LINGUIST List: Vol-5-837. Thu 21 Jul 1994. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 194 Subject: 5.837 Sum: Goodnight, sweet Prince!, Period disambiguation Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. Asst. Editors: Ron Reck -------------------------Directory------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 94 11:03:42 EDT From: Larry Horn Subject: Goodnight, sweet Prince! (Good morning, O{+>!) 2) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 16:14:18 +0200 (MSZ) From: hoffmann@utrurt.uni-trier.de (Christiane Hoffmann) Subject: SUM:Period disambiguation -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 1) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 94 11:03:42 EDT From: Larry Horn Subject: Goodnight, sweet Prince! (Good morning, O{+>!) First, a grateful nod to the following respondents who helped clarify my thinking about the issues I raised in my earlier posting ("ex-Prince"): Barbara Abbott Dave Kathman Mark Aronoff Mike Lake Gosse Bouma Mireille Langenbach Barbara Brunson John McCarthy [thanks for the subject line!] John Coleman Joyce McDonough John Cowan Miriam Meyerhoff Tom Cravens Kathy Mitchell Nancy Frishberg Benjamin Moore Lisa Frumkes Jerry Neufeld-Kramer Georgia Green Nik Silver Jim Jewett Todd Sieling Trey Jones schwa (the sociolinguist frmly knwn as Dave Britain) Charles Juengling (frmrly knwn as Aaron Broadwell) On the glyph: This is a logo or logogram designed by Prince around five years ago. Its form has been described in the following ways. - the male or Mars sign. (This seems unlikely, in view of the artist's portrayal of himself: "I'm not a man. I'm not a woman." - combination of male (Mars) and female (Venus) sign. This is the most frequently employed description. - a cross between the Scorpio astrological sign and female/Venus symbol - a 'curly dagger' - 'looks like an ankh' - 'looks like a combination of a circle, an arrow, and a trumpet' - 'looks like something from Dr. Seuss's On Beyond Zebra The generally accepted semantic interpretation (if we allow names to have senses, pace Kripke 1972) is that of a transcendence of the male/female distinction, in that both are encompassed, as with the Chinese yin/yang representation or perhaps the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung (that's my reading, not something claimed by the artist or his acolytes). Many contributors pointed out that there is a priori NO phonetic representation for the glyph, despite an apparently apocryphal story that a fan hotline dispensed the authorized pronunciation for a while. An AP dispatch reports that Prince "changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol so that he could move on to the next stage of his musical development" [cf. Hegel 1892: 180]. When asked how the symbol is pronounced, he responded (in either a Vibe or Rolling Stone interview) "You don't." He is also reported to have claimed that Prince has retired or died. ("Prince is dead but I control his music.") The "two high whoops" mentioned in the Times review were evidently intended as an attempt not to refer but to imitate, approximating the vocal stylings in Prince's earlier performances, and can thus be considered (in John McCarthy's words) "an improvisation by vocally frustrated fans". While the symbol (also appearing as the new name of his group, formerly known as New Power Generation or, later, as NPG, and as their eponymous--if that term can be felicitously used here--album) is not itself pronounced, the human drive for reference is a stubborn thing. The album just mentioned has been called "Symbol", and the artist has been variously referred to not only as "ex-Prince" (after the fashion of "the former Yugoslavian republic of Macedonia") but also, and more conventionally, as "the artist formerly known as Prince". He apparently accepts this designation, which (through the Principle of Least Effor of Zipf's Law (see Zipf 1949) has generally become truncated to "(The) Art. Frmly Knwn as Prince". (Note the process of "impure name formation", as Strawson (1950: IV) calls it, in which "substantival phrases grow capital letters" and move from descriptions to proper names.) The