LINGUIST List 5.934

Wed 31 Aug 1994

Qs: GENITIVES, Repetition, French purism, Spelling errors

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1. David Gil, Q: GENITIVES & (IN)DEFINITENESS
2. Jan Krister Lindstrom, query: repetition
3. "Lazar A. Peter", Prospects for French purism and info on "language bill"
4. , spelling errors

In English, prenominal genitives, such as "Mary's book", exhibit
certain properties of definite NPs, whereas their postnominal
counterparts, such as "book of Mary('s)", seem to be unmarked for
(in)definiteness.

I'm looking for bibliographical references to descriptions and
analyses of (in)definiteness in genitive constructions in English
and/or other languages, within any framework -- GB, model-
theoretic, functional, typological, etc.

Please send the references to me, and I'll post a summary.

David Gil
National University of Singapore
ellgildnusvm.bitnet

Some moths ago I sent a query about a pragmatically special kind of
repetition that I termed *contrastive*. The coinage may still be
subject to change, but the phenomenon -- which is typically found in
colloquial Swedish -- looks as follows:

Sw. -- Du har en ny bil!
 -- Ny och ny, den aer ju begagnad...

Word-to-word transaltion into English:

 -- You've go a new car!
 -- New and new, it's actually used...

The idea of the repetition is roughly to pick out an item and, in a way,
weigh its semantic nuances in the context of use. E.g. it may be disputable
to call a particular car new if it is bought second hand, even if it may
be new to a person that has not seen it before.

Last spring I was curious if this kind of *contrastive* (or *weighing*)
repetition occurs in somewhat corresponding ways in other languages. I
was glad to note a wide interest in the topic. But I would like to
receive some further information especially about languages around the
Baltic sea (there is a hypothesis that this kind of repetition might
be an areal pragmatic feature).

* Does the phenomenon exist in German (examples, please!) -- and if it does --
is there some dialectal variation e.g. between Nothern & Southern usage?

* I have learned that Polish seems to have something corresponding. Could
I get some more specific information about the Polish usage?

* To date, I have not received any responses concerning Russian or the
languages of the Baltic countries (Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian). Is
there any evidence of the phenomenon in these langauges?

Also, comments on other languages than the above mentioned are welcomed.

Thanks in advance,

Jan Lindstrom <jlindstrwaltari.helsinki.fi>
Dept. of Scandinavian languages
University of Helsinki
Finland

Is there anybody out there who knows exactly what the new (abortive?) language
legislation in France would (have) involve(d)? Can you send some written
 material on this or just point out where it's available? Is there nothing that
 the
linguistic community can do to stop purists purifying?
Thanks in advance, Peter A L

Can anybody poin me in the direction of a corpus of spelling
errors, in ASCII format, which could be used to test a spelling
correction system.

Could you mail me direct at the address below if you can help
Thanks,

Brett
--
Brett S. Parker * Tel 091 374 2549
University of Durham * E-mail -
England * b.s.parkerdurham.ac.uk