16.2059, Review: Semantics/Cognitive Science: Schalley (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2059. Sat Jul 02 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2059, Review: Semantics/Cognitive Science: Schalley (2004)

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1)
Date: 01-Jul-2005
From: Milena Slavcheva < milena at lml.acad.bg >
Subject: Cognitive Modeling and Verbal Semantics 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 17:16:27
From: Milena Slavcheva < milena at lml.acad.bg >
Subject: Cognitive Modeling and Verbal Semantics 
 

AUTHOR: Schalley, Andrea C.
TITLE: Cognitive Modeling and Verbal Semantics
SUBTITLE: A Representational Framework Based on UML
SERIES: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 154
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2872.html


Milena Slavcheva, Linguistic Modeling Department, Institute for 
Parallel Information Processing, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia

INTRODUCTION

The book is a monograph that introduces a representational 
framework for verbal semantics, the Unified Eventity Representation 
(UER). The approach is rather innovative, since it introduces object-
orientation as a new paradigm to linguistic semantics, and proposes 
graphical representation based on the Unified Modeling Language 
(UML) -- "the current lingua franca for the design of object-oriented 
systems in computer science" (p.1). The approach is a cognitive one 
and the semantic representation is elaborated from a theoretical 
perspective. The aim is to develop a framework for the modeling and 
description of verbal semantics, which is intuitive and formal at the 
same time.

The monograph consists of ten chapters, an appendix (containing the 
notational elements of the UER), extensive notes, a list of references, 
an index of names, an UER index, and a subject index. A preface, a 
list of figures and a list of tables are also provided at the beginning of 
the book.

SYNOPSIS

Chapter 1 is a short introduction where Andrea Schalley points out the 
main objectives of the proposed representational framework and 
summarizes the content of the book chapters. 

In Chapter 2, "Survey of research positions", A. Schalley overviews 
the most prominent linguistic research positions relevant for the UER 
and presents the UER's positioning with regard to the issues 
discussed. She considers approaches to the lexical semantics of 
verbs, thus elaborating on and comparing key concepts and 
representational devices like semantic features, semantic markers, 
stereotypes, prototypes, semantic roles and protoroles. Aktionsart and 
its relation to verb classification are also discussed. The structural 
relations within the lexicon are represented by their notable 
manifestations like sense relation, polisemy, and lexical fields. A. 
Schalley discusses five different approaches to decompositional 
semantics, starting with the older and rather influential Generative 
Semantics, and continuing with the prominent Jackendoff's 
Conceptual Semantics, Fillmore's Frame Semantics, Wunderlich's 
Lexical Decomposition Grammar and Pustejovsky's Generative 
Lexicon. Another topic relevant to the UER and included in Chapter 2 
is that of semantic primitives or semantic primes and the Natural 
Semantic Metalanguage originated by Wierzbicka.

Chapter 3, "Introducing the UER", outlines the foundation of UER as a 
graphical formalism, which adopts basic constructs from the Unified 
Modeling Language (UML), but also makes adaptations and 
extensions to UML to ensure the linguistic applicability of UER. The 
UER architecture is defined as a hierarchy of abstraction layers.

Chapter 4, "Basic concepts of the UER" introduces general-purpose 
mechanisms that provide the extensibility devices for the UER. The 
basic UER concepts are represented. From one side, there are the 
static structure elements that typically model ineventities (entities 
which typically occur as participants in an eventity, that is, generally 
speaking, an event). On the other side, there are the dynamic 
structure elements that model the dynamic, behavioral aspects of 
eventities (i.e., events).

Chapter 5 presents advanced concepts of the UER, which meet the 
requirements of the linguistic application domain. The syntax and 
semantics of each modeling element are provided together with an 
example for illustration. The fundamental UER concept of EVENTITY 
FRAME is introduced, as well as elements modeling semantic relations 
among the members of the eventity concept. 

Chapter 6 provides an interpretation of UER concepts, presenting 
motivations and reasons for certain design decisions. The fairly 
permissive character of UER is pointed out which means that "the 
different concepts' member sets are not definitely specified" (p.181) 
and it is a matter of further typological research to establish these sets 
in order to handle different linguistic phenomena. A. Schalley makes 
proposals for handling key phenomena discussing EVENTITY 
FRAMES as central cognitive units, ATTRIBUTES as semantic 
features of participants, CLASSES as descriptors for sets of 
OBJECTS, that is "sets or collections of entities with similar structure, 
behavior, and relationships" (p.193), PARTICIPANT TYPES as 
references to ontological categories, GENERALIZATIONS as 
inheritance relationship promoters and taxonomy builders, and so 
forth.

