LINGUIST List 4.566

Mon 26 Jul 1993

Qs: Discourse particles, ALPI, Intermediate traces, Spanish

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1. Steven Schaufele, query: semantics of discourse particles
2. David Heap, Query: ALPI?
3. MICHAEL K DICKEY, Query: Intermediate Traces
4. pilar prieto, Spanish

I am acquainted with the work of Goldberg, Schourup, etc. on the pragmatics
of discourse particles such as 'actually', 'i mean', 'like', 'well', and
'y'know'. I'm wondering if anybody has investigated them from the point of
view of formal semantics. I have a suspicion that such particles are, in
fact, semantically vacuous and require 'semantic hosts', rather as clitics
require phonological hosts. Does anybody out there know of any research in
formal semantics that might relate to this issue, or of any attempt to
integrate such particles into formal semantic theory?

Sincerely,
Steven
------
Dr. Steven Schaufele c/o Department of Linguistics
712 West Washington Ave. University of Illinois
Urbana, IL 61801 4088 Foreign Languages Building
 707 South Mathews Street
217-344-8240 Urbana, IL 61801
fcoswsux1.cso.uiuc.edu

*** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! ***
 **** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! ****

 I am currently studying the range of variation in pronominal
clitic clusters across Romance varieties, and am rather short of
dialect survey data for Ibero-Romance varieties. There was a
survey done in the '30s for the _Atlas Linguistico de la
Peninsula Iberica_ (or ALPI), of which one volume (containing 75
phonetic maps) eventually appeared in 1962. According to Tomas
Navarro Tomas (1975:15), the remaining survey materials were
(are?) in Madrid, either at the 'Centro de Estudios Historicos',
or elsewhere under the auspices of the Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Cientificas. This is as much as I have been able
to find out, and I would greatly appreciate it if anyone could
provide any more information about the following questions:

1) Exactly where are the remaining ALPI survey materials? Can
researchers gain access to them? Under what conditions?

2) Was the questionnaire used for the ALPI survey published (or
otherwise available) anywhere? At this point, it is unclear just
how much morphological data (of the sort that interests me)
might have been elicited in this survey.

3) Are there any other linguistic atlas or similar dialect
surveys of the Ibero-Romance varieties which include at least
some data involving pronominal clitics? I am already familiar
with the various regional atlases by M. Alvar et al. (Andalucia,
Aragon-Navarra-Rioja, and Islas Canarias), as well as Griera i
Gaja's Catalan atlas. I would be _most_ interested in any other
surveys, either completed or in progress, using questionnaires
which could provide at least some data on pronominal clitics.

Any other practical information regarding dialectological
research in Spain would also be greatly appreciated. Please reply
to me personally as I will be set to NOMAIL in the near future; I
will eventually post a summary if there enough interest.

Many thanks in advance,

David Heap
University of Toronto
heapepas.utoronto.ca

Out of curiosity, what empirical evidence is there for the existence of
intermediate traces *other than* stuff from Subjacency, etc.? Some people
around here have noted Esther Torrego's analysis of obligatory subject
inversion in wh- questions in Spanish and Quantifier Float stuff. (Somebody
also mentioned AgrO object agreement phenomena, and the French que/qui
alternation.) What other phenomena, particularly non-adjunct movement
examples, illustrate intermediate traces at work? Please respond directly
to me, and I will post a summary.

Mike Dickey
mkdickeytitan.ucs.umass.edu

 I would appreciate any information or pointers about the
existence of Spanish databases with the any of the
following characteristics:

1/ Spanish text with parts-of-speech labels.

2/ Spanish text with syntactic labels.

3/ Spanish speech (any dialect) with phoneme segmentation.

4/ Spanish speech (any dialect) with some kind of
prosodic labelling.

 I would also appreciate any information on commercial and
non-commercial programs for Spanish text processing:

1/ parts-of-speech taggers

2/ syntactic parsers

 Please reply to my address, and I'll summarize the
responses to the list. Thanks in advance,

Pilar Prieto
prietoresearch.att.com