LINGUIST List 6.104

Wed 25 Jan 1995

Qs: American native lgs, Critiques of PAS, Parsing, Chechen

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Directory

1. James Irving, Native Languages
2. dbritain, Query: Preferred Argument Structure
3. Phil Bralich, Parsing Problems
4. "Fujisawa, Kensuke", Chechen

I am interested in American native languages (particularly Lakota), and am
trying to track dowm a newsgroup where native languages are practiced. I am
led to believe that such a group may be hosted at Texas A & M University.
Are you able to assist me? Thanks, James Irving. jameswoody.apana.org.au

I've recently been reading some of the work on the hypothesis of Preferred
Argument Structure (PAS) developed by Du Bois (e.g. 'The Discourse Basis of
Ergativity' in vol 63 (1987) of LANGUAGE, work by Fox and Thompson on
relative clauses, also in LANGUAGE, a paper by Ashby and Bentivoglio in
Language Variation and Change (1993) etc). But does anybody know of any
*critiques or evaluations* of this approach. I'd be grateful to anyone who
could let me know of any published responses to PAS, and will send a summary
to the list of what I hear.

Cheers!

Dave Britain
Dept of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Colchester
England
dbritainessex.ac.uk

I am currently working on a syntax project with Professor Derek Bickerton at
the University of Hawaii. As part of this research, I am trying to compile a
list of problem areas for Natural Language Parsing systems. Specifically,
I would like to know which syntactic phenomena (with example sentences) cause
the most problems for people trying to write Natural Language Parsers
and Generators. Any information you can give me on this in terms of examples
or references to published material would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Phil Bralich

 My name is Ken Fujisawa. I am seeking information regarding The
Caucasian Family, as to how many languages there are in it, and their
names. I am aware of Northeast Caucasian or Nakh-Daghestanian family
to which Chechen belongs to. I assume that it is a subclass of
Caucasian Family. If so, are there any other subclasses? If you
could provide me with the above information, I would certainly
appreciate it.