LINGUIST List 5.695

Wed 15 Jun 1994

Sum: Order of conjuncts, Addendum to ape language summary

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1. "Barbara.Abbott", Sum: Order of conjuncts
2. Michael Kac, Addendum to Summary

Once again LINGUISTs come through. Last week I asked for references on what
determines the order of items in conjunctions (e.g. "peanut butter and jelly",
but ?"jelly and peanut butter"). I said I had the Cooper and Ross paper
(included in the list below) but nothing more recent. Thanks to Kon Kuiper,
Carol Miller, Rich Hilliard, Loren Allen Billings, Mel Resnick, Mihoko Kubota,
Ton van der Wouden, Raphael Salkie, Bill Rapaport, Kay Bock, Maryellen
MacDonald, Steve Pinker, and Grev Corbett. The references they suggested are
given below. Also Mel Resnick remarks:

Thanks for asking about this. The topic is of interest to me on a cross-
linguistic basis, viz.:

 ENGLISH SPANISH
 ------- -------
 black and white blanco y negro
 from head to toe de pie a cabeza

REFERENCES

Allan, Keith. 1987. [no title given]. Journal of Linguistics vol 23 no. 1.

Cooper, William E. and John Robert Ross. 1975. World Order. R.E. Grossman,
L.J. San, & T.J. Vance, eds., Papers from the Parasession on Functionalism,
Chicago Linguistic Society, 63-111.

Everaert, Martin 1993. Vaste verbindingen (in woordenboeken). Spektator
22, 3--27. [Dutch]

Geeraerts, Dirk 1989. Types of meaning in idioms. In Proceedings of the first
Tilburg workshop on idioms, ed. by Martin Everaert and Erik-Jan van der
Linden. Tilburg: ITK.

Gil, David. 1987. "On the scope of grammatical theory" in S. Modgil & C.
Modgil (eds), Noam Chomsky: Consensus & Controversy. Philadelphia and
Falmer, UK: Falmer Press, pp. 119-141. This paper refers to an earlier
paper by Gil in Hopper & Thompson, eds, Syntax & Semantics 15, Studies on
Transitivity.

Kelly, M., Bock, J.K., and Keil, F. (1986). Prototypicality in a linguistic
context: Effects on sentence structure. _Journal of Memory and Language_ 25:
59-74.

Kuiper, Kon, [?] Koenraad and Paddy Austin 1988. Constraints on coordinated
idioms. Te Reo [the journal of the NZ Linguistic Society] 31: 3-17.

Malkiel, Yakov. 1959. Studies in irreversible binomials. Lingua 8, 113--
60. Repr. in Essays on linguistic themes, Oxford, Basil Blackwell,1968, 311-
-55.

McDonald, J.L., Bock,K. & Kelly, M.H. (1993). Word and world order:
Semantic, phonological, and metrical determinats of serial position. _Cognitive
Psychology_ vol 25, 188-230. (The reference list in this paper cites a lot of
work, experimental and otherwise, on order in conjuncts, frozen and
otherwise.)

Pinker, Steven and David Birdsong. (1979). Speakers' sensitivity to rules of
frozen word order. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 497-
508.

Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. William Morrow; see pp. 166-
170.

Urtz, Bernadette (ABD at Harvard in Slavic linguistics, but lives in Ithaca)
may have a working paper on this subject in a colloquium papers volume edited
by Olga Yokoyama (her adviser).

In my summary of responses to my query regarding the ape
language controversy, I neglected to include the following references
(communicated by John O'Neil).

Neisser, A. (1983) _The_Other_Side_of_Silence_ New York:Knopf.

Petitto, L.A. (1988) "``Language'' in the prelinguistic child". In F.
Kessel, ed.,
_The_Development_of_Language_and_of_Language_Researchers_
Erlbaum.

Pinker, S. & P. Bloom (1990) "Natural language and natural
 selection" _Behavioral_and Brain_Sciences_ 13:707.

- & M.S. Seidenberg (1979) "On the evidence for linguistic abilities
in signing apes" _Brain_and_Language_ 8:162.

Seidenberg, M.S. (1986) "Evidence from the great apes concerning the
biological bases of language." In W. Demopoulos and A. Marras, eds.,
_Language_Learning_and_Concept_Acquisition_.

- & Petitto, L.A. (1979) "Signing behaviour in apes: a critical
review" _Cognition_ 7:177.

- (1987) "Communication, symbolic communication, and language"
_Journal_of_Experimental_Psychology_ 116:279.

Terrace, H.S., L.A. Pettito, R.J. Sanders & T.G. Bever (1979) "Can an
ape create a sentence?" _Science_ 206:891.

Michael Kac