LINGUIST List 4.440

Wed 09 Jun 1993

Qs: VP Focus, Zamparelli, Scrabble, Marx Bros, English

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Laszlo Kalman, Query: Language with explicit VP focus?
2. Markantonatou S, Zamparelli's address
3. Ron Smyth, Scrabble
4. John Cowan, Query/Just For Fun: Marx-ist Linguistics
5. , grammar problem

Dear Linguists,

I am desperately looking for a language that explicitly marks VP
focus. What I have in mind is a language with focus marking which
distinguishes sentences meaning (1) below from all the others that
follow:

(1) What I did was buying a house [rather than, say, moving to a hotel]
 (VP focus)

(2) I bought a HOUSE [rather than a boat]
 (NP focus within VP)

(3) I DID buy a house.
 (emphatic focus)

Thank you -- Laszlo Kalman
 Dept. of Computational Linguistics, University of Amsterdam

I am looking for the address of Mr Zamparelli. Could you please help me?
I would be happy with any type of address, electronic or not.

Thank you very much

Stella Markantonatou

Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ
UK

email: marksessex.ac.uk

Some friends are in the middle of a Scrabble game, and have been discussing
which skills are needed to be a good player (vocabulary, anagram skills,
special Scrabble strategies). Does anyone know of any studies (maybe done
by Scrabble organisations or by the manufacturer) on this Sunday-afternoon
topic?
Replies to
smythlake.scar.utoronto.ca
Ron Smyth

This is mildly a query, because I would like to know who published this
example and where, but mostly it is just by way of amusing the subscribers.

The three Marx Brothers engage in varied distortions of English to make
their humor, but the distortions operate on different levels for each
brother. Groucho's humor is mostly semantic: puns and other kind of
wordplay, and English PP-attachment ambiguity ("I shot an elephant in my
pajamas. What he was doing in my pajamas, I'll never know.") Chico's
depends on distortions of syntax and morphology ("We want to make reservash
[ion]"). Harpo's distortion is on the phonetic level -- he communicates by
beeps, snorts, and plucked strings only.

Anybody seen this before?

Is only one, or both, of the following sentences correct?

He trained as an engineer.
He was trained as an engineer.

Please send your replies to me. Thank you.

K.Y. Wu
H8008767hkucc.hku.hk