LINGUIST List 5.773

Mon 04 Jul 1994

Qs: Diathesis alternations, Fonts, Culioli, Journals, Morphology

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1. Jutta Frense, Query: Diathesis alternations
2. "Robert D. Rachlin", Phonetics fonts for WordPerfect
3. "Ms." "N.I.Laporte", Culioli
4. , Q: ten best linguistics journals
5. Trey Jones, Morphological Rules

I am currently working on my MSc dissertation which is concerned with a
contrastive analysis of English and German verb alternations and semantic
verb classes that participate in these alternations. I have enough material
on English diathesis alternations but so far I could not find much on German.
I would be very grateful if you could send me any references that deal with this
topic. I am particularly interested in (the terminology and the examples have
been taken over from Beth Levin's book "English Verb classes and Alternations"):

* the locative alternation
 He loaded hay onto the wagon.
 He loaded the wagon with hayt.
* the dative shift
 He gave the book to David.
 He gave David the book.
* the causative/inchoative alternation
 Janet broke the cup.
 The cup broke.
* the middle alternation
 The butcher cuts the meat.
 Meat cuts easily.
* preposition-drop alternations
 Martha slowly descended down the stairs.
 Martha slowly descended the stairs.
* the conative alternation
 Paula hit the fence.
 Paula hit at the fence.
* reciprocal alternations
 The car collided with the bicycles.
 The car and the bicycle collided.
* the possessor-attribute factoring alternation
 I admired his courage.
 I admired him for his courage.

 I admired his honesty.
 I admired the honesty in him.

What I am investigating is whether German has the same semantic classes as
English and whether German verbs may participate in the same alternations.

WordPerfect 6.0 has an on-board phonetics character set (character set
2). Does anyone out there know of an alternate downloadable phonetics
font for WordPerfect (any version) that has proved especially useful,
i.e., complete and user-friendly?

The reply may not justify a lot of bandwidth, so a personal e-mail to me
would likely be best.

Many thanks.

Bob Rachlin

________________________________________________________________________
| Robert D. Rachlin Downs Rachlin & Martin Burlington, VT 05402-0190 |
| rachlinpanix.com Compuserve: 72420,3350 MCI: 583-3818 |
|................Tel: 802 863 2375 Fax: 802 863 2573..................|

I am writing on behalf of Martin Clarke. He is trying to get into Culioli's
enunciative linguistics, but the only material he has is in French. He is
looking for some references in English and would like to get in touch with
anybody who is working on this.
Thanks to anybody who can help.
Nadine Laporte
pss070clss1.bangor.ac.uk

My university, the university of Huelva (Spain), is one of the youngest
ones. It became independent from the University of Sevilla at the
beginning of this academic year. Its central library is in the process
of purchasing whole collections of journals. I have been asked to select
the ten best linguistics journals. Could you help me?
Some information on how much the whole collections of the journals would
cost would also be helpful.
I will make a summary of the responses if there is interest.
Thanks,
Juan Pablo Mora
University of Huelva, Spain

I'm posting this query for a colleague who is not on the list.

He is working on a computer program to generate related morphological
forms from other forms. He wants to be able to get related
adverbs from adjectives, and vice versa, nouns to and from adjectives, and
verbs to and from nouns.

For example:
 _Input_ _Output_
 quick quickly
 speedy speedily
 difficult difficulty
 independent independence
 hard hardness
 automate automation
 authorize authorization
 suspend suspension
etc etc...

We are looking for references that will give us both a listing of regular
morphological correspondences, but also a list of core vocabulary with
irregular morphology. We are especially interested in any work that focuses
on *spelling* conventions since this is for a text-based system.

At the moment the primary focus is English, but eventually similar
information on other languages will be needed (French, Spanish, German,
Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Russian and
Japanese [Kanji]).

**We would also gladly accept any information on software (free or to buy)
**that does this already (ESPECIALLY FOR LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH).

Please send responses to me personally at
 treybrs.com
and I will relay them on. I will also post a summary if there is enough
interest.

Thanks very much..

-Trey Jones
Dataware Technologies