LINGUIST List 8.1264

Sat Sep 6 1997

Qs: Hapax Legomena, CMC, Grammar, Anaphora

Editor for this issue: Martin Jacobsen <martylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Damien Guay, Q: English "hapax legomena"
2. Eva Erson, language in CMC
3. ash, Experiments about the "Intervention Constraint"?
4. Ms S.H. Parfitt, query about status of governing category/reflexive anaphora

Sorry for my quirky use of that term, but it seems to fit! I've been
interested lately in words which survive in "common" "colloquial"
speech because of a single, usually cliched, usage.

Some examples:
	sieve	as in	"leaks like a sieve"
	gamut	as in	"running the gamut"

In some circles, these words continue to be used, but I would guess
that the majority of speakers, at least in my area, the Midwestern
United States, do not know these words as separate entities, but do
know the meaning of the phrase. It seems that they would pass
completely from daily usage into the realm of jargon or complete
disuse were it not for these cliches.

My question: What are some other examples? Any hypotheses as to
whether a word's becoming part of a clich=E9 dooms it to disuse
elsewhere?

Thanks!
Damien Guay
-Musik
 -- cognoscetis veritatem --
 -- et veritas vos liberabit --

Hello!

I am totally new at the Linguist list and start my participation with
a cry for help. I am a linguist and involved with people from computer
science departments in Sweden; my thesis was about the language and
world of ideas of a small group of computer interested boys/young men,
from a feminist perspective. I am now working with the material from a
Swedish newsgroup and need to know more about the *language* within
computer-mediated communication on the whole. I am familiar with the
research presented in various articles in Susan Herring (ed)
Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural
perspectives (1996) but there must be much more written about the
subject Language within CMC. I would be most helpful for any help,
references to books, articles or researchers...

Best regards
Eva Erson

Hello everybody,

Does anyone know about psycholinguistics/sentence processing
experiments done regarding Grinder's (1970) Intervention Constraint.
Although originally proposed in relation to Super-Equi NP Deletion,
Jacobson and Neubauer (1976) extend it to deal with reflexivization in
English, as it interacts with other syntactic phenomena (e.g. picture
NPs, extraposition, wh-fronting). I'm interested in any experimental
work done on testing these ideas.

Thanks,
Ash Asudeh
Centre for Cognitive Science
University of Edinburgh
ashcogsci.ed.ac.uk

Dear all,

I am trying to ascertain the current status of reflexive anaphora in
the Principles and Parameters approach. Specifically,

I have the following questions.

Can anybody tell me whether the governing category and proper
antecedent parameters still exist per se in Minimalism? If not, what
has replaced them? Presumably there is still a need for a set of
nested values (of the governing category in particular) which in part
accounts for differing grammatical domains in which anaphors are
resolved across languages? What is the innate content of anaphora
resolution said to be, currently?

Any information about any or all of these questions would
be gratefully received.

Yours,
S. Parfitt