[Corpora-List] describing languages as [link]-[sem]-[morphsyn]tripplets...

[John F. Sowa]

On 1/10/2011 6:51 PM, Califf, Mary Elaine wrote:
> “We” certainly doesn’t seem to me to be a primitive.  Consider
> Malay/Indonesian, where two distinct words (“kami” and “kita”) are used
> for two different meanings of English “we.”  Interestingly enough, a
> generic word for you with no additional limitations/connotations
> (“anda”) was added to the language top-down because there really wasn’t
> a word in the language that meant just “you.”

That's a good example.

And if you look at semiotic analyses, all pronouns can be analyzed
as various kinds of indexicals. Once you start analyzing sign types,
you get into Peirce's classifications of classifications of signs...

But you could also get into Freudian "ego" and "superego", Buber's
_Ich und Du_, and all the psychological and sociological issues...

All of these, of course, are different "language games" that can
be played with the vocabulary of any language.  And that gets us
into Wittgenstein's later philosophy and its many interpretations...

These considerations lead us to Cruse's open-ended number of
"microsenses" for any word in any language...

Just counting the options leads us from semantics to statistics...

John

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