LINGUIST List 4.289

Wed 21 Apr 1993

Qs: Color, parsing and psychology, 'to dis'

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Roslyn Kalifowicz-Waletz, color terms
2. , Psychological Basis for Parsing
3. , 'to dis'

(1)Does any one know of any study or published texts on color terminology
in any Middle Eastern or Oriental languages (other than Hebrew) from any
period?

(2)The findings by Paul Kay and Brent Berlin of the of the universal
evoulutionary pattern of color encoding as expressed in their book "Basic
Color Terms" have been widely accepted. But I have seen almost no
critical response on the 1978 article of Paul Kay and Chad McDaniels
called "The Significance of the Meanings of Basic Color Terms" (Language,
Vol.54, No. 3) that finds the Berlin and Kay evolutionary pattern to be
physiologically determined. Does any one know of any critcal literature
on this article or what acceptance this part of the Kay & McDaniel's work
has found among their peers? Please respond to my address directly and I
will post a summary of these replies to Linguist.

I am currently working on the parsing of English sentences to do
with the law domain. I have chosen one implementation of a parser,
and would like to say that this is psychologically valid.

Does anyone know of any psychologically based experiments
(published in journals) on determining how humans parse sentences?

Matt Adams
AI Research Laboratory
Department of Computer Science
University of Otago
Dunedin
New Zealand

e-mail : bungleotago.ac.nz

Some time ago the LINGUIST listserve had a discussion of the express
'to dis' in the sense of showing disrespect to someone. A student
now inquires whether other English words can be identified which
originate from affixes and have come to be used as free morphemes
and as inflecting bases. Please reply privately.
Mimi Klaiman
Indiana-Purdue University, Ft. Wayne IN 46805
(219) 481-6772
klaimancvax.ipfw.indiana.edu
klaimanipfwcvax.bitnet