Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...

David Peterson wrote:

> Trebor wrote:
>
> << I don't know how I'm going to get my hands on a Braille copy of
> _Describing
> Morphosyntax_, unfortunately, but maybe you guys could help?>>
>
> I don't know if you're at or associated with a university, but I remember
> when I
> was at Berkeley and working for the DSP (Disabled Students Program), if
> someone
> who was visually impaired wanted a given text, no matter what it was, they
> would
> either come up with a Braille or spoken version of the book--free of
> charge.
Sometimes it's possible to find a volunteer reader; Payne would require
someone with linguistic knowledge because of terminology, the foreign lang.
examples, phonetic stuff, etc.  I wrote to Trebor that I emailed Cambridge
U.P. to ask about a Braille or audio version-- of course he may already have
thought of that.....

An invaluable resource whose name I forget and which I'd love to
> have
> is a book that gives every type of verb in American English.   I think
> there
> are something
> like 150 different types of verbs that this author identifies, and she (I
> know the author
> is female) gives examples of each and how specifies how exactly they're
> different.
Can you summon up any specifics or examples from the memory banks? 150 seems
an awful lot. Now that I think of it, someone on the List (sorry, I forget
who) has been doing complicated diagrams of verbs wrt what can occur with
what (is it Venn diagrams? or something like that??) Perhaps that's what
your author was doing?

There's also Martin Joos's old "The English Verb" (1950s/early 60s), based
on a fictional "trial transcript" in some British novel. Very thorough, but
quite traditional (and very British). I have a copy somewhere..........