LFG BULLETIN MARCH 2001 ------------------------------ * LINGUISTICS IN THE NEWS * --------------------------------- Q. Please explain how to diagram a sentence. A. First spread the sentence out on a clean, flat surface, such as an ironing board. Then, using a sharp pencil or X-Acto knife, locate the "predicate," which indicates where the action has taken place and is usually located directly behind the gills. For example, in the sentence: "LaMont never would of bit a forest ranger," the action probably took place in a forest. Thus your diagram would be shaped like a little tree with branches sticking out of it to indicate the locations of the various particles of speech, such as your gerunds, proverbs, adjutants, etc. [Dave Barry, lifted from http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/index.html] ---------------- * OTHER NEWS * ---------------- Upcoming LFG Conferences: - ------------------------- - LFG2001, Hong Kong, June 25-27, 2001 Invited Speaker: Sam Mchombo organizer: Adams Bodomo email: lfg2001@hkusua.hku.hk web page: http://www.hku.hk/linguist/research/LFG2001.html The program for LFG01 will be out soon! - LFG2002: organizer: Stella Markantonatou (marks@ilsp.gr) venue: Athens, Greece - 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 - ------------------------------------------------- - 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 The deadline to register is June 1! 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: DALRYMPLE, Mary and Ronald M. Kaplan. 2000. Feature Indeterminacy and feature resolution. Language 76(4):759-798. MORIMOTO, Yukiko. "Discourse Configurationality in Bantu Morphosyntax" (Stanford University, PhD dissertation). Available at: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~morimoto as a gzipped ps file. ----------- * ILFGA * ----------- Elections for two new executive committee members will occur this summer. Join now to be eligible to vote. 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 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 ----------- * EDITORS * ----------- Please send updates, suggestions and news for inclusion in the next LFG Bulletin (June 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 - ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.