LINGUIST List 6.678

Sat 13 May 1995

Qs: Borrowing, Stanford workshop, Involvement, CA Instruction

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Directory

1. Alexis Manaster Ramer, Q: Borrowing of Body Part Terms and Numerals
2. Alexis Manaster Ramer, Q: 1987 Stanford Reconstruction Workshop
3. Gregory Watson, Involvement
4. "D.L.EBBRELL", Computer Assisted Vocabulary Acquisition/ Software ????

I am again looking for clear examples of borrowing of the term
for 'ear' and also of lower numerals (i.e., lower than 11).
I have not been able to find any clear instances of the former
(some claim that Tsakhur borrowed 'ear' from Georgian but this
is not so clear), and only a handful of the latter all involving
reconstructed languages (e.g. Semitic 7 and probably 6 -) Indo-
European, a whole bunch of Semitic and IE numerals -) Kartvelian,
and such). It would be nice to have clear cases in attested
languages.

Also, any examples other than Uralic or Afro-Asiatic for
a wel-established language family whose lower numerals are not
all cognate?

I will post a summary.

I am wondering if anyone who attended the same might have
any papers, handouts or notes on the Altaic panel at the
workshop, esp. on the presentations by Clark and Austerlitz.

Hello,
I'm a PhD student interested in measuring aspects of INVOLVEMENT in prose
literature. But what exactly is involvement? What does it entail? How does a
reader feel more or less involved with a text, and why? I'm intereseted in
trying to quantify this phenomena.

I'm aware of the work of Deborah Tannen, in particular those linguistic
strategies which she labels Involvement Strategies. Halliday and Hasan's
work (1976: 1986) and Hasan's (1989) work on grammatical cohesion should
also be taken into consideration. I would also like to consider aspects of
lexical cohesion and lexical stylistics.

Other than these ideas I'm rather at a loss. I'd appreciate any information
that you may be able to offer on other avenues of invesitgation, or sources.

Naturally I'll prepare a summary of your responses,

Best regards,

Greg Watson

I am a Phd student interesting in doing a comparative study comparing the
use of computer based learning tools for the acquisition of vocabulary
with relation to reading comprehension with conventional methods. The
literature review I have completed so far has led me to a consideration
of the following points:

1) A promotion of deep processing strategies is more likely to lead to
acquisition.

2) Such processing means higher levels of analysis which
allows both new and existing lexical knowledge to be restructured,
increasing awareness of characteristics such as polysemy, and the
applicability of lexical items to a variety of contexts (increa sed
pragmatic competence in command of the lexicon).

I am now at the stage where I need to find a piece of existing software
which I can use in experimental tests to investigate its effectiveness in
terms of the pedagogical methodology behind it.

Ideally, I was thinking of a package which included tools such as on-line
dictionaries, glossaries, thesauri, notebook facilities, concordancers etc
to be used in connection with reading tasks. The target language would be
either EFL, French, or Spanish.

My interest is in the extent to which tools such as the above can
facilitate skills such as inferring from context, and forging relations
between lexical items to strengthen semantic networks.

I would be interested in hearing from anyone who shares an interest in
this area and who may be able to direct me towards a suitable software
package, or who could recommend and useful contacts.

Thankyou

Dawn Ebbrell (University of Hull)

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>From D.L.Ebbrell Dept: Language Centre, University of Hull, HU6 7RX.

Email D.L.Ebbrelllangc.hull.ac.uk TEL: 44-1482-466327
 FAX: 44-1482-465991
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