LINGUIST List 5.32

Mon 10 Jan 1994

Qs: Prepostions, IE sound laws, Bilingual child, History texts

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Directory

1. , Query: Lexical Semantics of Prepositions
2. Steven Schaufele, Help! Compendium of IE Sound Laws sought
3. Andrew E Levin, Bringing a child up bilingually/multilingually
4. , Hist. of Eng. Texts

I am working on a classification of semantic roles expressed
by/through the use of prepositions in English. An admittedly-shallow
search of the literature has turned up very little on this topic.
I've been analyzing the prepositional phrases contained in a corpus of
about 10,000 English sentences from heavy equipment manuals.
While I realize that this is an unusual undertaking, I'm sure that
there must be other people who have worked in this area of interest.
I would appreciate any references to publications on the semantics of
prepositional phrases, whether of English or of other languages.
A related topic which could be useful to me is the semantics of English
noun-noun compounds.

Historically, this kind of analysis seems to fall more into the realms
of lexicography and foreign language teaching; I am working in natural
language processing with forays into syntactic theory and
semantics/pragmatics. It seems entirely possible that relevant work
may have been done in any or all of these areas of endeavor. Several
colleagues suggested that I post my query to this list. Suggestions of
other appropriate forums of inquiry are also welcome.

Thanks in advance,

--Marion Kee Internet: keecs.cmu.edu
Center for Machine Translation, Carnegie Mellon University

A few years ago i happened to find in the University of Illinois
(Urbana-Champaign) library a fairly small book that was basically a
compendium of all the sound changes that had ever been proposed for the
Indo-European language family -- things like Grimm's Law, Grassmann's Law,
Verner's Law, Brugmann's Law, Siever's Law -- with examples and some
critical commentary. I thought i had taken down a citation for the book,
but now i can't find either the citation (if i actually did take it down)
or the book itself, and i'm leaving UIUC in a couple of weeks. If anybody
out there knows of such a book, please give me a citation as quickly as
possible; i'd like to look it over a bit before i go off to Hungary to
teach an introductory course in historical linguistics.
------
Dr. Steven Schaufele 217-344-8240
712 W. Washington Ave. fcoswsux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Urbana, IL 61801

*** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! ***
 **** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! ****

Could anyone recommend good sources (in English, Russian or French) to read on
bilingual(multilingual) upbringing of a child in a bilingual family? Were
there any interesting studies or research done on linguistic, cognitive and
other developmental issues of raising an infant/child in a multilingual
setting?

Have any subscribing linguists had any direct experience with this subject?

Any help would be appreciated.

A friend has asked me to post this request:
Can anyone recommend textbooks for a course on the History of the English
Language. Any recommendations for vidios?
Thanks in advance.
Paul Denlinger
Soochow University