LINGUIST List 6.794

Fri 09 Jun 1995

Qs: Lowth's Grammar, Negations, Spanish-Eng dictionary

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. "Indigenous Lang. Proj.", Q: Lowth's Grammar
2. Elke Hentschel, Query: negated questions
3. Elke Hentschel, Query: negated exclamations
4. E. Wayles Browne, Spanish-English dictionary/synthesizer

Does anyone know where I could obtain a copy of Bishop Robert
Lowth's _A Short Introduction to English Grammar_ (1762)?
(This is the guy that made up all those rules that put fear
into English students from Kindergarten through Ph.D.)

I would prefer an electronic version, but a hard copy version
would be fine, too.

I'll post a summary to the list.

Thank you,
Chuck Coker
102134.2274CompuServe.Com (= New Temporary Address
CJCokerCSUPomona.Edu (= Still good, but I'm not checking
 it regularly during the summer

Dear colleagues,

I am interested in negated questions of the typ: "Look, over there -
isn't that John?", where the speaker is really almost certain that it IS
John, and makes use of the negated question in order to convey this.

So far, I have been able to collect data from 44 languages; I have found
only two (Apache and Navajo, both belonging to the Athapaskean group)
where a similar construction cannot be used in the sam sense.

I would be very grateful to everybody who could provide me with further
data - about other languages that allow that type of construction as well
as about languages that do not allow it.
The languages collected so far are:

Indo-European languages:
Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czesh, Creole, Danish, Dutch, English,
Farsi, French, Greek, Islandish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese,
Rumanian, Russian, Swedish, Serbo-Croat, Singhalese, Slovenian, Spanish,
Ukrainian

non-Indo-European languages:
Apache, Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Indonesian,
Japanese, Korean, Mina (Togo), Navajo, Quechua, Tagalog, Tatar, Turkish,
Uzbek, Yoruba (Nigeria), Gulmanuma (Burkina Faso), Hebrew, Liele
(Gurunsi), Meekakan (Mandingo; Senegal), Moore (Burkina Faso).

Thank you very much for your help, and of course I'll publish a summary!

Elke Hentschel
jasamzedat.fu-Berlin.de

Dear colleagues,

in some languages, one can use negated exclamations like for instance:
Bengali: Kee misti swad naa! (literally: 'How sweet is not the taste')
German: Was es nicht alles gibt! (literally: 'What there is not all!')
Serbo-Croatian: Sta nisam sve doziveo! (literally: 'What didn't I all
live through')
when the speaker is not wondering about the lack of taste, or astonished
at the absence of adventures, but quite on the contrary.

So far, I have been able to find the same kind of construction in the
following languages:

Bengali, Bulgarian, Danish, Farsi, French, Georgian, Hungarian, Islandic,
Italian, Polish, Quetchua, Russian, Serbo-Croation, Singhalese,
Slovenian, Tartar, Ukrainian.

Does anyone know other langues which allow the same kind of negated
utterances with positive meanings?

Thank you very much for your help!

Elke Hentschel
jasamzedat.fu-berlin.de

Wanted: Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionary with
Spanish-speaking auditory output component. Can be on floppy disks or
CD-Rom. Preferably for use with DOS. Anyone with information, please write
directly to me:
ewb2cornell.edu . =A1Muchas gracias!

Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics
Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Morrill Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.
tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h)
e-mail ewb2cornell.edu (1989 to 1993 was: jn5jcornella.bitnet //
jn5jcornella.cit.cornell.edu)