LINGUIST List 5.1083

Wed 05 Oct 1994

Qs: Adjectives, Harmony, Contrastive, String manipulation

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Directory

1. David Gil, Q: SIZE ADJECTIVES AND QUANTIFIERS
2. Elizabeth Hume, Vowel harmony
3. "Filip Devos", info
4. Bill Croft, String manipulation tools for the Mac?

I'm looking for examples, from any language, of quantifiers
that are formally related to size adjectives.

So far, I am familiar with the following three examples:

English:
little > a little

Lao:
nohy5 > nohy5 neu:ng2
little little one
"little" "a little"

Minangkabau:
ketek > saketek
little one-little
"little" "a little"

Is anybody familiar with more such examples?

In spite of the typological and geographical diversity of these
three languages, the above constructions are strikingly
similar. This raises the following further questions:

(1) are there any analogous examples where "many" is derived
from "big"?

(2) are there any examples where the derivation is in the other
direction, ie. where a size adjective, eg. "little" is derived
from a quantifier, eg. "a few"?

(Note: this query is cross-posted on the linguist and sealang
lists. A joint summary will also be posted on both lists.)

We are compiling a database of vowel harmony/assimilation
processes, e.g.
 vowel to vowel assimilation
 vowel to consonant assimilation
 consonant to vowel assimilation

We are asking for the names of languages, with reference(s), if
possible. Well-known as well as lesser-known cases are welcome,
published or unpublished.

Please respond to fparkinsling.ohio-state.edu

Thank you,

Frederick Parkinson

This message centralizes some four requests for information:

1. A colleague of mine has heard about some new journal devoted to
contrastive linguistics. Unfortunately, he can't remember the title/
publisher/etc. Can anyone help him? He also asks which other journals (other
than <Contrastes> in France and <Papers and Studies in Contrastive
Linguistics> in Poland) are entirely devoted to contrastive studies.

2. Are there any other electronic lists (than the Linguist List) that may
interest linguists?

3. Researchers in an interdisciplinary project on semantic vagueness and
fuzzy set theory (fuzzy logic) are trying to locate colleagues working on
the same subject (exchange and pass on information, publications, calls for
papers, etc.).

4. The same holds for researchers in a contrastive project on verb valency
and verbal polysemy (writing a contrastive valency dictionary of Dutch,
French and English).

Please contact: <filip.devosrug.ac.be>, for which many thanks in advance.

Filip Devos
Department of Dutch Linguistics
University of Gent (Belgium)

Does anyone out there know of a Macintosh string
manipulation program that operates on text files?
Anything from something grep-like to something fancier
would be of interest. Also, I'd be interested in learning
about either public-domain or commercial programs.

Thanks,
Bill Croft

Dept of Linguistics, U Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
w.croftmanchester.ac.uk FAX: +44-61-275 3187 Phone: 275 3188