11.2215, Qs: Crime Scene Language, Syntactic Variation

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-11-2215. Sat Oct 14 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 11.2215, Qs: Crime Scene Language, Syntactic Variation

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1)
Date:  Wed, 11 Oct 2000 10:58:00 +0100
From:  Horacio Saggion <h.saggion at dcs.shef.ac.uk>
Subject:  Crime Scene Language

2)
Date:  Wed, 11 Oct 2000 08:51:53 -0400
From:  nmontessuit at netscape.net
Subject:  Syntactic Variation in Monolingual Corpora

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Wed, 11 Oct 2000 10:58:00 +0100
From:  Horacio Saggion <h.saggion at dcs.shef.ac.uk>
Subject:  Crime Scene Language

Hello,


I'm looking for any source of information about 'Crime Scene Reports':
ongoing/finished projects, books, journals, research papers.

I'm interested in knowing more about the lexicon, grammar, conceptual
information, style, everything related to how and what is written about
a crimes, in particular how police officers report crimes.

It would also be valuable any information about Forensic Linguistics.

Thanks in advance,

Horacio Saggion
saggion at dcs.shef.ac.uk


-------------------------------- Message 2 -------------------------------

Date:  Wed, 11 Oct 2000 08:51:53 -0400
From:  nmontessuit at netscape.net
Subject:  Syntactic Variation in Monolingual Corpora

Hello,

I'm working on a text generator that would account with variation in
the form of the same text (syntactic or 'stylistic' variation)
The goal is to account each text of the corpus by a set of parameters
which explain how each "style" was selected.

I need some corpora to work on.  If somebody is faced to the same problems,
let (him/her) contact me.

P.S:  Just to precise what *would* fit, here are some examples that
will *NOT* fit :

(1) "Exercices de Style", by Raymond Queneau : i.e. the same short story
told one hundred times in one hundred different ways.  This won't fit
because the variation is too much "literate".   One needs to work on
more "spontaneous" production, and also, I should add that the variation
is too much semantic and pragmatic as much as syntactic.  No good, thus.

(2) A set of sentences that say the same thing, but in different ways.
This may be good, if the variety is rich enough, and the sentences big
enough.   Otherwise a mere disjunction of possibility would suffice to
describe the whole corpus, --- and a mere disjunction is clearly
worthless from a reductionist viewpoint.

So, the corpora should be within these two extremes.   If somebody is
interested by the syntaxic formalism I used to describe this variety,
let (him/her) contact me.

montessu at cicrp.jussieu.fr
Nicolas Montessuit, France

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