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OT: CHAT/OT: source/goal survey

From:daniel andreasson <daniel.andreasson@...>
Date:Sunday, September 10, 2000, 17:48
Hi all.

In my typology class we have got an assignment in which
we are supposed to find informants for at least 20 different
languages from as diverse areas as possible. So far my group
(consisting of me, Henrik and Svetlana - interesting, eh? ;) )
have got informants from every genera (Dryer's term) except
the Austronesian-Papua New Guinean genera. We've found our
informants by talking to friends and asked the language
institutions at uni. We're quite proud of ourselves. :)

The assignment is about finding how different languages
express source and goal. E.g. 'go to Stockholm', 'come
from Gothenburg', 'send flowers to Pelle', etc. The
hypothesis is that 'source' is marked in a consistent
way, while 'goal' isn't.

Anyway. We still need some more informants and I was
wondering if some of you guys would like to do that.
Since there are people from all around the globe here
I though I could at least ask. And now I'm talking about
non-European langs such as Hebrew, Korean, Mandarin,
Indonesian, North American langs, etc.

I do hope that this doesn't fall under the category "Do
your own homework!". If it does, please feel free to
yell all you can at me. :)

Please e-mail me back privately if you're interested
or to the list if you wanna yell at me. :) This could
be your chance of having your name appear on a real
live D-level typological investigation. ;) It doesn't
take much time and is quite simple. My address is as
always daniel.andreasson@telia.com.

/ Daniel

ObConlang: I have to make it somewhat on-topic. :)
How do you express source and goal in your respective
conlangs?

PS. We're discussing universals among other things in
my class, but unfortunately I don't have time to
participate in the discussion here. Perhaps I can
revive the thread further on. Universals is a bit
of a favourite subject of mine. I can recommend the
first and second chapter of Jae Jung Song's 'Linguistic
Typology' for a good summary of recent findings about
universals. I don't recommend the book in general though.
It's dense and boring and pretty much sucks. Anyway... DS.