LINGUIST List 2.276

Friday, 7 June 1991

Disc: urkish, Flemish, Pseudo-Oblique objects

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Sean Boisen, Turkish query
2. , Flemish
3. bert peeters, Pseudo-oblique objects

Mark Seidenberg writes:

> Could someone please point me to (a) a computer-readable Turkish lexicon
> (a list of words and their pronunciations), and/or (b) work on morphological
> parsing in Turkish?
>

Several years ago I worked with a morphological parser for Turkish
devised by Jorge Hankamer at UC Santa Cruz, which (reasonably enough)
included a lexicon of about 1300 base entries (without detailed
phonetic pronunciations, only part of speech and simple definitions).
You should contact him directly to obtain it: I assume he's enlarged
and enhanced it by now. I doubt my old email address for him is still
valid, but back in 87-ish it was ucscc!hankucb-vax.berkeley.edu.

........................................
Sean Boisen -- sboisenbbn.com
BBN Systems and Technologies, Cambridge MA

A (somewhat delayed) response to Willem de Reuse's question about the
pragmatics of double-pronoun constructions in Flemish-Dutch dialects.
I do not know the dialects referred to in the discussion so far, but my
own dialect, from Antwerp city, does have the pronoun doubling system too,
as do most Belgian Dutch dialects. Since I happen to be working (together
with my colleague Georges De Schutter) on a grammar of the Antwerp dialect,
I have been looking into the issue of the pragmatic differences between
alternatives quite recently. The question is: what is the difference between
simple pronoun forms such as

Ik em da gedaan
I have that done
I have done it/this

and complex forms such as

Ik/k em ekik da gedaan
I-full/clitic have I-expanded-form that done

One problem is that intuitions are not sufficient to settle the matter, so we
are planning to work with informants to find out more about this. Anyway,
as far as I am concerned, there are several factors involved. One is focus on
the subject of the sentence. In the complex form the pronoun is much more
prominent. Yet this is not sufficient, since in the simple form one can
perfectly stress the initial pronoun to make it focus, too. I have the feeling
that there is a subtle differencein the type of focus this produces, but I
would not know how to formulate this at present. Another matter which seems
involved is empathy: in many cases the second form is used to express some
kind of emotional commitment (this is a very unnuanced rendering of what is
involved) - a rather positive or satisfactory feeling about what is uttered
in the sentence, or sometimes a rather negative attitude. The first form is
completely neutral in this respect.

But there is much more going on. Also consider the second-person cases, which
are much more complex than the first-person cases:

Gij/g e da goe gedaan
You-full/clitic have that well done

Gij/g e gij/ga da goe gedaan
You-full/clitic have you-full/semi-full that well done

G e dega/degij da goe gedaan
You-clitic have you-expanded-semi-full/expanded-full that well done

One complicating factor is that there are even more pronoun forms involved
here. There is a full, semi-full, and clitic simple pronoun, and a full and
semi-full expanded pronoun (and I am not even mentioning one further form,
'gijse', which is used in reactive speech acts only).
There are also some syntactic differences with the first person singular.
The second sentence has no equivalent in the first person singular: it is not
possible to have pronoun doubling with the non-expanded form there.

*Ik em ik da goe gedaan

In the third sentence it is impossible to use the full form of the normal
pronoun in initial position. In the second sentence, however, one can use
both a full and a clitic form (the semi-full form probably does not occur
for purely phonetic reasons) initially.
It will be obvious that this is a quite complicated matter, and I do not
feel up to predictions about what precisely is going on here, in terms of
precise pragmatic conditions selecting one form or another. I hope I'll
know more in a couple of months.

Jan Nuyts
University of Antwerp

(1) Between 45 minutes and an hour elapsed.
(2) A time between 45 minutes and an hour elapsed.

The analysis of (1) in terms of (2) makes a lot of sense to me. However, how
does Rick Wojcik suggest we should look at the greeting at the end of this
message?

Greetings from down under down under
(i.e. from Tasmania)

Bert Peeters <peeterstasman.cc.utas.edu.au>

[End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 0276]