LINGUIST List 8.184

Thu Feb 6 1997

Qs: Speech errors, Ditransitives, Sources

Editor for this issue: Susan Robinson <suelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Victoria A. Fromkin, request for speech error corpora
2. Yehuda N. Falk, Query: Ditransitive prepositions
3. Keiko Muromatsu, request for articles

At ucla, we are hard at work building up the computerized database of
speech errors which in a year will be made available to the linguistic
community (on the web or on a disk)

We would like to enter any available collections of errors so please
send them to me either as an attachment, or straight e-mail, or by fax
to 213 654 1935, or by ftp, or....

Single errors can of course always be sent, as so many of you have
been doing over the years.

Vicki Fromkin


Vicki Fromkin

"To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies"
	Oscar Wilde

I am posting the following question for a student. Please reply to me
privately, and if there is enough response I'll post a summary to the
list.

The question is whether there are any languages with ditransitive
prepositions (or postpositions). There are certainly prepositions
whose meanings are conducive to being realized syntactically as
ditransitives. Take _between_, for example. Are there any languages
which, instead of something like (1), allow you to say (2)?

(1) a. I am standing [between the chair and the table]
 b. I am standing [[between the chair] and [between the table]]

(2) I am standing [between [the chair] [the table]]

Similarly, are there any languages that have a preposition denoting a
path that can take as internal arguments the endpoints of the path, so
that instead of (3) you would say (4)?

(3) Spock went [from Vulcan] [to Romulus]
(4) Spock went [P [Vulcan] [Romulus]]

If such constructions are impossible, as I suspect, why are they
impossible? Why are ditransitive verbs permitted and ditransitive
prepositions not? Any ideas?

 

 Yehuda N. Falk
 Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
 Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel
 msyfalkpluto.mscc.huji.ac.il
 http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msyfalk/

"And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than
Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the 
fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped." --Arthur C. Clarke,
2001: A Space Odyssey

Dear linguists:

I am currently working on the movement of numeral classifiers for my
dissertation at the University of Maryland, College Park. However,
there are some articles I have not been able to obtain, and I would
like to ask if you could help me obtain them:

Kamio, A. 1977. Suuryoosi no sintakkusu. Gengo 6, 83-91.
Kamio, A. 1973. Observations on Japanese Quantifiers. Descriptive and
	Applied Linguistics VI. International Christian University, Tokyo,
 	69-92.
Kamio, A. 1977. Restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in
	Japanese. Descriptive and Applied Linguistics 10, 147-168.
Okutsu, K. 1969. Suuryootekihyoogen no bunpoo. Nihongo Kyooiku 14, 42-60.
Harada, S. I. 1976. Quantifier float as a relational rule. Metropolitan
	Linguistics 1, 44-49. Linguistic Circle of Tokyo Metropolitan
	University.
Iwasaki, K. 1988. Yuuri suuryoosi no jojutusei to jutugoshootenka kinou.
	Eigogaku Kenkuu 65, 75-87.


I would appreciate it very much if you could send me copies of the
above articles if you have them, or else contact me to make other
arrangements. I am also interested in obtaining whatever you possess
or have written about classifiers/measure words in any language, for
my reference. I will gladly reciprocate.

Thank you very much in advance,

Keiko Muromatsu
Department of Linguistics
1401 Marie Mount Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-7515 USA
e-mail: keikowam.umd.edu