LINGUIST List 5.1131

Mon 17 Oct 1994

Qs: Det+Adj, Application procedures, Corpora, Tenses/discourse

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Directory

1. Annie Senghas, Determiner+Adj in Spanish, French, and English
2. Stanley Dubinsky, application deadlines/applicant notification timetables in Lx
3. Kathy Mitchell, English corpora
4. Viola Giulia Miglio, query about tenses and discourse analysis

Hello Linguist-listers,

I am looking for references which discuss the relative productiveness
of the determiner-adjective construction in Spanish, French, and
English. Can anyone steer me to such references?

 In Spanish, nouns that are easily recoverable from context
can be "dropped" from within certain constructions. Such deletion is
typical in Spanish. We thus see many determiner-adjective
constructions of the type:
 1) los ricos ('the rich (ones)')
 las americanas ('the Americans' (fem))
 el nuevo ('the new (one)')

In French we see similar determiner-adjective constructions, such as:
 2) les riches ('the rich (ones)')
 les americaines ('the Americans' (fem))
 le petit ('the small (one)')

My impression is that the construction is less common (or is the
result of a less freely productive process) in French than in Spanish,
and is even less common in English, where it seems primarily limited
to some nationalities ('the French', 'the British') and groups of
essential types of people ('the rich' can refer to the group of people
who have the property 'rich', but cannot refer to a single rich
person). I have found articles that discuss this construction in
Spanish, but not that directly compare how freely it appears in Spanish
vs. English and French.

Also of interest to me, but less crucial at this point, are
discussions about whether the construction involves noun deletion,
nominalizing the adjective, or some kind of pro-form or dummy nominal
roughly equivalent to the English 'one' or 'type'.

Please post directly to me at anniepsyche.mit.edu. I am happy to
summarize to the list if there is interest.

Thanks,
Annie Senghas

We are considering some changes to our application procedures here
at U of South Carolina. We would like to know from other Linguistic
Programs and Departments in the US and Canada what your application-
admissions timetables are like. Specifically:

1. Do you have an annual application deadline? If so, what is the date?

2. At what point in the calendar do you notify applicants of acceptance
 or rejection?

3. At what point in the calendar do you decide upon and extend offers
 of funding?

If there is interest, I can summarize for individuals or for the net.
Thank you.

Stan Dubinsky
Linguistic Program
U of South Carolina

I'm sure this is not the first time this has been asked:

I need some pointers to large English corpora, either tagged for parts of
speech or untagged, public domain or not.

I'm also interested in part of speech taggers, public domain or
otherwise.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'll summarize to the list if I
get more than a couple of responses.

 Kathy Mitchell
ai.kathymcc.com

 I would greatly appreciate any bibliographical tips (anything published
over the last 10 years) about the use of tenses in literary and/or spoken
contexts.

Viola Miglio
Linguistics Dept.
Marie Mount Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20705 - U.S.A.

e-mail: violawam.umd.edu