<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">Like many bystanders, Ive been the resisting the temptation to join in this fight, with its wonderful mix of the odd and the very familiar.<DIV>BUT....does the following help at all? </DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Some people use "syntax" and "grammar" to mean almost the same thing and some dont. People who like</DIV><DIV>Wittgenstein (several players here, myself included) tend to use "grammar" in the way he did, a way in which it is fine to say that the "support" sentences have the </DIV><DIV>same syntactic-pattern but different grammars. There is an old tradition of seeing things this way and it never totally goes away. In the neolithic period of NLP, Schank and I used to write about getting to semantic structures without a syntactic level of analysis, and we used a lot of this sort of rhetoric and even similar examples. Burton in 1977 wrote Semantic Grammar</DIV><DIV>(<A href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1045283.1045290">http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1045283.1045290</A>); there is the late Karen Sparck Jones entry in the Ai tools catalogue under this same title (<A href="http://aicat.inf.ed.ac.uk/entry.php?id=554">http://aicat.inf.ed.ac.uk/entry.php?id=554</A>) and even now at Microsoft research work goes on using that phrase (<A href="http://research.microsoft.com/research/srg/grammar.aspx">http://research.microsoft.com/research/srg/grammar.aspx</A>). The tradition has strong relations too to what Fillmore has called "Frame semantics" since 1976 (<A href="http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/papers/crj_cjf2000.pdf">http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/papers/crj_cjf2000.pdf</A>) and to the way lexicographers like Hanks look at how meanings arise from sets of corpus examples (<A href="http://www.patrickhanks.com">http://www.patrickhanks.com</A>/). And, of course, Beth Levin has come up with strong claims about the relationship of the syntax and semantics of verbs (<A href="http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-1102.html">http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-1102.html</A>) and , whether or not you accept those claims, they must be considered here. So, there's lots of stuff out there on this way of doing things (as John Sowa keeps saying, if I read him right) and were not really adding much here by just chucking more examples at each other.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Rob--I dont get your last bit:</DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">Failure to treat the syntax of "supported" on an ad-hoc basis in this way means you have no way of capturing the information that, in a grammar of English, "supported" = "accompanied" but also "supported" != "accompanied". That means you will be unable to capture detailed syntactic restrictions which prevent you from saying "slightly odd" things like "Tom accompanied his tomato plant to the garden (where he planted it.)" </BLOCKQUOTE>Surely, thats not the contrast you want--it's rather that "I accompanied the man with a stick" has exactly the syntactic pattern of the first (support-tomato) example l, but that means nothing at all --their joint class membership there leads to NOTHING---because of the quite different "semantic grammars" of the concepts.<DIV>Best</DIV><DIV>Yorick Wilks</DIV><DIV><BR><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On 13 Sep 2007, at 14:07, Rob Freeman wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">On 9/13/07, <B class="gmail_sendername"><A href="mailto:maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu">maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu</A></B> <<A href="mailto:maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu">maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu</A>> wrote:<DIV><SPAN class="gmail_quote"> </SPAN><BLOCKQUOTE class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Rob Freeman wrote:<BR>> As an example, consider the verb *support* in the following sentences: <BR>><BR>> Tom supported the tomato plant with a stick.<BR>> Tom supported his daughter with $10,000 per year.<BR>> Tom supported his father with a decisive argument.<BR>> Tom supported his partner with a bid of 3 spades. <BR>><BR>> These sentences all use the verb *support* in the same syntactic pattern:<BR>><BR>> A person supported NP1 with NP2.<BR>><BR>> Yet each use of the verb can only be understood with respect to a <BR>> particular subject matter or domain of discourse..."<BR>><BR>> Well, I'm saying their syntax can only be understood with respect to<BR>> context too. Each context will select a different "grammar". <BR><BR>Hmm... In one sentence you acknowledge that all four use the same<BR>syntactic pattern; in another you that each context selects a different<BR>"grammar."</BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR>Sorry, Mike, I guess I didn't make it clear I was quoting John here. You can see the quote marks if you look carefully. I've been discussing this treatment of Wittgenstein by John since my 3rd(?) message in this thread. Here is the link again: <BR><BR><A href="http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/lex1.htm">http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/lex1.htm</A><BR><BR>It is of course John who claims the syntax of his examples is captured by:<BR><BR>"A person supported NP1 with NP2" <BR><BR>I think the syntax of "supported" in each context will be different. A different "grammar" will be found for it depending on context. For instance, "supported" will be in a class with one set of words in "daughter" contexts ( e.g. "accompanied"), and in classes with other words in "tomato" contexts, etc.<BR><BR>Failure to treat the syntax of "supported" on an ad-hoc basis in this way means you have no way of capturing the information that, in a grammar of English, "supported" = "accompanied" but also "supported" != "accompanied". That means you will be unable to capture detailed syntactic restrictions which prevent you from saying "slightly odd" things like "Tom accompanied his tomato plant to the garden (where he planted it.)" <BR><BR>John would claim such restrictions are purely semantic, but in point of fact you can capture them with an ad-hoc search for syntactic regularities along the lines I recommend. Since a semantic representation is currently moot, but a syntactic representation is easily to hand (the corpus) I don't know why his is resisting this. <BR><BR>-Rob</DIV></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Corpora mailing list</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="mailto:Corpora@uib.no">Corpora@uib.no</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora">http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora</A></DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>