[Lingtyp] A list of 50 basic sentences

[Claire Bowern]

Many of the subjects are first person pronouns; but ergative splits often
differ by whether the subject is nominal or pronominal (or which person).
Claire

On Sat, May 8, 2021 at 9:47 AM JOO, Ian [Student] <ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk>
wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> to give you a better idea of what I intend to do with the list, please
> find attached a manuscript I’ve recently written: Basically the idea is to
> make interlinear glosses of 50-100 sentences and calculate the
> Damerau-Levenshtein distance between the glosses to calculate the distance
> between two languages.
>
> So for example if we translate the sentence “I am in the house” into
> English and Korean,
>
>    - English has the structure <1.SG be.1.SG.PRES in DET house>
>    - Korean has the structure <1.SG-TOP house-LOC be-DECL>
>
> so we can calculate the DL distance between the two structures (by
> counting the number of transposition, deletion, and addition) to see how
> morphosyntactically different the two languages are (in this case, 2
> movements + 3 additions + 5 deletions from English to Korean, so 8 scores
> of DL distance)
> So the goal is to translate this list of 50-100 sentences into different
> languages, gloss them, and calculate the distance between each pair of
> languages.
> I hope this makes it a bit more clear. I’m sorry for the confusion.
>
> Regards,
> Ian
> On 8 May 2021, 9:34 PM +0800, Yunfan Lai <lai at shh.mpg.de>, wrote:
>
> Hi Ian,
>
> Frankly, I do not think that 50 sentences are sufficient. Sometimes using
> this sort of lists may be misleading. For example, among most others, the
> passive constructions in Gyalrongic languages are generally unelicitable.
> Showing the native speaker a passive sentence in English may more often
> than not lead to a translation with an active construction in Gyalrongic.
> Gyalrongic does have passive morphology, but can almost exclusively be
> found in natural narratives.
>
> Best,
>
> Yunfan
>
> On 8. May 2021, at 15:24, Denys T. <denys.teptiuk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Just a random thought: you have inferential, mirative, but what about
> reportative?
> And I am not sure that I understand correctly, but what is honorific about
> 'My mother ate fish'? ‘Mother’ over ‘mom’? I don’t know what to offer
> instead, but I would think about changing this one.
>
> Best wishes,
> Denys
>
>
>
> On 8. May 2021, at 16:08, JOO, Ian [Student] <ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk>
> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> I am trying to make a list of 50 basic sentential meanings.
> The goal is to make parallel corpora of different languages based on this
> list of sentences.
> Each sentence on the list serves to check whether a language has a given
> grammatical feature, and if so, in what form the language expresses it.
> When creating each sentence, I tried to limit its vocabulary to basic
> words that are found in most languages, avoiding culture-specific words.
> I would appreciate it if you could have a look at the attached file and
> advise what I should add/remove/modify.
>
> From Hong Kong,
> Ian
>
>
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> information intended for a specific individual and purpose. If you are not
> the intended recipient, you should delete this message and notify the
> sender and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (the University)
> immediately. Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or
> the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited and may be
> unlawful.*
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> quality of information obtained through University E-mail Facilities. Any
> views and opinions expressed are only those of the author(s) and do not
> necessarily represent those of the University and the University accepts no
> liability whatsoever for any losses or damages incurred or caused to any
> party as a result of the use of such information.*
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