LINGUIST List 2.698

Wed 23 Oct 1991

Qs: Kapow!, Pragmatics, Errata, Latin

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Bif! Bop! Kapow!
2. Michael Covington, Pragmatics
3. BARBARA PARTEE, Call for Errata
4. , categorial grammars of Latin
5. Richard Ogden, RE: 2.690 Finitenes, like, you guys
6. Dennis Baron, you guys's gender

I'm looking for a linguistic term for that class of words which
regularly appear in the vivid colours when Batman or whoever
indulges in a little gratuitous violence.
No this is a serious request. I am editing a series of texts in
the (alas somewhat moribund) Nyungar language of southwest Australia
and come across a variety of such terms. Appart from general flavour
they do a good job of partitioning a narrative. One such text, about
the first culture hero to discover women, includes at least the
following:
dung! (the sound of hero's suddenly erect penis hitting his chest)
dangkarl-dangkarl (the "snarling" sound his penis makes as he chases
 the women)
derrku-derrku (the scraping noise as the women push into a cave
 to escape)
binj-binj-binj (the ringing noise his penis makes as it bounces off
 the rocks at cave's entrance)
Thankyou Mark Ellison for suggesting the term "ejaculative", but I'm
not sure it's entirely appropriate. I'd appreciate any suggestions.
Please don't send me examples of similar words in other languages, or
your Freudian analysis of the text.
Alan Dench
Department of Anthropology
University of Western Australia
Nedlands WA 6009
A_DENCHfennel.cs.uwa.oz.au

Where and when was the first university course devoted wholly to
pragmatics, and called by that name? Was it Levinson's course at
Cambridge in spring 1978, or somewhere else, earlier?

Mathematical Methods in Linguistics, by Barbara Partee, Alice ter
Meulen, and Robert Wall is about to be reprinted. Please send any
corrections to atmucs.indiana.edu. Your help is much appreciated!
Alice ter Meulen (forwarded to linguistnet by Barbara Partee)

I would like references to any treatments of Latin NPs within the
general framework of categorial grammar. Analyses incorporating
some kind of Motagovian semantics for a determiner-less NP are of
special interest to me. And/or any analyses of languages in which
a noun/adjective distinction cannot be maintained without some
difficulty. Thanks
Alan Dench
Department of Anthropology
University of Western Australia
Nedlands WA 6009
A_DENCHfennel.cs.uwa.oz.au

Message 5: RE: 2.690 Finitenes, like, you guys

doesn't anyone else have 'you lot' as a possible plural?
Richard Ogden

We were discussing _you guys_ in my seminar last week, coin-
cidentally, and the question of gender marking came up. There
seems to be quite a disagreement among the 13 grad students
about whether -you guys_ is masculine or neuter. Several
students insisted they could use it for an all female group,
others said only an all male or mixed group. My sense of the
form is that for many women it may function _only_ to indicate
an all female group, ie, that it has replaced the out of favor
_girls_. All the students were surprised at the etymology
of _guy_, by the way. I'd be interested in hearing more comments
about the gender marking of this form in your (you guys's [gaizez]
experience).