LINGUIST List 2.231

Friday, 17 May 1991

Qs: Case, Pronoun singling, Teochew, Barcelona

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. "Anthony Aristar", Hierarchically Oriented Non-grammatical Case-systems
2. "Bruce E. Nevin", pronoun singling
3. , Teochew
4. , Contacts in Barcelona

I'm trying to collect examples of non-grammatical case-systems
which seem to be sensitive to nominal hierarchies of
one sort or another. I'm not interested in systems
where the GRAMMATICAL cases act this way--split-ergative
systems, for example, where only nominals low in hierarchical
status may be marked as ergative, or systems where certain kinds
of objects get marked, for example Spanish. The kind of systems
I'm more interested in are ones where either:

 (a) some case is simply disallowed for nominals of a 
particular value (e.g. in Basque animate nouns don't seem 
to take the instrumental)

or

 (b) the morphology of cases which appear on nominals of
certain hierarchical values is clearly and distinctly marked
(e.g. Yidiny where the ablative affix -mu can only appear
on a nominal of high hierarchical status if the nominal is
in the genitive case.)

My thanks!

Anthony Aristar

The discussion of pronoun doubling leads me to wonder about the
use of reflexive pronouns in e.g. Irish English:

 And there's himself coming in at the door, now.

Is there ground for supposing an antecedent "him himself",
"I myself", etc. becoming so customary as to lose the force
of the reflexive, and then the non-reflexive being zeroed
in the presence of the vitiated reflexive?

 He himself was coming in --> Himself was coming in

Is there some substrate in Gaelic?

 Bruce Nevin
 bnbbn.com

Teo Chew Tone Sandhi

I have an Honours undergraduate student investigating 
tone sandhi in her own dialect of Teo Chew (Chao-Chou, 
etc.), a near relative of Hokkien. As a first step we 
need some basic description of the tones and where to 
find them. Apart from a few somewhat less than edifying 
primers, we have tracked down the following dissertation 
references which may (or may not) be worth looking at. 

While I collected these references from the
University of California catalogue I am loathe to shell 
out the cash having them shipped in microfilm to the 
wilds of Western Australia (we might be the centre of the 
email universe, but sadly not smail) unless critically 
valuable.

Lin, Jocelyn Su-Fung
Tone sandhi in the Chinese dialects
April 1988

Shih, Chi-Lin
The prosodic domain of tone sandhi in Chinese
September 1986

Lien, Chinfa
Coexistent tone systems in Chinese dialects
March 1988

Hung, Tony T.N.
Syntactic and semantic aspects of Chines tone sandhi
October 1988

Wright, Martha
A metrical approach to tone sandhi in Chinese dialects
1983 (U.Mass.)

If anyone out there knows any of the authors and how I 
can best contact them for the relevant pages (in hard 
copy or electronic form) I would be most grateful for
your assistance.

And of course any other info on Teo Chew (like how many 
contrasting tones am I supposed to be hearing - we seem 
to be staring down the barrel of 8 contrasting tones) 
would be welcome too. Thanks,

Alan Dench
A_DENCHfennel.cc.uwa.oz.au

Department of Anthropology (but we're really linguists)
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, WA 6009

I'm going on a Fulbright next year to the Autonomous University
at Barcelona. Does anyone know of any contacts there who might
be able to answer some of my questions?

Bonnie Lyons

[End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 231]