LINGUIST List 2.383

Monday, 5 August 1991

Qs: Moscow conf, R Stanley, Slavic, Passives, Sign lg

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Directory

1. Alexis Manaster Ramer, Query on 1989 Moscow Conference
2. Phil Bralich, Richard Stanley
3. Lesli LaRocco, QUERY on Slavic Keyboards
4. , English continuous perfect passives (?)
5. , Query re deaf babies' babbling in sign language

Does anybody have a copy of the materials from the 1989 conference held
in Moscow "Lingvisticheskaia rekonstruktsiia i drevneishaia istoriia
vostoka" (May 29-June 2, 1989) and would be willing to let me use
it for a brief period of time?
Alexis Manaster Ramer

Doe anyone know an email or standard mail address for Richard Stanley, the
author of "Boundaries in Phonology" in _A Festshrift for Morris Halle_
editted by Anderson and Kiparsky? I have a couple of lists of email
addresses of linguists but he is not on them.
Thanks
Phil Bralich
University of Hawaii
bralichuhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.edu

Any information on keyboard layouts (computer or typewriter) for Slavic
languages other than Russian would be greatly appreciated.
Please respond to Slava Paperno at B47CORNELLC.BITNET.
Thanks

An enterprising student of mine (a non-native speaker of
English) made the following observation in a lecture on
the passive: "English does not appear to admit passives
in the continuous perfect." So for example, there is no
acceptable passive counterpart to the active:
I had been giving a lecture to an unwashed horde.
??An unwashed horde had been being given a lecture.
This seems quite unacceptable to me, but over the last
few days I have perhaps been letting my linguist's
intuitions overide my native-speaker intuitions. The
following does not seem so bad:
My car has been being cleaned all week.
And, with BE as a main verb (copula), the following is
not too bad at all:
John has been being naughty since this morning.
Mark Ellison tells me he finds the get passives a little
easier to deal with:
My car has been getting cleaned all week.
Shelly Harrison suggested that the problem is quite
simply a classic performance error. The sentences are
grammatical but English speakers have a great deal of
trouble processing them. He says he can accept such
things as grammatical but can't give them an
interpretation. He doesn't know what they mean!
However, he suggests that if a frame is provided then
they might be interpretable:
"How's the research paper going?"
"Oh, it's being finished."
"Sure! It's been being finished all semester!"
And then I stumbled upon this nice example in James
Blish's (1964) "Doctor Mirabilis" (p193 in the (British)
Arrow edition of 1984):
"On the instant of recognition, Roger knew that
he had been being followed."
They are starting to sound better and better!
My student threatens to write a research paper on this
topic (against my fervent hope that he will not - him
being a born again prescriptivist). If anyone has
fanciful thoughts on this subject I'd be amused to hear
them.
Alan Dench
Department of Anthropology
University of Western Australia
A_DENCHfennel.cc.uwa.oz.au

Can any one help? A recent newspaper article reported on some work
by Dr Laura Petitto and Paula Marentette of McGill University observing
deaf babies babbling in sign language and concluding that babbling is not
tied to sppech production but to the way the brain organises itself
to deal with the structure of language. Has any one any further
information on this? or know of any papers on this?
Jane Chandler