LFG BULLETIN
SEPTEMBER 2000
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* EGO CRISIS *
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As none of you noticed (not even Mary Dalrymple), Tracy and I utterly
failed to put out a Bulletin in June, as we were supposed to do.
This has led to a period of quiet self-reflection and the resolve that
Things Must Change.
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* LINGUISTICS IN THE NEWS *
---------------------------------
William Safire Orders Two Whoppers Junior
NEW YORK--Stopping for lunch at a Manhattan Burger King, New York
Times 'On Language' columnist William Safire ordered two "Whoppers
Junior" Monday. "A majority of Burger King patrons operate under the
fallacious assumption that the plural is 'Whopper Juniors,'" Safire
told a woman standing in line behind him. "This, of course, is a
grievous grammatical blunder, akin to saying 'passerbys' or, worse
yet, the dreaded 'attorney generals.'" Last week, Safire patronized a
midtown Taco Bell, ordering "two Big Beef Burritos Supreme."
[from the Onion: www.theonion.com, contributed by roving reporter
Kyle Wohlmut]
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* OTHER NEWS *
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LFG2000
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LFG2000 as part of the Berkeley Formal Grammar conference was a
success (this was determined in several late night sessions which
included representatives from both the HPSG and LFG communities, as
well as some agnostics).
5 days of hard conferencing were preceded by a day of hiking in the
hills around Berkeley (comment overheard: "no wonder more people don't
do LFG --- this is just too hard!").
A day of workshops was sandwiched in between 2 days of LFG-oriented
talks and 2 days of HPSG-oriented talks. This day of workshops
provided much stimulating information about arguments vs. adjuncts,
the place of morphology in syntactic theories, issues of learning, and
what to do about mismatches across components of the grammar.
For all of you who missed the conference: the LFG2000 on-line
proceedings are currently under construction and will be out by the
middle of October at:
http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/
The program of the conference can still be viewed at:
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~bfg2000/
Upcoming LFG Conferences:
-------------------------
- LFG2001
organizer: Adams Bodomo (abbodomo@hkusua.hku.hk)
venue: Hong Kong
For more information: http://www.hku.hk/linguist/research/LFG2001.html
- LFG2002:
organizer: Stella Markantonatou (marks@ilsp.gr)
venue: Athens, Greece
Recent LFG Publications:
------------------------
Vincent, Nigel. 1999. The evolution of c-structure: prepositions and
PPs from Indo-European to Romance. Linguistics 37-6, 1111-1153.
Bender, Emily. 2000. The syntax of Mandarin Ba: Reconsidering the
Verbal Analysis. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 9(2):105-145.
Ohara, Masako. 2000. An analysis of verbal nouns in Japanese. PhD
thesis, University of Essex.
Butt, Miriam and T.H. King (eds.). 2000. Argument Realization. Stanford,
CA: CSLI Publications.
Contributions: Kersti Borjars and Nigel Vincent
Multiple Case and the `Wimpiness' of Morphology
Rachel Nordlinger
Australian Case Systems: Towards a Constructive
Solution
Louisa Sadler
Noun Phrase Structure in Welsh
George Aaron Broadwell
Choctaw Directionals and the Syntax of Complex
Predication
Yo Matsumoto
Crosslinguistic Parameterization of Causative
Predicates
Helge Lodrup
Underspecification in Lexical Mapping Theory
Tibor Laczko
Derived Nominals, Possessors, and Lexical Mapping
Theory
As always, check out Joan Bresnan's webpage for more information and
links to recent (as yet unpublished) papers and other material:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/bresnan/unofficial-links.html
ILFGA
------
Elections were held this year and so we have two new members on the
executive committee: Victoria Rosen and Aaron Broadwell.
For a look at the entire executive committe and the identification
of other officials see
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/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
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* CONFERENCE GOSSIP *
---------------------
Miriam has done a lot of conference hopping this year and is pleased
to report that LFG has surfaced at a number of conferences this year
(besides at LFG2000, where it has to surface per definition).
The OT-Semantics conference at Utrecht ("Conference on Optimal
Interpretations of Words and Constituents") featured a talk by Miriam
Butt on linking and historical change in case systems from the
perspective of OT.
A complete program plus abstracts for the conference can be found at:
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/otwords.htm
The fall LAGB (Linguistics Association of Great Britain) in Durham
featured Peter Sells as a contributor to an OT-workshop and as the
Henry Sweet lecturer.
The OT-workshop (organized by Ad Neeleman and Vieri Samek-Lodovici)
talk was entitled "Markedness and Typological Implication in OT" and
discussed a number of the new OT-LFG approaches coming out recently
which are based on Aissen's (1999) idea of the harmonic alignment of
markedness scales.
A number of these papers are due to come out in a book edited by Peter
Sells entitled "Optimality Theoretic Syntax", so watch out for that.
Peter Sells' Henry Sweet lecture "The Morphological Expression of
Syntactic Information" took up the debate about the place of
morphology in relation to syntax that was begun by a workshop
organized by Andrew Spencer and Louisa Sadler at the LFG2000 and
proposed a treatment of some Skandinavian phenomena in terms of a
novel combination of insights from realizational morphology and
OT-LFG.
A paper by Anna Kibort (Cambridge) featured an LMT treatment of the
Polish -no/-to impersonal construction.
We do not apologize for not mentioning other conferences and
presentations that might have been relevant. We don't mention them
because we don't know about them. And we don't know about them
because you haven't told us about them (see the section entitled
"Editors", which still contains our standard plea for information).
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* EDITORS *
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Please send updates, suggestions and news for inclusion in the next
LFG Bulletin (June 2000) 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.