LINGUIST List 2.369

Sunday, 28 July 1991

Disc: Feature Percolation, Kinship, Gender, Compound nouns

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Directory

1. Ralf Thiede, Feature Percolation
2. William McKellin, Re: Mama Papa
3. Pamela Munro, Men's and Women's Speech
4. Jock McNaught, RE: Compound nouns
5. , Re: -gate suffix
6. mark l louden, Re: Queries

In "On Binding" [Linguistic Inquiry 11 (1980): 1-46], which started out
as a draft written in January 1978, Noam Chomsky wrote:
 Assuming Case to be assigned to NP under (68), let us suppose
 further that the feature "percolates" to the head noun and its
 determiner and modifiers, in the sense of Dougherty (1969).
 (p. 25)
His bibliographic reference is to:
Dougherty, R.C. (1969) "An Interpretive Theory of Pronominal Reference,"
 Foundations of Language 5, 488-519.
That may not be who "first introduced" the term, but it could be a lead.
 Greetings, --Ralf--

I'm sorry I don't have the complete reference but
E.R. Leach has a paper on "Mama and Papa" in Rethinking Kinship,
R. Needham (ed.) (ASA Monograph Series) London:Tavistock. 1971.
He discusses some of the implications of the distribution of phonologically
based patterns like mama and papa for the study of kinship.
Prof. Bill McKellin mckeunixg.ubc.ca
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C.
V6T 1Z1

In response to Alice Freed's query (24 July), I could provide several
references to grammaticized men's and women's forms of speech in American
Indian languages (where for example men's forms of verbs might be required to
include an extra morpheme or the like); this is not, however, related to
"gender" in the sense that term has been used in LINGUIST discussions re-
cently. If anyone would like these references, please let me know. However,
I suspect someone out there knows of a larger bibliography on the subject,
which I'd certainly appreciate a reference to. Pam Munro

Jan,
I (and presumably others who read this bulletin) would be interested in
seeing a compendium of the replies you received regarding compound nouns.
Could you spare the time to post a list of the references? I am most
interested to see how this compares with the references (and original
research) already done within EUROTRA on compounds. I had thought we had
covered the ground fairly well, and would like to see what we may have
missed out on.
Jock
--
John McNaught		 jock%ccl.umist.ac.ukean-relay.ac.uk (ean)
Centre for Computational jock%ccl.umist.ac.ukcunyvm.cuny.edu (arpa)
 Linguistics 		 jock%ccl.umist.ac.ukac.uk (earn)
UMIST			 jockcclsun.uucp
PO Box 88
Sackville Street
Manchester, UK 	 +44.61.200.3098 (direct)
M60 1QD

 CS Dept, GM Research Labs
fleck%robots.oxford.ac.ukRICEVM1.RICE.EDU (Margaret Fleck) writes:
>So does English now have a suffix '-gate'?
>
> Watergate
> Irangate
> Contragate
> Muldergate (South African)
> Inkathagate
Obviously the answer is 'yes'. But of course, the first one
'Watergate' is the Mother of All '-gates'.
-Kurt Godden

In response to Margaret Fleck's discussion of the '-gate' suffix in English
to indicate a political scandal: one of the best I ever heard was
'Kachinagate' to describe former Arizona governor Rose Mofford's involvement
with questionable political gifts.
Best,
Mark Louden