LINGUIST List 5.391

Tue 05 Apr 1994

Qs: Gramaticalization; Comparison; Portuguese; Reading

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Grammaticalization and black holes
2. Y. Shum, Comparison 2 Noun Phrases
3. , Brazilian Portuguese
4. Mireia Trenchs, Seminar, symposias,, etc. on reading processes???

Dear Linguist Readers,
I have a rather odd query, and hope somebody can help. It's a
standard (and usually well-supported) view in work on
grammaticalization, etc. that certain pathways in change are
unidirectional: e.g. word > clitic > affix, etc. In other words, the
end results of grammaticalization are black holes, out of which no
information can be extracted.

Does anyone know of any cases that are clear counterexamples, or are
construable perhaps as such? Onew that occurs to me is the rise of
the short-lived 'his-genitive' in English (the type 'John his house',
where apparently the -s ending of the genitive was reinterpreted for
a while as a reduced 'his', and the analysis was later extended sos
that you got 'Mary her house' (after 'Mary his house'), 'John and
Mary their houses', etc. One might take this as emergence of a word
out of an affix (even if the affix wasn't a word originally). Any
similar examples or things that suggest this kind of reversal would
be useful, as I'm doing some work on directionality in general, and
the notion of attractors in linguistic history out of which nothing
can emerge, and whether such things can be defined. If anyone thinks
my example is crazy or misintrpreted, that would be nice too.

Thanks. Roger Lass, Linguistics, University of Cape Town

Hi there,

 I would truly appreciate it if anyone could tell me of any methods
that could be used to determine if 2 noun phrases are equivalent,
given that the words in the phrases have been tagged with their part-of-speech.
 The reason why I'm interested in this is because I've written a crude software
that extracts noun phrases from a text. However, there are too many phrases
being extracted and I'm trying to get a 'frequency of noun phrases'.To do
this I will need a comparison algorithm.

 The naive way to do it is to consider 2 noun phrases are equal if
any of the nouns in the phrases are equal. This easily leads to the
situation where phrase A is equal to phrase B,phrase A is equal to phrase C
butphrase B is not equal to phrase C.

 Thanks a lot!

I would like to get in touch with a linguist who is familiar with the Brazilian
Portuguese language/phonemes. I have a small one-time job (couple of hours)
waiting for that person, and good pay! It can be entirely done via e-mail.

Please contact ingevpro.com if interested.

Inge De Bleecker

I'm currently conducting research on reading processes and teaching reading
skills in second and foreign languages. I've been granted a few
sabbatical months, and I'd like to use my free time as much (and as
intensively) as possible and attend seminars, conferences, symposia or courses
on these subjects. Do you know of any upcoming this year?

I'd also like to get in touch with people who share my research interest.

Thanks.

Mireia Trenchs
Facultat d'Humanitats
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona, SPAIN