LINGUIST List 2.336

Friday, 5 July 1991

Qs: Journal style, Compound nouns

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Style info for linguistics journals (LI in particular)
2. , Compound nouns.

Specific question: Does anyone have in emailable form the
style information for submissions to Linguistic Inquiry?
Our library seems to have discarded in binding the information
published in volume 15(1), and I'm in a hurry to get a
manuscript sent off.
Proposal: it would be handy if on-line information on style
requirements of linguistics journals was made available
electronically. This would save prospective authors hunting down
elusive style sheets, which libraries generously discard. An
ideal place for such information would be in the archive
files made available in association with the `linguist' mailing
list. Any editors have this information on-line? If so, send
it to me, and I'll organise with the editors of `Linguist' to
make it available.
marke.

Is there somebody among the readers of 'Linguist' who can give us some
bibliographic information about the computational, cognitivist, or
psycholinguistic treatment of compound nouns?
Information about ongoing research is especially welcome.
We are trying to set up a system that is able to analyze compound words
in the sense that it returns
 -the morphological decomposition (which is rather straightforward),
 -an educated guess at the semantic relations between these morphemes
 (especially difficult with new compounds, for which no information
 about the global meaning can be present in the lexicon).
Although were are especially interested in Dutch compounds, information
on English compounds and Romance compounds (both fundamentally different in
the sense that they are not written as one new word) will certainly be
useful.
To give you the flavour of our interests: the ultimate goal of such a
system is to be able 1) to guess the semantics of totally new compounds,
distinguishing grass specialist (some professor of botany), from
		 grass specialist (a tennis player who is more likely
		 to win in Wimbledon than in Flushing Meadow), and
2) to decompose electrical shock protection into
(electrical shock) protection instead of
electrical (shock protection).
Please send replies both to
Jan Dings and Lieve De Wachter
dingset.kuleuven.ac.be lieveet.kuleuven.ac.be