LINGUIST List 7.1623

Sun Nov 17 1996

Qs: Advertising discourse, Schizophrenia, Count-mass nouns

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

Directory

1. Christophe Rethore, Qs: Statistic analysis of advertising discourse
2. n, Qs: subordinate clause and schizophrenia related speech disorders
3. Peter Svenonius, Query: Nouns: count - mass; Classical Greek

Dear colleagues:

I am currently working on a quantitative, corpus-based study of French
and English advertising discourse, hoping to draw conclusions that
could be applied to the translation of print advertisements.

Would anyone know about the following topics:
1) translation of (print) ads (any language as source or target language)
2) use of corpora in the study of advertising discourse
3) use of statistical methods in the analysis of advertising discourse

Of course, I will post a summary of all relevant replies. Thank you in
advance.

Christophe Rethore * Tel. : (514) 343-6111 p3819 * Fax : (514) 343-2284
PhD - Linguistique et traduction * Groupe de rech.ling. du texte (GRELT)
Universite de Montreal * Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, bureau 9153
C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-Ville * Montreal (Quebec) H3C 3J7 CANADA

For an under-graduate paper, on the influence of schizophrenic
disorders on the usage of subordinate clauses by adolecsents,I would
like to get information regarding recent (1992 - 1996) researches
dealing with the folowing issues:

1. Normal development of language between the ages 12-18
 (discourse, pragmatics, narrative, integration of cognitive
 skills)
2. More specificaly: Subordinate clause forming by adolescents.
 (percentage, types, embedding)
3. Any researching done on the influence of disorders such as
schizophrenia on language development.

Thanks for your cooperation.
Keren Paz

Whorf 1956 (pp. 140-2) claims that Hopi makes no grammatical
distinction between count and mass nouns. Can anyone direct me to
references on languages which do not recognize a mass - count
distinction, or discussion of this point? I would be particularly
interested in discussions of Classical Greek, or any evidence that
Classical Greek DOES recognize a count - mass distinction.

I want to mention one example which I'm aware of.

Krifka 1995 offers a common analysis for all Chinese common nouns and
English mass nouns. Classifiers are used in Chinese for meanings
corresponding to English count nouns. If this is right, then Chinese
doesn't distinguish count from mass in any classification of _nouns_,
though the _grammar_ of Chinese apparently does distinguish count from
mass uses of nouns, by use of classifiers.

I imagine this might be true of other languages with noun classifier
systems as well. This is not quite the situation that Whorf describes
for Hopi; his examples of mass nouns used with a count sense show no
classifiers. The most interesting example for me would be one in which
no grammatical distinction is made, and where count versus mass
readings are strictly contextual (e.g. There's [a] chicken in the
pot).

Please reply directly to me at
 svenisl.uit.no

I will summarize for the list.

Thanks in advance,
Peter Svenonius
University of Tromsoe

References:

Whorf, Benjamin. 1956. _Language, Thought, and Reality_. MIT Press.

Krifka, Manfred. 1995. 'Common nouns: A contrastive analysis of Chinese and
English,'in _The Generic Book_, ed. by Gregory N. Carlson & Francis Jeffry
Pelletier. The University of Chicago Press.