[Lingtyp] Does bipolar polysemy exist?
ENRIQUE BERNARDEZ SANCHIS
ebernard at filol.ucm.es
Wed Jun 6 09:41:49 UTC 2018
You're fully right, Stela. Racism is rampant. As sexism also is
Enrique
2018-06-06 11:16 GMT+02:00 Stela Manova <stela.manova at univie.ac.at>:
> Dear all,
>
> In the past few days, in relation to the discussion on bipolar polysemy, I
> exchanged a number of messages with Mattis List on the relevance of
> Google’s research to linguistics. I thank Mattis for his reactions to my
> postings. I was honored: a male scholar born in Germany recipient of a
> highly prestigious ERC Staring Grant replied to me – a female scholar born
> in Bulgaria. I have lived in Vienna for almost 20 years. Yesterday, I was
> reminded one more time that I should be happy that I had the opportunity to
> study for a PhD degree in Austria but I cannot do science because as a
> female Bulgarian, I am supposed to be either a cleaning lady or a
> saleswoman. In other words, I am an Eastern European cockroach that tries
> to invade foreign territories. At least, I felt so the whole day yesterday,
> which postponed the writing of this message and also influenced its content.
>
> Mattis suggested that I prepare something on what we exchanged views here,
> namely Google and linguistics, so that the topic can be further discussed
> in blogs or other Internet platforms. I noticed (I use Google analytics)
> that after my postings on this list many linguists from all over the world
> visited my homepage. I understand it as an indication of interest in the
> topic. I could imagine preparing something on Google, math and linguistics
> but currently I have many problems in Vienna that do not allow me to do it.
> I am sorry for bothering you with this but in my opinion it is telling
> about what is going on in the European linguistics at the moment and these
> problems are not less important for the future of linguistics than Google’s
> research. I am specialized in Slavic and general linguistics, so I give
> examples from these fields. In the part of Europe where I reside, to be
> from Eastern Europe is a fault - even in the Slavic department of a
> university! In the Department of Slavic Studies in Vienna, people of Slavic
> origin are also divided into born in Austria and born in a Slavic country
> and the former group discriminates the latter, to show that they are
> superior. In the Department of Linguistics, the full professor, the natural
> morphologist Wolfgang U. Dressler, retired and was replaced with the formal
> semanticist Daniel Büring who immediately started a generative cleaning:
> only formal linguistics is linguistics, everything is syntax and
> syntax/semantics and all people who do research on other topics have to
> die. I have joint publications with two famous morphologists, Dressler and
> Aronoff, and I claim that there is morphology (not only distributed). If I
> could understand, to some extent, Büring’s incompatibility with Natural
> Morphology, could anybody explain to me why having published with Mark
> Aronoff who has a PhD from MIT makes me a bad linguist? Why are people who
> are not aware of basic principles of math very successful in formal
> grammar? What gives such people the right to impose their theoretical
> beliefs on others? Where does so much hate in linguistics come from?
>
> And now frankly, how many linguists will read an Internet text by a person
> with a Slavic name such as Stela Manova? It seems to me that a discussion
> on Google’s research and its relevance to linguistics, as suggested by
> Mattis, would make sense only if well-established linguists support it. I
> am afraid that I myself will also need some support in order to work on
> this; ideally, to distance from the linguistic absurd in Vienna, spending
> some time at an institution where I will not be treated as a cockroach. I
> am still doing linguistics, somehow; but I am tired of the senseless wars I
> have to war every day to survive in linguistics and as you could guess from
> my posts, I am now focused more on cognitive science and programming than
> on linguistics pure. As for my interest in mathematics and computers, I
> grew up in Bulgaria where at the age of 10, I was discovered as
> mathematically gifted and then received a solid education in mathematics.
> Yes, during the socialism, women were allowed to be smart.
>
> If someone is interested in working with me on what I addressed on this
> list or related issues, please feel free to contact me.
>
> Best,
>
> Stela
>
> On 04.06.2018, at 11:33, Mattis List <mattis.list at lingpy.org> wrote:
>
> Dear Stela,
>
> I think the points you brought up are very interesting, but it's
> probably time to stop the discussion at this point. What I would
> encourage you to do is now to write up your arguments in some form of a
> blog post (that you publish online on your preferred venue), as I think
> they are very interesting and important for a broader audience of
> linguists, and this is just a mailing list for typologists. If you do
> so, it would be very interesting, probably not only for me, but also for
> other colleagues from different fields, to jump on the train of this
> very interesting discussion and respond in blogs accordingly. It would
> also put the discussion on a more solid ground, as we could bring in
> quotes from colleagues and the like.
