LINGUIST List 8.338

Sat Mar 8 1997

Qs: Dialectology, Prepositions, Animacy

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

Directory

1. Baerman Matthew, Q: Dialectology databases
2. Elia Yuste - MSc in MT, HELP: CATALAN & ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS
3. Jack Sidnell, animacy

	The folks who are working on the Macedonian Dialect Atlas at
the Institute for the Macedodian Language in Skopje (where I've lately
been doing research) have asked me some computer-related questions
which I cannot even begin to answer - so to the list I turn. They are
thinking about putting together a computerized database. What they
have is thematically-oriented word lists from hundreds of villages,
plus texts. What they want of course is to cross-reference everthing
so stuff can be called up on the basis of meaning, phonological
features etc. etc. What they lack are prior examples of this sort of
thing having been done with dialectological material, something to
serve as a guideline. Surely such things have already been done
successfully, but I frankly don't know where, how or who by. If
anyone out there has any info or advice that would help get this
worthy project off the ground, it would be much appreciated. Please
send messages to my e-mail address. 
Thanks!

Matthew Baerman
Dept. of Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of California, Berkeley

baermanlotus.mpt.com.mk

Dear Linguist-readers,

I was wondering whether you could help me with this. I'm an
English/Spanish/ Catalan professional translator. At the moment I'm
concentrating mainly on my postgraduate course at the Department of
Language Engineering in UMIST (Univ. of Manchester Institute of
Science & Technology), which is called MSc in MACHINE
TRANSLATION. I've just started the literature searching for my
dissertation, which has to do with the compilation of a bilingual
lexicon and formal bilexical rules in Prolog to design an automatic
translation tool. The linguistic topic I am going to be handling is
spatial prepositions and their behaviour with verbs of movement, of
course, in the above-mentioned languages!!

So, please, if anybody knows about any bibliography or specialist in
this particular field, I would be eternally grateful. I'd be also
delighted to be given any reference/feedback about human translation
problems when dealing with prepositions in
Spanish/English/Catalan. This can help me to consider the difficulties
when implementing the so-called "bi-lexical rules" in the system.

Many thanks in advance.

Elia Yuste
Degree in English Philology (Univ.of Valencia, Spain)
Postgraduate student at CCL, UMIST
e-mail --> eliauk.ac.umist.ccl 

Linguists

I'm looking for research on animacy hierarchies - specifically work
which shows animacy as a constraint on morphosyntactic variation
(i.e. alternate pronoun forms, null and full forms etc.). Research on
English dialects would be the most useful but any Indo-European
langauge would also be helpful.

Thanks in advance,

Jack Sidnell
jsidnellepas.utoronto.ca

Anthopology
University of Toronto