[Corpora-List] ad-hoc generalization and meaning

[Rob Freeman]

On 9/13/07, maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu> wrote:
>
> Rob Freeman wrote:
>
> > I think the syntax of "supported" in each context will be different.
>
> What is your definition of "syntax"?


John doesn't like one sentence summarizations. But I do, so one might be:

Generalizations (ad-hoc) about the way words can combine.

> 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".
>
> The question is whether it's appropriate to capture that meaning
> distinction in the syntax, rather than in the semantics.  It seems to me
> that there's a class of facts that can be captured quite well by
> distinguishing syntax from semantics, but which is obscured when you try
> to collapse the two.


You gave some examples of this earlier, didn't you? At least, you gave some
examples to demonstrate syntax is important. I wasn't bothered then because
I also believe syntax is important. Now I'm trying to argue syntax is not
only important, but that it can code meaning.

You'd better give the examples again.

> 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.)"
>
> I would put it differently; I would say that collapsing syntax and
> semantics makes it difficult (maybe impossible :-)) to capture the fact
> that the above sentence is perfectly comprehensible, if (as you say) odd;
> whereas the following sentence is only comprehensible to English speakers
> with great difficulty, although the intended meaning is quite normal:
>    garden-the-to accompanied tomato-plant-his Tom


I think you are trying to demonstrate that this "sentence" has meaning, but
is incomprehensible because it does not obey English syntax.

By which you probably hope demonstrates the independence of syntax and
semantics.

Which is a slightly moot point. I'm not trying to demonstrate meaning cannot
exist without syntax. It can. I'm trying to show syntax can code meaning.

You have less (recognizable) syntax in your example, so the we lack that
code. That does not mean a recognizable syntax would not code meaning, only
that we are forced to use what we do have (lexicon, and a bit of
pig-Warlpiri?) to guess the meaning a missing syntax might have coded, in
this case.

If I take your example one stage further and show you a _picture_ of Tom
carrying the plant out into the garden, does that then demonstrate
_language_ does not code meaning (because you don't need language to convey
meaning)?

> 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.
>
> I'm sure you can find such regularities; the question is whether treating
> them as syntactic doesn't obscure the generalizations that I would
> consider truly syntactic.


By "truly syntactic" you mean syntactic generalizations which don't code any
corresponding meaning?

Let's look at them. Maybe such things exist.

It's possible. Remember my argument is slightly different from the
traditional. This kind of debate has usually been framed in terms of whether
semantics governs syntax. If that were true there would be no syntactic
distinctions which did not have a semantic basis. But I'm not arguing that.
I'm not saying semantics governs syntax (John is saying that, if anyone.)
I'm saying syntax, which you can define independently in terms of
regularities in texts, can be used to code semantics. (Though you don't need
it. You don't even need language. You might equally paint a picture and get
the meaning across that way.)

-Rob
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