LINGUIST List 14.1870

Sat Jul 5 2003

Qs: Ross/Rizzi Resources; Typology/Phonostatistics

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Eri Takahashi, Ross (1982) and Rizzi
2. Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk corpora of world languages in electronic form

Hello. I am currently a senior student at a university in Tokyo (ICU)
and working on my senior thesis. I need those two papers for it, but
cannot find them. I'd like to obtain a copy of those papers, if
possible, electric copies would be better. Does anyone have them? If
you have those materials, or if you know where I can download them,
please let me know. Thank you.

Ross, John Robert. (1982) ''Pronoun Deleting Processes in German,''
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the LSA, San Diego, CA.

Rizzi, Luigi (199?) ''Early subjects and null subjects,'' in Barbara
Lust, G. Hermon, and J. Kornfit (eds)SYNTACTIC THEORY AND FIRST
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, vol.2: Binding Dependencies and Learnability,
Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum.


Thank you. 

Eri Takahashi
eritakahashhotmail.com

International Christian University
Tokyo, Japan 

Dear colleagues, 

I do hope we might establish a joint project. I'd like to tell you
about our group of Phonostatistics and Typological Studies. It would
be very kind of You to let me know about Your activities in the field
of phonostatistics and typology in the West.

I planned to attend the conferences in the West (for instance in
Prague)to renew my contacts or to set up new ones. Actually, now that
democracy came to Russia, it is harder to travel to the West from
Novosibirsk than before, since the transportation cost more, than
before, when every post-graduate student could pay his ticket to go to
Moscow. Now a Novosibirsk linguist cannot find enough money to go even
to Moscow. I failed to find a bursary for my trip to Prague as well as
any other conference in the West. This is why your e-mail infromation
is of great interest and importance to us. In fact, e-mail is the only
contact with the colleagues in the profession.

If You happen to inform us about some international conferences on
phonostatistics, we'd be most grateful. Please,be so kind as to let us
know. Our group of phonological studies of Siberian, Paleo-Asiatic,
Uralo-Altaic, Far East, Oceanian languages and some isolated languages
(Korean, Nivh, Ket, Yukaghir, Japanese) is looking forward to
establishing close contacts with all the world colleagues in these
fields of linguistics: typology and phonostatistics.Many articles on
Siberian, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Mongolian, Tungus-Manchurian and
Paleo-Asiatic languages could be published on our data.

Now our small group is working on the texts of the 112th language of
the world: Dolgan. We have computed the following world languages:

1. Japanese; 2.Nivh; 3.Ket; (Finno-Ugric): 4.Mansi(Vogul):Sygva,
Sosva, and Konda dialects; 5.Hanty(Osjak): Kazym and Eastern dialects;
6. Hungarian; 7.Komi-Zyrian; 8.Udmurt (Votiak); 9. Mari (Che- remis):
Mountain and Lawn dialects; 10 Mordovian: Erzia and Moksha; 11
Vepsian; 12. Vodian; 13. Karelian: Tihvin, Livvikov and Ljudikov;
14. Saami (Lopari); 15. Finnish; (Samoyedic):16. Nganasan; (Turkic):
17. Azeri (Azerbaidjanian); 18. Tatar: Sibirian-Baraba and Kazan;
19. Altai (Kizhi);20. Kumandin(Altai); 21.Turkish; 22. Turkmen;
23. Jakut(Saha); 24.Karakalpak; 25.Kazah; 26. Kirgiz; 27. Tofalar;
28.Shorian; 29. Dolganian; 30.Hakas; 31.Ujgur; 32.Uzbek; (Tungus-
Manchurian): 33.Nanai; 34. Negidal; 35. Evenk (Tungus); 36.Even;
37. Uljch; 38. Orok; 39. Oroch; 40. Nivh; (Mongolian): 41. Mongolian;
42.Buriatian; 43. Kalmykian; (Slavonic): 44.Russian; 45. Ukrainian;
46. Belorussian; 47. Sorbian; 48. Serbo-Croatian; (Iranian):
49. Gilian; 50. Persian (Iranian); 51. Tadjikian; 52. Pushto;
(Paleo-Asiatic): 53. Iteljmen (Kamchadal); 54. Chuckchian;
55. Jukagir; 56. Eskimo:Siberian and American; 57. Arabic;
58. Mangarayi (Aboriginal Australian); 57) Korean and many others -
111 all in all.

Many of these languages are endagered. I'm sure it is high time to
establish the corpora for the endagered languages. I wonder what the
world linguists think about this idea. Should the corpora for the
endangered languages be created? Or should it not? Is it important or
should we forget about this idea, since it is not important at all?
Our main goal, though, is to find out the universal characteristics of
the sound pictures of world languages and to calculate the
phonological distances on the basis of the frequency of occurrence of
phonemes and phonemic groups. Then we plan to publish the word
frequency dictionaries of the languages mentioned above. As a matter
of fact,many of these languages are still on the old punch-cards, but
we are transfering them on PC diskettes.Many of the texts
(e.g. Japanese,Persian,Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, etc.) are fed in the
form of phonological transcription. We could exchange some of the
material in the electronic form. We'd be also happy to work together
on some joint project with linguists all over the world.

Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk, Russia. E-mail address:
 yutambhotmail.com