Chapters 1-6 (summarized up to now) provide the formal specification 
of the UER, while Chapters 7-9 make account of its application.

In Chapter 7 general issues are discussed concerning the modeling 
capacity of UER. Directions for further research are also indicated. 
Along the lines of the UER decompositional approach to verbal 
semantics, the significant issue of the definition and utilization of 
semantic primitives is considered, as well as the devices used for 
modeling granularity and constraining the representation of verbal 
semantics. A very important point in this chapter is the vision for 
extending UER in order to account for compositional semantics. The 
author is aware of the great amount of work to be done in this 
direction, but nevertheless she marks the milestones of the potential 
development.

Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 demonstrate two different applications of the 
UER, in theoretical and in descriptive linguistics respectively. The first 
application, deployed in Chapter 8, is "a preliminary development of a 
linguistically relevant eventity classification based on the UER" 
(p.251). The classification systematizes cognitively primary classes, 
reflects fundamental Aktionsart distinctions, and takes advantage of 
the graphical representation of abstracted semantic content. Chapter 
9, entitled "Application II: The polysemy of German "setzen" is an 
attempt to demonstrate the "broad applicability and potential of the 
UER as a valuable tool for semantic analysis and semantic 
representation" (p.325). First the eventity concept encoded in the 
English verb "put" is represented by the respective UER diagrams. 
Then the polysemous readings of the German verb 'setzen' are 
described employing the modeling devices of the UER formalism.

Chapter 10 is an epilog where A. Schalley recapitulates the 
characteristics of UER and stresses upon the main qualities that the 
representational framework strives to achieve: expressiveness, 
universality, cognitive adequacy and, where possible, practicability.

EVALUATION

A. Schalley's monograph is distinguished for its originality and 
innovation. The approach is attractive because it utilizes the thinking 
and the design of object orientation -- at present the most prominent 
paradigm in programming languages. The approach to verbal 
semantics is a cognitive one and thus relies on intuition and world 
adequate conceptualization. At the same time UER is formally 
adequate, the syntax and semantics of its modeling elements are 
explicitly specified, a metalanguage guarantees the well-formedness 
of the building blocks of the representation. The formal soundness is 
further guaranteed by the utilization of representational devices from 
the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as formulated in the UML 
specifications, to which the UER linguistically suitable adaptations and 
extensions also conform. In such a way, although the complete formal 
semantics of UER has not been fully elaborated (as is also the case 
with the still developing UML standard), the UER conforms to the 
requirement for formal correctness and reliability. 

UER is a graphical formalism, "a mixture of graphical, two-dimensional 
elements as well as elements expressed in either natural or logical 
languages and thus linear textual constructs" (p.80). I agree with A. 
Schalley's statement that such formalism provides for linguists an 
intuitive and at the same conceptually rigorous modeling device. The 
object- oriented modeling together with the application of UML, the 
nearly established (i.e., officially published in the near future) standard 
for design, visual representation and documentation of object-oriented 
systems in computer science, bring the UER models near to the most 
up-to-date implementation, although the investigation presented in the 
monograph does not deal directly with implementation. 

The approach, as presented in the monograph, is purely theoretical 
and purely semantic. Being a practitioner, I feel a bit uneasy about the 
amount of efforts necessary to put the UER into practice. I am also 
concerned about the interface to syntax, that is, to the anchors of real 
life language productions. But I am well aware of the fact that this is 
the case with all emerging linguistic theories and formalisms. After all 
the present investigation is the necessary theoretical foundation of a 
newly developed representational framework of semantics. A. Schalley 
herself conceives the UER as a first step towards a broader treatment 
of language data and elaboration of applications. 

A special merit of the UER is the possibility to capture variable 
granularity of the semantic description. The UER metamodel with its 
multiple layers of abstraction guarantees the deployment of a type 
hierarchy and makes use of the distinction between type and instance, 
which is vital to building effective linguistic models allocated to 
applications in computer systems. The generalization mechanism is a 
fundamental one and allows the user to adjust the granularity of the 
linguistic modeling depending on the application requirements.  

The last two sentences in the last chapter of A. Schalley's monograph 
say: "However, many topics were still beyond the scope of this 
investigation, and it was not possible to test the UER for several 
different languages. We hope that investigations that use the UER will 
be carried out, thereby closing the gaps and stimulating further 
development of the UER." (p.328)

I think that it is worth trying to apply this promising representational 
framework. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

The reviewer, Milena Slavcheva, is a specialist in building formal 
models of language for software applications and in producing large-
scale language resources (lexicons and corpora). She is interested in 
the study and formal representation of verb-centered structures at 
different levels of linguistic analysis, as well as in the development of 
real linguistic components utilizable in the automatic processing of 
language.





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