LINGUIST List 5.639

Fri 03 Jun 1994

Qs: "Rule of three", Tone test, Text comparison, Verb acquistion

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Directory

1. David Prager Branner, Query: the "rule of three" in comparativism
2. russ bernard, tone test
3. "William J. Rapaport", comparing 2 texts
4. "Henk Wolf", acquisition of verbs

I have always heard that in establishing corrrespondence sets one should
have, at a minimum, three unarguable examples before daring to use the
word "regular". A reasonable requirement, but who said this first? Was
it Meillet? I would appreciate hearing any ideas, concrete citations, or
rumors.

David Prager Branner, Yuen Ren Society
Asian L&L, DO-21, University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195 <charmiiu.washington.edu>

george mbeh and i have a paper describing the
results of our first test of the tone problem.
the tone problem is this: do native speakers of
previously nonwritten tone languages need to see
tones marked when they begin to use alphabetic
writing in their languages?

the problem has several interesting components.
for example, what are the consequences,
in terms of language instruction, if tones in those
languages are marked or not marked? do some native
speakers have more need than others to see tone marked?
how can we measure these variables and test these
questions?

this first paper of a series introduces the experimental
test we've devised and describes the results of the test
on one native speaker of one tone language, kom. (kom is
spoken by about 130,000 people in the grassfields region
of northwest province, cameroon.) for this one speaker, a
university professor of history, marking tones slows down
significantly his apprehension of text in kom.

if anyone would like to see a copy of this paper, please
correspond directly to ufrussnervm.nerdc.ufl.edu

russ bernard

I'm posting this query for a colleague in our Classics dept.

She wants to be able to compare 2 texts to see if they were written
by the same author, or by different authors. Presumably, this would
be done by some combination of a stylistic and a statistical analysis.

(As I recall, this sort of technique has been used by folks who try to
figure out if Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare's plays.)

What she needs are pointers to the literature, especially information
on how reliable such arguments are.

Please reply by email to: rapaportcs.buffalo.edu

If there is sufficient interest, I'll post a summary. Thanks.

Dear linguists,

I'm putting on this query for a friend who is not on e-mail. He is looking
for references on children's acquisition of verbs. He's especially
interested in the acquisition of Dutch verbal complexes, but references to
more general works are welcome too. Please respond through me.

Henk Wolf
H.A.Y.Wolfstud.let.ruu.nl