LINGUIST List 4.427

Fri 04 Jun 1993

Qs: Discontinuous conjunctions, Juncture, Puns

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1. Ulrich Hermann Wassner, Discontinuous conjunctions in GTG
2. Max W. Wheeler, English juncture (grey day/grade A)
3. "S.GOODMAN", Puns Message

Hello!
Can anybody out there tell us how Generative Grammar or any of its derivates
deals with conjunctions consisting of two parts (e.g. 'both - and' or
'neither - nor' in English, 'weder - noch', 'sowohl - als auch' or 'nicht nur -
sondern auch' in German)? Or has anybody hints to literature on this topic? If
there are no discontinuous constituents - how are we to treat those?
Thanks in advance

Marjon Helmantel (helmantobelix.uni-muenster.de) /
Ulli Wassner (wasnerdmswwu1a)

A graduate student of mine is investigating non-native speakers' sensitivity
to English juncture phenomena. She wishes to collect a good range of examples
of pairs which share (more or less) the same phonemes but have different
boundaries or juncture phenomena. Several such pairs are classics of the
literature, e.g.:
 night-rate nitrate
 grey day grade A
 why choose white shoes
 I scream ice cream

I have a feeling that somewhere there are substantial collections of such
pairs. Can anyone point out a useful source?

Has anyone any such pairs that they have heard, read, invented that they'd be
willing to share?

The best examples, for our purpose, are those which can more or less plausibly
be fitted into the same frame sentence, such as:
 I have {known oceans/no notions} that you yourself couldn't imagine
 Any {grey day/grade A} would be bad news for one professor I know

I will reply to the list with a summary if anything interesting turns up. Many
thanks in advance for replies or comments.

Max Wheeler,
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences,
University of Sussex,
Falmer,
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH
U.K.

I wanted to ask if anyone out there enjoys punning and would be prepared to
contact me and discuss it, as my research is in that area. I am very
interested in attitudes to puns, and their possible effects from the point of
view of functional linguistics.

I would also like to thank all those who sent me bibliographies and
information. If you could reply to my personal address (not the list) that
would assist me greatly.

Thank you very much.

Sharon Goodman
University of East Anglia (p450uk.ac.uea.cpc865)