is enough to guarantee that > the languages must be related? Here are three different (independent) takes on the subject: 1) Arguably, it only takes a single "good" example. That is, if C is good enough to rule out chance resemblances, borrowings, etc., so that the only remaining explanation is a common ancestral form, then (so far as I can see) the languages must in fact be related even if they share only a single ancestral form. So surely the definition of C is going to be more problematic than the specification of N is. However, the "goodness" of C would surely depend on a demonstration of regular sound correspondences between the N forms, and such a list of correspondences would provide a tool for analyzing the remaining morphemes in the two languages. In practice, failure to turn up a large number of additional matches after such an analysis would leave other linguists skeptical about the correctness or completeness of your specific list of correspondences, however robust C might be in the abstract. Thus the problem moves again, from the goodness of C to the goodness of someone's claims of having satisfied C. For instance, if C's checklist included that "there must be at least 12 regular sound correspondences" and I set forward a mere 5 pairs of words with correspondences that satisfied C, but could not produce any more pairs on demand, linguists would surely question whether my correspondences were correct and complete, even if everyone agreed on the definition of C itself. In short, I don't think such a formalization of the problem in terms of N and C is going to work in practice. At some level you are always going to have to pile on enough examples to convince your peers, which is of course the way things have always worked. 2) More abstractly, I am skeptical that such a formulation exists in any form that will correctly separate related pairs of languages from non-related pairs. I suppose it would be tolerable to use a weaker formulation that fails to validate some pairs of languages that are in fact related, but the formulation must *never* falsely validate pairs that are not related. We could surely satisfy that requirement trivially by using a fairly stringent C and then setting N to a very large value (see take 3, below), but what we need, if it is to be of any use in practice, is a formulation with a fairly small N. However, I submit this conjecture: "For any reasonable C, and for any N small enough to be useful, it will be possible to obtain a provably false positive result by applying the test to some single language, L, and showing that C spuriously maps words in L onto other words also in L in an inappropriate manner, at least N times, falsely 'proving' that L is related to itself other than by the identity relation." 3) Somewhat tangentially: For questions that try to limit "how many?" from above or below, we have the mathematically robust concepts of "none", "a bounded number", "an unbounded number", and "an infinite number". It seems to me that we need another category between "bounded" and "unbounded", which might be described as "trivially bounded by some excessive number, but difficult or impossible to bound precisely or even closely".[note 1] So far as I know, no such mathematical concept exists. Your problem seems to be an example of this. For instance, if I cited 5000 "good" examples of matches between two languages, almost everyone would be convinced that the languages were in fact related. But if I tried to narrow the required number down from 5000 to a precise/close bound, then that is exactly the question you have raised. Another example that will ring among linguists is the question of how many center embeddings you can use in a sentence and still expect a hearer to be able to parse it correctly. If I claimed that no one could parse embeddings 5000 deep, surely everyone would agree. But if I tried to bound the number precisely/closely, we would likely get into a heated debate over what the actual number should be.[note 2] It seems to me that this problem of "precise/close boundability" defines a general class of problems, and may well be worthy of study as a mathematical concept. Notes: [1] It is tempting to call this "soft bounding", but I reject that because the name would seem to claim something about the nature of the phenomenon itself, and I think we (or the mathematicians) should determine something about that nature before giving it any such name. [2] Admittedly, the second example is weak because the parsable depth of embedding surely varies with the individual hearer and with the content of the sentence in question. However, even if you abstract those variations away I think you would discover that the same boundability problem arises. (This problem has exercised me for some time, because grammarians like to think grammar allows an unbounded number of such embeddings, but experience shows that such a grammar differs greatly form citable forms. It would therefore be nice to have a conceptual category tighter than "unbounded", but looser than some specific number such as "four". We could, IMO, improve our grammmatical theory by substituting that concept for the concept of unboundedness in our grammars.) Always a pleasure to hear from you on HISTLING, Bobby Bryant Austin, Texas From bmize at email.unc.edu Thu Aug 10 23:10:52 2000 From: bmize at email.unc.edu (Britt Mize) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:10:52 EDT Subject: History of the English Language at Kalamazoo Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- (Please excuse cross-posting.) The Carolina Association for Medieval Studies is sponsoring a session on the History of the English Language at the next International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 3-6, 2001) in Kalamazoo. Papers on any aspect of the history of the English language are invited for this session. Proposals treating any period of the history or prehistory of English are eligible for consideration, as are proposals with an emphasis on HEL pedagogy, and approaches to the subject matter may be diachronic or synchronic. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) these: sociolinguistic factors in the history of English; morphological or syntactical change; phonological developments; lexical borrowing; orthography; the relationship between spoken and written English; semantics; dialect; the emergence of English from the West Germanic dialect continuum; gender representation; grammatical gender; the sociohistorical relationship of English to other languages; and the development of standardized forms of English. Abstracts should be directed to Britt Mize at the following address: CAMS, c/o Department of English Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520 or via email at bmize at email.unc.edu. If you send an abstract by surface mail, please include your email address so we can confirm receipt of your submission. (This message is being posted to HEL-L, ANSAX-L, MEDTEXTL, CHAUCER, HISTLING, GERLINGL, and ONN.) From B.blake at latrobe.edu.au Thu Aug 24 13:27:06 2000 From: B.blake at latrobe.edu.au (Barry Blake) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 09:27:06 EDT Subject: First circular ICHL 2001 Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- First circular August 2000 The XVth International Conference on Historical Linguistics will be held in Melbourne, August 13-17, 2001. The Department of Linguistics at La Trobe University will host the conference, and it will be held at the Hotel Ibis, 15 Therry St, Melbourne. This is on the northern edge of the Central Business District, close to the University of Melbourne and the restaurants of Lygon Street. Plenary speakers Alexandra Aikhenvald Cynthia Allen Lyle Campbell R.M.W.Dixon Susan Herring Nigel Vincent Workshops Offers of workshops, which will be held on Friday 17 August, are welcome immediately. Abstracts The deadline for abstracts for papers (20 min) is Easter 2001, but if you require earlier acceptance, you can send your abstract at any time and we will review it within a few days. Abstracts (of no more than 250 words) should be submitted in the body of an email message to B.Blake at latrobe.edu.au alternatively in Word 6 or as an ASCII (text) or rtf attachment. Luddites can send a hard copy to: Professor Barry J. Blake Director ICHL 2001 Department of Linguistics La Trobe University Bundoora, VIC 3083 Australia. Fees Conference registration is $264 ($240 + $24 GST) until I June 2001. Late registration is $286 ($260 + $26 GST). Student registration (full time student or unemployed) $132 ($120 + $12 GST) Note that these figures are in Australian dollars. $1 Australian is about 39 pence sterling and 60 cents US. Accommodation Accommodation has been reserved at the Hotel Ibis. Participants should book directly. Tel 61 (03) 9639 2399 Fax 61 (03) 9662 9263 Current room rates at the Ibis Hotel: Standard Twin One double bed & one single bed (1,2,3 pax using existing bedding) @ $105.00 nett, room only, incld. GST (no rollaways available in room) Standard Queen One queen bed 1-2 pax @ $105.00 nett, room only, incld. GST (rollaway extra @ $27.00) One Bedroom apartment One queen bed (1-2 pax @ $135.00 nett, room only, incld. GST (sofa for 1 pax - extra @ $27.00) Two Bedroom apartment One queen bed & two single beds 3-4 pax using existing bedding @ $185.00 nett, room only, incld. GST (sofa for 1 pax - extra @ $27.00) Buffet breakfast @ $13.00pp Above rates include GST Above rates are Room Only. Climate August is the last month of winter, but don't be put off. The weather is mainly sunny and the maximum temperature is usually around 15 Celsius and occasionally higher. Travel The Skybus runs from Melbourne Airport (Tullamarine) every half hour to the bus station in Franklin St, which is just a few metres from the Hotel Ibis. International Quantas Airways has been appointed the Official Airline for the ICHL 2001. Under this arrangement Qantas offices in all parts of the world will be pleased to discuss with you or your travel agent any special travel requirements and itineraries, and will explain airfare structure for the most economical travel