LINGUIST List 9.374

Sat Mar 14 1998

Qs: Word Freq,Emotional Lang,Verbs,Native American

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

Directory

1. Peter Renowden, Word Frequency Lists
2. R.M.Stibbard, Refs: Field Studies on Emotional Speech
3. Gisbert Fanselow, Verb Movement and Verbal Morphology
4. (The Left Rev.) John Konopak, Query: Words in Native American languages

Hello. Do you know where I might be able to obtain a copy of common
English language word usage frequency lists. This is for educational
purposes relating to spelling, language usage etc. I would appreciate
any comments or suggestions you have.

Thank you
Peter Renowden

I am currently working on a description of the prosodic and
paralinguistic features of a corpus of emotional speech. There is a
long-running literature on experimental work, in which either actors
simulate the emotions or the emotions are induced in subjects, but I
have found no reference on work using naturally ocurring emotions.

I would very much appreciate any help if anyone knows of work in this
area.

Richard Stibbard,
Department of Linguistic Science,
University of Reading,
Reading
RG6 6AA

It has been claimed that there is a correlation between verb movement
and the richness of verbal morphology: if verbal morphology is rich
then the language has verb movement.

Do you know of any counterexamples? Is the generalization restricted
to SVO languages? Or is it restricted to SVO languages that have
suffixal agreement?

Let me try to say what is meant by "richness" and "verb movement" in a
theory-neutral way:

We might say verbal morphology is rich if you have "enough" explicit
person number distinctions.

For SVO languages (that do not allow scrambling), you can tell whether
a language has verb movement or not by checking whether the verb and
the object may be separated by a negative operator or certain adverbs
(as in French) or whether this is not possible (English), according to
ideas that go back to Joseph Emonds, I believe

I will post a summary

Please reply to
fanselowrz.uni-potsdam.de

Gisbert Fanselow
Lx, University of Potsdam, 
P.O. Box 601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany
Fon: x49-331-977-2446
Fax: x49-331-977-2761
URL: http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~fanselow/

Hello--For a paper I'm trying write, I am hoping to hear from folks
who are knowledgeable in the languages of Native American groups.
Especially, I am trying to find out what words are used in these
groups to express the concept(s) which in English are compressed into
the verb "to teach." I have heard (mumble, somewhere, mumble) that
there is NO word in Navajo, for instance, that literally translates
this term. But from my Boas, Sapir, and Whorf, this is not a
surprise. So I would like to query those with knowledge of native
american languages (1) whether there exists a literal translation,(2)
if not, what terms metaphorically capture this sense, and (3) how
these terms would be rendered in a literal translation. 

Thanks,

John Konopak 
Asst. Prof. 
Univ. of Oklahoma 
jkonopakou.edu