LINGUIST List 2.685

Mon 21 Oct 1991

Qs: French terms, Nouns and verbs, Themselves

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1. Joe Foley, QUERY
2. , QUERY
3. Richard Ogden, RE: 2.627 Themselves
4. , Susanne Winkler, where are you ?

I was wondering if anyone knows what terms are used in French for: Field, Mode,
 Tenor, Transitivity, Mood, Modality, Grammatical Metaphor, Nominalisation,
Theme, Rheme, etc., as used in Systemic Linguistics (Halliday 1985).
I do know that some work was done in Canada (Laval) but I am not sure how exten
sive it is. Obviously direct translation into French from English doesn't work!
 Any help will be very welcome.
 Joe Foley (ELLFOLEYNUSVM.BITNET)

 Hubert.Lehmann.+49.404-235.LEH.at.DHDIBM1.IBM.Scientific.Center.Heidelberg.Germ
 anytamvm1.tamu.edu (6221)
Is anyone aware of statistical work concerning the co-occurrence
of nouns and verbs in sentences - with or without respect to given
syntactic relations? I'm especially interested in statistics for
languages such as German, English, French, and Spanish, but also in
the methods used.
Hubert Lehmann

Message 3: RE: 2.627 Themselves

I'd like to add to the list of things which have struck people on LINGUIST
as unusual. The following three utterances were all from the same person,
a woman from Britain who lived between the ages of 5 and 15 in the USA
(her accent is what you might call mid-Atlantic, but I'm not sure that's
particularly relevant):
	if you don't be very specific it's can be hard for people to see
what you mean
	what are you wanting to achieve?
	it's good for you to see what each other are doing and how you're
doing it
The second one (are wanting) struck me as pretty normal for N. England, but
the others stood out for me, especially the last one which I remember seeing
in linguistics books with stars and question marks in front.
I think the interesting question is not how widespread are these examples
(also the 'anymore' case, and 'themself' and 'needs washed'), but rather
if these are examples of 'performance' and we recognise them as odd because
they don't quite square up to our ideas of 'competence' (which I think,
perhaps miostakenly, is justified mostly on intuition), at what point in
their development do things like the above become 'competence' rather than
'performance', and how would you know?
I ask this because I've always felt that performance was used too often as
nan excuse not to study the real languages that real people speak.
Richard Ogden
rao1uk.ac.york.vaxb

The MIT Working Papers in Linguistics is trying to get in touch with
Susanne Winkler. We have an address for her in Wankheim, but there is
no indication as to where Wankheim might be located (eg. Austria,
Germany or Switzerland are the obvious guesses).
Can anyone help us locate her ?
Contact me (Jonathan Bobaljik) by e-mail: JDBOBALJATHENA.MIT.EDU
or by snail mail : MITWPL - Dep't of Linguistics & Philosophy -
Room 20D-219 - MIT - Cambridge - MA - 02139 - USA
Thanks,
Jonathan
MITWPL