LFG BULLETIN
JUNE 2001
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* LINGUISTICS IN THE NEWS *
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NEW YORK--According to a report released Monday by the Modern Language
Association, speakers of the Star Trek-based Klingon language
outnumber individuals fluent in Navajo by a margin of more than
seven-to-one.
"Navajo, a 3,000-year-old Native American tonal language belonging to
the Athabaskan/Na-Dené group of tongues, is clearly dying and will
likely be extinct by 2010," MLA president Frederick Toback
said. "Fortunately, though, the sad, steady decline of this once-proud
Native American tongue has been more than offset by a rising interest
in Klingon culture."
Klingon speakers said they are pleased with the report. "Every day,
more and more people are discovering the excitement and challenge of
Klingon, or, as it's called by native speakers, tlhIngan-Hol," said
Doug "HoD trI'Qal" Petersen, an official grammarian at the Klingon
Language Institute. "After just a few weeks of studying Klingon, you,
too will be saying 'qo' mey poSmoH Hol!'"
As membership in the KLI continues to swell, the Navajo
population, whose lands occupy approximately 25,000 square miles in
the four corners of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, has
dwindled to 150,000.
With the surge of interest in Klingon has come a corresponding surge
in publishing. Klingon-language editions of The Iliad, Hamlet and The
Bible are now available, as well as the classic Klingon tale The Eyes
Of Kahless.
"What's happening with the Klingon language is extremely exciting,"
MLA associate director Stephen Hogue said. "If its popularity
continues to grow at the current rate, we may consider giving certain
Klingon-speaking groups financial support in the form of grants and
special-interest funding. Increasingly, the MLA is diverting funds
from dying languages like Navajo to vibrant, emergent ones such as
Klingon."
[from the Onion: www.theonion.com (abridged version), contributed by
roving reporter Kyle Wohlmut]
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* OTHER NEWS *
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Upcoming LFG Conferences:
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- LFG2001, Hong Kong, June 25-27, 2001
Invited Speakers: Sam Mchombo, Nigel Vincent
organizer: Adams Bodomo
email: lfg2001@hkusua.hku.hk
web page: http://www.hku.hk/linguist/research/LFG2001.html
The Program is available at the web page and features a Chinese
Linguistics Workshop as well as a Workshop on Tense.
See you all there!
- LFG2002:
organizers: Stella Markantonatou and Yanis Maistros
venue: Athens, Greece
email: marks@ilsp.gr, maistros@cs.ntua.gr
webpage: http://thais.cs.ntua.gr/LFG2002
- LFG2003: somewhere in the USA
If you are interested in hosting the LFG conference in
the US, please contact Tracy Holloway King
(thking@parc.xerox.com).
PROPOSALS ARE STILL BEING ACCEPTED!
Hopefully a decision will be made in Hong Kong during
the LFG2001 business meeting.
Computational Linguistics Fall School in Konstanz
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- 1st Fall School of the Computational Linguistics Section of the
German Linguistics Society (DGfS).
Place: Konstanz
Time: September 10-21, 2001
Courses:
Stefan Mueller (DFKI) and Jonas Kuhn (IMS Stuttgart)
Grammar Development in constraint-based Formalisms:
HPSG and LFG
Henning Reetz (Konstanz)
From the Speechsignal to the Word
Tibor Kiss (Bochum)
Perl for Linguists
Heike Zinsmeister and Sabine Schulte im Walde (IMS Stuttgart)
Statistical Methods in Grammar Development
Invited Speakers: Mary Dalrymple (Xerox PARC)
Louisa Sadler (Essex)
More information at:
http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/conferences/dgfs-cl00.html
You can still sign up!
Recent LFG Publications:
------------------------
(Please send us the citation for your recent publications to include
in the next issue; announcements of publicly available theses are
encouraged.)
RECENT LFG PUBLICATIONS:
Knüppel, Veronika. 2001. Die Syntax der Negation im Französischen. Eine
lexikalisch-funktionale Analyse. Linguistische Arbeiten, Band 435.
Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Falk, Yehuda N. 2001. "Constituent Structure and Grammatical Functions in the
Hebrew Action Nominal" Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Israel Association
for Theoretical Linguistics, 11-12 June 2001, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem.
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* ILFGA *
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DONATE TO ILFGA: There are two ways to make a donation:
1. Send a check made out to "Intl. Lexical Functional Grammar
Assc." in US dollars to:
Tracy Holloway King
NLTT/ISTL
Xerox PARC
3333 Coyote Hill Rd
Palo Alto, CA 94304
USA
This is the simplest (and cheapest) method if you have access to US
dollars.
2. Have money transfered directly into the account.
Please let the ILFGA Treasurer, Tracy Holloway King (thking@parc.xerox.com), know if you
want to make a donation in this way.
ILFGA is a 501(3)c organization (i.e. a non-profit) and as such
contributions are tax deductible in the US (and perhaps elsewhere; if
you are not in the US, check your home country for tax status). A
receipt will be issued for each donation.
