[Lingtyp] A list of 50 basic sentences

Sat May 8 15:11:54 UTC 2021

Hi Ian,

Possibly you'll encounter a problem with this group

  1.  I have a dog
  2.  I have two dogs
  3.  I have many dogs

As you probably know, expression of possessive sentences can be very complex cross-linguistically.

In Choctaw, for example, 'dog' will be the subject of a verb like 'exist' or 'stand' and the verb will supplete to show its number. Both the possessor and possessee can be marked nominative.  E.g.

John-at      ofi-yat      im-a̱tta-h
John-nom dog-nom 3dat-exist:sg-tns
’John has a dog.’

These are some of the most complicated sentence types in Choctaw.  I think if someone who did not know much about the lg elicited these as part of 50 basic sentences, their grammar would be quite hard to understand.

If you’re looking for simple examples of sg/du/pl contrasts, I would avoid the verb 'have'.

Aaron B.

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Claire Bowern <clairebowern at gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 8, 2021 9:52 AM
To: JOO, Ian [Student] <ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk>
Cc: LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] A list of 50 basic sentences

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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<mailto: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<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__1.SG&d=DwMFaQ&c=sJ6xIWYx-zLMB3EPkvcnVg&r=qeKcDF9fuJtynE1sgtWkljlMiU6zkoGT-A9LsHjrx94&m=_41v-heIh1mO0HQU9oMR_8A74htfuSqV8FBCy6mfSE8&s=stp2oJg4IANL6q5lP_2HBfFEAatmmyEzO9Pu67Q9wrg&e=> 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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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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