[Lexicog] Re: Kirrkirr and Shoebox/Toolbox

[Mike Maxwell]

Koontz John E wrote:

> On Fri, 13 Aug 2004, Mike Maxwell wrote:
>
>>The FieldWorks group was intending to incorporate the categories in a
>>number of works (such as the "Textbooks in Cambridge" series--I'm
>>thinking particularly of the books with titles like "Tense", "Aspect",
>>"Number", "Person" and "Case").
>
> After wrestling briefly with a few schemes like this I've come to believe
> that anything one does in this line is either too limited or too soon out
> of date or too cumbersome.  Usually all of these at once.  You can't fix a
> fundamentally wrong approach by being encyclopaedic about it.  I think
> a better approach is to come up with data structures that accomodate any useful
> terminology, with the terminology included in the data along with the
> form.  In other words, rather than providing singular and plural fields
> allow for multiple generic formname-form pairs of fields.

Maybe I wasn't communicating this well--there is no intent in FW of
providing a slot in your dictionary, say, for the dual form of
something.  Rather, there is provision for slots for irregular forms
(nothing limits it to irregular forms, but it doesn't make sense to do
this for regular forms) + associated morphosyntactic information.

So if in some language an irregular form that you want to list in your
dictionary entry, 'tengo', for example, then you create a minor entry,
type in the form (or copy it from some text), and assign it whatever
gloss/morphosyntactic features you want, maybe
   1SgPresIndic' =
   [[Subj [[Pers 1][Num Sg]]][Tense Pres][Mood Indic]]
(there is a way of viewing this information either as a gloss or as a
morphosyntactic feature structure)

The minor entry is linked to the main entry that it corresponds to.
Whether you see this as a subentry within the main entry, or as a minor
entry alphabetized somewhere else, is totally a matter of the view you
choose--in terms of the database, these are the same thing.

> Trying to work in some or any specific terminology is like providing
> fields named for the typeface to be used to print them.  A system likes
> this should specify the logic of the situation, not the superficies,
> whether typographical or linguistic.

I'm not clear what you're suggesting here.  Let me offer something that
I'm certain is _not_ what you're suggesting: I once worked with a
grammar (it shall remain nameless here) that used numbers to encode the
relations among affixes, slots, POSs etc.  I guess it was formal, and
specified the logic, but even after I had studied the language for a
month and had some feel for how it worked, I found it nearly impossible
to understand this grammar.  I ended up writing names alongside all the
numbers.

As I say, I don't think this is what you're suggesting; but I'm unclear
what you are saying.  Rather than try to comment on or respond to your
other points, I think I'd better wait for clarification.

--
	Mike Maxwell
	Linguistic Data Consortium
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu



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