LINGUIST List 4.897

Sat 30 Oct 1993

Qs: Pupils' Corpus, Farsi, Italian Lexicon, Phonetics

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Directory

1. "Anna-Brita Stenstr|m", RE: Corpus of pupils' written English
2. M Perkins, Research on Farsi
3. Graham Seaman, PCKimmo Italian lexicon
4. Karen S. Chung, Diphthongs and syllable count

Does anyone have access to a corpus of written English, essays, etc. by
native speakers aged around 16-17 for comparison with a similar corpus done
by Norwegian students collected at Bergen university (the EVA project)?

Angela Hasselgren & Anna-Brita Stenstr|m

A PhD student of mine - Habibeh Samadi - is researching the acquisition of
grammar in Farsi-speaking children. We have so far been unable to find any
published or unpublished work in this area, or even anything on Farsi
(spoken Persian) in general.

Is this a vacuum? Any information or leads gratefully accepted.

Mick Perkins

Does anyone have a freely available lexicon and set of
rules for italian using pckimmo (the morphological
analyzer)? If not, can anyone suggest a better forum to ask in?
Many thanks,
Graham Seaman
 ------------------------------------------------------------
Graham Seaman, School of Computer Science,
University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish St. London W1M 8JS
email: seamangwmin.ac.uk

I have two questions for the phonetically inclined:

 (1) How many syllables do _child_ and _spoil_ have? I remember being
taught in second grade that both have only one, and for me, sometimes they do
have only one; but often I pronounce them as two syllables, the second
beginning with a glide: ['tSaI jld] and ['spCI jl]. Does anybody have input
or references on these and similar examples involving syllable count of
words like these containing diphthongs, particularly [aI] and [CI]?

 (2) The [C] (backwards c), i.e. _aw_ as is _saw_ and _law_, in North
American English is supposed to be a monophthong; but for me it is a dynamic
rather than static sound; the mouth continues to open wider for a while to
complete the sound. For this reason I have never been comfortable considering
it a plain old cardinal vowel. I'd appreciate hearing others' thoughts on this.

 Thanks!

 Karen Steffen Chung
 National Taiwan University
 karchungccms.ntu.edu.tw