LINGUIST List 3.394

Tue 12 May 1992

Qs: Lexica, French, Apposition, Gender, Neural Nets

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Lou Burnard, General Enquiry re General Enquirer
2. Julie Auger, Grammatical intuitions about Quebec French
3. "J.L. MacKenzie", Apposition
4. , Mandarin Chinese software
5. "Scott,Helen", Undergraduate Course on Gender and Language
6. , neural net software

I am trying to trace uptodate information about the availability of
machine-readable lexica for content analysis in the style of
Stone's 'General Enquirer' program of the late 70s. According to the
Humanities Computing Yearbook the General Enquirer program
itself, together with 3 such lexica (Lasswell, Harvard A and Harvard B)
is reportedly available for a reasonable sum from ZUMA, at Mannheim in
Germany, but it occurs to me that others must exist elsewhere.

My intention is, of course, to add these lexica to the existing holdings
of the Oxford Text Archive so that they will be more generally and
widely available.

Please don't reply to the list direct, but to:-

ARCHIVEUK.AC.OXFORD. VAX

Thanks

Lou Burnard, Oxford Text Archive

 I am looking for a couple of native speakers of Quebec French who
would be willing to give acceptability judgments about Colloquial
French sentences. While I have access to a large corpus which
provides me with lots of conversational and narrative data, I still
need to test with other native speakers various plausible
structures which happen not to be found in the corpus. Any
volunteers?
 Thanks in advance.
--Julie Auger
 University of Pennsylvania
 augerlinc.cis.upenn.edu

Can anyone send me, on behalf of a graduate student, titles on apposition?
We're particularly interested in the question of case agreement between the two
 elements of the appositional construction. In German, for example, the general
 rule is that the two elements agree in case, but there is a (non-standard?)
 tendency for the second element to appear in the dative, irrespective of the
 case of the first element. An example from Eggeling's *A dictionary of modern
 German prose usage*:

Sie stiegen durch [die Annaschlucht]accusative hinunter, [einer noch vor kurzem
 verwildert gewesenen Felsenschlucht]dative

'They climbed down the Anna Gorge (accusative), a rocky ravine that not so long
 before had been allowed to grow wild (dative)'

Any information, which should be mailed directly to me, will be gratefully
 received and acknowledged. If there is sufficient response, I will post the
 information for general distribution.

Lachlan Mackenzie

I would be much obliged if someone could supply me with information leading
to the acquisition of the necessary software for word processing in
Mandarin Chinese. Xie xie nin
 Candace Rodman, Ball State University

I am designing a one semester course on gender and language
for undergraduates; the prerequisite for this course will be a
one semester introductory course on general linguistics. I
need ideas and reading materials. Has anyone out there taught
such a course? I would appreciate any help you might be able
to give. SCOTTHGRIN1.BITNET

I am seeking information/recommendations on commercially available software
for neural net analysis. We are interested in small packages which could
be run on a PC or more expensive packages which could be run on a VAX6420
type system (funding is uncertain but potentially generous!).
 We hope to apply neural net analysis to multivariate statistics on
scientific data and/or modelling natural language processing. This is
an independent "sparetime" project ; I am a neural net rookie and not
too computer literate either so good documentation would be important.
Nonetheless we do contemplate potentially quite sophisticated use of
complex nets eventually.
 Also we would appreciate any comments on the intensive user training
courses which are occasionally offered.

Thanks to Rich for giving me this space. Email reply preferred to
eyoungbinah.cc.brandeis.edu
or
rathbinah.cc.brandeis.edu

P.S. There wouldn't be something in ShareWare, would there?

Sincere, Ed