to suit your needs. Please quote the reference code CIC*461/199. Domestic Special discounted fares of up to 45% off the full normal economy class airfare, excluding taxes, have been negotiated for delegates (subject to class availability at time of booking and conditions apply) attendfing the ICHL 2001 in Melbourne. Please quote the following reference code and receive the applicable discount or any special fares at the time. Reference code: 1190521. Please call Qantas Association Sales on: 1800 684 880 (Australia-wide) and they will assist. For further information, see our website www.latrobe.edu.au/www/linguistics/conferences.html From sp20 at york.ac.uk Sun Aug 27 19:19:56 2000 From: sp20 at york.ac.uk (Susan Pintzuk) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 15:19:56 EDT Subject: Annotated Old English corpus now available Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The Brooklyn-Geneva-Amsterdam-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English The Brooklyn-Geneva-Amsterdam-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English (henceforth the Brooklyn Corpus) is a selection of texts from the Old English Section of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, annotated to facilitate searches on lexical items and syntactic structure. It is intended for the use of students and scholars of the history of the English language. The Brooklyn Corpus contains 106,210 words of Old English text; the samples from the longer texts are 5,000 to 10,000 words in length. The texts represent a range of dates of composition, authors, and genres. The texts in the Brooklyn Corpus are syntactically and morphologically annotated, and each word is glossed. The size of the corpus is approximately 12 megabytes. The syntactic annotations enable the users to pose and answer questions about word order, constituent order, abstract structure, and syntactic and morphological characteristics of the texts in the corpus. The annotations are general-purpose and as theory-neutral as possible, while still incorporating the insights of modern linguistic theory; they can be used by scholars with widely varying research interests. The syntactic annotations mark constituents, both clausal and non-clausal, by labelled brackets, with some relations marked by empty categories. The structure assigned to a sentence by the labelled bracketing can be quite complex, but it is not a complete syntactic analysis: the function of the bracketing is not to assign a structure to Old English sentences but rather to facilitate searches. The Brooklyn Corpus is available without fee for educational and research purposes, but it is not in the public domain. More information about the Brooklyn Corpus and how to access it is available at http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~sp20/corpus.html. Downloading the Brooklyn Corpus Manual is unrestricted, but the corpus texts and search scripts are available only to users who agree formally to the conditions of use. Susan Pintzuk Department of Language and Linguistic Science University of York Heslington, York YO1 5DD United Kingdom sp20 at york.ac.uk Telephone: +44 1904 432661 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 30 12:59:39 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 08:59:39 EDT Subject: Q: the 'only six' argument Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This is a very general question on comparative linguistics. Quite often, in my reading, I've come across a statement of the following type: "The presence of only six good matches between two languages is enough to show that the languages must be genetically related." I've seen this many times in various forms, but I've never been alert enough to take notes. Now, a couple of things strike me. First, the number is always different. Six is the smallest I've ever seen, but I've also seen 15, 50 and various other numbers. Second, the expression 'good matches' is never defined, and I have no idea if it means anything beyond 'matches that impress me personally'. So, my question: does anybody believe that any version of this statement is valid? More precisely, do we have a number N and a set of criteria C such that the existence between two languages of N matches satisfying criteria C is enough to guarantee that the languages must be related? