LINGUIST List 6.582

Wed 19 Apr 1995

Qs: Greek corpus, L1 acq, Prague conf, Accusative marking

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1. MARKOPOULOS GEORGE, Qs: Greek Corpus
2. , Babies' intellect
3. Richard Lilly, Info about the Trubetzkoy Prague Conference
4. Vincent DeCaen, Q accusative marking and prepositions

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I'm writing my thesis on the computational treatment of nominal compounds
in Modern Greek. I'm in the need of a large scientific corpus on a single
domain (1 million words ~ 7 Mbytes) in a sublanguage related to technical
(telecommunications, computing, machinery etc.) or medical terms.

Any help in this direction will be highly appreciated.

Thank you for replying.

George Markopoulos
Computational Linguistics and Phonetics Laboratory
School of Philosophy
University of Athens
gmarkopatlas.uoa.ariadne-t.gr

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This may be an ignorant question, since I know nothing about
psycholinguistics or language acqisition, but it has bothered me since I was
about nine years old (/o"/ = front rounded mid vowel):

Once as a kid I was in a restaurant next to an apparently very recently
immigrated German family with a very small infant -- almost a baby. The
toddler heard someone say it was 3:30 p.m. and tried to imitate it, but
severely mangled the word "thirty". His whole large family began coaching
him in pronunciation, intently repeating "so"ti, so"ti, so"ti!" After about
five minutes of this, and a few more approximations, the baby came out with a
perfect, clean-as-a-whistle, Midwestern American "thirty". His family
clapped and squealed with glee.

How did this baby do this?

James Kirchner

I am looking for the dates and contact address of a Conference planned to
take place in Prague next Spring. Can anyone help ? thank you in advance.
Richard LILLY, Phonetics Laboratory, Lille, France.

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Richard LILLY, Laboratoire de Recherches Phonetiques
Universite de Lille III -DULJVA- B.P. 149
59653 Villeneuve d'Ascq CEDEX
France
Phone: (33) 20 33 62 59
Fax : (33) 20 91 91 71
Email: lillyuniv-lille3.fr(Richard Lilly)

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In Hebrew and some important dialects of Aramaic a preposition is used
to mark the direct object when it is "definite" (otherwise the object
is a bare NP). In Aramaic, the preposition is "to"; in Hebrew, the
preposition may be derived from a Semitic root "go to." This reminds
me of the Spanish marking in /a/ "to". Turkish apparently uses case
in a similar manner to distinguish direct objects.

I am looking for a) other languages that distinguish direct objects
(and which prep is used), b) the various stages through which the
phenomenon develops (especially in the case of Spanish), c) any
technical treatments of such a phenomenon, esp. in cross-linguistic
perspective. Is it related to questions of ergativity?