LINGUIST List 6.181

Thu 09 Feb 1995

Qs: French course, LaTex on PC, Ellipses, Assessments

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1. Richard Epstein, french course
2. Ami Kronfeld, LaTex on PC
3. Ted Pedersen, ellipses
4. L Kelly, Multiple Choice Assessments

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I'm going to be teaching a course on `Structure of French' in the spring.
It's a course in a Linguistics department, intended for upper division
undergraduate students (many of whom are linguistics majors). No knowledge
of French is necessary, but some background in linguistics
is assumed; lectures and all required readings will be in English. The
content of the course depends on the instructor, and can cover any area
of French linguistics (phonology, syntax, sociolinguistics, etc. etc.).

I'd be grateful if people who have taught a similar course would be willing
to share any sort of reference material, e.g. syllabi, reading lists,
bibliography, etc. In particular, does a suitable textbook exist at all?

I'll be happy to post a bibliographical summary. Thanks very much in advance.

Rich Epstein.

p.s. References to works written in French are also welcome (they could
help provide background reading for me).

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I have been using LaTex on Unix for years. Now I am about to trade my
Sparcstation for a PC and am looking for a good LaTex version for my
new machine. I have been told that several good PC versions are
available, but so far I did not have any luck. Any pointers?

Please respond to me (aminli.com) and I will post a summary for the
benefit of other subscribers.

Thanks,

-Ami

I am interested in finding a fairly comprehensive treatment of the
different kinds of ellipses that can occur in an English sentence. I
have found a number of grammar texts that discuss ellipses but they
don't go into much detail.

I'm also interested in any work that deals with identifying where an
ellipsis occurs and what was left out of the sentence.

My motivation for asking these questions is that I'd like to write a
computer program that converts sentences with ellipses into sentences
with none. Right now I'm trying to identify different kinds of
ellipses and decide which I might be able to resolve with a computer
program. If anyone has implemented an "ellipsis resolving" program I'd
be real curious to hear how it went.

This is a simple example of what I'd like my program to do.

Input: Bill bought a gun but Mary did not.
Output: Bill bought a gun but Mary did not buy a gun.

Input: Bill bought a gun and Mary a crossbow.
Output: Bill bought a gun and Mary bought a crossbow.

Regards
Ted

--
* Ted Pedersen pedersenseas.smu.edu *
* Department of Computer Science and Engineering, *
* Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275 (214) 768-2126 *

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We are looking at new ways of assessing our first year students.
Currently we use short answer questions and both timed and take home
essay assignments. These methods are becoming increasily time consuming
to grade as class sizes rise, so we are considering swapping the short
answer questions for multiple choice questionnaires which can be marked
using optical markers (automatically).

1) Those of you who use this sort of assessment method, how do you think
it works?

A) Does it allow you to test the range of material you would like to
test?

B) Is there any literature on how to formulate GOOD MCQ questions?

C) Are there any published or accessable MCQs on linguistics topics at a
first year undergraduate level (syntax, morphology, semantics,
phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics).

2) Those of you who use different methods of assement for large basic
level undergraduate classes, what are they, do they work?

Please send you replies to me directly.
Thanks for your help.

Louise Kelly