LINGUIST List 6.1231

Sun Sep 10 1995

Qs: Classroom discourse, Morphology, Stress, German -chen

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <dizdartam2000.tamu.edu>

Directory

1. karen stanley, Q:classroom discourse
2. "Michael C. Beard", Morphology terms
3. , Sum - Teaching stress in intro phonetics
4. Richard Sproat, Origin of German -chen

I am looking for articles/research that investigate classroom discourse
in the 'regular' university classroom (ie, not the language learning
classroom). My particular focus is on the elements that would be
useful to present to prepare high level ESL learners not only for
notetaking from lectures but *also* for interaction within the context
of the university classroom.

Mostly what I have looked at up to the present are ESL textbooks that
focus on verbal devices for cohesion as they are used by classroom
teachers when presenting lectures.

While I continue to be interested in sources for that type of
information, I am especially interested in articles/research that
look at other aspects of lectures and teacher-student interaction.

If people respond to me directly, and I receive sufficient response,
I will post a summary to the List.

Karen Stanley
e: karenhsunivscvm.csd.scarolina.edu

I'm looking for the proper terms for number morphemes beyond 'Dual'. What
follows 'Singular, Plural, Dual, ...'? I can't remember if it's 'Trinary' or
'Tertiary' or something like that. Also, what is the generally acknowledged
limit (typologically speaking) for marking number morphologically? I thought I
read that no languages have number morphemes which indicate any number (group)
beyond five before resorting to a *plural* morpheme.

Your help in this matter is greatly appreciated. I can't seem to locate the
sources where I've read this material.

Sincerely,
Mike Beard
Wayne State University
73131.3101compuserve.com

Hi Linguists.

Does anybody have any hints on how to help undergrads in an introductory
phonetics class learn to hear lexical stress (that is, to identify the syllable
in a word that receives primary stress), particulary in AmEng? The two "helps"
i know are 1) say the word several times, over-emphasizing one syllable at a
time (i've just done this by example, using extreme f0 & intensity variation).
One production should sound reasonably normal and the rest should sound pretty
odd; or 2) tap your finger as you say the word; folks usually tap on the
stressed syllable. While most students i've had seem to grasp this fairly
quickly, i still have a few who, after numerous examples, look at me as if
i'm being utterly mystical. Some of these are non-native speakers
of English, but not all.

I realize that this question calls up all sorts of issues on the nature of
stress and its perception, but before one can address those at all it's
necessary to introduce the concept somehow, and so far my experience has been
that introductory discussions of stress in phonetics texts ultimately
assume that speakers can pretty reliably "hear stress" once the phenomenon is
pointed out to them--that is, that there's something intuitively obvious
about the notion of a stressed syllable. But what about those students/speaker
s
who apparently find nothing intuitive about it?

I'm happy to post a summary if i get sufficient response.

Thanks much.


laura l. koenig (koenighaskins.yale.edu)

Can anyone tell me the etymology of the Modern German diminutive
suffix -chen? As far as I can glean from the grammars and dictionaries
of Middle High German I have at hand, the diminutive affix in most
Middle High German dialects was some variant of -li^n (Modern -lein),
hence my curiosity about the source of the other allomorph. (Also, for
those dialects of Modern German which have the third variant -el, is
that derived etymologically from -lein?)

-

Richard Sproat
Linguistics Research Department
AT&T Bell Laboratories | tel (908) 582-5296
600 Mountain Avenue, Room 2d-451 | fax (908) 582-7308
Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA | rwsresearch.att.com