final stage, attested both among music reporters and Mark Aronoff's daughter's friends, is TAFKAP (a.k.a. tafkap), which is of course a perfectly good name, and eminently pronounceable. To the extent that Prince was attempting to transcend language by adopting the glyph, I think we can all enjoy the irony of the fact that his fans, reviewers, promoters, and distribu- tors have opted for something pronounceable after all, whatever the solution chosen. Linguistic revenge! As far as orthography goes, Gosse Bouma pointed me toward the users group alt.music.prince for various solutions to representing the glyph (or "love symbol", as it is sometimes called) in ascii format. Favored spellings include O{+> O-> 0+> There are also the expected mixed representations (e.g. "Prince/O+>") and an ultra-Zipfian "P". The asciified glyphs take normal inflectional endings, as in "Personally I think the song is among 0+>'s worst". And then there was the wistful reflection, "If I changed my name to a symbol would it be harder to cash a check at 7-11?" Aaron Broadwell has suggested that we consider the role of taboo avoidance in TAFKAP's adoption of the glyph, as an instance of the process whereby the tetragrammaton (YHWH or JHVH) representing the proper name of God (or G-d) in Hebrew is avoided and replaced by "Adonai" ('the Lord'), but space does not permit extended discussion of ineffability here. REFERENCES Hegel, G. (1892) The Logic of Hegel: Translated from the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences by W. Wallace. 2d ed. Oxford Univ. Press. Kripke, S. (1972) Naming and Necessity. In D. Davidson & G. Harman, eds., Semantics of Natural Language. D. Reidel. Strawson, P. F. (1950) On Referring. Mind n.s. 59: 320-54. Zipf, G. K. (1949) Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge: Addison-Wesley. --&* (frmrly knwn as Larry Horn) *Note that my new glyph not only is directly characterized in ascii but has both a straightforward phonetic and semantic representation, the latter glossed roughly as 'let's all conjoin and intersect with one another in unity, harmony, and universal siblinghood'. Of course, it's not REALLY translatable. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 16:14:18 +0200 (MSZ) From: hoffmann@utrurt.uni-trier.de (Christiane Hoffmann) Subject: SUM:Period disambiguation Dear Linguist readers, some months ago I posted a query concerning the disambiguation of sentence final stops. Your responses were very helpful esp. since exhaustive search for references in the library turned out to be very difficult. Since a concrete solution for a newspaper corpus (30 MIO running words of the Berlin "taz" (die tageszeitung)) had to be found, my algorithm is rather corpus-specific. Basically, it makes use of lex-rules and list-look-ups to classifiy potential sentence final stops. A documentation and the sources are available per ftp from: ftp.Uni-Trier.DE get /pub/local/parsing/punktdisamb.tar.Z I am sorry, but practically all of the NL-parts of the documentation are written in German. Thanks to: "Henry S. Thompson" "logendra (l.) naidoo" David Palmer (dpalmer@cs.berkeley.edu) (Andras Kornai) Cathy Ball David Bree Ed Haupt Frens Dols Mark Steedman Marti Hearst Oliver Christ bryan@ad.cise.nsf.gov (Bryan Thompson) cb@xis.xerox.com (Christopher Bader) dever@pogo.isp.pitt.edu (Dan Everett) edwards@cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Jane A. Edwards) feldweg@sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de (Helmut Feldweg) foster@citi.doc.ca (G. Foster [TAO]) koontz@alpha.bldr.nist.gov (John E. Koontz) manny@cam.sri.com (Manny Rayner) regier@ICSI.Berkeley.EDU (Terry Regier) riley@tiberius.research.att.com (Michael D. Riley) roscheis@CSLI.Stanford.EDU shelmrei@crl.nmsu.edu (Stephen Helmreich) srini@CoLi.Uni-SB.DE (V.Srinivasan) ted@crl.nmsu.edu (Ted Dunning) wachal robert s Christiane Hoffmann *********************************************************** "It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem." -- Niels Bohr INTERNET: hoffmann@ldv01.Uni-Trier.de *********************************************************** -------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-5-837.