LINGUIST List 4.316

Tue 27 Apr 1993

Qs: Psycholinguistics, corpora, parsing, suss

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1. , Query
2. Jon Aske Aritza, Query: PC software for analyzing corpora
3. juan mora, Query: parsing spoken texts
4. Paul T Kershaw, Query: Origin of suss

 I am very interested in any research on sentence processing in Russian
or other Slavic languages. I am also trying to find out whether any psycho-
linguistic experiments in general have been carried out on language
comprehension in these languages. Any kind of information and/or references
will be highly
appreciated. Irina Sekerina.

I have a question about computer software for analyzing corpora/texts
which runs on IBM PC's.

Recently there was an "ad" in Linguist for a Lexa package of tools for
analyzing corpora which seemed very interesting. It was billed as "a set
of programs for lexical data processing, written by Raymond Hickey" and
"available from the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities for
about 100 USD".

Has anyone heard of this software? Used it? What other software do
people use to analyze text? I have used Shoebox up till now as a
database, but will need more tools in the near future. What can people
recommend or warn against?

Any information will be greatly appreciated. BTW, my current research is
on the pragmatic factors which influence word order in Basque and that
is what I will be using the software for.

I will summarize any responses I get. Thanks a lot.

Jon Aske

PS I have already posted this query on Funknet and Corpora.list, but
with very little success. This is my last hope.

Jon Aske
Political Science / Anthropology Home address:
Bates College Jon Aske
Lewiston, Maine 04240, USA "Aritza Enea"
 12 Bardwell St.
Work phone: (207) 786-6472 Lewiston, Maine 04240-6336
Fax number: (207) 786-6123 -Phone: (207) 786-0589

e-mail: jaskeabacus.bates.edu or jonaskegarnet.berkeley.edu

I am sending this query on behalf of a friend. Send any responses to me
and I will pass them along, and I will give a summary if there is interest.

Could someone send me references dealing with the following two topics:
a) speech to speech machine translation
b) parsing spoken texts (i.e. coming from a speech recognizer)
Thanks

The recent Linguist posting on bound morphemes becoming free glossed "suss" as
"to treat with suspicion." However, both recorded uses of the word that I have
(both from UK songwriters) don't allow for this reading, but rather a gloss
like "determine/figure out":
 Aztec Camera, 1984, "The birth of the true": "I saw some pictures of the
world at war / I couldn't suss what all the fuss was for."
 Thomas Dolby, 1992, "That's why people fall in love": "I've been all
around this flat old Earth / and I still ain't got it sussed."
Is this a case of semantic shift, or is "suss" derived from something else?
Back in '84 it struck me as a clipping of something, as the posting asserts,
but "suspect" doesn't work.

(Also, since the posting asked for bound morphemes, this didn't seem to come
up, but adverbs seem to always require an adjective or a verb, so are bound in
one sense, and hence the faddish use of "very" a few years ago might fit the
query in spirit if not in form:
 A: I like that new guy in school.
 B: Ooo, yeah, he's so VER-y, isn't he?)