[Corpora-List] Chinese and English POS

[Mike Maxwell]

Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
 > I don't believe it makes sense to look for a theory telling us what PoS a
 > given word in a given context "really" is... I just don't see that
 > there is a "truth of the matter" to which a theory may correspond or fail
 > to correspond...
 > But I was always clear that I wasn't claiming to discover facts
 > about English structure, only imposing a classification scheme on 
English. (It seemed to me that some of the contributors to this thread 
were not
 > recognising this distinction, though others perhaps do.)

I'm afraid I don't recognize it, or else I just don't understand.

Perhaps my misunderstanding starts with the statement about "a theory 
telling us what PoS a given word in a given context 'really' is."  But 
theories about Language (the capital L is intentional) don't claim (at 
least theories I'm familiar with) to tell you what a PoS of some word in 
some language in some context is.  What they do claim--at least some 
theories do--is that there will be some set of categories for a given 
language, and that words of different categories will behave differently 
in their morphology and/or syntax.  In addition, some theories have a 
list of possible categories; whether there is such a universal list 
(still more what the list is) is, of course, an empirical question.

In addition, an analysis of a particular language might give you ways to 
figure out what PoS a particular word in a particular context is.  The 
fact that those ways might fail to provide a unique answer in every case 
does not surprise me, any more than it would surprise me for the 
phonetic analysis of a language to leave it ambiguous whether some phone 
of that language in some context was voiced or not.

I'm also puzzled about the issue of imposing a classification scheme on 
a language as opposed to discovering facts about its structure.  I would 
hope that we're all agreed that the child learns some structure, whether 
this structure is a set of rules or a probabilistic structure of some 
sort, or maybe some other kind of structure; and that this structure 
which children learn enables them (as has been observed ad infinitum) to 
go beyond what they have heard.  It may be hard for us to figure out 
what this structure is, and we certainly haven't got the full answer 
yet; but I would like to think that we've at least discovered some 
interesting truths about the structure of many languages, not just English.

But as I say, maybe I'm just misunderstanding what Geoffrey Sampson was 
saying.
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist

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