LINGUIST List 2.660

Mon 14 Oct 1991

Misc: Responses

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Directory

1. Fan mail from some flounder?, Re: 2.646 LINGUISTS Nameserver
2. , RE: 2.642 Sound Change and Collectives
3. Allan C. Wechsler, 2.635 Filled pauses
4. "Wayles Browne, Re: Filled Pauses
5. Prof. Roly Sussex, Re: 2.654 Responses: "I says" dialects
6. "Bruce E. Nevin", data is

Message 1: Re: 2.646 LINGUISTS Nameserver

This isn't about the linguist nameserver, just trying to reply to something
else.
A while back, someone asked for Shibatani's whereabouts. He is at
University of Kobe, probably in the English dept. I don't know if
he has na e-mail address.
Susan Fischer

Message 2: RE: 2.642 Sound Change and Collectives

Michael Barlow replies to Michael Kac's request for information on
collectives on verbs mentions the use of reciprocal morphology.
The use of reciprocals with a collective interpretation is fairly
common, certainly in Australian languages. Although I am pretty sure
the semantics involved here are not quite what Kac was looking for,
an additional reference is:
Lichtenberk, F. "Multiple uses of reciprocal constructions", Australian
Journal of Linguistics 5 (1985) 19-41.
and if this IS what is being sought, the polysemous functions of a
verbal collective suffix in a group of Australian languages is
described in:
Dench, A. "Kinship and collective activity in the Ngayarda languages
of Australia" Language in Society 16 (1987) 321-340.
I should say that Lichtenberk's paper is not in the least bit restricted
to Australian languages.
Alan
Dench
Department of Anthropology
University of Western Australia
Nedlands WA 6009
A_DENCHfennel.cc.uwa.oz.au

 Date: Tue, 8 Oct 91 00:59:11 PDT
 From: eesspeech.sri.com (Liz Shriberg)
 Subject: filled pauses
 Does anyone know of any cross-linguistic work on hesitation phenomena?
 In particular I am interested in filled pauses (like "um" and "uh"
 in English; "euh" in French.) Any type of information
 (phonetic/phonological
 form, prosodic characteristics, function, distribution, etc.) would be
 extremely helpful. Information on languages other than English,
 French or German would be especially appreciated. Anecdotal information
 on a language you have worked on would also be great, as would suggestions
 for people to contact.
My mother is a native Hebrew-speaker, one of the first full generation
of such, b. 1922. She uses [a:] and [e:], mostly the latter. Gosh, I
can /hear/ her in my imagination -- the memory of the pausal [e:] is
very evocative of my memory of her voice! (I'm a pretty good mimic, but
I've /never/ been able to imitate her accent.)

Serbo-Croatian agrees with what Scott Delancey says about Japanese and
Mandarin: it uses a demonstrative _ovaj_ 'this (masculine singular
nominative)' as a pause filler. Unlike Japanese and Mandarin, this is
not a distal demonstrative; it's the closest of three:
ovaj 'this (near me); just about to be mentioned'
taj 'this/that (near you); already mentioned'
onaj 'that (further from both of us); mentioned on a previous occasion'.
The language has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter; I don't
know why it doesn't use the neuter _ovo_ here.

Message 5: Re: 2.654 Responses: "I says" dialects

Ron Smyth <smythlake.scar.utoronto.ca> asks about "I says" dialects.
Australian teenagers have a similar (and endemic) usage with "go":
"and then he comes in, and he goes, he goes, umm ... and then I go,...".
There isn't anything quite like "I says to him, I says", and this use
of "go" is unknown (to me, anyhow) in the past: I haven't heard "he went"
meaning "he said". The main function is discourse-oriented, and is
a means of marking discourse participants, including switch reference
(at a not too formal level) when new participants enter the conversation.

A convenient way to rationalize the use of "data" as a singular
in English to those who don't know the history just pointed out
(or are unimpressed by it) might be to claim that it is a collective
noun like "sand". The real issue of course is not semantic but
social. Of such tiny shibboleths are mighty social barriers made.
	Bruce Nevin
	bnbbn.com