[Corpora-List] Primitives, semantic and otherwise

[Yorick Wilks]

> I normally hate to disagree with Bob Amsler, and disagreements on individual word usages and choices may or may not throw light on the issue of primitives: he clearly thinks they do but I am more sceptical. I dont think his separation of "trolley" and "cart" shows any principles at work--I have a hunch it may be more arbitrary than he suggests. The "bus like" sense of "trolley" is not restricted to the US--I was brought up with London trolley-buses--big beasts with arms attached to overhead wires. They were contrasted with trams, that ran on rails, in the UK--and those of course are streetcars in the US.. But "trolley" versus "cart" is therefore more moot. All the illustrations of carts in Wikipedia are two wheeled--contrasting with wagons etc. which, for me, makes the choice of "shopping cart"in the US more interesting and mysterious. 
> 
> Sometimes these varying uses come simply from technology import and the particular word choice sticking with the machine. A case that has always intrigued me is "car" versus "carriage"--on trains those two words name the passenger vehicle (or did--the UK is now switching to "coach" I think) BUT, and here is the point, the electric underground railway in London has always used "car" for these objects because the technology was imported in the late 19C from New York I believe--early underground trains in London were steam driven. The British dont usually notice, till you point it out, that they use "car" for these objects below ground and "carriage" above. I dont think there is any principle at work here--and "car" is a pretty primitive word----just an accident of importation.
> Yorick Wilks
> 
> On 18 Jan 2011, at 19:13, amsler at cs.utexas.edu wrote:
> 
>> Primitives have a curious habit of being split into smaller units every few decades. Chemical elements became primitives with the creation of the periodic table of atoms, but physicists split the atom and have continued subdividing those results. To me, the useful properties of a set of primitives derives from their completeness (covering all the known combinations of the next larger units) and their organizational ability (revealing useful properties about which combinations are possible, predicting what combinations will occur)--rather than their indivisibility.
>> 
>> Theories of semantic primitives could serve many purposes (and fields). Charles Osgood et al. created the semantic differential to analyze connotative meaning and used factor analysis to extract several independent dimensions of 'semantic space'. However, connotative meaning doesn't explain denotative meaning. Primitives there seem to call for an approach more like that of the periodic table. Alas, our current state of knowledge there seems more akin to alchemists trying to figure out what things are 'elemental'.
>> 
>> A true set of semantic primitives for denotative meaning should do something useful, such as predict the meaning of compound nouns or predict which compound nouns would be more likely to be used. I suspect that isn't uniquely possible since compound nouns seem to sometmes acquire their meanings by hapstance. I.e., some day we need a new term for something and grab a couple of nouns and stick them together and people accept the new term, since you have to call something new by some new name. We could call this the discover's or inventor's principle. You discover/create it, you get to name it.
>> 
>> Now, sometimes interesting things happen when the new term is translated between languages or even within regional variations of a language. For example, in the United States, we created 'shopping carts' which people use in stores to load up their purchases and to carry their purchases into the parking lot. But in British English the word 'cart' was wrong, they use 'trolley' to mean what American English means by a 'cart' (and likewise, American English couldn't use 'trolley' since that is reserved for, among other thing, large bus-like vehicles, which typically run on tracks or use overhead electrical lines for power) so for British English, 'shopping trolly' was the correct compound.
>> 
>> That's revealing of underlying primitives at work. When you have to take a perfectly reasonable compound apart because it clashes with your society's semantics and change its words you could be showing that the component words have different primitives in those two variants of English. It also shows that those component words are 'alive' in the sense that they actively affect the creation/acceptance of new compounds rather than just being historical accidents of the past.
>> 
>> But it all feels like alchemy to me right now.
>> 
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