LINGUIST List 11.761

Mon Apr 3 2000

Qs: CHILDES Data/German, Pronoun Echo

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Bettina Spreng, CHILDES data for German
2. m.getty, Pronoun 'Echo'

Hello everyone,
I am a PhD student at the University of Toronto and I am currently
exploring the merits of the CHILDES database. For some reason I cannot
figure out why running the MOR program for German does not give me
syntactic categories. It parses into words but for categorization I get
only question marks. It seems to be a problem with the lexicon or with the
parser or both but I am not sure anymore. Any hints what I might do wrong?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you.

Bettina Spreng
PhD candidate Linguistics
U of Toronto
bsprengchass.utoronto.ca

Dear Linguists!

I'm researching a peculiar pattern in a couple of Germanic
dialects according to which a pronoun adjacent to some functional head is
duplicated (with some modifications), like as in the following example
from West Flemish (where 'se' is the duplicate and 'zie' the full
pronoun):

'k peizn da-se zie werkt
 I think that-she she works
'I think that she works'

The adjacency requirement and the fact that this pattern occurs only in
the presence of overt pronouns (cf. *'k peizn da-se Marie werkt) leave
these data arguably distinct from better-studied phenomena such as
object doubling in various Romance dialects. 

Is anyone familiar with similar data from non-Indo-European languages?
I'll be most grateful and will post a summary of relevant responses.

Many thanks in advance,
Michael Getty
University of Toronto