LINGUIST List 9.788

Tue May 26 1998

Qs: "promise", Hungarian Socioling, Dialectology

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

Directory

1. manaster, 'Promise' and Underdetermined Grammars
2. Davide, Hungarian Sociolinguistics
3. manaster, History of Dialectology (Population Biology, etc.)

If (and it is a big 'if') languages other than English
(but otherwise very similar to it) do not exhibit such
variation as does English in terms of whether sentences like

John promised Sue to hire Bill

are OK, then the variation in English itself is
unlikely to be due to underdetermination of
the grammar by the primary data, as suggested
by Georgia Green. In fact, I don't think I
know of any clear case of variation due to
underdetermination even though this is often
posited (first I think by Zelig Harris).

Are there any clear cases that anybody knows
about?

Alexis

My name is Patricia Bertini, I'm a language student at University in Pavia,
Italy. I study linguistics as main subject and I'm working to my thesis
which deals with Hungarian sociolinguistics; I'm going to study which
linguistic changes ocurred in the advertisments' language after the 1989's
socio-political changes.
If you know any publication or peson who deals with this subject,
please, let me know; I'm looking for any kind of material about
advertisments in general too.
If you have any kind of information that could be useful to me, please 
email me.

Thanks in advance.
 Yours sincerely, Patricia Bertini

I believe that it was dialect geographers of the late 19th or early
20th century who discovered that the georgraphical distribution of
ling. variants can often tell us about their (pre)history, e.g., that
there is more variation where the lg is older, that innovations
tend to occur in large peripheral areas, while older forms 
survive in scattered but central ones, etc. Similar principles
seem to have been found of value in population biology and
perhaps in other sciences that deal with historically evolving
systems. But I cannot seem to find out who came up with all
this in linguistics or in biology. Any leads would be very
welcome. AMR