LINGUIST List 2.850

Mon 09 Dec 1991

Qs: Discourse, Elamite, Kimmo, Black English, Us

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1. helen dry, texts for Discourse Analysis course
2. Geoffrey Mess, proto-Elamite, request for clarification.
3. Aleksander Murzaku, query: Two Level Morphology of Italian?
4. Ellen Prince, till death do us part
5. Ellen Prince, African-American English

I'm putting together a graduate course in Discourse Analysis and realize
I've become dissatisfied with the book I've used before (Brown & Yule,
_Discourse Analysis_, CUP). Does anyone have suggestions about replacement(s)?
There will be a packet of articles as well on topics like
evidentiality/affect, repetition, structure of personal narrative, etc. But
I'd like to give the students an "overview" text if possible--or, conceivably,
two texts, since the course will treat both written and spoken discourse.
Any suggestions that you send to my personal address I'll summarize and
post to the list. Thanks very much for your help.
Helen Dry
hdryemunix.emich.edu

The September issue of Atlantic contained an article by D. Roberts
"The Decipherment of Ancient Maya". In passing the author makes some
inaccurate statements about the status of various scripts (for
instance, he said that Elamite and futhark runes were not
understood). The latest issue contains two letters to the editor
pointing out mistakes. These letters seemed to disagree on the
question of whether proto-Elamite is understood.
Would anyone care to enlighten me?
 - Is the proto-Elamite script a descendant of Sumerian cuneiform? Is
it ideographic, syllabic, or alphabetic ?
 - Where are the proto-Elamite sites ? I understand that generally
they are near Susa, S.W. Iran. But what is the geographical range of
the sites ? about how many are there?
 - Is anything known about the proto-Elamite language ?
 -To what period has the proto-Elamite culture been dated ?
And changing the subject a bit,
 -Has the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis been generally accepted ?
Has there been much published since Mcalpin's (hope I got the name
right) memoir on this ?
(I posted a similar note in the newsgroups sci.lang, sci.archaeology
but no one's replied except to suggest suscribing to LINGUIST -
thanks, Jacques Guy)
--Geoffrey Mess

Does anyone know if there exists any article or anything else describing
the italian morphology using the Koskeniemi two level model?
If anyone have heard anything about, please, let me know.
Thank you very much,
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there's a country western song sung by randy travis that has the refrain:
together forever, till death do we part...
yeah, '...do *we* part'. clearly, the change of from 'us' to 'we' was not made
for reasons of rhyme or meter. does anyone know why it was changed? could
it be that the archaic sov word order was unparsable and a semantically weird
but at least parsable instance of subject-aux inversion was preferred? that
is, the interpretation that we are parting until death is just not possible
given the rest of the lyrics, all about how we're together--it really does seem
that the singer intends to convey the meaning of 'till death do us part'.
is there some other explanation, e.g. dialectal, that i'm missing?

is there anyone out there in LINGUISTland with native intuitions in
african-american english who'd be willing to give me some grammaticality
judgments? thanks.