LINGUIST List 4.661

Fri 03 Sep 1993

Qs: Hindi, Tags, ASL, Disorders

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. David Adger, hindi query
2. James Tauber, references for syntactic class tags
3. Christopher Brockett, Query: Donkey Sentences in ASL
4. Cherilyn Young, speech, lang, and SLE

Can anyone who's a native speaker of Hindi tell me whether this
language has measure phrase complements like:

(1) Anson weighed 70 kilos
(2) The book cost 10 dollars
(3) The conference lasted 2 weeks

and if it does, whether past participles agree with the measure phrase
in the same way that normal objects agree?

Many thanks in advance,

David

I'm looking for comprehensive references to work done on
syntactic categories - specifically in reference to choosing
what tags to use when tagging corpora (often in highly
inflected languages) for parsing with an augmented phrase
structure grammar.

I'm interested, for example, in the various pros and cons to
treating each case of noun as a separate class versus lumping
them all together as `N'. Also whether all verb forms should
be lumped together as `V' versus separating participles, infinitives,
etc.

The CCAT's morphologically tagged LXX, for example gives two tags:
The "type" (noun, verb, adjective, demonstrative...) and the
"parse" (number, gender, person, case, tense, mood...).

>From a *syntactic* point of view, I can understand things like
number and gender being pushed aside as `secondary' ("parse") tagging, but
it seems to make more sense to distinguish tensed verbs, infinitives
and participles at the primary tag level ("type") rather than secondary.

Where should I be looking for discussion of such issues?

James Tauber
jtaubertartarus.uwa.edu.au

Are there any subscribers out there who are native or near-native signers of
ASL and might be willing to help me with some data? I am trying to find
out, for a project in the crosslinguistic typology of quantification, what
the ASL equivalents of following are. What I need is an item-by-item
pseudo-English gloss, including discourse and syntactic markers, if any.
Depending on the responses, I may need to ask some follow-up questions.

If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it.

If a woman owns a dog, she usually talks to it.

I apologize for the boring examples. Any pointers to papers on the
ASL treatment of this class of sentences would also be much appreciated.
Please e-mail replies to me direct at chrisbrou.washington.edu.

Thank you,

Chris Brockett
Dept. of Asian Languages and Literature
University of Washington

 I'm looking for any information about speech and language
disorders/dysfunction caused by systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), or
(more generally) SLE's effects upon the central nervous system. I'll be
extremely grateful for anything anyone can send me, and I'll send to
LINGUIST a summary of the information I receive. Thank you!!!

 Hopefully and gratefully,

 Cherilyn Young
 210 W. 27th St. #12
 Austin, TX 78705

 cherilynccwf.cc.utexas.edu