LINGUIST List 4.70

Sat 06 Feb 1993

Qs: Adjectives, morphology, biblio, recognition

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Arie Verhagen, Query: Attributive adjectives and 'salient feature copying'
2. Diana Ryesky, FW: Morphological dictionaries
3. "Harold Ormsby, Request for bibliog suggestions
4. , Language Recognition

On page 78 of his _Language - The Loaded Weapon_, Dwight Bolinger
mentions the phenomenon that in certain Adj-N combinations the
adjective names a quality that is frequently associated with the
noun, whereby the hearer is invited to consider the property as in a
sense 'inherent' to (the members of) the category (cf. "stubborn
ox", "proud father", "irresponsible child", or in advertisements,
"modern technology", "friendly hosts"). I have two questions related
to this phenomenon.

1) Bolinger mentions two names of linguists in this connection:
 J.P. Maher (to whom he attributes the term 'salient feature
 copying'), and J.D. McClure, but he doesn't give references.
 Would anybody be able to help?
2) Does anybody know any other publications on this phenomenon,
 conditions for its use, contexts in which it particularly found,
 etcetera?

Please reply directly to my e-mail address (see below), not to the
list. Thanks in advance!

Arie Verhagen
Center for Language and Communication, Utrecht University
The Netherlands

e-mail: Arie.Verhagenlet.ruu.nl

I am seeking information on morphological dictionaries and/or
morphological processors with comprehensive morphological analysis for
Arabic, Korean, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese and
Chinese. If you know of any companies or institutions who would have
them, researchers doing this kind of work, or any other leads, please
contact me.

Thanks
Diana Ryesky

A colleague who is trying to do a good job against almost impossible
odds asked me to ask if anyone can suggest (a) book(s) or article(s)
in French or Spanish on grammatical comparisons between French and
Spanish. This is for Spanish-speaking teacher-trainees. Something
recent and general would be ideal.
.
Please reply directly to me:
ormsby  unamvm1.dgsca.unam.mx
ormsby  unamvm1.bitnet

I am a third year finalist at Leeds University studying computer
science.
My third year project is to research language recognition and to
write a program in the language Pop 11 to recognise the following
languages :
 Dutch
 English
 French
 Gaelic
 German
 Italian
 Portuguese
 Serbo-Croat
 Spanish
One of the approaches to this is , when reading a body of text in one
of those particular languages , is to recognise particular sequences
of letters unique to that language. For example , for english I have
already thought of "ght" which I believe is unique to it. However ,
the others I am not so sure about and I was wondering if anyone would
know (or give me advice as to where to look) any sequences of letters
for any of the languages mentioned above.
Thanks

 Stephen Johnson.