LINGUIST List 4.657

Thu 02 Sep 1993

Misc: Uptalk, Before, Lx in the News

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Karen Kay, Question marks and intonation
2. Melody Sutton, Re: 4.625 Qs: Before, Dictionary, Lexicon, Malinke
3. Becky Passonneau, Computational Linguistics in the news

Alex Monaghan said:
> karen kay writes:
>
> > I thought that bimbo was Italian for 'child'?
>
> is this a case of "uptalk" (recent newspaper article starring mclemore)
> in orthography? if so, is it common? i find it really bizarre to mark this
> kind of thing with a question mark?

I don't know what uptalk is. I used the question mark to indicate rising
intonation, which I would use if I were saying this sentence. I use
question intonation for statements I'm not quite sure of. I think this
is a common feature of English

Karen Kay
 karenknetcom.com

Message 2: Re: 4.625 Qs: Before, Dictionary, Lexicon, Malinke

RE: The use of "before" pointed out by Michael Henderson. ("I have never been
to Finland before.") This is perfect for me, with no implication that I am
about to go to Finland. (To convey that I am planning a trip, I might stress
"before.") Apparently those of us under 30 have an extra negative/aspectual
polarity item.

Melody Sutton
UCLA

Last year there was long discussion on LINGUIST bemoaning the
fact that linguistic research is generally misrepresented in
the popular media. Today's NYTimes (9/1/93, p. D5)has an article by
John Markoff which proves that accurate journalism is indeed
possible. He reports on current work by the group led
by Karen Jensen, and quotes other linguists such as
Steve Richardson and Judith Klavans. The article
concerns the construction of a large
knowledge bases extracted from machine-readable dictionaries,
using parsers and linguistic knowledge.
Richardson and Jensen, at Microsoft, are quoted on the
strengths of using MRDs, and Klavans is quoted on limitations.