>
> Looking forward to read your arguments in much more detail. I'll try to
> do my best to answer them following all due scientific standards.
>
> All the best,
>
> Mattis
>
> On 2018-06-04 11:00, Stela Manova wrote:
>
> Dear Mattis,
>
> You tend to provide misleading information, this not only about the
> capacity of the human brain, s. Dmitry Nikoleav’s correction message
> below. You are also mistaken about the Google’s goal, which is neither
> “mimicking translation” nor "to get a machine running that replicates a
> human talking". Google’s goal is to have an effective search engine -
> the most effective one; everything else is more or less related to it.
> The Google search algorithm is highly relevant to linguistics - Google
> searches primarily texts. Yet for some reason, you never mention the
> Google search engine when you discuss Google’s research results.
>
> Google's AI beating the professional Go player: Yes, I know the story
> but your version is misleading again. This was done by DeepMind in
> London within their AlphaGo
> program: https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/. Google bought the
> start-up DeepMind - for £400 M! The Go player against the machine
> contest took place afterwards but it is a DeepMind story. Google did not
> pay so much money for a game-developing company. DeepMind was and is
> specialized in visual recognition. So, it is not about playing Go or any
> other computer game better than a human but about training a neural
> network to solve visual recognition tasks and it is good that the
> computer won. Computer vision assists us in many areas of life:
> medicine, healthcare, security and navigation, to mention just a few.
>
> Grammar / non-grammar and Google: I speak of non-grammar because
> Google's method does not have anything to do with linguistics. I refer
> to the method explained in the following
> video: https://blog.ycombinator.com/jeff-deans-lecture-for-yc-ai/. A
> neural network is trained on different types of data, including
> language. I do not see a connection to Chomsky or any other theoretical
> framework in linguistics.
>
> In linguistics, Baayen’s Naive Discriminative Learning is in line with
> Google’s research.
>
> As for linguistic research / fundamental linguistic questions and
> Google’s approach, I do not have Google's resources (human and funding),
> and therefore do morphology in linguistics. My research was not inspired
> by Google but by the Gauss-Jordan
> elimination: http://homepage.univie.ac.at/stela.manova/
> uploads/1/2/2/4/12243901/cognitiveapproachsuff1-suff2.pdf. I
> have investigated suffix combinations in a number of languages and it
> turned out that in all those languages suffix combinations are fixed,
> i.e. if a word has more than one derivational suffix, based on the first
> suffix, one can predict the following suffix because there is only one
> option for a following suffix. I then tested this finding
> psycholinguistically. Native speakers know which suffix combinations
> exist and which do not in their language and they do not need bases
> (roots / stems) to judge whether a suffix combination is a legitimate
> one. All linguistic theories derive morphological structure starting
> with a root (or a stem, depending on the theory). Yet, for some reason,
> native speakers that took part in the experiments, all without
> linguistic education, did not need roots and stems and could do
> something they were not supposed to be able to do. I think that we do
> not know enough about the role of memory in language processing. This is
> how I understand Google’s research. It seems to me that in language
> processing the human brain relies on structures (sequences) of various
> lengths and uses them as ready-made blocks as well as that it also uses
> pieces of structure that linguists do not recognize as linguistic units,
> i.e. that there are not only phonemes, morphemes, etc. in language
> processing but the human brain also operates with structures that are
> neither words no morphemes, neither phrases nor sentences, etc. In the
> case of my research, e.g., suffix combinations are structures between
> morphemes and words.
>
> Best,
> Stela
>
> On 03.06.2018, at 12:25, Mattis List <mattis.list at lingpy.org
> <mailto:mattis.list at lingpy.org <mattis.list at lingpy.org>>> wrote:
>
> Dear Stela,
>
> I still don't see how building a machine that is barely understood,
> mimicking translation from French to English or similar can be
> considered as being a scientific alternative to linguistic research. You
> may say, from the perspective of AI research it is scientific, in the
> sense that new knowledge is generated if the machine words better, but
> it does NOT answer linguistic questions, it could optimally provide a
> model of linguistic intuition among humans, but this does not answer
> fundamental questions that linguists ask themselves, and we are
> discussing linguistic implications here, not questions of engineering,
> like how to tweak your neural network most quickly and efficiently.
>
> Have you followed the debate about google's AI beating the Go players?
