LINGUIST List 6.497

Mon 03 Apr 1995

Qs: Habere/avoir, Ling as a career, Syntax, Dipthongization

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Julian Linnell, habere/avoir
2. cxyb, Linguistic work inquiry
3. , A rethinking of small phrases as phrases containing three-argument
4. MARC PICARD, Dipthongization

Meillet (1912) claims the Latin habere was grammaticalized in French as
the perfect avoir:(a) Did French have a perfect before avoir?and if so, (b)
How was it encoded? Many thanks, jlinnellmail.sas.upenn.edu

Dear List Members,

Would anyone know of the prospects for jobs in the linguistic field
for someone who has some knowledge/training with no degree, especially
outside of second-language teaching and speech pathology? And, any
advice on how to look for or find this kind of work would be greatly
appreciated.

Also, would anyone be able to give or suggest a comprehensive
breakdown of the skills required to do linguistic work?

Please respond to me directly.

Thank you in advance,

Kevin

My wife is currently struggling through generative syntax here at
Georgetown. She came home the other night and started analyzing some
small clauses (ie. "I consider [him a friend.]"
It seems to me that you could merely treat these phrases in terms of
a relatively closed class of verbs (I don't know what they all are,
but there can't be more than a handful.) If you state a rule
VP) V NP (AP/NP)
where the second element is optional and then label "consider" and
like verbs in the lexicon as three-argument verbs where the external
argument is an agent assigning a copula relation between the two
internal arguments, this should work, shouldn't it? Granted, I'm no
syntactician, but it seems logical to me.

David Harris, Arabic Department, Georgetown University
e-mail: harrisdguvax.georgetown.edu phone: 202/687-5744
http://www.georgetown.edu/grad/catalogue/arabic.html


 * % [ *) ^ { * ] & ~ : } * [ % ( $ ] *

 "Seit den Hexen nichts mehr geschieht, sind sie harmlos."
 Elias Canetti

 * % [ *) ^ { * ] & ~ : } * [ % ( $ ] )

 I'm searching for a plausible articulatory phonetic reason why the
diphthongization of /a:/ to /ao/ would be blocked by a following palatal
consonant like /y/ or /n~/ and nothing else. In other words, the change
takes place before bilabials, labio-dentals, dentals, postalveolars and
velars but not before palatals. Any ideas?

Marc Picard