LINGUIST List 6.1155

Fri Aug 25 1995

Qs: Trees, On-glides, Language attitudes

Editor for this issue: T. Daniel Seely <dseelyemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Karl-Michael Schneider, Tree macros for LaTex
2. , palatal on-glides
3. Anne Hof, Qs: Language attitude studies (German)

I wonder which TeX/LaTex macros linguists use to draw tree structures. I tried
tree.sty which was written by Edward M. Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz and uses
the PiCTeX macros. It works fine but does not do kerning, which means that
tree nodes are arranged geometrically as in a), not as in b), for example
(note the position of the TOPIC node):

a) b)
 IP IP
 / \ / \
TOPIC I' TOPIC I'
 / \ / \
 FP I+V FP I+V
 / \ / \
 F' FOCUS F' FOCUS
 / \ / \
 AspP F AspP F

(example taken from a handout paper by Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King)

Is there a tree macro that draws trees like in b)? Thanks for your help, I'll
post the results.

Karl-Michael Schneider
Department of General Linguistics
University of Passau, Germany

Does anyone know of any language(s) with more than one type of unrounded
palatal on-glide between consonant and vowel, e.g.,

 [i] vs [j] vs [ji]

as in

 [kan] vs [kian] vs [kjan] vs [kjian]

The reason for my asking is because Middle Chinese is often assumed to have
such a four-way contrast -- I personally do not think such a
contrast is possible, but I'd like to check with people working with other
language families before I jump to any conclusions. By the way, the notation
in square brackets is PHONETIC, rather than phonemic; so interpreting the [kj]
sequence as a palatal affricate will not do.

Wenchao

Can anybody who has done (or knows about) current research on language
attitudes in a 'standard/non-standard variety setting' please contact
me. I have just started a thesis on 'Attitudes towards "Hochdeutsch"
in Southern Germany'and I would like to find out more about recent
(1990+) research on language attitude studies, especially in the
German-speaking area.

Thank You

Anne Hof(German Dept., University of Manchester)
MFLUGAHfs1.art.man.ac.uk