LINGUIST List 15.2690

Wed Sep 29 2004

Qs: English/Arabic Preposition Drop; Available Corpora

Editor for this issue: Gayathri Sriram <gayatrilinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Mahmoud Abduljawad, English & Arabic Preposition Drop
2. Jeremy Robinson, Search for Corpora, Language Attrition Project

Message 1: English & Arabic Preposition Drop

Date: 28-Sep-2004
From: Mahmoud Abduljawad <atmahmoud4

yahoo.com>
Subject: English & Arabic Preposition Drop

Dear Colleagues,

The topic I am researching is concerned with the Preposition drop
alternations in English and Arabic as instances of transitivity
alternations in the sense that these alternations involve a change in
the transitivity of the verb. Specifically, in these alternations, a
verb is used either transitively or intransitively with a
prepositional phrase complement. In othert words, these alternations
are characterized by an alternation between these two frames:
[NP V Preposition NP] / [NP V NP], where the first one is intransitive
and the second is transitive. As indicated below, some verbs as in (1)
allow for this alternation, while others as in (2) do not:

1.a.Mary climbed up the mountain.
b.Mary climbed the mountain

2.a.The spaceship revolved around the earth.
b. *The spaceship revolved the earth.

I have a problem finding more English verbs that behave like the verb
in (1) due to the fact that I have no native speakers around to help
as informants. I would appreciate it if our Linguist readers provide me
with English examples like the one in(1) or any relevant references.
Your assistance is deeply appreciated!

Abdelgawad. T. Mahmoud, Ph. D.
Associate Professor of Linguistics,
Chairman of the English Department,
Director of the English Language Center,
Faculty of Arts, University of Assiut, Egypt

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax

Message 2: Search for Corpora, Language Attrition Project

Date: 28-Sep-2004
From: Jeremy Robinson <jr024

byuh.edu>
Subject: Search for Corpora, Language Attrition Project

My name is Jeremy Robinson, I am a student at Brigham Young
University-Hawaii.  I am looking for free or inexpensive corpora in
English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and
Korean for our language attrition project we are working on.  As I am
somewhat new to Corpus Linguistics, I am not yet highly familar with
what all is out there.  Preferably, we would like speech corpora, but
any help would be very helpful.

Subject-Language: Chinese, Mandarin; English; German,
Standard; Italian; Japanese; Korean; Portuguese; Spanish;
Code: SPN

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
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