LINGUIST List 8.564

Tue Apr 22 1997

Qs: Compounds, Grammar text, Japanese verb

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

Directory

1. Laurie Bauer, Query: Nominal compounds
2. Frederick Newmeyer, 'Fundamentals of Grammar'
3. Dietrich Bollmann, morphology, syntax and semantics of the japanese verb

It is well-known (and frequently mentioned in books on word-formation)
that nominal compounds are ambiguous (perhaps vague, depending on
definitions of the terms): A _London bus_, for example, may be going
to, coming from or operating within London. But does anyone have an
example, from poetry or advertising, of such ambiguity being exploited
in such a way that more than one meaning is relevant?
The ambiguity *is* sometimes exploited in jokes, where a reanalysis is
forced: -It's the royal garden party on Wednesday. -Oh, have you been
invited? -No, but my garden has. Are there also more serious
instances of the ambiguity being used?


Laurie.BAUERvuw.ac.nz
Department of Linguistics, Victoria University, PO Box 600,
Wellington, New Zealand
Ph: +64 4 472 1000 x 8800 Fax: +64 4 495 5057

Our department has started teaching a new course called 'Fundamentals
of Grammar'. The idea is to present basic grammatical concepts and
terminology to first-year undergraduates who plan to major in a
foreign language. The problem is finding an adequate textbook. All of
the descriptively-oriented introductions to grammar that we have found
focus exclusively on ENGLISH. But we want to expose the students to
aspects of grammar that are found in other languages that they might
set out to study, that is, such phenomena as pronominal clitics,
varieties of agreement rules, rich case systems, and so on.

Can anybody recommend a textbook?

Thanks; I'll summarize.

Fritz Newmeyer
fjnu.washington.edu

Dear all,

to finish university I plan to write my MA thesis about the
modelling of the japanese verb in unification based formalisms like
JPSG or HPSG. I am thus interested in literature and systems related
to the morphology, syntax and semantics of the japanese verb.

Could anybody help me with some indications on articles, papers and 
existing systems concerned with this topic?

For the moment I found the following:

 Young-mee Yu Cho, Peter Sells 
 (to appear in 'Journal of East Asian Linguistics'):
 'A Lexical Account of Inflectional Suffixes in Korean'
 
 Takao Gunji (1987): 'Japanese Phrase Structure Grammar'
 Reidel, Dordrecht.
 
 Toru Hisamitsu, Yoshihiko Nitta (COLING 94):
 'An Efficient Treatment of Japanese Verb Inflection for
 Morphological Analysis'
 
 Masayo Iida, Christopher D. Manning, Patrick O'Neill, Ivan A. Sag 
 (Presented at the LSA 1994 Annual Meeting):
 'The Lexical Integrity of Japanese Causatives'
 
 Peter Sells (to appear in 'Linguistic Inquiry'):
 'Korean and Japanese Morphology from a Lexical Perspective'
 
 Mariko Udo (1982): 'Syntax and Morphology of the Japanese Verb: 
 A Phrase Structural Approach'
 unpublished M.A. Thesis, University College London.
 
Thank You very much in advance, 

		Dietrich Bollmann
		(dietbcs.tu-berlin.de)