LINGUIST List 3.856

Mon 02 Nov 1992

Qs: Computers, Articles, Addresses

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Asmawi Mohamad, LISP
2. , Measuring Pause
3. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Re: Place-Names and Articles
4. Sean Boisen, seeking references on control language and inanimate objects
5. Hartmut Haberland, Query - e-mail addresses
6. James Tauber, Hebrew and Koine Greek
7. , Korean Alphabet Day
8. , Query: Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Does anybody out there know of the availability of LISP program
for PC platform (either for Dos or windows) that is parallel to
MacLISP for macintosh?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Asmawi Mohamad

I'm enquiring for a student here who is looking at taped narrative
texts in an Aboriginal language. What is the easiest/best way of
measuring length of pause in text? How do the conversation analysts
do it? Is it crude (stopwatch) or does more sophisticated
instrumentation help? A reference to a method paper would be good.

Then there are other questions. The speakers vary enormously in their
mean speed of speaking. Is "mean speed of speaking" a useful concept?
Is it possible to factor this kind of thing out and leave significant
levels of difference in pause that are "meaningful"?

Patrick McConvell, Anthropology, Northern Territory University,
PO Box 40146, Casuarina, NT 0811, Australia

A curious feature of all varieties of English (so far as I know) is
the discrepancy between river and sea names on the one hand (which
need the article) and mountain and lake names on the other (which
reject it). In the case of rivers, it does not matter whether the
proper part of the name comes after the word _River_, as is usual in
Britain (_the River Thames, the River Ouse_ etc.) or before it, as
is usual in New Zealand (_the Ashley River, the Waimakariri River_
etc.). Are there any varieties of English where expressions such as
_the Mount X_, _the Lake Y_, _the Z Lake_ are usual? And is there
any general issue lurking here, which makes it more than just a
descriptive curiosity? I would be interested to know of any
relevant references.

Islands seem to be more disparate than other geographical entities.
Groups of islands regularly take the article (_the Orkneys, the
Balearic Islands, the Cyclades_). But individual islands seem to
fall into three groups: (a) those with stand-alone names, like most
cities (_Skye, Sicily, Novaya Zemlya_); (b) those which incorporate
the term _island_ or some such geographical label but have no
article (_Stewart Island, Norfolk Island, Baffin Land_) and (c)
those which have article plus geographical label (_the Isle of
Wight, the South Island_). My feeling is that names of types (b)
and (c) are less likely to refer to islands which are also political
entities than names of type (a) are. Can any sense be made of all
this?

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Andrew
 Carstairs-McCarthy

I'm looking for references relevant to the topic of how people use or
might use language for controlling semi-intelligent real-world
objects. For example, imagine a smart kitchen with speech
understanding technology, so that I could have the ability to request
the coffeepot to brew me a cup, or control the thermostat, or perform
numerous other simple operations. What predictions can we make, based
on other uses of language, or what studies have people actually done,
about the _way_ people might address their appliances? For example,
what might differentiate use of the object/action construction like
"microwave, on", versus "turn on microwave" (using the metaphor of the
whole kitchen as some kind of controlling agent).

I'm most interested in empirical studies on this particular topic
(they don't have to be about kitchens, of course). Speculations are
welcome too, but especially if you can support them from some more
general sociolinguistic or language acquisition principles (if those
are even the right subfields to look toward).

Sean Boisen

Does anybody have e-mail addresses or FAX numbers for any of the following
people:

David D. Lewis
Robert Stalnaker
Eve Sweetser
Helmut Schnelle
Enik"o Bollob'as
Hilary Putnam
John Perry
David Kaplan
Esa Itkonen
Hans-Julius Schneider

Please answer to jamdou.dk or hartmutruc.dk. Thanks a lot!

Can anybody give me information on acquiring the following:-
	A morphologically tagged Hebrew Old Testament
	A context-free grammar of OT Hebrew
	A context-free grammar of Koine Greek

Thankyou
James Tauber (jtaubertartarus.uwa.edu.au)

I have heard that there is a national holiday in Korea sometime in November
that commemorates the creation of the unique Korean alphabet (which is based
on distinctive features and hence anticipates modern phonology by several
centuries). Can anyone confirm this and provide details?

Martin Haspelmath, Free University of Berlin

As background material for a speech the Director of NSF is making
later this month, I am looking for a clear (to non-specialists),
succinct (2-3 pp.) statement and critique of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis. I expect that one or more linguistics textbooks probably
have such a section, but I have been away from textbooks for so long
that I don't know which ones, nor do I have ready access to them.

Can anyone give me good advice? Direct replies are preferred, to
pchapinnsf.gov or pchapinnsf.bitnet.

Thanks in advance,
 Paul Chapin, NSF