LINGUIST List 3.581

Wed 15 Jul 1992

Misc: Center-Embedding, Electronic Resources in Linguistics

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1. Anthony Aristar, Center-embedding in NP's
2. , Electronic resources in Linguistics

In some languages there occurs a pile-up of morphemes
at the margins of NP's, so that all NP-internal
nouns are unmarked, and the markings which should
appropriately occur on those nouns are concatenated in
one position, usually the end of the NP. So, in a language
like Sumerian, you'd get the following string:

 house wife man of of to
 "to the house of the man's wife"

A more "normal" phrase like:

 *house to wife of man of

would be ungrammatical.

I know that there's at least one African language which
also does this: it was used as a counterexample to--I believe--
Kuno's early constraints on center-embedding. Does anyone know
what this language is, and--more important--does anyone know
of other languages which do this kind of thing?

I am the Humanities Librarian at M.I.T. and also the linguistics
bibliographer. Currently, I am working on a guide to electronic
resources in linguistics. I would appreciate hearing from any of you
who use electronic resources in your work or research; I am
interested in both commercial products ( e.g., LLBA on Dialog) and
non-commercial ( e.g., University library catalogues on the internet.)
I would also appreciate any evaluative comments.

I will be happy to share the guide on linguist when it is ready.

If you are interested in looking at M.I.T. Library's catalog the
telnet address is library.mit.edu or 18.84.1.12

Thank you in advance

Theresa A. Tobin
M.I.T. Humanities Librarian
tatathena.mit.edu