> The follow-up was: now, that the machine is better than humans, humans
> will have to study the moves by the machine to learn from it. So a
> machine was created that beats humans in a particular game, but the
> knowledge, what creates successful strategies when playing that game was
> NOT created. That IS the difference between engineers working on
> automatic translation and linguists trying to investigate certain
> properties of human languages.
>
> I have discussed this in an earlier blog post (longer time ago) that
> focuses on topics of historical linguistics, where machine learning
> techniques have an even harder time in providing useful solutions.
> There I also point to some literature reflecting that engineers and
> computer scientists are well aware of this problem (maybe not the people
> with google, but maybe even them: it is much easier to enhance a model
> if you understand why it fails):
>
> *
> http://phylonetworks.blogspot.com/2016/11/once-more-on-
> artificial-intelligence.html
>
> I also don't understand why you insist on the non-grammar part of google
> translate? They use sequence models, right? And what is a model that
> creates a sequence other than a grammar, albeit a rather simple one on
> Chomsky's hierarchy. Or am I getting something wrong, and there's a
> definition for grammar I am not aware of? Definitely possible, but I'd
> like to know which one you base your distinction on...
>
> Best,
>
> Mattis
>
>
> On 03.06.2018 11:31, Stela Manova wrote:
>
> Dear Mattis,
>
> You write:
>
> but there's a misunderstanding regarding scientific endeavor
> here: google people are engineers, their goal is to get a machine
> running that replicates a human talking. What linguists want to do is
> scientific endeavor, we do not only want to replicate a machine doing
> the same things that we do, but we want to UNDERSTAND what the
> machine does.
>
>
> What is scientific endeavor? Imagine that we have to describe
> scientifically, let me say, a brick. We can say: 1) a brick is building
> material; it is used for building houses; when building houses, we order
> bricks in a specific way to construct walls, etc.; 2) Alternative
> definition: a brick is a/ /parallelepiped with 90 degree angles; bricks
> can differ in form and size; a brick usually contains holes that can
> also differ in form and size; etc. Which definition provides a better
> understanding of what is a brick - the one that focuses on what a brick
> is good for or the one that cares about form, size, and holes?
>
> Like all recent research in AI, Google research is inspired by the
> organization of the human brain (thank you, Dmitry, for the addition).
> Is this scientific endeavor or not? I think it is.
>
> I cannot agree that Google engineers do not understand what a machine
> does. On the contrary, exactly because they understand it very well,
> they managed to optimize the Google Translate algorithm. Btw, what
> should make linguists nervous is not the fact that the algorithm without
> grammar performs faster than that with grammar (in my previous message I
> explained why; it is a matter of mathematics). What is really surprising
> is that the algorithm without grammar translates more precisely than the
> algorithm with grammar.
>
> I am aware how sensitive the grammar-non-grammar issue is for the
> linguistic community, but as Volker Gast wrote here: "At the end of the
> day, the various approaches to linguistics should be judged against the
> value of their results…”
>
> Best,
> Stela
>
>
> On 02.06.2018, at 21:11, Dmitry Nikolaev <dsnikolaev at gmail.com
> <mailto:dsnikolaev at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Dear Mattis,
>
> a small correction:
>
> Furthermore, it is not that trivial as the google-people suggest: they
> use extremely large training corpora for automatic translation which is
> based on stochastic (albeit apparently simple) grammars. A human,
> however, acquires a language with much LESS training material and a
> smaller brain. This questions cannot be solved if we rely on google or
> the engineering part of "computer science".
>
>
> The biggest announced neural networks seem to have on the order of 1
> to 2 hundred billion parameters (weights of connections between
> neurons). Human brain has ~100 billion neurons and on the order of 100
> trillion connections / learnable parameters. Huge NLP endeavours
> probably match and surpass the amount of input humans receive when
> acquiring a language, but computationally human brain is not small, it
> is in another universe.
>
> With kind regards,
> Dmitry
>
>
> On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 at 14:29, Mattis List <mattis.list at lingpy.org
> <mailto:mattis.list at lingpy.org>> wrote:
>
> Dear Stela,
>
> very brief, but there's a misunderstanding regarding scientific
> endeavor
> here: google people are engineers, their goal is to get a machine
> running that replicates a human talking. What linguists want to do is
> scientific endeavor, we do not only want to replicate a machine doing
> the same things that we do, but we want to UNDERSTAND what the
> machine does.
