LINGUIST List 2.323

Tuesday, 25 June 1991

Disc: Bulgarian, Lexitron, IO Agreement

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1. Kjetil R} Hauge, Bulgarian corpus
2. Koenraad De Smedt, lexitron
3. , Re: Indirect Object Agreement

Roland Noske was looking for a Bulgarian corpus - I have a rather smallish
one, consisting of dialogues and reading passages from two Bulgarian
textbooks. It all amounts to about 170 Kbytes. The last time I asked
someone who could be expected to know (two years ago), no corpora of
Bulgarian machine-readable text were available in Bulgaria. I will ask
again later this summer.
-Kjetil Ra Hauge, U. of Oslo, P.O. Box 1030 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo 3, Norway
-E-mail: kjetilrhhedda.uio.no -Fax: +472-454310 -Phone: +472-456710

This is a belated response to a query about electronic dictionaries. A
few years ago, Van Dale Lexicografie published LEXITRON, an encyclopedic
dictionary of Dutch. This CD-rom offers more than just a 'printed'
dictionary put on a disc. Rather, it is a full lexicographic database
containing all (well, almost all) inflectional and derivational forms.
Smart spelling correction based on sound similarity is provided. Trivia
collectors can search the large number of encyclopedic entries, while
linguists and crossword puzzle freaks can search the dictionary using
patterns, categories and labels. Several of LEXITRON's components were
designed by Stichting Cognitieve Technologie.
Koenraad de Smedt

I know it's late replying to the question (from Jan Olsen) about
indirect object agreement, but here's another bit of information.
It's already been noted that languages that have object agreement
marking opt to agree with the IO rather than the DO with double-
object verbs. (Many of these languages also have an alternative in
which agreement with both is possible by using serial or embedding
constructions.) Palauan (Western Austronesian) has both. The object
agreement phenomena can be analyzed (if one wishes to) as specifier-
head agreement: agreement with the IO when a DO is present is agreement
with the specifier of VP; agreement with the DO when there's no IO
involves movement to specifier. This also accounts for the lack of
agreement with unaccusatives and other intransitives, agreement in
causatives and other "clause-union" constructions, and probably
exceptional case marking phenomena. Sandy Chung and I have (separately)
used this device to analyze "long-distance" agreement in WH constructions,
in Chamorro and Palauan, respectively. For details on the DO/IO
agreement analysis in Palauan, the paper is forthcoming in Lingua.
Carol Georgopoulos