JOIN ILFGA:
If you haven't yet, you can still join ILFGA, the International
Lexical Functional Grammar Association by sending mail to:
majordomo@lists.stanford.edu with the message:
subscribe ilfga-members
BE IN THE DATABASE:
In addition, please add yourself to the ILFGA linguist database.
To do so, send email to Chris Culy (culy@ai.sri.com) with the
following information:
NAME
AFFILIATION
OFFICIAL ADDRESS
EMAIL ADDRESS
WEB PAGE
RESEARCH INTERESTS
RESEARCH LANGUAGES
The database can be accessed at:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/ilfga/member-database/ilfga-namelist.html
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* EDITORS *
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Please send updates, suggestions and news for inclusion in the next
LFG Bulletin (September 2001) to:
miriam.butt@uni-konstanz.de
thking@parc.xerox.com
Most importantly, please send information about:
- your recent publications or papers
- publically available grammars
- current grammar development efforts
- recent dissertations
Thank you,
Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King
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Frequently Asked Questions: FAQs
Information on the following topics is available on the LFG WebPages:
http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/LFG/
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg
1. WHAT IS LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR?
2. WHAT ARE THE BEST INTRODUCTORY BOOKS/ARTICLES TO LFG?
3. THE LFG WWW SITE
4. THE LFG MAILING LIST
5. LFG BIBLIOGRAPHY, RECENT PUBLICATIONS IN LFG
6. HOW TO RETRIEVE LFG DOCUMENTS
7. PUBLICALLY AVAILABLE LFG SYSTEMS
8. CURRENT GRAMMAR DEVELOPMENT EFFORT
9. UPCOMING EVENTS
If you have access to ftp, but no access to Web, you can get a copy of
the FAQ by ftp or email (see "How to Retrieve LFG Documents" below).
Please help keep this document and the FAQ up to date!
Send updates and suggestions for improvements to the FAQ to
doug#essex.ac.uk.
Send updates, suggestions and news for inclusion in the LFG Bulletin
to miriam.butt@uni-konstanz.de or thking@parc.xerox.com, or post them
on the LFG list (LFG@listserv.linguistlist.org). Most importantly,
please send information about:
- your recent publications or papers
- publically available grammars
- current grammar development efforts
---
* HOW TO RETRIEVE LFG DOCUMENTS *
Some LFG documents are available on the web, by FTP, or by email.
There are three ways to get them.
(1) Most of the documents are accessible via the WWW:
The current version of the list of Frequently Asked Questions about LFG:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/lfg-information.html
Introductions to LFG:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/clwww.essex.ac.uk/LFG/Introductions.html
http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/LFG/Introductions.html
The LFG bibliography:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/bibliography.html
http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/LFG/Bibliography.html
The bibliography is also available at the CL/MT Group Bibliographic
Search Page, maintained by Doug Arnold of the University of Essex.
The URL is:
http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/search/
(2) You can get the documents by anonymous FTP from:
ftp ftp-lfg.stanford.edu
All of the documents are in subdirectories of the directory
/pub/lfg. Here is a list of some of the files in that directory that
are relevant for LFG researchers:
in the directory /pub/lfg/bibliography:
The LFG Bibliography in various versions and formats.
in the directory /pub/lfg/lfg-information:
FAQ [the latest version of the list of
Frequently Asked Questions about LFG]
in the directory /pub/lfg/lfg-introductions:
pracinstrucsforlfg.ps [an introduction to LFG notation by
Michael Wescoat]
formal-architecture.ps [an introduction to LFG by Ron Kaplan]
neidle.ps [an introduction to LFG by Carol Neidle]
sadler.ps [a paper on recent developments in LFG by
Louisa Sadler]
in the directory /pub/lfg/lfg-presentations:
Slides and handouts from LFG conferences and courses.
in the directory /pub/lfg/papers:
Papers that have been submitted to the LFG Archive.
Compressed versions of some of these files are also available.
The file names of the compressed versions are the same, except
they have ".gz" at the end. There may be other LFG-related files
in that directory as well, which you are welcome to retrieve.
(3) You can get some files by email, via the Listserv "get"
command. A list of currently available files can be obtained by
sending a message to
LISTSERV@listserv.linguistlist.org
(please note: address the message to LISTSERV, not LFG). The
message should contain the following command:
index lfg
The following files are available, and there may be additional files
as well:
LFG-bulletin.txt [the latest version of the LFG Bulletin]
FAQ.txt [the list of Frequently Asked Questions]
lfgbib.text [the LFG bibliography]
To get a file, send a message to LISTSERV@listserv.linguistlist.org
containing the following command:
get <filename>
For example, if you want to get the latest version of the FAQ, you
would send a message to LISTSERV@listserv.linguistlist.org with
the following command:
get FAQ.txt
You will receive the file in an email message.