LINGUIST List 4.714

Fri 17 Sep 1993

Sum: Nominal Phrases, Spanish Phonemes

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1. Amparo Alcina, Sum: NNPP and reference
2. Stephen H. Houchen, Spanish Phonemes

THIS WAS THE QUESTION:

>I am working on Nominal Phrases Processing from the point of views of
>the Reference. Concretely, I deal with the topics of logic and pragmatic
>specifity and the definiteness in the nominal phase.
>I will be very greeting for any modern reference book or article about
>this that you can provide.
>I am interested in the Irene Heim' PhD (Mass.Univ) about the semantics of
>(in)definiteness nominal phrases. I'd like know if it is published and
>how I can get it.

>Thanks.

Amparo Alcina alcinavm.ci.uv.es
Dept. Teoria dels Llenguatges
Valencia University
Avda. Blasco Ibanyez, 28
46010 Valencia

THESE ARE THE ANSWERS:

This is the literature recommended about the topic:

Ariel, Mira, 1990, Accessing Noun Phrase Antecedents. Routledge. London
and New York. 265pp
Charolles, Michel (ed), 1986, Research in text connexity and text
coherence: a survey.
Chesterman, Andrew, 1991, On Definiteness: A Study with special reference
to English and Finish. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 56. Cambridge
University Press.
Diesing,Molly, 1992, Indefinites. MIT (LI Monographs 20) 175pp
 An implementation of Heim s idea.
En+, Murvet, (an article in Linguistic Inquiri, 1991).
Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1980, (article) in F. Heny (ed), Ambiguities in
intensional Contexts. D. Reide.
Heim, Irene R., The semantics of (in)definitess noun phrases. Garland
Press, New York.
Ioup, 1977, (article) in Linguistics and Philosophy.
Kamp, H. and U. Reyle, From Discourse to Logic. Kluwer, Dordrecht.
 (An introduction to the Discourse Reference Theory, in which is
 based the Heim s PhD).
Keizer, Evelien, Reference, predication and (in)definiteness in
Functional Grammar. PhD Free Univ., Amsterdam. ( J.L. Mackenzie)
Kleiber, G. (a lot of works about reference, I have not concrete
 works).
Neale, Stephen, 1990, Descriptions. MIT Press.
 (Defends the Russell theory, againts the Heim idea).
Paducheva, Elena V., 1985, Vykazyvanie i ego ssotnesennost s
 dejstvitel'nost'ju. Moskva. (Written in Russian. Some people
 think it is the best book about reference and NNPP).
Prince, Ellen, (a lot of works about the topic:
 en P.Cole (ed) 1985, Radical Pragmatics,
 en I PrA papers in Pragmatics, vol 2, 1988,
 en A.Joshi (ed) Elements of Discourse Understanding)
Ruys, E.G., 1993, The scope of Indefinites, Led, Utrecht. (With a good
 literature about the logic aspects of reference).
Reuland, Eric J. and Alice Ter Meulen, 1987, The representation
 of (in)definiteness. MIT Press. Car Studies in Linguistics 87.
Strand, Kjetil, 1992, "Constraints on Noun Phrase Indexing in Text
Comprehension" (I have received this article, but I have not
 notice about its publication. If anyone is interested, I can
 offer the author electronic adress).

I recently asked the question of whether "g" and "j" are pronounced
identically before "e" and "i" in Spanish. To summarize the many
answers I received, within a particular dialect they are homophonous.
There is variation between dialects, however.

Northern Spain:
 a velar fricative, [x] in IPA notation.

Southern Spain and much of Spanish America:
 pharyngeal fricative [h] similar to 'h' in English home

Others (e.g. Chile):
 complementary distribution between two allophones of /x/:
 (1) palatized fricative [c,] before a [+front] vowel
 (2) otherwise a velar fricative [x].

Thanks for the answers!

Steve Houchen
shhouchefirebird.aud.alcatel.com