LINGUIST List 5.1166

Sun 23 Oct 1994

Qs: Spanish, Narrative, Volodin, Who/What, Infixes and prefixes

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Paul Roochnik, Spanish sentence corpus
2. Laine Berman, Query: children's narratives and violence
3. Jonathan David Bobaljik, Re: A.P. Volodin
4. , Requery: Who/What with ref. to animals
5. David Schneider, Q: L's with infixes and prefixes

Dear Linguist,

 I am hunting for a corpus of Spanish sentences. Ideally, the
corpus should include 1000 (or more) sentences in Spanish. If you know
of such a corpus, I would be grateful for your advice. Since this
corpus will be used in computational linguistic research, I would
prefer ASCII format. Failing that, other formats (WP, WinWord, etc.)
will do fine -- I will just do a conversion. Thank you very much for
your help. Please reply to 5290958mcimail.com

 Cheers from Paul.

Can anyone help me locate studies that describe the styles, structures, or
topics of narratives, either spoken or written, from adolescents, aged 8 to
16? The original language of the narratives does not matter, but those from
Indonesian or Southeast Asian languages would be particularly helpful.

I am about to begin a discourse analysis of a fairly large corpus of 'life
stories' from homeless children in Java. I will focus - for now - on
descriptions of violence and sexual abuse as they appear in the stories by
locating how these experiences fit into the narrative in terms of affect,
agency and responsibility. For the most part, the stories are composed of
a progression of speaker-centered event clauses with little affect, and no
agency or responsibility. Nor do they show any blame or anger toward the
violence and deceptions they describe. The stories display no particular
focus or stress, no climax, no 'so what?' - just chronologies of events. Is
this common in adolescent stories, or those by abused children?

Does anyone know of studies of narratives told by children who have
experienced abuse, violence, etc.? Studies of adolescent narratives will
also be helpful.

Thank you in advance,
Laine Berman
gt6qcqcvaxa.acc.qc.edu

I would appreciate any help in contacting a Russian linguist, Aleksandr P
Volodin. I believe he is currently in Bonn, Germany, though he is
affiliated with the Institute for linguistics in St. Petersburg, Russia.

I have exhausted the nameservers and email lists, and society (LSA, SSILA,
etc...) lists to no avail.

Thanks to all,

Jonathan

Sometime ago I posted a query about whether 'who' or 'what' is
used to ask about animals in various languages. I won't summarize
the responses at this time, since most of them only served to
show that my question was too broadly framed. Itappears that
there are different situations involved, and the one where I
think I am the most likely to get some clear judgements and some
clear differences between languages is the situation where we
are asking for the kind of animal, not trying to identify the
individual animal (e.g., Spot vs. Dutchess). For ex., someone
walks into a room with a swelling on his arm, a wound or whatever,
do you say (in whatever language)

'Who bit/stung you?' or 'What bi/stung you?'

or You catch a glimpse of an animal disappearing into the
distance (diving under water, whatever). Do you say:

'Who was that?' or 'What was that?'

I believe that in English and Polish, it would always be 'what',
but in Russian (according to the standard descriptions and according
to some checking with native speakers by Alex Eulenberg) it would
be 'kto' ('who'). I have no clear idea for any other language.

I will post a summary if I receive responses to this new query.

Alexis Manaster Ramer

I am looking for references to languages that have both infixes and
prefixes/suffixes. In particular, I am looking for languages that have
infixes with phonological forms similar to prefixes/suffixes in that same
language. Any references or pointers you can provide for languages that
have infixes in general and languages with similar infixes and prefixes
will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Dave Schneider
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Delaware