LINGUIST List 4.200

Thu 18 Mar 2003

Qs: OCR, Also/only, Contrastive, Language games, Autonomy

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Mark Kas, query on OCR hardware
2. David Gil, QUERY: ALSO/ONLY IN YUMAN & ELSEWHERE
3. Sonja Launspach, contrastive analysis
4. Trey, Language games
5. , Query: Independence/Autonomy of Grammar

The Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) wants
to purchase OCR hardware and software. Our problem is that we have found
excellent software, but that we have not been able to find the right
hardware. "Right" is for us: a scanner WITH A BOOKEDGE. A bookedge
is a necessary feature for our Faculty, since we have a lot of old books
that need to be scanned for our corpus-linguistical research. Does
any of the Linguist-readers know of a scanner with bookedge which can
be bought separately from OCR software? Please reply directly to me.
Thanks!

Mark Kas
Department of Dutch Linguistics
e-mail: kaslet.rug.nl

First, a query for Yuman language specialists:

In Maricopa (as I recall; I have no sources handy), the suffix [-nt-]
means "also" while the suffix [-t-] means "only". Are these two
suffixes related, synchronically or diachronically (by dint of their
common element [t])? What are the corresponding facts in other
Yuman languages?

And now a general query:

Is anybody familiar with a language, anywhere, in which "also" (or
perhaps "even") and "only" are formally related (as is possibly the
case in the above Maricopa example)?

Please answer me directly:

David Gil (National University of Singapore)
ellgildnusvm.bitnet

I am looking for any references or info to help me compile a
constrastive analysis of Arabic and English. I am also looking for any
reference that gives info on sociolinguistic differences that students
learning the second language would need to know.
 Thanks
 Sonja Launspach
 t720026univscvmm

I am interested in finding information/references concerning language
games, such as Pig Latin and Abi-Dabi in English, Chicken Language in
English and German, and the Japanese Entertainers Secret Language.
I would like both references and descriptions of such games. If you have
any information on such games, let me know by email at
 vjone00ricevm1.rice.edu (please note: those 0's are zeros, not o's)
I will summarize my findings, if any, and post them back.
Thanks,
 Trey Jones, Rice University

Does anybody know where the term 'autonomy' was first used
(I do know it occurs in Chomsky's Reflections on Language
in 1975, whereas in Syntactic Structures he talked about
'independence of grammar', but I do not know where the
change took place)?

Also, does anybody know any references where autonomy of
grammar is taken (by Chomsky or anyone else) to mean
independence from functional factors? In all of Chomsky's
writings that I have perused, he seems to be concerned
with independence from other things (e.g., semantics,
performance, statistics), but it seems that nowadays the
term is widely used to mean the idea that there are formal
principles to grammar which are not functional. Where
does this come from?