LINGUIST List 9.1312

Tue Sep 22 1998

Qs: Usage, Lang Acquisition, Spectrum of Sibilants

Editor for this issue: Scott Fults <scottlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. manaster, Q: "Sexual relations"
2. Ronald Peereman, English and French children vocabulary
3. Simona Herdan, Q: acquisition of causative verbs
4. Jack Wiedrick, Spectral analysis of sibilant sounds

I have been surprised by the lack of discussion by linguists
of the descriptive facts regarding the phrase "sexual relations"
as used by Clinton. I am not sure what these are, but it does
seem to me that this was once a rather standard term for
genital intercourse, just as he says, although the same is
not the case for apparently similar terms like "to have sex"
or even "sexual relationship". Is there anybody out there
with relevant data about actual usage over the last 40 years,
say.

AMR

Hello,

Interested in language acquisition, I am looking for speech corpora and
word frequency lists which could be used to estimate the vocabulary
directed to French and English children of different ages (from birth to
9 years old), as well as the vocabulary used in children productions
(from 4 to 9 years old).

Is any one of you aware of any resources I could use

Thank you in advance,
Ronald Peereman
- 
Ronald Peereman
Laboratoire Etude Apprentissages & Developpement, C.N.R.S.
Universite de Bourgogne, 6 bd Gabriel, F21000 Dijon, France
Tel. ++33 0380395756, Fax. ++33 0380395767
e-mail. peeremanu-bourgogne.fr

Dear Linguists,
	I'm trying to find out whether there is a link between the complexity
in a causative structure and the difficulty in its acquisition. I suspect
that, although very complex themselves, the lexical pairs (eg. die-kill) are
acquired first, more complex syntactical patterns like "have something done"
only coming later. I also wonder whether this might have anything to do with
the example given in Lakoff and Johnson's "Metaphors We Live By":

Sam killed Harry. - single event
Sam caused Harry to die. - complex event structure

Their conclusion is that "the closer the form indicating causation is to the
form indicating effect, the stronger the causal link." (pages 128-133)
Following this I would assume that the child goes for the stronger
effect and minimum effort (simplest event structure)

	Any feedback, including references to (preferably available online)
books or articles that deal with this topic will be highly appreciated. I
will post a summary if I get enough responses.

Thanks in advance,
Simona Herdan

Is there anyone out there who is currently doing - or knows someone who is
doing - work on the sound spectra of fricative speech sounds, and
especially sibilants? I am particularly interested in locating
any research which attempts to characterise auditory distinctions between
sibilants in terms of sound spectra, i.e. which tries to provide a
perceptually significant acoustic signature for the sounds in question.

Jack Wiedrick
Rice University