LINGUIST List 9.925

Sat Jun 20 1998

Qs: WH-Phrases,E-Prime,Old English

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

Directory

1. Norvin Richards, WH-Phrases
2. Brian & Kate, E-Prime
3. Elisa Vazquez Iglesias, Translations from Old English

In (my) English, there's a contrast between (1) and (2):

(1) [Whose book] did you buy?
(2) *[Books about what] did you buy?

There seem to be some languages in which the equivalent of (2) is
okay; these include Malagasy, Standard Arabic, and Bafut (a Bantu
language of Cameroon). I'm looking for languages of this type;
languages, that is, in which an overtly moved wh-phrase can be an NP
containing a PP whose object is a wh-word. If anyone knows of any,
I'd be grateful for the relevant information. I'll post a summary to
the list, if there's sufficient interest.

- Norvin Richards

Any and all thoughts/opinions/POVs regarding E-Prime, a.k.a. English
without any form of the verb "to be", will be gratefully accepted and
considered for a Linguistics paper I'm doing. Thank you!


Brian Gallagher
Vancouver, BC
Canada

Dear linguists,

I would like to get in touch with somebody who could help me translate some
Old and/or Middle English data containing 'self' forms. All these data are
taken from the Helsinki Corpus, so I would also like to know if there
exists a translation into Modern English of the diachronic part of this
corpus. 

Thanks in advance.

Elisa Vazquez Iglesias
Department of English and German Philology
University of Santiago de Compostela, SPAIN