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From bdbryant at mail.utexas.edu Thu Aug 31 16:17:07 2000 From: bdbryant at mail.utexas.edu (Bobby D. Bryant) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 12:17:07 EDT Subject: Q: the 'only six' argument Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: > So, my question: does anybody believe that any version of this > statement is valid? More precisely, do we have a number N and > a set of criteria C such that the existence between two languages > of N matches satisfying criteria C is enough to guarantee that > the languages must be related? Here are three different (independent) takes on the subject: 1) Arguably, it only takes a single "good" example. That is, if C is good enough to rule out chance resemblances, borrowings, etc., so that the only remaining explanation is a common ancestral form, then (so far as I can see) the languages must in fact be related even if they share only a single ancestral form. So surely the definition of C is going to be more problematic than the specification of N is. However, the "goodness" of C would surely depend on a demonstration of regular sound correspondences between the N forms, and such a list of correspondences would provide a tool for analyzing the remaining morphemes in the two languages. In practice, failure to turn up a large number of additional matches after such an analysis would leave other linguists skeptical about the correctness or completeness of your specific list of correspondences, however robust C might be in the abstract. Thus the problem moves again, from the goodness of C to the goodness of someone's claims of having satisfied C. For instance, if C's checklist included that "there must be at least 12 regular sound correspondences" and I set forward a mere 5 pairs of words with correspondences that satisfied C, but could not produce any more pairs on demand, linguists would surely question whether my correspondences were correct and complete, even if everyone agreed on the definition of C itself. In short, I don't think such a formalization of the problem in terms of N and C is going to work in practice. At some level you are always going to have to pile on enough examples to convince your peers, which is of course the way things have always worked. 2) More abstractly, I am skeptical that such a formulation exists in any form that will correctly separate related pairs of languages from non-related pairs. I suppose it would be tolerable to use a weaker formulation that fails to validate some pairs of languages that are in fact related, but the formulation must *never* falsely validate pairs that are not related. We could surely satisfy that requirement trivially by using a fairly stringent C and then setting N to a very large value (see take 3, below), but what we need, if it is to be of any use in practice, is a formulation with a fairly small N. However, I submit this conjecture: "For any reasonable C, and for any N small enough to be useful, it will be possible to obtain a provably false positive result by applying the test to some single language, L, and showing that C spuriously maps words in L onto other words also in L in an inappropriate manner, at least N times, falsely 'proving' that L is related to itself other than by the identity relation." 3) Somewhat tangentially: For questions that try to limit "how many?" from above or below, we have the mathematically robust concepts of "none", "a bounded number", "an unbounded number", and "an infinite number". It seems to me that we need another category between "bounded" and "unbounded", which might be described as "trivially bounded by some excessive number, but difficult or impossible to bound precisely or even closely".[note 1] So far as I know, no such mathematical concept exists. Your problem seems to be an example of this. For instance, if I cited 5000 "good" examples of matches between two languages, almost everyone would be convinced that the languages were in fact related. But if I tried to narrow the required number down from 5000 to a precise/close bound, then that is exactly the question you have raised. Another example that will ring among linguists is the question of how many center embeddings you can use in a sentence and still expect a hearer to be able to parse it correctly. If I claimed that no one could parse embeddings 5000 deep, surely everyone would agree. But if I tried to bound the number precisely/closely, we would likely get into a heated debate over what the actual number should be.[note 2] It seems to me that this problem of "precise/close boundability" defines a general class of problems, and may well be worthy of study as a mathematical concept. Notes: [1] It is tempting to call this "soft bounding", but I reject that because the name would seem to claim something about the nature of the phenomenon itself, and I think we (or the mathematicians) should determine something about that nature before giving it any such name. [2] Admittedly, the second example is weak because the parsable depth of embedding surely varies with the individual hearer and with the content of the sentence in question. However, even if you abstract those variations away I think you would discover that the same boundability problem arises. (This problem has exercised me for some time, because grammarians like to think grammar allows an unbounded number of such embeddings, but experience shows that such a grammar differs greatly form citable forms. It would therefore be nice to have a conceptual category tighter than "unbounded", but looser than some specific number such as "four". We could, IMO, improve our grammmatical theory by substituting that concept for the concept of unboundedness in our grammars.) Always a pleasure to hear from you on HISTLING, Bobby Bryant Austin, Texas