LINGUIST List 8.307

Sun Mar 2 1997

Qs: Street Speech, Style sheet, Old English

Editor for this issue: T. Daniel Seely <seelylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Larry Rosenwald, Joyce, Dickens, and street speech
2. Lumme Erilt, LSA style in LATEX
3. Fernando Martinho, Old English adjectival inflection

	Hi - the title of this query is probably more interesting than the
substance of it. A student of mine wants to look at Dickens' _Oliver
Twist_ and Joyce's _Ulysses_ in the context of whatever information she can
find about 19th-century London street speech (for Dickens) and early 20th-
century Dublin street speech (for Joyce).
	I'd be grateful, on her behalf, for any citations people could send
me; they should be sent directly to me ( lrosenwaldwellesley.edu ), since
she's not on e-mail.
	Thanks very much, Larry Rosenwald/ Wellesley College

Does anybody know whether there are available LSA stylesheet bibliography
styles for use in LaTex?
Yours,
Lumme Erilt

Lumme Erilt
Sytiste tee 43-203, EE0034 Tallinn, Estonia
Tel. 372-2-581257

Dear Linguists,

I am working on aspects of adjectival inflection through Germanic and
Romance languages, and have some specific questions about English
adjectives. Sorry if it sounds trivial to some of you.

It is well known that modern English lacks adjectival inflection, at least
for features of gender and number (English adjectives have overt
superlative and comparative inflection, though).

According to some sources, however, it looks like English actually LOST
these adjectival gender and number features at some stage of its evolution,
contrary to other Germanic languages like Dutch and German (the latter is
refered to have 'rich' adjectival inflection).

Here is what I am interested in:

1.What kind of morphemes did old English use for gender and number features
within old adjectival inflection? Particularly, did morpheme 's' apply to
adjective number, as it did (and does) for nouns? Also, did old English
adjectives have some gender morpheme?

2.How do determiners (and quantifiers) behave with respect to the same
questions? Did old English determiners bear some kind of gender or number
inflection, contrary to modern determiners?

3.Exactly WHY did English adjectives lost their gender and number
inflection (but not their superlative/comparative inflection)? Did this
loss have some counterpart (like some kind of complementary distribution
with other lexical/functional heads)?

4.What exact references could help me explain WHY and HOW English
adjectives were affected by the loss of their inflection at some stage of
English evolution, proving that modern English (null) adjectival inflection
is the result of this loss? Also, are there any related Internet resources
available?

Some examples of sentences in old English with full inflected adjectives
would be welcome too :-)

Best,

Fernando

fmartmail.ua.pt
http://sweet.ua.pt/~fmart