LINGUIST List 15.391

Fri Jan 30 2004

Qs: Latin Verbs; Audio/Text Alignment Tools

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

Directory

1. Bruno Maroneze, thematic vowels in Latin verbs
2. Naomi Fox, Audio/Text Alignment

Dear linguists,

I have a question on the meaning of the thematic vowels in Latin
verbs. I was always thaught that the only function of thematic vowels
was to indicate the inflection class of the verb (first, second, third
of fourth conjugation). But I think it is very strange that there
exists a morpheme which has only a grammatical function and doesn't
have meaning. My hypothesis is: in earlier stages, the thematic vowel
was a ''full morpheme'', (maybe even unbound), which had a meaning
possibly related to the Aktionsart or the valency of the verb. Later,
this morpheme suffered a grammaticalization process and lost its
meaning. I wish to know if this problem was already studied; could
someone point me some bibliographical references on this matter?

I will post a summary if there are enough responses.

Best regards,

Bruno O. Maroneze
University of Sao Paulo - Brazil 

Subject-Language: Latin; Code: LTN 
Language-Family: Indo-European; Code: IE 

I'm working on a project which is digitizing endangered language
data. My team is aligning audio texts with the print transcriptions.
We'd like to know what experiences field linguists or other
researchers have had with the tools available for working audio and
video data, and what the benefits or drawbacks of these tools may
be. Thanks in advance for your information, and we will of course post
a summary to the list.

Naomi Fox