>
> This issue of machine learning approaches which are all very
> black-boxy,
> has now finally gained some intention among scholars, since it is
> also
> dangerous, if we want to use machines to replace human labor in the
> future (look at how badly facebook filters hate-speech). But it is
> also
> fundamentally different as an approach: we NEED to care about
> categories, as we want to look inside the box, not simply create a
> new one.
>
> Furthermore, it is not that trivial as the google-people suggest:
> they
> use extremely large training corpora for automatic translation
> which is
> based on stochastic (albeit apparently simple) grammars. A human,
> however, acquires a language with much LESS training material and a
> smaller brain. This questions cannot be solved if we rely on
> google or
> the engineering part of "computer science".
>
> Best,
>
> Mattis
>
>
>
> On 02.06.2018 11:17, Stela Manova wrote:
>
> Dear Randy,
>
> What you write simply shows that you do not know enough about
>
> numerical
>
> systems and how a computer works. Yes, there exist different
>
> numerical
>
> systems, btw not only the binary and the decimal one, but there are
> special notations for the different systems, so that
>
> mathematicians and
>
> computers know in which system a number is. Additionally, a computer
> works only in binary code. How exactly those things happen in
>
> computer
>
> science is explained, e.g.,
>
> here: http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/hex/.
>
>
> Regarding induction / deduction and Jeff Dean’s method, I will not
> philosophize, there is a clear definition of mathematical
>
> induction. In
>
> math, induction is used in recursive situations to establish the
>
> basic
>
> case. That MIT professor explains induction and recursion very
>
> well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPSeyjX1-4s&t=0s&list=
> PLUl4u3cNGP63WbdFxL8giv4yhgdMGaZNA&index=23.
>
> Let us leave readers decide of what type is Jeff Dean’s method.
>
> What linguists cannot understand is the fact that in order to apply
> mathematical logic, one needs elements that are of the same
>
> type. If you
>
> assume that there are different types of words (basic elements of a
> system), you cannot describe that system mathematically, at
>
> least not
>
> without preliminary sortings of the elements, which will make the
> analysis more time-consuming = slower computer program.
>
> Therefore, Jeff
>
> Dean claims that using grammar is less efficient than handling
>
> without
>
> grammar. In sum, the difference between the computer scientist
>
> Jeff Dean
>
> and a linguist: Jeff Dean treats all words as units (elements of the
> same type) while linguists philosophize on bipolar polysemy =
>
> Jeff Dean
>
> solves a problem, linguists create an additional one.
>
> Btw, if linguists listen to computer scientists, there would not
>
> be any
>
> research on complexity in linguistics, either. The above MIT
>
> professor
>
> again, part 1
>
> at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9nW0uBqvEo&list=
> PLUl4u3cNGP63WbdFxL8giv4yhgdMGaZNA&index=36, and
>
> part 2
>
> at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lQXYl_L28w&list=
> PLUl4u3cNGP63WbdFxL8giv4yhgdMGaZNA&index=37.
>
>
> Best,
> Stela
>
> On 02.06.2018, at 08:51, Randy J. LaPolla
>
> <randy.lapolla at gmail.com <mailto:randy.lapolla at gmail.com>
>
> <mailto:randy.lapolla at gmail.com
>
> <mailto:randy.lapolla at gmail.com>>> wrote:
>
>
> Dear Stella,
> The mathematical approach you discussed is very much in the
> Structuralist tradition, and not that much in line with the most
> cutting edge recent AI research. Almost all linguistics (including
> Chomsky), plus most computer science, particularly NLP, is based on
> Structuralist principles (though Interactional Linguistics,
> Usage-based approaches, and Halliday’s approach are not). What you
> said, "in mathematics / computer science, in isolation, a
>
> sequence of
>
> elements always has a single meaning because if it has not, no
> computation is possible”, and you assume it must be true for
>
> language,
>
> is very much the sort of thing I was talking about. Even in
>
> computer
>
> science that is not true, as “10” in a binary system such as
>
> machine
>
> code has a different “meaning” from “10” in a non-binary
>
> situation, so
>
> 1 + 1 = 2 is only true in the context of a non-binary code.
> Mathematics and logic is also tautologies, as Wittgenstein pointed
> out, so quite different from natural language, where even “War
>
> is war”
>
> is not a tautology, and that is why there was the whole Oxford
>
> School
>
> of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Grice, Austin, Searle, etc.),
>
> as they
>
> saw that natural language is quite different from the mathematical
> approach being pushed by the logical positivists and analytic
> philosophers. (Frege and Russel had turned logic into
>
> mathematics, and
>
> tried to apply it to language—the early Wittgenstein went along
>
> with
>
> that initially, but later saw how problematic even his own early
> approach was.)
