LINGUIST List 4.83

Mon 08 Feb 1993

Qs: Field schools, Computational, Code mix, Coordination

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1. roberta chase borgatti, summer field schools
2. Kemal Oflazer, Computational Implementations of Semantic Structures
3. Vincent Su, code mixing
4. , Unbalanced Coordination

I am a first-year graduate student in cultural anthropology and am looking for
a field school taking place this summer where I can learn research methods in c
ultural or linguistic anthropology and work on a project under supervision of a
 professional anthropologist. My particular interest is in the sociolinguistics
 of the Provence region of France (e.g., looking at the use of French vs. Occit
an languages). Any suggestions/recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Roberta Chase Borgatti

Has there been any computational implementations and/or use
of Jackendoff's Semantic Structures in NLP applications?

Any information or comments on such implementations would
be appreciated.

Thanks

Kemal Oflazer
Bilkent University
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent, ANKARA, 06533 TURKIYE

e-mail: kotrbilun.bitnet
fax: (90) 4 - 266-4126
 (90) 4 - 266-4127
tel: (90) 4 - 266-4133
 (90) 4 - 266-4000/1258

Dear Linguists,

I am looking for studies of intra-sentential code-switching (or code-mixing)
in Chinese languages, especially in Mandarin and Taiwanese.

Any references will be greatly appreciated.

Vincent Su
NTNU144TWNMOE10

Does anybody know of examples of either unbalanced coordination (as in (i))
or extraordinary balanced coordination (as in (2)) in any language? I am
collecting data on these kinds of coordination for my PhD thesis, and I
have data from 20-30 languages so far, but more would be welcome.

(i) Mary was sitting between him and I

What is unusual in unbalanced coordination is that one of the conjuncts
does not have the grammatical properties that we expect in that position.
In (i), the second conjunct has nominative case, which is unexpected in
object position. Other features that might be subject to unbalancedness are
e.g.tense, aspect, person, and number. (The latter two only if there is
some agreement-marking elsewhere which obviously takes only one of the
conjuncts into account.) Serial verbs might be concidered in these terms,
too. It is important that the opposite order of the same conjuncts would
be unacceptable or much worse, i.e.: A & B, vs. * B and A. I am only
interested in morpho-syntactic unbalancedness, not in the
semantic-pragmatic type of "drink the poison & die".

(ii) Him and her were always good friends

What is unusal in extraordinary balanced coordination is that, although the
conjuncts have the same grammatical features, these features are unexpected
in this position. In (ii), both conjuncts have accusative case, but the
expected case would be nominative. The deviant feature(s) is only possible
because the phrase is coordinated, i.e. A & B, B & A, vs. *A, *B.

I would welcome data from any language or language variety (the phenomenon
is more prevalent in substandard varieties in some languages). Please
include, if you can, information on whether this is a widespread or
marginal phenomenon in the language (-variety), and where the
language(-variety) is spoken. If possible, examples from a written source
with references is preferred, but I am of course interested in any other
examples, too.

For those interested, I can compile a list of the answers.

Janne Johannessen,
University of Oslo.