LINGUIST List 9.117

Sat Jan 24 1998

Qs: Twin Langs, Metaphors, Russian, Psycholing

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

Directory

1. Bernard Comrie, Twin Languages
2. Di Kilpert, Metaphors
3. Jameela Ann Lares, Russian Syntax
4. Anja Krueger, Psycholinguistics/Missing-Word Sentences

Twin Languages

Can anyone direct me to literature on the subject of twin languages,
i.e. languages (spoken or signed) used by twins and distinct from the
language of the rest of the family/community?

Bernard Comrie
University of Southern California
comriebcf.usc.edu

- 
Bernard Comrie
Dept of Linguistics GFS-301 tel +1 213 740 3674
University of Southern California fax +1 213 740 9306
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1693, USA e-mail comriebcf.usc.edu

Address from mid-May 1998 (new telephone, fax, e-mail not yet
available): Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Inselstrasse 22-26 D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Re Marie-Lucie Tarpent's posting

> 2) language as object of metaphor: what can language be compared to?
explicit (e.g. neo-grammarian 'family tree'; Saussure's game of chess;
the city) and implicit (?) metaphors for language; what do such
metaphors reveal about language and how speakers view it? How do
mataphors for language relate to directions in linguistics?

I am interested in corresponding with anyone who has thoughts about/
has written anything on this subject.

Di Kilpert 
Rhodes University
Grahamstown
South Africa

During a class discussion on syntax as a regular feature language, and
particularly the organization of subject, verb, and object, one of my
students claimed that Russian doesn't seem to him to have any regular
syntactic organization whatsoever, or at least no regular organization
of some order of SVO. I told him it was unlikely that that was the
case, but that I would check with my colleagues on the Linguist List.

So, the question is twofold:

	1. Isn't Russian syntax regular in general?

	2. Doesn't it have a regular order for subject, verb, object?

Jameela Lares
Department of English 
University of Southern Mississippi 
Hattiesburg, MS 39406

I've just started research on statistical language models. I'm
planning to carry out experiments using missing-word sentences to
compare human performance with language model performance.

Does anybody know of similar experiments carried out recently?

Could you please send any references or information to

a.krugerqub.ac.uk

Thank you very much in advance,

				Anja Krueger