LINGUIST List 5.296

Wed 16 Mar 1994

Qs: Bilabial fricative, Spatial preps, Jesperson, Reflexives

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Directory

1. Kathleen Doty, Q: Bilabial fricative
2. Laurie Bauer, Spatial Prepositions
3. , Jespersen and clefts
4. "david c. gohre", Translation of Reflexives

One of my colleagues who is not on the List would like to know
if there are any modern languages with a voiced bilabial fricative.
He realizes there is an IPA symbol for the sound, but is looking
for examples from existing languages.

Please reply directly to me and I'll post a summary if it seems
appropriate. Thanks in advance from both of us.

--Kathleen Doty

What I take to be a typographical error in Joachim Grabowski's posting on
spatial prepositions (namely _davant_ for current French _devant_) had me
reaching for my _Petit Robert_. Yes, current _devant_ derives from
_d'avant_. Now the localist hypothesis suggests that temporal location
should be described in terms of spatial location. Here we seem to have a
case where spatial location is described using the temporal words as a
metaphor. Are there many such cases that people are aware of? I realise
this is tangential to Joachim's query, but it strikes me as a point of
interest. Or perhaps the localist hypothesis has developed in the last ten
years or so?

Laurie.BAUERvuw.ac.nz
Department of Linguistics, Victoria University, PO Box 600, Wellington, New
Zealand
Ph: +64 4 472 1000 x 8800 Fax: +64 4 471 2070

I am working on cleft sentences in English discourse and read in O. Jespersen
that "The Irish make an excessive use of cleft sentences: Is it reading your
[sic] are? | it is angry that he was | it's right weel you look | It's
yourself should have been there...."

Has anyone researched why this claim is so, if it is? While I'm interested in
syntactic and semantic issues with clefts, is something historical going on
here with Irish-English? If there is, it might prove interesting for
syntax/semantics. I'll post a summary of replies.

Dennis Perzanowski
dennispaic.nrl.navy.mil

Does there exist such a language that in the translation of the
'self' (as part of 'himself') the translation comes out as a body
part, such as head, neck, etc...

Thank you-

-David Gohre
-Dgohrecw-f1.umd.umich.edu