LINGUIST List 2.668

Thu 17 Oct 1991

Qs: Insertion, 'Come' and 'bring', Lg essays, parser

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1. "Julia Aymerich, query
2. , Query intrusive r-insertion
3. Adam Kilgarriff, Query: `Come' and `bring'.
4. Larry Gillick, Re: filled pauses
5. Andrew Garrett, Re: 2.661 Word Processing
6. Peter, Essays on Language
7. Jeff Turley, Re: 2.667 'He goes'
8. "Paik,Woojin", FIDDITCH Don Hindle's deterministic parser

Does anybody know about bibliography on Spanish clitics in Machine
Translation systems or NLP systems? I am also interested in the
treatment of clitics in LFG.
Any (ANY) suggestions will be highly appreciated.
Julia.

In J.C. Wells' "Accents of English"(1982), volume 1, p. 226, he gives the
rule for r-insertion in RP English (both linking /r/ and intrusive /r/)
as:
 0 -> r / [-high V]__ #0 V
(i.e. a zero can become an /r/ in the environment of a non-high vowel and
a word or morpheme boundary followed by a vowel, this if my set of
character codes turns out different from yours on your screens).
This rule made me wonder about the position of the /u:/, as in 'groom'.
To my humble non-native ears, r-insertion after /u:/ appears to be
possible, even though it is a close vowel, as in 'you and me' /ju:rnmi:/
and 'hue and cry' /hju:rnkraI/. Am I right in assuming this? If so, can
we perhaps posit a rule preceding r-insertion that diphthongizes the /u:/ to
/U/, so that Wells' rule still holds (since it does include centring
diphthongs)?
Does anyone know how common intrusive r-insertion is in RP? Is it the
predominant phenomenon in environments defined by the rule or not?
Richard Piepenbrock

I once heard a reference to some research which compared the phrasal
constructions and idioms involving `come' and `bring', and concluded that the
patterns were very similar for the two verbs. Does this produce any flicker of
recognition? If so, could you give me any further clues which might help me
locate the work.
Thank you,
 Adam Kilgarriff
 University of Sussex, England

I seem to recall that Jim (James D.) McCawley fills pauses
with [ai], homophonous with "I", leading the unsuspecting
listener to expect an agreeing VP to follow. If this is a
feature of his native dialect, how do its speakers avoid
similar confusion? Jim?
 Mark A. Mandel (even if the header says Larry Gillick)
 Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-7670
 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160 USA

Message 5: Re: 2.661 Word Processing

Apropos all this, does anyone know of phonetic and/or other linguistic fonts
which are scalable (e.g. Type 1) and available for Adobe Type Manager for
Windows (or indeed otherwise suitable for use in Windows; I use Word)?
Andrew Garrett

 In an effort to get more undergraduates into our linguistics courses (I am
in the English Department at the University of Houston), I will be teaching a
course officially entitled "Non-Fiction Prose" for sophomores. I don't think I
can get away with teaching linguistics as such, but I can certainly assign
solid articles dealing with language (and possibly larger selections; I have
already ordered Labov"s "The Study of Non-Standard English" for the course).
The selections need to be defensible as essays, in case my colleagues in
literature ask, and I have added the obligatory articles by Orwell, etc. for
their benefit, but I am looking for good essays that are linguistically sound
and readable by sophomores. Suggestions would be welcome. Thanks in advance.

Message 7: Re: 2.667 'He goes'

Does anyone know of equivalents to the verbum dicendi "he goes",
that is where a verb of motion has been thus grammaticalized?
A friend from Madrid gives the peninsular Spanish "se pone" 'he
puts himself', as in "se pone: no quiero!" 'he goes: I don't want to!"
(This periphrasis also means 'become', as in "se puso triste" 'he got
sad.')

Can anybody share information about Don Hindle's deterministic parser called
FIDDITCH? I believe this parser was used for the Penn Treebank Project.
Is it possible to obtain for free of charge for the research purpose?
Thanks, Woojin