LINGUIST List 4.279

Fri 16 Apr 1993

Qs: Before=while still not, Spanish tagging, reading

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1. , Q: before = while still not
2. Inderjeet Mani, POS tagging - Spanish
3. William J. Rapaport, "miracle of reading"

 In Choctaw and Creek there seems to be no specific complementizer/ subordi
nating conjunction with the meaning 'before'. Translations of English
sentences with 'before' are translated with a sequence of morphemes
meaning 'while' + 'still' + 'not':

(Choctaw)

Ik-oklhiliik-ok-i_sha-kma_, chokka falammih.
neg-darken-neg-still-while house return

'He went home before it got dark.'
(lit. While it still wasn't dark, he went home.)

A student of mine is interested in examining this pattern in more detail.
Do any LINGUIST readers know of references to such a pattern or other,
non-Muskogean, languages with this property?

Reply to me personally, and I'll summarize if there is sufficient interest.

Aaron Broadwell, U. of Oklahoma (aa2492uokmvsa.bitnet)

Hello,

I'm interested in information on any part-of-speech taggers for
Spanish.

If you wish, you may reply to me and I will post a collected reply.

Thanks,

Inderjeet Mani

Artificial Intelligence Technical Center
Mail Station Z401
The MITRE Corporation
7525 Colshire Drive
McLean, Virginia 22102-3481
manistarbase.mitre.org

Can anyone supply me with a reference to the following idea, which I read
several years ago but neglected to keep? I call it "the miracle of
reading".

The idea is that reading is miraculous, strange, weird, ...: From a
third-person point of view, it consists of a person looking at some
physical object with strange markings on it. Yet that person is learning
something, getting information, by this process.