LINGUIST List 4.193

Tue 16 Mar 1993

Qs: Case frames, Malagasy, terminology, adjectives, Leipzig

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Directory

1. James Tauber, Case Frames for Greek/Latin?
2. Dawn MacLaughlin, Malagasy speaker?
3. Glenn Ayres - CDI San German, Latin grammatical terminology
4. David Gil, QUERY: ADJECTIVES
5. , Query re International Conference for Teachers of German

Can anyone provide me with information regarding the inadequacy of
Phrase Structure Grammars in syntactically parsing highly inflexional
languages like Koine Greek and Latin where word order is secondary
to case endings in determining structure. Surely something like case
frames are wonderfully suited to analyzing Latin and Greek sentences
but I haven't seen this done anywhere. Most books on Natural Language
Processing deal with languages that are far less case-based and more
word order based.

If you know of any books or journal articles that address the syntactic
parsing of highly inflexional languages (where case is the main syntactic
indicator) I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks in advance

James Tauber
jtaubertartarus.uwa.edu.au

 Is there a native speaker of Malagasy out there somewhere who would
be willing to answer some questions for me concerning Malagasy syntax?

 Dawn MacLaughlin
 Bolt Beranek and Newman Program in Applied Linguistics
 Cambridge, MA Boston University
 dmaclaugbbn.com dawnlouis-xiv.bu.edu

Recently it has occurred to me that the term *predicate nominal* of
traditional English grammar might have originated as a mistranslation
of a Latin grammatical term which would have been better translated as
*nominal predicate*, applicable to the entire predicate of a copulative
sentence and not just the nominal/adjectival portion. Unfortunately,
however, I have been unable to track down relevant Latin sources. Help
in substantiating or falsifying my conjecture would be greatly
appreciated.

Please reply directly to me, and I will post a summary.

 -- Glenn Ayres (gayresinter.ui.clu.edu)

Is anybody familiar with a language, other than English, with a
construction of the following form?

"I want the RED ONE"

I am interested in the extent to which different languages permit
adjectives to stand by themselves as complete NPs. While some
languages (eg. French, Hebrew) allow bare adjectives to occur in NP
positions, others (eg. Malay, Mandarin) make use of a nominalizing
particle or affix (eg. "yang" and "de" respectively). English is the only
language I know of that requires a dummy noun "one". So I would
be curious to find out how unique English is in this respect.

(Also, I would be interested if anybody is familiar with any other
kinds of morphosyntactic strategies to enable adjectives to occur in
NP positions.)

Please answer me directly, and if there's sufficient response, I'll post
a summary.

David Gil (National University of Singapore)
ellgildnusvm.bitnet

I realise that this enquiry is peripheral to the interest of most list
members, but more regular ways of obtaining information have thus far been
unsuccessful.

I wonder whether anyone can give me any information for a prospective
participant in the International Conference for Teachers of German to be
held in Leipzig in early August, or an e-mail address from which such
information could be rapidly obtained.

Malcolm Ross
Department of Linguistics
Research School of Pacific Studies
CANBERRA A.C.T.
Australia 0200