[Corpora-List] ad-hoc generalization and meaning

[Yorick Wilks]

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.
BUT....does the following help at all?

Some people use "syntax" and "grammar" to mean almost the same thing  
and some dont. People who like
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
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
(http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1045283.1045290); there is the  
late Karen Sparck Jones entry in the Ai tools catalogue under this  
same title (http://aicat.inf.ed.ac.uk/entry.php?id=554) and even now  
at Microsoft research work goes on using that phrase (http:// 
research.microsoft.com/research/srg/grammar.aspx). The tradition has  
strong relations too to what Fillmore has called "Frame semantics"  
since 1976 (http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/papers/crj_cjf2000.pdf)  
and to the way lexicographers like Hanks look at how meanings arise  
from sets of corpus examples (http://www.patrickhanks.com/). And, of  
course, Beth Levin has come up with strong claims about the  
relationship of the syntax and semantics of verbs (http:// 
linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-1102.html) 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.

Rob--I dont get your last bit:
> 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.)"
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.
Best
Yorick Wilks





On 13 Sep 2007, at 14:07, Rob Freeman wrote:

> On 9/13/07, maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu> wrote:
> Rob Freeman wrote:
> > As an example, consider the verb *support* in the following  
> sentences:
> >
> > Tom supported the tomato plant with a stick.
> > Tom supported his daughter with $10,000 per year.
> > Tom supported his father with a decisive argument.
> > Tom supported his partner with a bid of 3 spades.
> >
> > These sentences all use the verb *support* in the same syntactic  
> pattern:
> >
> > A person supported NP1 with NP2.
> >
> > Yet each use of the verb can only be understood with respect to a
> > particular subject matter or domain of discourse..."
> >
> > Well, I'm saying their syntax can only be understood with respect to
> > context too. Each context will select a different "grammar".
>
> Hmm...  In one sentence you acknowledge that all four use the same
> syntactic pattern; in another you that each context selects a  
> different
> "grammar."
>
> 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:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/lex1.htm
>
> It is of course John who claims the syntax of his examples is  
> captured by:
>
> "A person supported NP1 with NP2"
>
> 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.
>
> 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.)"
>
> 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.
>
> -Rob
> _______________________________________________
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20070913/885635a9/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora