LINGUIST List 4.531

Wed 07 Jul 1993

Qs: Registers, French, Classifiers

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Directory

1. michele kilgore, Physicians' Registers
2. Jeff Tennant, Query: Mac Software for French Pronunciation Teaching
3. David Gil, QUERY: CLASSIFIERS AND CONSTITUENCY

I am a grad student at UGA researching the different registers used by physicia
ns with each other, with patients and patients' families, and with other medica
l professionals. Any suggestions or sources very much appreciated. Thanks. Mkil
goreuga.cc.uga.edu

Could anybody recommend software to help students learn French
pronunciation and phonetics? I am mainly interested in programs for the
Macintosh (HyperCard stacks or other such material), but suggestions regarding
MS-DOS software would be welcome as well.

Please reply to my e-mail address and I will post a summary to the list.
Merci.

Jeff Tennant
Department of French
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6A 3X7
Canada

tel: (519) 661-2111 xt5688
e-mail: jtennantbosshog.arts.uwo.ca

I am fishing for constituency tests for numeral
classifier constructions both in "numeral classifier
languages" and in languages like English.

Consider the following phrases in Mandarin and their
equivalents in English:

 shi bang rou
 ten pound meat
 "ten pounds of meat"

 yi guo fan
 one pot rice
 "one pot of rice"

 san ge ren
 three unit man
 "three men" [no English equivalent with classifier]

My gut feeling is that the constituent structure for
such phrases is different in "numeral classifier
languages" than in English-type languages; specifically,
that it is [NUM CL] NOUN in languages like Mandarin, but
NUM [CL NOUN] in languages like English. However, when
I started looking for solid evidence in support of this
claim, I found it surprisingly difficult to come up with
good constituency tests in either English or Mandarin.

I would therefore appreciate any suggestions and/or
references pertaining to the constituent structure of
numeral classifier constructions in any language, of
either the English or the Mandarin types. Explicit
constituency tests would be most welcome.

(Also, I wonder whether there might be language-internal
variation between different classes of classifiers, for
example "measure" classifiers, eg. "pound"; "container"
classifiers, eg. "pot", and others.)

A further note: In numeral classifier languages, the sort of
evidence I am familiar with in support of [NUM CL] NOUN
constituency derives from tone sandhi (in Mandarin), the
coalescence of NUM and CL into a single word (in
Japanese), the ability of the [NUM CL] constituent to
"float" (in Japanese), and the occurrence of NOUN NUM CL
word order (in Thai). In contrast, in Vietnamese,
Thompson's reference grammar seems to suggest that the
constituency is NUM [CL NOUN], and the Vietnamese
linguists who I've had occasion to consult would appear
to agree.

David Gil
National University of Singapore
ellgildnusvm.bitnet