LINGUIST List 7.1239

Sat Sep 7 1996

Qs: L1 acq, Tov, Unaccusative, Matched-guise questionnaire

Editor for this issue: T. Daniel Seely <dseelyemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Hiroyuki Oshita, "passive" ergatives in L1 acq
2. Sandra Golstein, Tov
3. Hiroyuki Oshita, unaccusatives in Korean
4. Lyle Campbell, Matched-guise questionnaires

Dear Linguists,

Errors in which ergatives (or unaccusatives) are superficially
"passivized" are not uncommon in L2 acquisition of English by non-native
speakers of various L1 backgrounds. For example,

(1) *My father was died last year
(2) *A strange incident was happened before my eyes
(3) *This kind of problem is existed in my country, too
(4) *A little green man was appeared out of the spaceship

It is my understanding that such errors do not appear in child L1 English.
Are there observations in the L1 acquisition literature against this
generalization?

Please respond to me directly. I will summarize them if there are
a sufficient number of responses for summary.

Thank you very much for your help.


Hiro Oshita (oshitascf.usc.edu)
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Southern California

Maybe some Belgian subscribers to this list know the origin of the argotic 
word "tov", used in Brussels. I was told that it meant something like 
"good", such as in:

C'est tov = that's good.

This struck me as a Hebrew speaker, 'tov' having exactly the same meaning 
in Hebrew.

Thank you.

Sandra Golstein	(sandratovna.co.il)

Dear Linguists,

I have been trying to find references on unaccusative verbs in Korean--so
far without much success. Will you direct me to works (written in
English) on the Unaccusative Hypothesis (a.k.a. Split Intransitivity) in
Korean in which morphological (e.g. compounding?), synthetic
(Case-marking, quantifier floating, etc.?) and other types of evidence is
presented.

Please respond directly to me. I will post a summary.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Hiro Oshita (oshitascf.usc.edu)
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Southern California

 A colleague of mine in the Maori Studies Dept. is preparing a
matched-guise questionnaire to investigate attitudes towards Maori-accented
English in New Zealand. She would like to consult other questionnaires
which have been used in matched-guise studies elsewhere and requests
bibliographic references to useful sources. She will provide a summary of
the responses. Please reply to her directly: Jeanette King at:

j.kingmaori.canterbury.ac.nz

 Thanks in advance for help.

Lyle Campbell
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch, New Zealand
Fax: 64-3-364-2065
Phone: 64-3-364-2242