LINGUIST List 6.394

Sun 19 Mar 1995

Qs: Syntactic annotation, Minimalism, Variability, Orthography

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1. EAGLET, please post call for info syntactic annotation schemes
2. Keiko Muromatsu, Minimalism, Uriagereka
3. "R.Hudson", Italian variability
4. Dr M Sebba, Query: orthography and society

EAGLES (Expert Advisory Groups on Language Engineering Standards)

A new subgroup within the EAGLES Text Corpus Working Group is currently
 collecting data on corpus syntactic annotation schemes, as a
continuation of the work already carried out on morpho-syntactic
annotation schemes.

The purpose of this sub-group is to provide an overview of syntactic
annotation schemes in existence, and produce guidelines for the future
development of such schemes.

More specifically, we are interested in the following:

i) syntactic annotation schemes - is the scheme an implementation of an
 existing linguistic theory?
 does it depend on other forms of annotation (eg. POS tags)?
 is it language dependent/language group dependent?
ii) parsing systems - is the parser probablity-based or rule-based?
 does the parser require restricted text or will it handle
 any text?

Any information on the above topics would be greatly appreciated.

EAGLES is an EU funded initiative, and is therefore working primarily
on languages with the EU, but we would also be interested in feedback
from groups working on languages less commonly represented or from
outside of the EU.

Please send any information direct to the following address:
Eagletlancaster.ac.uk

I am sending this message on behalf of Juan Uriagereka, who is currently
finishing a book on minimalist concepts, to appear in MIT Press. I am
assisting Juan in gathering a minimalist bibliography. If you have a
minimalist paper, dissertation, book, etc. OR a similar material whose
content BEARS on minimalist issues, we would appreciate it if you could
send us the following, for reference purposes:

1) A complete identification of the material, following LI guidelines.

2) A brief abstract (one paragraph or so), describing the material.

3) If at all possible, the actual material (address: Juan Uriagereka
1401C Marie Mount Hall, Linguistics, UMD, College Park, MD 20742)

The ideal piece for citation is a PUBLISHED article or a thesis, although
unpublished manuscripts are also welcome, since Juan is working with
Howard Lasnik on a second book on technical aspects of minimalism, to
appear in Blackwell, and they would like to collect all sorts of
bibliography. The deadline for the MIT Press book is soon (bibliography
should be in by May), whereas the deadline for the Blackwell book is
1997, and material can be sent for that at a slower pace. But please be
sure to provide accurate references the way you want them to appear in
print, and send them by e-mail to my address: keikowam.umd.edu, if pos-
sible in ASCII format. We appreciate your cooperation, and hope that we
can adequately refer readers to interesting work on the topic.

 Sincerely,

 Keiko Muromatsu
 e-mail address:keikowam.umd.edu

 Deparment of Linguistics
 1401 Marie Mount Hall
 University of Maryland, College Park
 MD 20742-7515 U.S.A.

I have a small group of Italian students whose job (set by me) is to find
examples of phonological variables on which they vary individually. They
tell me they've not been able to find anything at all. Are they missing
something, or is this a fact about Italian? (They come from various different
regions, so they've found differences between them, but no individual
variability.)

Dick Hudson
Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT
uclyrahucl.ac.uk

I would be grateful to users of LINGUIST for any references to books or
papers on the specifically _social_ aspects of orthography, e.g. the
relationship between standard orthographies and social/educational
stratification, contested orthographies for particular languages, etc.

I am aware of work by Schieffelin and Doucet, and Priestly, but I would
be grateful for any other references. I'll post a summary to the
Internet.

Mark Sebba
Department of Linguistics
Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, England
Telephone (+ 44 1524) 592453 (W)
Fax: (+ 44 1524) 843085
e-mail: m.sebbalancaster.ac.uk