LINGUIST List 13.1744

Thu Jun 20 2002

Qs: Copula/American Eng, Inflection Patterns/DP/NP

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

Directory

1. Brenda Guo, Copula in Spoken American English
2. Michael Hughes, Inflection patterns in the DP/NP

I am looking for syntactic and/or pragmatic explanations for
constructions like the examples below taken from spoken American
English. If any of you have read anything about this type of sentence
where a form of the copula appears twice, or even have thought about
it for that matter, I would love to hear what you've found.

Example 1: 

Speaker A: "We have items such as Ferrari wine, Ferrari Golf clubs,
and Ferrari Mont Blanc pens in our boutique which are really big
sellers at Christmas."
Speaker B: "People buy those things as Christmas gifts?" 
Speaker A: "The thing is is people who are into cars are really into
cars."

Example 2:

Speaker C: "There is a great web site you and your listeners should
take a look at. You can find it at [web address given]. Can you
guess what that site is about?"
Speaker D: "I'd guess it offers free computer games."
Speaker C: "What it is is it is developed applications for computers
similar to parental control type software or other content filtering
programs."			

Subject-Language: English; Code: ENG 

I am curious to know which categories in the DP/NP are most often
inflected for gender, case, and number, cross-linguistically. In
particular, I would like to know about the relative frequency of
concord marking on the determiner, adjective, and noun. What patterns
are attested? Are there languages that exclusively mark one of these
categories? Is it ever the case that the adjective is the only
lexcial category that is marked for gender/case/number? Is marking
the determiner more or less typical than marking the head noun?
References in this regard would be greatly appreciated. Beyond that,
if you would care to send, directly to me, a summary of concord
patterns in the language(s) you are familiar with, I would be happy to
post a summary. 

Many Thanks, 
Michael Hughes