LINGUIST List 14.3298

Mon Dec 1 2003

Qs: Phrasal Verbs; Contracted Braille Systems

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Directory

  1. Murray Adams, Phrasal verbs
  2. Ben van Poppel, help needed for study of contracted Braille

Message 1: Phrasal verbs

 Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 14:55:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Murray Adams <adams.elcwanadoo.fr>
Subject: Phrasal verbs

I am a mature student completing my Maitrise in English Linguistics
and want to write my M�moire on Phrasal Verbs, hopefully concentrating
on one of the following aspects: - syntactic vs. semantic
determination of verb+adverb combinations; - the problem of
transitivity in verb+adverb combinations; - free combination
vs. semantic fusion in verb+preposition combinations; - the Compound
Noun derivatives of phrasal verbs.

I've got a few leads on some published papers but would be grateful if you 
could indicate any important memoires/theses/dissertations which I should r
ead.

Thanking you in advance

Murray Adams

Subject-Language: English; Code: ENG
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Message 2: help needed for study of contracted Braille

 Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2003 17:29:51 +1100
From: Ben van Poppel <fuguetpgi.com.au>
Subject: help needed for study of contracted Braille

Greetings to all.

My name is Ben van Poppel, and I'm currently looking to commence an Honours
project in linguistics next year at Monash University. As a totally blind
student who has studied a number of languages, formally and otherwise, my
primary interest is the use and design of contracted Braille systems by
various language communities.

Contracted Braille systems are generally the primary literary form of
Braille for those languages which have them an vary in complexity from a
handful of contractions for common character clusters to those with several
hundred constituents and extensive sets of rules governing their use.
Contracted systems exist for many European languages (the others are purely
alphabetic) and I also know of systems for Arabic, Kiswahili and
Malay/Indonesian, but their may well be numerous others.

At present, my plan for my Honours project is to do a study of several
contracted Braille systems, particularly those for English and German (as
I'm best acquainted with these) but possibly others depending on access to
information about them. In particular I would like to compare their
structure, analyse the choices of constituents (not just orthographically
but lexically as well), and compare the degrees to which each system is
grammaticalised and how.

I'd be very interested to know if any similar research has been conducted
in the past, and if anybody here might have any suggestions about places to
look for journal articles etc which are pertinent to my study. Most of the
research I've encountered up till now have more to do with the low level
aspects of Braille reading like haptics etc, and much of the rest has been
a little anglocentric. Also, if their are any other blind readers at hand,
I'd also be grateful for any pointers to resources for contracted systems
other than those for English and German.

Thanks very much in advance for any assistance.

Cheers,
Ben
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