LINGUIST List 7.269

Wed Feb 21 1996

Qs: NPI typology, Relative clause, Computerising dictionary

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <dizdartam2000.tamu.edu>

Directory

1. cleeplaza.snu.ac.kr, NPI typology: discussion
2. Lee, Relative clause
3. "J. Fix", Re: Computerising German Dialect Dictionary - Help

I am interested in the typology of NPIs. I assume some languages have
'any' as NPI (as in English), some other languages have indefinite
specifiers [either from wh-words or non-wh indefinite
pronominal/adjectival/adverbial](as in Greek, Chinese and Japanese) as
NPIs, and still others have both of them as NPIs (as in Korean). On
the other hand, some languages need the above elements plus concessive
(or disjuntive/additive or emphatic) markers to function as NPIs. What
about languages you know? If there are enough responses, I will make
a summary and post it later. Thank you in advance. Best,
 Chungmin Lee

Does anyone know of a language which has ALL of the following
syntactic properties:

(1) In an NP consisting of a relative clause, the head noun follows
the relative clause.

(2) The gap relativization strategy is (obligatorily or optionally)
used for at least one grammatical function (i.e., subject, object,
etc.) of a clause.

(3) Null subject and object are NOT allowed.

If you know of none, do you know if any (functional or formal)
syntactic theory would predict the non-existence of such a language?

Ming-wei Lee

I am a German Postgraduate student in Canterbury, UK, doing a masters in
Applied Languages and Computing.

I have had the idea of "computerizing" a not yet completed paper
dictionary of a German dialect which I have worked on as an assistant for
some time. The goal of this project is not so much to provide a
possibility for extensive research on the language material, but to make
it more easily available for the staff to answer queries. There should
also be the possibility of being able to search for conceptually related
entries. To use the capabilities of today's technology and not just to
produce a reflection of the paper version, I would like to include
hypertext links to sound files (to illustrate pronunciation) and to
pictures (to illustrate eg. no longer existing objects). In a later
version I would perhaps include online links to other dictionaries which
were used as sources.

The data of this dictionary is, as is the case with most dictionaries,
quite varied. There are entries of one line as well as ones filling many
pages, there are entries filling only compulsory slots, such as
"lemma" and "meaning" and others using all the possible slots.

Because of this diversity, it seems problematic to me to feed the data
into an ordinary database (let alone how). I was therefore wondering if
there is anybody else facing a similar problem, if they had found an
existing database system (as eg. MS Access) as a solution to this
problem or that they had to create their own one.

I would greatly appreciate any helpful hint and will post a summary of
them.

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 Jakob Fix, University of Kent at Canterbury, jf4ukc.ac.uk
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