LINGUIST List 3.301

Mon 30 Mar 1992

Disc: Agent, Natural Language, Its, Right-Dislocation

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Directory

1. mark, 3.278 Coding of AGENT as LOCATION
2. Michel Eytan LILoL, Re: 3.214 Responses: Imperatives, Aphasia, Natural Language
3. Allan C. Wechsler, Lev. 25:5
4. (llan C. Wechsler, right dislocation

Eva Schultze-Berndt asks about languages exhibiting
> AGENTs marked by a PATH case or adposition ("Perlative") - there
> are French _par_, German _durch_, but I have found no other
> examples so far.

How about English _by_? You might consider that as either
locative or perlative.

 Mark A. Mandel
 Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA

Message 2: Re: 3.214 Responses: Imperatives, Aphasia, Natural Language

>Date: 2 Mar 92 17:03
>From: Carl Alphonce <alphoncecs.ubc.ca>
>Subject: Re:3.198 - Natural Languages
>
>Formal languages are used much in mathematics and computer science.
>Chomsky did quite a bit of work in formal language theory, and defined four
>classes of languages which form a hierarchy. This hierarchy is known as the
>Chomsky hierarchy. A very good (though technical) book on the
>topic is "Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation"
>by J. Hopcroft and J. Ullman (Addison-Wesley, 1979).

Yeah, but it is outdated (and quite heavy going). I would recommend:
An Introduction to Formal Language Theory
by Moll, Arbib and Kfoury
Springer-Verlag, New-York Heidelberg Berlin

==michel eytandpt-info.u-strasbg.fr

I stand corrected. And I'm also quite intrigued by this "uninflected
possessive"; I regard myself as pretty permissive and can easily put
myself into the appropriate frame of mind for reading Chaucer without
mentally starring any of the ME sentences. But I just can't stop myself
from starring "of it own accord"; it just looks _weird_.

To the person who complained of lacking an on-line KJ: I have one (you
didn't think I knew the Pentateuch so well that I could locate a single
pronoun from memory, did you?) but I don't know where it's from or what
edition; also the italics (important if you want to compare with the
original tongues) have been lost in the translation to ASCII. Still,
it's an interesting corpus. BTW, that "its" was the _only_ one I could
find.

I studied right dislocations appearing in a corpus of spoken French a few
years ago:

William J. Ashby, "The syntax, pragmatics and sociolinguistics of left-
and right-dislocations in French". Lingua 75 (1988), 203-229.

See also:

Knud Lambrecht, Topic, antitopic and verb agreement in non-standard French.
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1981.
William J. Ashby
Department of French & Italian
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106
ashbyhcfmail.ucsb.edu Phone: 805-893-3973 Fax: 805-893-8016