LINGUIST List 4.763

Tue 28 Sep 1993

Qs: Bibliographies, Esperanto, Text, Intonation

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , on-line bibliographies
2. clara mojica, esperanto
3. "Claudia Brugman", request for text suggestions
4. Evan S. Smith, Question Intonation

Are there any on-line linguistic bibliographies on
Internet? At the moment, I'm interested in
computational linguistics, but from time to time I have
need of others. I am aware of the one which is the
machine version of "Computational Linguistics in the
'80s" (clbibrussell.stanford.edu), but it apparently
isn't being kept up-to-date. The AI people used to
regularly send out "bib" entries for journal articles
etc. (I don't know if they still do); does anyone do
that for linguistics?

A friend of mine is desperately trying to find references on research
evidence indicating that some children were unable to acquire esperanto
in spite of their being raised in an environment where esperanto was
the input language.

I appreciate your help on ths matter. Please respond directly to my
e-mail address since I am not subscribed to the list anymore.

Clara Mojica Diaz
cmojicande.unl.edu

I'm currently co-teaching a first-year course entitled "Language, Style, and
Communication" (since I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, the course is
at its end rather than its beginning). It's strongly recommended, and
about to be required, as a course for Science (read "Med") majors, and is
also open to, e.g., English majors. My co-lecturer is a rhetorician, and we
 have
been concentrating this term on critical reading and on decent analysis and
writing from a rhetorical point of view. We have also been teaching them
how to give short speeches. I was responsible for part of the course that
had to do with lingusitic interaction, and I tried to teach about such
issues as prejudice based on linguistic behaviour; the disctinctions between
prescriptivism and descriptivism and dialect and register; gender-based
differences; the fact that nobody's total linguistic behaviour is either
"standard" or "Received" (and I deconstructedthose two ideas for them). I
skimmed over such issues as the distinction between "what's
said" and "what's meant" (lg. in context issues) and communicative
failures and repairs, etc. All this in the context of no real linguistic
training (for them): we have another first-year course which is a real
introduction to linguistics.

The reason the Science students have to take it ultimately comes down
to two facts: they're weak in literacy skills and the Med establishment is
responding to a widely-held and well-justified belief that doctors don't
give a damn about their patients and don't know how to either listen to
them or talk to them effectively. (How we're supposed to make them give
a damn has not been revealed to us.)

In addition to my own slender contribution to our lecturer-authored hand-
book, I had them read Halliday and Hasan's _Language, Context, and Text:
Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective_. It was a less than
complete success (that is, they hated it): it was too dense and there was
too much idiosyncrasy in their terminology. I'd appreciate any suggestions,
to be implemented next year, on a text that deals with some or all of the issues
mentioned above--in short, a book in applied sociolinguistics which takes a
linguistic perspective (as opposed to a "communications" perspective--the
ones I've looked at are too focused on "improvement" and don't take the
linguists' descriptive/nonprescriptive perspective) but which doesn't spend
a lot of time on terminology or anything theoretically sophisticated from
 linguistics.

Other things to know about the situation: I am in control of only nine out
of the 26 weeks in the full-year term, and we have only one hour of
lecture and one hour of tutorial/discussion section per week. Students
are reluctant to read anything, so whatever they read has to be enter-
taining and not very challenging. Book prices here are even more
outrageous than in the US, so it should be relatively cheap. A substan-
tial minority of students take both first-year courses, so there shouldn't
be too much overlap with a linguistics intro such as Fromkin & Rodman
or O'Grady et al.

I am already overdue in getting my textbook order in, and I haven't found
anything even close to acceptable among my search, so whatever you
can tell me will be great. I will summarize to the list if people indicate
interest.

Thanks.
 --c. brugman
Claudia Brugman
English Dept. and Linguistics Programme
University of Otago
PO Box 56
Dunedin, New Zealand
cbrugmangandalf.otago.ac.nz

Text item: Text_1

 Has anyone noticed or documented the following phenomenon:

 Either/or informational questions often receive the traditional yes/no
 intonation, esp. in fast-food restaurant talk, e.g., "Is that for here
 or to go?". When I hear that in the "new" intonation, I am tempted to
 respond, "Yes, one of those."

 Is this intonation used because it is "fast speech?"

 Evan Smith
 smitheext.missouri.edu