>
> I am aware of what has been going on in AI, particularly by
>
> Jeff Dean,
>
> in the switch from symbolic (deductive/rule-based) AI to inductive
> approaches, and am quite happy they finally have seen the light in
> that regard, and that has made a big difference in terms of
>
> what the
>
> systems can do. That switch, from rule based deductive
>
> algorithms, is
>
> what Dean means by doing without grammar; what they find using the
> inductive approach is still grammar (as Peirce said “Induction
>
> infers
>
> a rule”), and simply based on symbol manipulation, so a long
>
> way from
>
> modelling actual communication, which is based on meaning, not
> symbols, and so what they are talking about is not really
> “understanding". Induction can only take you so far (Peirce’s
>
> view was
>
> that deduction (which is tautology) and induction do not tell you
> anything new—although abduction is the “weakest” inference, as
>
> he put
>
> it, it is the only one that tells you something new; On the
>
> difference
>
> between the latter two: “. . . the essence of an induction is
>
> that it
>
> infers from one set of facts another set of similar facts, whereas
> hypothesis [abduction—rjl] infers from facts of one kind to
>
> facts of
>
> another.”); the next step is to understand how communication
>
> actually
>
> works (as it isn’t coding/decoding) and try to see if it is
>
> possible
>
> to model abductive inference, which is what real communication is
> based on. I don’t know if that is possible. The problem is they are
> not working with linguists who understand communication, and so
>
> on the
>
> one had assume it is about symbol manipulation, and on the
>
> other end
>
> up often reinventing the wheel. One example is a talk I went to
>
> at our
>
> Complexity Institute, where the speaker talked about how his
>
> algorithm
>
> had shown that some words in English, such as “a little bit" occur
> together more often than others. We linguists of course knew that
> decades ago, but as this person had not talked to any linguists
>
> before
>
> starting a linguistic study, he had no clue about what had been
>
> done
>
> in terms of collocational relationships.
>
> Yes, the abilities and principles related to meaning creation and
> linguistic behaviour are general cognitive mechanisms and
>
> behavioural
>
> principles, not specific to language, and not unique to humans. You
> say, "Linguists believe that linguistics is a module of its own
>
> in the
>
> brain and love re-defining things as something specific for the
> field”, but that statement only applies to an ever-shrinking
>
> minority
>
> of people doing rationalist philosophy rather than empirical
> linguistics, and the ones associated with the now discredited
>
> symbolic
>
> AI.
>
> All the best,
> Randy
> -----
> *Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA* （羅仁地）
> Professor of Linguistics and Chinese, School of Humanities
> Nanyang Technological University
> HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive | Singapore 637332
> http://randylapolla.net/
> Most recent book:
>
> https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-
> 2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 1 Jun 2018, at 4:57 PM, Stela Manova
>
> <stela.manova at univie.ac.at <mailto:stela.manova at univie.ac.at>
>
> <mailto:stela.manova at univie.ac.at
>
> <mailto:stela.manova at univie.ac.at>>> wrote:
>
>
> Dear Randy,
>
> What I wrote does not have anything to do with structuralism
>
> but is
>
> based on recent research in language understanding on which we
>
> rely
>
> every day. I mean research carried out by Google. Intriguingly,
> people who do NLP and LU at Google are not linguists but computer
> scientists and the senior fellow of the Google Brain Team,
>
> Jeff Dean,
>
> claims that language understanding does not need grammar, see his
> slides on Scaling language understanding models
>
> at https://blog.ycombinator.com/jeff-deans-lecture-for-yc-ai/, starts
>
> at 24:54 in the video, as well as the slides on Google Translate -
> 27:52 in the video (the slides are below the video), but
>
> please watch
>
> the whole video if you have time. This is one of Jeff Dean’s many
> talks on Deep Learning, I give this link because I have it in my
> computer but you can google the topic and the speaker. So,
>
> Google’s
>
> LU does not use grammar but is based on combinations /
>
> sequences of
>
> elements and statistics; and ironically, linguists who believe in
> grammar and irony (based on your message below) use Google
>
> products
>
> every day. The wisdom from the Google sequence-to-sequence
>
> model is
>
> that single examples do not count as evidence for the
>
> organization of
>
> a system. Reread now our discussion on what is bipolar
>
> polysemy and
>
> you will understand, why so many linguistics professors from
>
> so many
>
> different countries cannot agree on a definition.
