LINGUIST List 3.128

Sun 09 Feb 1992

Qs: LFG, Historical, Semiotics, Monkeys

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Bruce E Litow, Lexical Functional Grammars
2. David W. Talmage, Looking for software tools for historical linguistics
3. , Semiotics
4. Michael Hancher, Monkeys at typewriters

I would like to know if LFG formalism is still being used. The
result of Berwick-Nishino that LFG grammaticality is NP-complete
is not so negative as it might first appear. Any information on LFG
research would be appreciated.

Bruce Litow
Computing Services Division
P.O. Box 413
Univ. Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, 53201
litowcsd4.csd.uwm.edu

I would like to correspond with historical linguists who are using
software tools in their work. I'm especially interested in tools for
the comparative method and/or internal reconstruction.

Please reply directly to me. I'll summarize to the Linguist.

 ------------------------------------------------------------------
David W. Talmage (talmageluvthang.aquin.ori-cal.com)
"Once more. This is deixis. This is your brain on deixis. Any questions?"

Ron Smyth m'a indique l'existence d'un ouvrage
publie par l'Universite de Toronto "Essays in Applied
Visual Semiotics" qui est un receuil d'articles du
Toronto Semiotic Circle.
Quelqu'un peut-il me faire parvenir l'adresse
electronique (si elle existe) de Paul Bouissac qui est
au departement de francais de l'University
deToronto.Victoria College, Toronto, Canada.
Ce dernier semble etre en mesure de me donner plus
de renseignement a propos de cet ouvrage.
Si de votre cotes vous possedez des renseignements a
ce propos, pouvez-vous me les communiquer.
Thanks.

MALIN Franck, Universite de Toulouse le Mirail,
France.

"If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it
_might_ happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If
an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they _might_
write all the books in the British Museum." A. S. Eddington
called this "a rather classical illustration" when he introduced
it into his discussion of entropy in _The Nature of the Physical
World_, Gifford Lectures 1927 (New York: Macmillan; Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1931), 72. The general concept of
generating a text by randomly scattering letters is as old as
Cicero (_De Natura Deorum_ 2.37). But was the monkeys-at-
typewriters example a "classical" one by 1927? Or did Eddington
invent it?

 Michael Hancher / English / University of Minnesota