[Lexicog] Slots and slot fillers (nee "Nouns")

[Patrick Hanks]

Thanks, Rudy.  Very instructive.

When doing corpus-based analysis of verb meaning and use in English, I'd
love to have a semantically driven parser that could distinguish adverbials
of manner/attitude from instrumental adverbials, regardless of the number of
words involved in each. This is because the type of adverbial can sometimes
affect the meaning of the verb, thus:

treat someone {with respect / respectfully}   = ATTITUDE
treat someone (with chemotherapy/chemotherapeutically) = MEDICAL

-- where the number of words in the adverbial is immaterial and its semantic
value is what matters.  But I suppose that is too much to hope for.

Ah well, back to the grindstone.

Patrick



----- Original Message ----- 
From: <rtroike at email.arizona.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2006 10:34 AM
Subject: [Lexicog] Slots and slot fillers (nee "Nouns")


>
> Whether a phonological sequence is a "word" or a "phrase" is sometimes in
> the eye of the beholder, or depends on the structure of the language
involved.
> In English, we write prepositions with a space before and after them, but
in
> Turkish (and most SOV languages), what corresponds semantically (per Ron
Moe)
> is placed at the end of the phonological sequence, and is generally called
> a "case suffix" or sometimes, if written with a space, a "postposition".
In
> English, the GENITIVE marker is written solid with what precedes (more
later),
> albeit with an apostrophe (-'s) [due to the false notion that arose in the
> 17th century that this was a contraction of "his" -- it was not so written
> earlier nor is it in any other Germanic language] when the Genitive
expression
> (single or multiple words) _precedes_ the head Noun, but separately, as
"of",
> when the Genitive expression _follows_ the Noun.
>
> (The "of", being weakly stressed, may encliticize to the Noun, and be
written
> solid with it, as "cup of coffee" becomes "cuppa coffee". -- As a
digression,
> this creates a problem grammatically and lexicographically, as the {GEN}
> morpheme, in its allomorphic form "of", is detached phonologically from
the
> NP it is connected to grammatically; non-native speakers, encountering
> "cuppa" in print, may wonder what it is and look for it in a dictionary
[the
> same problem, from different sources, applies to common orthographic forms
> "hafta", "wanna", "gotta", and "coulda"]).
>
> Charles Fries documented the fact that in Old English, the "Saxon
Genitive"
> was used 95% of the time and the "Romance Genitive" 5% of the time. By the
> 18th century this had reversed to 5% and 95%, respectively. Similarly, the
> suffixed Genitive of Latin was replaced by a preposition "de/di" in the
> modern Romance languages. It is clear, then, both from cross-linguistic
> comparisons as well as from internal histories, that at the level of
semantic
> structure, the suffix and the preposition constitute the same linguistic
> element, with different surface realizations based on positional
differences
> in surface structure.
>
> Structuralists like Bloomfield, Bloch, Fries, Hill, Hockett, Pike, and
Trager
> all recognized the hierarchical difference between the syntactic position
> and its filler(s). A common example of the time was the use of the single
> word "fire" as a complete utterance, which ambiguously could be taken as
> an imperative of a Verb, ordering guns to be shot, or as an elliptical
> existential, alerting hearers to the (possible) presence of a fire. In the
> first instance, "Fire!" was seen as filling the following hiearchical
slots:
>
>        Sentence
>           |
>        Predicate
>           |
>          Verb
>           |
>         Fire
>
> To say that "fire" is merely a word, and nothing more, would be to miss
the
> whole significance of its use, and any valid grammar of English would have
> to account for that. (I am reminded here of the distress expressed by a
> fellow evening-class student in my Beginning Chinese course some years
ago,
> when the instructor mentioned that some word had two possible meanings,
> when she insistently repeated her concern that she would not be able to
> tell which meaning was intended. The wise instructor finally, after a
> number of vain attempts to quiet her concern by illustrating contrasting
> contexts in which the different meanings would be deployed, finally
uttered
> the memorable observation, "Madam, words do not normally occur outside of
> sentences".)
>
> As for the concern about the difference between words and phrases (apart
> from the suffix~postposition/preposition example), the labels NP, VP, DP,
> NumP, TP, etc., although usually verbalized as "noun phrase", etc., do
> not mean "more than one word", but rather are simple formal designations
> of slots within a hierarchical system. (Thanks to X-bar 'theory', the
> exact significance of these labels has changed from the original
> Transformational-Generative grammar, but that is a technical matter.)
>
> No one I know would argue that "at this moment" is not a phrase, and
> "now" is not a word, but in the following sentences, all would agree
> that they are filling the same slot, AdvP-time (or some similar
designation):
>
>          He is leaving at this moment.
>          He is leaving now.
>
> Structural linguists were very much at pains to try to distinguish
> terminologically between word-level category labels and slot-category
labels.
> Thus for them, both of these would be "Adverbials", but only "now" would
be
> an "Adverb". (Since morphological features were used to define
word-classes,
> "pretty" would be an "Adjective", because it could take the suffixes "-er"
> and "-est", but "beautiful" could not be an "Adjective", though it could
be
> classified as an "Adjectival" because it could be compared
periphrastically
> by the use of "more" and "most".) Rigorous methodological purity was a
> touchstone among many, perhaps most, structuralists.
>
>      Rudy Troike
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>



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