>
> It is not about bipolar polysemy, it is about the future of the
> field. Google guys claim and prove that the same learning logic
> applies to all areas of life; roughly, the same rules operate
> in visual perception, chemistry, language, etc. Linguists believe
> that linguistics is a module of its own in the brain and love
> re-defining things as something specific for the field - there is
> even statistics for linguists which unfortunately differs from
>
> Google
>
> statistics because people who do statistics in Google are
> mathematicians while (most of the) linguistic statisticians
>
> were bad
>
> at math at school and therefore studied languages at the
>
> university, etc.
>
>
> I have a PhD in general linguistics from the University of Vienna
> (and my both PhD supervisors were very bad at math) but I cannot
> agree that this is sufficient evidence that the tip of my nose
>
> is the
>
> end of the horizon. OK, I was also educated in math nine years -
> intensively.
>
> Best,
>
> Stela
>
>
> On 01.06.2018, at 06:06, Randy J. LaPolla
>
> <randy.lapolla at gmail.com <mailto:randy.lapolla at gmail.com>
>
> <mailto:randy.lapolla at gmail.com
>
> <mailto:randy.lapolla at gmail.com>>> wrote:
>
>
> Hi All,
> This whole discussion shows how problematic some of the a priori,
> non-empirical assumptions of the Structuralist approach are. The
> assumption that there is a fixed association of sign and
>
> signifier,
>
> and so words have meaning in some abstract universe divorced from
> context, and the assumption that language can be dealt with
> mathematically, and the assumption that communication happens
> through coding and decoding (on the computational model), and
>
> that
>
> the “real” word is the written, abstract, out-of-phonetic-context
> form, and so phonology in context can be ignored, and as there is
> only one “real” meaning to a word, the different uses in
>
> context ,
>
> such as irony, can be simply ignored or treated as deviant. The
> assumption that there is a fixed system that has iron-clad rules,
> and that there are aspects of the system that are necessary for
> communication to occur.
>
> There is much literature showing how problematic these
>
> assumptions
>
> are, but somehow they are still in force in much of
>
> linguistics, as
>
> reflected in some of this discussion.
>
> My own view is that communication involves one person
>
> performing a
>
> communicative act in a particular place and time and to a
>
> particular
>
> addressee, and the addressee abductively inferring that person’s
> reason for performing that act in that particular context to that
> particular person at that particular time. So it is completely
> context dependent, as Nick shows, and there is no minimum
> morphosyntactic structure required, as David Gil has shown.
>
> No part
>
> of the communicative situation or act can be left out in terms of
> understanding the meaning that the addressee creates in inferring
> the communicator’s intention (as Mark shows in including
>
> gesture in
>
> his discussion, though it also includes non-conventionalised
> behaviour, e.g. gaze and body movements; and it is creation of
> meaning, not transfer of meaning, and so subjective and
> non-determinative). Language and other conventionalised
> communicative behaviour (language is behaviour, not a thing, and
> does not differ in nature from other conventionalised behaviour)
> emerges out of the interaction of the people involved.
>
> So the question asked is like a Zen koan: you can’t answer it
>
> yes or
>
> no, as it is based on problematic assumptions.
>
> Randy
>
> -----
> *Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA* （羅仁地）
> Professor of Linguistics and Chinese, School of Humanities
> Nanyang Technological University
> HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive | Singapore 637332
> http://randylapolla.net/
> Most recent book:
>
> https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-
> 2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324
>
>
>
>
> On 1 Jun 2018, at 7:42 AM, Nick Enfield
>
> <nick.enfield at sydney.edu.au <mailto:nick.enfield at sydney.edu.au>
>
> <mailto:nick.enfield at sydney.edu.au
>
> <mailto:nick.enfield at sydney.edu.au>>> wrote:
>
>
> In Lao:
>
>
> 1. The verb cak2 means ‘know’, and can be negated as in
>
> man2 bòò1
>
> cak2 [3sg neg know] ‘S/he doesn’t know.’ But when used
>
> alone,
>
> with no subject expressed, often with the perfect marker
>
> (as in
>
> cak2 or cak2 lèèw4) it means “I don’t know.”
