LINGUIST List 4.755

Sat 25 Sep 1993

Disc: Noun Constraints, Metanalysis

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1. Amparo Alcina, Sum NNPP (2)
2. "Anne M Loring-1", Re: 4.735 British English
3. mark, metanalysis
4. , RE: 4.723 Qs: Verbal behavior, MT, UHUH, Korean

The article "Constraints on Noun Phrase Indexing in Text Comprehension"
(Kjetil Strand), is printed in Lars Ahrenberg (ed), 1993, Papers from
the Third Nordic Conference on Text Comprehension in Man and Machine,
Linkoping, Sweden.

Thanks.

Amparo Alcina
alcinavm.ci.uv.es
Dpt. Teoria de los Lenguajes
University of Valencia
Avda. Blasco Ibanyez, 28
46010 Valencia
Spain

Message 2: Re: 4.735 British English

I am fascinated by the notion of adding a plural suffix to "help" in British
English ("helps wanted"), which sounds WEIRD in American English.
(I can think of another routine British plural usage that is not used in
American: Compare the American English "drug dealers" with the
British (and Canadian?) English "drugs dealers".)

 But in every English I know of, we have "cook" and "cooks"
(not "cooker", "cookers", unless we're talking about kitchen equipment
rather than people).
 So, folks, a "help" helps, a "cook" cooks, right? Do we
have more of these agentive nouns lacking the derivational "-er" suffix?
Some in British English that aren't in American English?
Different constraints on what can be pluralized? Why?

Anne Loring
University of Minnesota

Dennis Baron writes:

As for technical terms, again I'm sorry if you reject metathesis as
an explanation of nadder>adder. It does seem a stretch. In their
discussion of the word, Pyles and Algeo (4ed, p. 144): "the _n_ of
the indefinite article has attached itself to the following word" --
no technical term here. But on p. 38 Algeo claims, "The metathesis of a
sound and a syllable boundary in the word _another_ leads to the
reinterpretation of original _an other_ as _a nother_, especially in
the expression "a whole nother thing."

 -------------------------

The key phrase is "of a sound and a syllable boundary".
Metathesis is any reversal of ordering; in this case one of the
objects reordered is a syllable (in fact, word) boundary,
resulting in the transfer of a phoneme from one word to another.
This SPECIFIC kind of metathesis has been called metanalysis, as
has been pointed out.

 Mark A. Mandel
 Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : markdragonsys.com

Message 4: RE: 4.723 Qs: Verbal behavior, MT, UHUH, Korean

In response to Bob Wachel's query, the notion that uh-huh (and uh-uh) is of
African origin was put forward by David Dalby (see my recent posting on OK).
I saw it in a feature in the London _Times_ in July 1969, but I'll try and
find out if Dalby published any more scholarly accounts than this.

On "backchanneling", the term, as far as I know, was one of quite a few
technical innovations for conversational analysis invented by the ethno-
methodologists in the early 70's, e.g. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson in
Language 50 (1974).

Paul Werth.