LINGUIST List 9.1405

Fri Oct 9 1998

Qs: Code-switch, Kinyarwanda, Morph/syntax, tErm

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

Directory

1. meg, a corpus of Spanish-English code-switching data
2. MJ.Ball, Kinyarwanda phonetics
3. Mike_Maxwell, Morphosyntactic features universals
4. Wayles Browne, tErM?

I am presently searching for a corpus of data on Spanish-English
code-switching for the purposes of investigating syntactic constraints
on code-switching. I am hoping that perhaps someone either has a corpus
of data that I may utilize for my research or may know of a corpus that
I may search for myself. Any response would be greatly appreciated.

A colleague not currently a list member is looking for any information
(in English or French) on the phonetics of Kinyarwanda: either
descriptive or instrumental.

Please contact Nicole Mu"ller at
muellercardiff.ac.uk

With thanks

Martin J Ball
Professor of Phonetics and Linguistics
University of Ulster

I am looking into helping field linguists (people who have had some basic
training in linguistics, but are for the most part not at a Ph.D. level) set up
an appropriate system of morphosyntactic features for a particular language
(usually a language which is relatively unstudied).

By 'morphosyntactic features', I'm referring to the kind of features that are
used in verbal agreement (subject and/or object person, etc.), tense/aspect,
case marking, negation, etc. etc.; or parts of speech systems (+/-N and +/-V a
la Chomsky and Jackendoff, for instance).

In phonology, there has been considerable research on what a universal feature
system might be (and even some agreement!). I am aware of very little such
research in morphosyntax, aimed at a universal feature system, but maybe that's
due to my ignorance. Of course, some things are not universal (extended gender
systems, say), and others may or may not be (shape classifier systems). But
some sorts of morphosyntactic features are are least arguably universal. I am
aware, for instance, of arguments to the effect that person marking features
should be expressed in terms of +/- SPEAKER and +/- HEARER (see e.g. Noyer's
1992 MIT thesis, which also deals with universal number features).

There are also some results in the typological literature, but those tends to
be--well, typologies. For instance, typological work by itself might lead you
to a system in which PERSON had three values, 1 2 and 3 (and maybe 4). But
without further theoretical work, you probably wouldn't come up with
binary-valued SPEAKER/ HEARER features. So I'm looking for s.t. that's more
theoretically informed than pure typologies.

My thinking is that if one had such a universal morphosyntactic feature system,
it might serve as a starting point for a field linguist's language-particular
system. Even if there is not agreement (and I'm sure there isn't), some ideas
about universal systems would save field linguists from a lot of dead ends.

Do readers of this list know of such work on morphosyntactic feature systems?

I will summarize any replies which come to me. Thank you!

 Mike Maxwell
 Mike_Maxwellsil.org
 Summer Institute of Linguistics

A frequent error in writing is to mix upper- and lower-case letters
(large and small letters) within a single word, e.g. WoRd. Is there
a term for this error?


Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof., Department of Linguistics
Morrill Hall 321, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.
tel. 1-607-255-0712
fax 1-607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE)
e-mail ewb2cornell.edu