> 2. The verb faaw4 means ‘to hurry, rush’, and can be
>
> negated as in
>
> man2 bòò1 faaw4 [3sg neg rush] ‘S/he doesn’t hurry/isn’t
> hurrying.’ But when used alone as an imperative, with no
> subject expressed, often repeated, or with an appropriate
> sentence-final particle (as in faaw4 faaw4 or faaw4 dee4) it
> means “Don’t hurry, Stop hurrying, Slow down”.
> 3. Often, both positive and negative readings of verbs are
> available when the irrealis prefix si is used (with
>
> context or
>
> perhaps intonation doing the work); eg khaw3 si kin3
>
> [3pl irr
>
> eat] could mean ‘They will eat it’ or ‘They will
>
> definitely not
>
> eat it’ with a meaning similar to the colloquial English
> expression “As if they would eat it.” The second meaning is
> made more likely by insertion of the directional paj3 ‘go’
> before the verb (khaw3 si paj3 kin3 [3pl irr go eat] ‘As if
> they would eat it.’).
>
>
> Nick
>
> * *
> * *
> * *
> * *
> *N. J. ENFIELD *| FAHA FRSN | Professor of Linguistics
> Head, Post Truth Initiative https://posttruthinitiative.org/
> Director, SSSHARC (Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities
>
> Advanced
>
> Research Centre)
> Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
> *THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY*
> Rm N364, John Woolley Building A20 | NSW | 2006 | AUSTRALIA
> T +61 2 9351 2391 | M +61 476 239 669
> orcid.org/0000-0003-3891-6973
>
> <http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3891-6973>
> <http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3891-6973>
>
> E nick.enfield at sydney.edu.au <mailto:nick.enfield at sydney.edu.au>
> <mailto:nick.enfield at sydney.edu.au
>
> <mailto:nick.enfield at sydney.edu.au>> | W sydney.edu.au
> <http://sydney.edu.au/>
>
> <http://sydney.edu.au/> nickenfield.org
>
> <http://nickenfield.org/> <http://www.nickenfield.org/>
>
> * *
>
>
> *From: *Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org
>
> <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>
> <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org
>
> <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>>> on behalf of
>
> Mark Donohue <mark at donohue.cc <mailto:mark at donohue.cc>
>
> <mailto:mark at donohue.cc <mailto:mark at donohue.cc>>>
>
> *Date: *Friday, 1 June 2018 at 7:13 AM
> *To: *David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
>
> <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>>>
>
> *Cc: *"LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>
> <mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
>
> <mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>
> <mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>>"
>
> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>
> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>
> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>
> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>>
>
> *Subject: *Re: [Lingtyp] Does bipolar polysemy exist?
>
> In Tukang Besi, an Austronesian language of Indonesia, the verb
> 'know' is dahani; verbs are generally prefixed to agree with the
> S,A argument, thus
>
> ku-dahani 'I know'
> 'u-dahani 'you know'
>
> etc.
> In some contexts (imperatives, emphatic generic (TAME-less)
> assertion), the prefix can be omitted.
>
> dahani 'I/you certainly know'
>
> Now, I've heard this (and only this) verb used, in the
>
> absence of
>
> any inflection, with exactly its opposite meaning
>
> Dahani 'I don't know'
>
> in what might be a sarcastic sense. Unlike the antonymic uses of
> many adjectives in many languages, including English, this
>
> use of
>
> dahani is actually a simple (though emphatic) negation of the
> verb's 'normal' meaning.
>
> -Mark
>
> On 1 June 2018 at 04:43, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de
>
> <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
>
> <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>>> wrote:
>
> Yes, as Matti points out, negative lexicalization is not
>
> quite as
>
> rare as I was implying. Yet at the same time, I suspect
>
> that it
>
> might not be as common as Matti is suggesting. Looking at the
> examples that he cites in his Handbook chapter, I suspect
>
> that in
>
> some cases, the negative counterpart isn't "just" negative,
>
> but is
>
> also associated with some additional meaning components.
>
> Matti doesn't list "good"/"bad" as being such a pair, though,
> citing work by Ulrike Zeshan on sign languages, he does mention
> other evaluative concepts such as "not right", "not possible",
> "not enough". in English, at least, "bad" is not the
>
> negation of
>
> "good", it is the antonym of "good"; there's all kind of
>
> stuff in
>
> the world which we attach no evaluative content to, and which
> hence is neither good nor bad. (It's true that in English,
>
> in many
>
> contexts, the expression "not good" is understood as meaning
> "bad", which is interesting in and of itself, but still, it
>
> is not
>
> necessarily understood in this way.) While I have no direct
> evidence, I would strongly suspect that in languages that have
> lexicalized expressions for "not right", "not possible",
>
> and "not
>
> enough", the meanings of these expressions will be the
>
> antonyms of
>
> "right", "possible" and "enough", and not their negations.
