LINGUIST List 6.1405

Thu Oct 12 1995

Sum: Mothers in trees

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

Directory

1. Richard Hudson, SUM: mothers in trees

Some time ago I asked why we talk about nodes in PS trees as mothers and
daughters, with three sub-questions as the agenda:


Q1 Why family relations at all, given that `daughters' are *parts* of their
`mothers'?
Q2 Why female?
Q3 Why family relations at all, given that people have two parents, not just
one?

Thanks to the people listed at the end of this message for their answers.



Q1 Why family relations at all?


No clear answer to this, but one message assumed I was talking about
historical trees, which raises the obvious possibility that linguists
looking for syntactic diagramming techniques knew about trees for showing
language `families' in historical linguistics and took them over. However,
maybe Chomsky invented trees (sharing this distinction with
Tesnie`re, who used the trees in a much more obvious way for dependencies
rather than for part-whole relations). If so, maybe he got them from graph
theory in maths? I'm out of my depth.


Q2 Why female?


It turns out that we linguists are out of step with mathematicians and
computer-scientists, who generally use sex-neutral terminology (parent,
child), or even male terms (father, son), but apparently *never* female
terms. (I was sent a hair-raising quote from a standard computer-science
text which justifies the male terms as `more professional' than female would
be ...) I wonder why we've opted for female terms. One suggestion is that
most of us are indeed female (unlike mathematicians and computer
scientists). Another possibility is, again, that we got it from historical
linguistics. Where did they get it from? Maybe from the fact that the word
for `language' is feminine in familiar languages (German and Romance)? I'm
out of my depth again.

Q3 Why just one parent?


This doesn't seem very interesting, though some people thought it might have
something to do with microorganisms that skipped the sex bit.


Thanks to:

Ansrew Bredenkamp, Richard Coates, Roy Dace, Pius ten Hacken, Mark Hansel,
Waruno Mahdi, Geoffrey Nathan, Mark Pedersen, David Powers, Daniel Radzinski,
William Rapaport, Eddy Ruys, Raf Salkie, Goerel Sandstroem, Anton Sherwood
 ===========================================================================
Prof Richard Hudson Tel: +44 171 387 7050 ext 3152
 E-mail: r.hudsonling.ucl.ac.uk
Dept. of Phonetics and Linguistics Tel: +44 171 380 7172
 Fax: +44 171 383 4108
UCL
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
UK