LINGUIST List 9.639

Fri May 1 1998

Qs: Part-of-Speech,Diacritics,Terminology,Winnebago

Editor for this issue: Anita Huang <anitalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Ji Donghong, what's behind Part-of-speech (II)?
2. lewisohn, Diacritics on the web
3. SEVERINE, Company database - Terminology
4. Elischa Ben-Ezra, Winnebago language

Several days ago, I posed a query "what's behind part-of-speech?", up
to now, more than 10 researchers have replied me. Now I would like to pose
another query on the topic before presenting a summarization:
 
 Q: Is the part-of-speech based on syntactic distribution a
 WELL-FORMED concept?

where I mean "WELL-FORMED" by the following condition 1) and 2):
 
 
 1) For a particular language, we can select, based on some resonable
 principles, some distribution information among all as criteria
 for POS definition.


 /* NOTE to 1): For a particular language, there may be too much
 syntactic distribution information, and we cannot 
 list all. */ 


 2) We can select, based on some principles, some among all possibly
 produced classes as part-of-speech categories.


 /* NOTE to 2): Given a fixed set of distribution information as
 constraints, there will produce many many classes based
 on the constraints, or combinations of the constraints.
 For example, given only two constraints, c1 and c2, we
 may get the following conditions, with one condition
 corresponding with one class:
 
 c1, c2, c1 AND c2, c1 OR c2, NOT_c1, NOT_c2, ...
 
 It seems difficult that we don't think they are classes
 based on distribution. */

THE AIM OF THIS QUERY:
 
 1) if the answer to the query is YES, we should face the difficulties
 in Chinese POS definition, and try to find what really lead to
 them.

 2) if the answer to the query is NO, we should not seek POS based on
 distribution again, especially for the languages with few affixes, 
 e.g., Chinese, and turn to other criteria. 
 
Any comments or information will be highly appreciated. I will present a
suumarization.

Ji Donghong

- ---------------------
Kent Ridge Digital Labs
Singapore 119613
Email: dhjikrdl.org.sg
Tel: 65-8746380
Fax: 65-7744998
- ---------------------

Does anyone know of fonts that can be used with te mack os and can also
be used on web pages which have the diacritical marks needed to
transliterate Persian and Arabic into English., other than Middel East
Times?

We are a company in the steel industry and thinking about establishing a
database of our own to resolve our tranlsation problems. We would like
to contact other companies which have recently created such a
terminological database in at least 2 languages - in order share
experiences and to know which problems they have encountered.
Who can give further information or advice on such a project?
Thank you in advance.
valmaneasynet.fr

My name is Elisha and I am a student at the Bonn university, Germany.
I am looking for any (and all) Winnebago language materials
...books, papers, articles, tapes and videos!
Is it possible to send to me the information which you have?

Thank you very much, in advance.

Elisha Ben-Ezra