>
> Under lexicalized negatives in the domain of tense/aspect,
>
> Matti
>
> lists "will not", "did not", "not finished". Well the one case
> that I am familiar with that falls into this category is
>
> that of
>
> the Malay/Indonesian iamative/perfect marker "sudah", which
>
> has a
>
> lexicalized negative counterpart "belum". However, "belum"
>
> isn't
>
> just "not sudah"; it also bears a strong (if not invariant)
> implicature that at some point in the future, the state or
> activity that is not complete will be completed — in fact, just
> like the English expression "not yet". (When people in
>
> Indonesia
>
> ask you if you're married, it's considered impolite to
>
> answer with
>
> a simple negation "tidak"; you're supposed to say "belum"
> precisely because of its implicature that you will, in the
>
> future,
>
> get married. By avoiding this implicature, the simple negation
> "tidak" is viewed as a threat to the natural order of
>
> things, in
>
> which everybody should get married.)
>
> I suspect that many if not all of the cases characterized
>
> by Matti
>
> as "lexicalized negatives" will turn out to be associated with
> some additional meaning component beyond that of "mere"
>
> negation.
>
>
>
>
>
> On 31/05/2018 20:06, Miestamo, Matti M P wrote:
>
>
> Dear David, Zygmunt and others,
>
> negative lexicalization is not quite as rare as David seems to
> imply. There is a cross-linguistic survey of this
>
> phenomenon by
>
> Ljuba Veselinova (ongoing work, detailed and informative
> presentation slides available through her website), and Zeshan
> (2013) has written on this phenomenon in sign languages.
>
> There's
>
> also a short summary in my recent Cambridge Handbook of
> Linguistic Typology chapter on negation (preprint
>
> available via
>
> the link in the signature below).
>
> Best,
> Matti
>
> --
> Matti Miestamo
> http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~matmies/
>
> <https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/O7N4CL7rK8t5zx0kUBCq-Q?domain=
> ling.helsinki.fi>
>
>
>
>
> Zygmunt Frajzyngier <Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at COLORADO.EDU
>
> <mailto:Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at COLORADO.EDU>
>
> <mailto:Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at COLORADO.EDU
>
> <mailto:Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at COLORADO.EDU>>> kirjoitti 31.5.2018
>
> kello 17.23:
>
> David, Friends
> Related to David’s post, not to the original query.
> In any individual language, there may exist a few of
>
> ‘Not-X’ items.
>
> In Mina (Central Chadic) there is a noun which designates
> ‘non-blacksmith’.
> In several Chadic languages there exist negative existential
> verb unrelated to the affirmative existential verb.
> Zygmunt
>
> On 5/31/18, 5:52 AM, "Lingtyp on behalf of David Gil"
> <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org
>
> <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>
> <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org
>
> <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf
>
> of gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
>
> <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>>> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> On 31/05/2018 13:37, Sebastian Nordhoff wrote:
>
> On 05/31/2018 01:18 PM, David Gil wrote:
>
> A point of logic. "Not X" and "Antonym (X)" are distinct
> notions, and
> the original query by Ian Joo pertains to the former,
>
> not the
>
> latter.
>
> but is there any (monomorphemic) lexeme which expresses
>
> not-X
>
> which is
> not the antonym of X?
>
> But how many (monomorphemic) lexemes expressing not-X are
> there at all?
> The only ones I can think of are suppletive negative
> existentials, e.g.
> Tagalog "may" (exist) > "wala" (not exist). Even
>
> suppletive
>
> negative
> desideratives don't quite fit the bill, e.g. Tagalog
> "nais"/"gusto"
> (want) > "ayaw", which is commonly glossed as "not want",
> but actually
> means "want not-X", rather than "not want-X" — "ayaw" is
> thus an antonym
> but not a strict negation of "nais"/"gusto".
>
> What is not clear to me about the original query is
>
> whether
>
> it is asking
> for negations or for antonyms.
>
> --
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
>
> Email: gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
>
> <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>>
>
> Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816
>
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>
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> _______________________________________________
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>
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>
> --
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
>
> Email: gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
>
> <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>>
>
> Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816
>
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--
Enrique Bernárdez
Catedrático de Lingüística General
Departamento de Lingüística, Estudios Árabes, Hebreos y de Asia Oriental
Facultad de Filología
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
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