LINGUIST List 5.1246

Mon 07 Nov 1994

Qs: "Snow", Software, Clitic reduplication, Cues of emotions

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1. "Leslie Z. Morgan", Re: 5.1239 Eskimo "snow"
2. Daniel Radzinski, machine translation software
3. Jairo Morais Nunes, Q: clitic reduplication
4. "FRANKE INGOLF", Vocal Cues of Emotions

Message 1: Re: 5.1239 Eskimo "snow"

The returned discussion of "snow" in Eskimo has brought my
thoughts around to a related issue which I do not recall having
seen discussed on _Linguist_ since I've subscribed: the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis. I just read an article in _Foreign Language
Annals_ 27.3, "Awareness of Text Structure: Is There a Match
Between Readers and Authors of Second Language Texts?" by
Sally A. Hague and Rene'e Scott (343-363), where one of the
hypotheses in examining Spanish texts is that they will differ
because of the difference in culture-set ways of writing (based
on articles by Kaplan (1966 & 1976). In fact, their sample DOES
NOT show such a difference.
I was under the impression that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is
generally NOT accepted and is somewhat of an error in interpre-
tation.
A dean here has cited the hypothesis (without knowing that is
what he was citing) as the main reason for studying foreign
languages. Does anyone have some suggestions of readable
refutations of Sapir-Whorf, something one could send students,
deans, etc. to? Or is this a returning issue that is under
debate?
Thank you- I'll summarize responses for the list.
Leslie Morgan MORGANLOYOLA.EDU or MORGANLOYVAX.BITNET

Could anyone please point me to any commercially available packages for
machine translation, or machine-aided translation, from any of Bulgarian,
Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Japanese or Korean into English? Any leads
would be greatly appreciated.

Daniel Radzinski
Tovna Translation Machines
Jerusalem, Israel
drtovna.co.il

 I'm looking at clitic reduplication as exemplified by the Spanish
sentences in (1) (from Silva-Corvalan 1989):

 (1) a. Yo LO iba a matarLO
 I him was-going to kill-him
 b. Yo despues LO andaba buscandoLO
 I later him was looking for-him
 c. TE puedo verTE manana
 you I-can see-you tomorrow

 I would appreciate if the readers of LINGUIST could provide me with
references on this kind of phenomenon (not necessarily in Romance). I would
also like to get in touch with native speakers of languages that allow
constructions like (1) in order to check some data.
 Thanks, Jairo Nunes.

Dear linguist members,
at the time I try to realize an experiment for my final report. The subject
of this report is 'Vocal Cues of Emotion'. For this experiment I have to
produce stimuli containing a neutral nonsense sentence spoken by
different emotions. My head was steaming thinking about neutral
nonsense words. Here my results:

a. STUSS
b. PRACHUS
c. BEFTI
d. KONU
e. TAGRIA
f. KUTIN
g. PETRE
h. KASCHTENA

These nonsense words are combined to a sentence:

i. STUSS PRACHUS BEFTI KONU TAGRIA A KUTIN PETRE
KASCHTENA.

This sentence is the base for speakers who are requested of speaking it
as 10 different emotions. The emotions are:

1. happiness
2. interest
3. surprise
4. grief
5. anger
6. disgust
7. contempt
8. fear
9. shame
10. guilt

To be sure that an emotional perception is based on vocal (not semantic)
cues alone I need a judgement at sematic content for the nonsense words
and sentence above.

I would like to request you to decide if each word (a. to h.) and the
sentence (i) is related to an emotion by READING alone. I would also
know if you are familiar with a word simply writing an 'F' for 'familiar'.
Do not hesitate writing a '0' if you are not able to refer to an emotion.

Please reply to fran2801pcmail.uni-trier.de in the following form:

emotion, decision
------------------------------
(example)
a, 3
b, 9, 10, F
c, 0
.
.
.
i, 0
--------------------------------

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Ingolf Franke
University of Trier

e-mail: fran2801pcmail.uni-trier.de