LINGUIST List 7.1466

Fri Oct 18 1996

FYI: New corpus, PhD thesis, URL correction

Editor for this issue: Susan Robinson <robinsonemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. LDC Office, New Corpus from the Linguistic Data Consortium
2. Jose Camacho, PhD thesis
3. GAVIN O SHEA LINGUISTICS PG, spelling reform

 Announcing a NEW RELEASE from the
 LINGUISTIC DATA CONSORTIUM

		 Voice Across Hispanic America
			 VAHA

Voice Across Hispanic America (VAHA) is a corpus of Spanish telephone
speech, recorded digitally from 915 native speakers of Spanish in
various parts of the United States. With nearly 39,000 recorded and
transcribed utterances, VAHA will be useful for a variety of research
studies, but it is intended primarily for speech technology research
and development in telecommunications applications. It is patterned
after MACROPHONE (LDC94S21), an American English corpus that is
widely used for this purpose.

This corpus was collected by Texas Instruments in Dallas, TX, for the
Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania.

Institutions that have membership in the LDC during the 1996
membership year will receive VAHA on request at no additional
charge, in the same manner as all other text and speech corpora
published by the LDC.

Nonmembers can receive a copy of VAHA for research purposes only for
a fee of $3500. If you would like to order a copy of this corpus,
please email your request to ldcunagi.cis.upenn.edu. If you need
additional information before placing your order, or would like to
inquire about membership in the LDC, please send email or call (215)
898-0464.

Further information about the LDC and its available corpora can be
accessed on the Linguistic Data Consortium WWW Home Page at URL
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/.

New Disseratation: Syntactic Structures in Nominals: A Comparative
Study of Spanish and Southern Quechua. Liliana Sanchez. University of
Southern California. Distributed by GSIL Publications.1996

The main aim of this dissertation is to provide an analysis of the syntax of
 nominal modification based on the hypothesis that there is a group of
DP-internal functional categories in addition to Gender/ Number
Agreement Phrase that mediate between nouns (derived and non-derived)
and their argumental and non-argumental modifiers. The common
syntactic properties of restrictive modifiers such as adjectives,
restrictive relative clauses and prepositional phrases in the two
languages under study, Spanish and Southern Quechua, are accounted for
as properties of a functional projection Predicate Phrase internal to
DP. The common morphosyntactic properties of argumental modifiers are
accounted for as the properties of a DP-internal Person Agreement
Phrase which is required to express subjecthood inside DP. Finally,
the syntactic properties of a special class of nominal modifiers that
includes adjectives in Spanish and quantifiers and suffixes in
Southern Quechua are accounted for as properties of two DP-internal
functional projections, Mode Phrase and Aspect Phrase, that interact
with the modality and aspectuality of the main clause. The data
examined comes from Spanish and Southern Quechua, two languages with
opposite values in the Head Parameter; Spanish is a head-initial
language whereas Southern Quechua is head-final. It also includes
different stages of Bilingual Spanish, the variety of Spanish spoken
by native speakers of Southern Quechua. The latter shows a gradual
shift in the feature specification of the functional projections
proposed.

To order, send a check in US dollars for $12 +shipping ($3 domestic,
$5 international) made out to the
Linguistics Dept.,
MC 1693
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1693

For more information, contact gsilusc.edu or
 http:\\www.usc.edu\dept\gsil\gsil.html


Jose Camacho
Modern Languages Dept.
Baker Hall 160
Carnegie-Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
camachoandrew.cmu.edu

Sincere apologies and a red face for all who were unable to get 
through to the link on the English spelling reform which I posted 
recently. Somehow a <c> replaced an <s>, and must have been smirking 
at all the wrong connections it was causing.

The correct address is:

http://www.les.aston.ac.uk/simplspel.html

Again, apologies!
Gavin O Se
UCD, Dublin