LINGUIST List 7.376

Mon Mar 11 1996

Qs: Occitan & Gascon, Pinker, Adjective ordering in English

Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Joanfrancsaol.com, Attn: Romance languages specialists - Occitan & Gascon information
2. rmallott, Pinker The Language Instinct
3. Ben Hambidge, Adjective ordering in English

Hello,

I put on the www the following information, about projects I'm
involved in. Maybe you could have a look at them and feed me back
some data.

About the Gascon dialect, DiGaM project, led by J. Lafita, is
readchable at:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/3068/
e-mail:
digaminnet.meta.fr

About the Occitan language, my pages "Aqui parlan occitan" are
at:
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/2085/
(with some short lexics)

The Estudis Occitans review is at:
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/2687/oceo00.html
(will be expanded in April)

For all these data, I'm looking for mirror sites in Europe and in Asia.

Please let me know if you can help, and feel free to e-mail me
comments ONLY AT THE FOLLOWING ADDRESSES:

blancjfibm.net

OR

jfblancsvmnet.meta.fr

Yours truly,

JF Blanc

 Has there been discussion of The Language Instinct on the list? If
so, could someone refer me to the archive. If not, is the general
view that Pinker's ideas are sound and useful - or that, as I am
inclined to think, they are open to a number of criticisms ?


Robin Allott email: rmallottpercep.demon.co.uk

I'm looking for references that discuss reasons for adjectives being
ordered in English - preferably syntactic ones (and ideally in a GB
framework).

e.g., why can we say:

	 a little red book

but rarely
	? a red little book


I'm also interested to find out if other languages follow the same
pattern. I've looked at Dixon 1982 and Dixon 1990, which examines what
exactly the ordering is, grouping adjectives into semantic classes,
but it doesn't discuss reasons for the ordering. Can anyone help?

Thanks,
Ben Hambidge, Edinburgh University.
<benling.ed.ac.uk>


Refs: Dixon, R: "Where have all the adjectives gone?", Mouton 1982

 Dixon, R: "A new appraoch to English grammar", Clarendon
			Press, 1990.