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holistique.com>Dear linguists, We are a company of linguistic engineering and we are looking for information about "phonetisers" (in french "phonetiseurs") of a particular type : we would like to know if there is "phonetisers" by Markov's chain, if yes, how do they work ? Are they accessible, downloadable, done market, etc. ? Thank you in advance and sorry for my broken english ! Virginie BREUS Linguist HOLISTIQUE COMMUNICATION 1 avenue du President Pompidou 92 500 RUEIL-MALMAISON FRANCE Tel : (+ 33) (0)1 41 29 78 00 Fax : (+ 33) (0)1 47 08 92 91 E-mail : breusMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
public.gz.cn>I'm with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and am living in China and researching Bouyei, a Northern Tai language of about 3 million speakers. I've done extensive dialect survey, and worked through the phonologies of the various dialects, as well as a first order estimate of the intelligibility network. This has been published as a book in Chinese, but not English yet! I've also spent lots of time learning the language, and am now interested in working through the grammar, semantics, pragmatics and discourse structures of one of the central dialects of this language. This is a new area for me, and I could use some advice about how to proceed. The more I think about it, the more interested I am in how the language 'works' with regard to encoding thought. I've collected scads of natural texts, and have worked out all the constituent structures found in the language so far. What I have in mind is to go through all the text data I have so far and tag it grammatically and semantically, and then work out the realizations of the semantic constructions and functions into the grammar and vice versa. I would also like to see how pragmatics affects the language output, and look into the interaction of the grammar and discourse structure. I know this is a mammoth project, but it needs to be done to understand this particular language as much as possible. Bouyei is a little known language, and next to nothing has been done beyond historical linguistics and phonology sketches. I'm sure it has a lot of interesting grammar and semantic phenomena. In the late '80's I studied generative grammar and an offshoot of stratificational grammar targeted for field linguistics. Recently, I've been reading what I can regarding RRG, Systemics (seems a bit quacky?), LFG and HPSG, but it's only introductory work and some miscellaneous articles. So far, I haven't seen anything that would guide me in my quest, but I don't have access to a good library yet. What I've seen in these is a comprehensive theory, but only sketches of small parts of language, with semantics as somewhat of an afterthought(??). I'm interested in a comprehensive, systematic way to encode the semantic constructions and functions of language. As I've gone through some of the Bouyei texts and tried to tag the semantics, I've encountered all sorts of problems; concepts that I can't find in any semantic theory, and I would have to make up a way to encode it myself. This is unsatisfactory, because I would hope that my research would easily contribute to existing semantic research, and how can it do that well if I'm using my own system? Surely there are semantic systems/hierarchies that are being used to comprehensively research language. Regarding lexical semantics, I'm quite impressed with the work done by WordNet, and can well imagine applying that system to Bouyei, with modification. This applies to the lexicon, and involves subcategorization of verbs (in a minimal way??), but what about semantic propositions/constructions? Also, I'm quite impressed with the theory of LFG, and it's computational capability, but does LFG have a semantic theory that can be used to encode an entire language? As you can see, I'm becoming quite interested and fascinated with the study of meaning in language, and I'm also pretty much out to sea. Does anyone have some advice as to where I might start, and what resources there are for this kind of research? Any help will be appreciated. Cheers, Wil SnyderMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue