LINGUIST List 4.163

Mon 08 Mar 1993

Qs: Pronoun or anaphor, US/UK vocab., Indonesian, theta

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1. Andrew VanderSpuy, pronoun or anaphor?
2. mark, US/UK vocabulary
3. Brian Spooner, Indonesian in the Arabic script
4. "Sze-wing Tang", theta-role

I have a question concerning anaphors vs pronouns. In Zulu, a South Afric
an Bantu language, there is a set of forms which are used only after
prepositions. These forms can have either a pronominal meaning or an
anaphoric one:
 'Ukhuluma ngaYE'
 'He is talking about _him_;
 He is talking about _himself._'
 Sentences which contain these forms are ambiguous in isolation,
(if the anaphoric/pronominal form potentially agrees with the subject)
and sometimes ambiguous in context.
Can anyone tell me how these forms would be analysed in terms of
Chomsky's binding conditions, seeing they are both pronominal and
anaphoric, but are not empty categories? Would one say that they
change their feature specification according to context/ intended
meaning, or are they some sort of exception to the binding
conditions? I'd appreciate any comments.

Andrew VanderSpuy <140avdswitsvma.wits.ac.za>
Department of African Languages
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa

Are there any comparative dictionaries of US and British English,
with respect to pronunciations and/or spellings? Someone here
swears he's seen such a thing. I have Norman Moss's
_British/American Language Dictionary_, but it deals exclusively
in definitions and doesn't touch pronunciation or orthography at
all.

For that matter, I would like to hear about monographs as well as
dictionaries & similar lists. I am interested in the language as
it is fairly generally used in the national population, across
the general vocabulary, not in studies of a few words or a
particular regional dialect.

Please respond directly to me, and I will summarize to the list.

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

 All grammars leak.
 (Sapir [thank you, colleagues!])

I interested in contacting anyone working with Indonesian texts written
in the Arabic script. This is in connection with a manual I am preparing
on problems in reading handwriting in particular styles of the Arabic
script in various languages.
Please contact me directly; spoonermec.sas.upenn.edu
Brian Spooner
Dept. of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania

Can anybody tell me what is the theta-role of 'John' in (1)?

 (1) I asked John a question.
 (2) I gave Mary a book.

Is it a GOAL? Has anyone already pointed out the thematic difference
between 'John' in (1) and 'Mary' in (2)?
Any comment on these questions would be much appreciated.

Sze-wing Tang <swtangcuhk.hk>
The Chinese University of Hong Kong