LINGUIST List 6.148

Fri 03 Feb 1995

Qs: Cheb, Object suffixes on verbs, Jobs in NLP, Tagging French

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1. , Query: "Cheb"
2. Simon Corston, Object suffixes on verbs
3. Mark Aronoff, jobs in NLP?
4. , Tagging French

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This is trivial, so skip it if you're busy.

The Czech Republic has a city bordering on Bavaria called Cheb (German
"Eger"). The "ch" in the name is pronounced as a voiceless palatal central
fricative, as in German "ich", "China", or "Chirurg". Despite the presence
of this sound word-initially in German as well, most German tourists (and
railway ticket agents) seem to pronounce the name with an initial affricate,
as in English "chin". This was very perplexing for my Czech high school
students, who would have expected German pronunciation identical to the
Czech, or for some Germans [keb], or perhaps even the anglophone favorite
[heb].

The only explanation any of us could come up with was that English is so
widely and well taught in Germany that Germans may tend to pronounce
unfamiliar foreignisms according to English spelling conventions.

Does anyone know the real reason, or know of similar cases?

James Kirchner

Content-Length: 1533

I am studying Roviana, a Western Oceanic lg. There are pronominal object
suffixes which occur on the verb indexing person, number etc. However,
there are no affixes on the verb which would correspond to 'subject'
(however we might construe the concept). Dixon (1994) claims that there
are no lgs with object affixes but which lack subject affixes. Does
anybody else know of any other counter-examples?

Also, whether or not the lg also indicates other grammatical relations by
means of affixes, does anyone know of typological studies on object
affixes in general (e.g. comparable to observations about subject
affixes, e.g. that if any person/number is zero it will tend to be 3SG
(Mayerthaler 1988)).

Any refs or data much appreciated.
I will post a summary.

Simon Corston

An undergraduate student who is about to graduate with a major in
computer science and a minor in linguistics has asked me whether
there is some sort of centralized source of information about jobs in
natural language processing. Can anyone enlighten me? I will post a
summary. In these days of budget cuts, it would be very useful to be
able to tell students about possible employment.
Mark Aronoff

Content-Length: 1571

 Dear Corpora reader,

 I have a tagger for French that successfully tags 91% of unrestricted texts.
I am interested in helping people tag text, and in building up the
training data base too.

If you want to have some text tagged, you can send it to me or I can
send some text to
you. I will return it to you 91% tagged. I will ask you to manually fix it.
 You will return the fixed text to me, and I will re-use the tagged text for
further training. At the end, you will own your tagged text.

 Further details will be given to interested people.

Evelyne Tzoukermann
AT&T Bell Laboratories
room 2D-448, P.O. Box 636
600 Mountain Avenue
Murray Hill, NJ, 07974-0636
USA

Tel. (908) 582-2924
FAX (908) 582-3306
EMAIL evelyneresearch.att.com