Also, I don't see how you can call a model "semantic" when it makes
no reference to the world. The model as described by Wikipedia
could have the capability of telling me whether a sentence is
natural or highly unlikely, but unless I misunderstand something,
there is no possibility it could tell me whether a sentence
describes a scene.



That is really a philosophical point: it seems to be a special case of
linguistic
structuralism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism

in the spirit of Saussure....  In this approach one studies language as a
system
of interrelating signs ... e.g. "large" is defined in terms of its
relationship to "small"
and "huge" rather than in terms of its relationship to the physical
world....

So yeah: you can't tell from linguistic structure alone if a sentence
describes
a real scene or an imaginary scene. But you might be able to tell if it
defines
a scene or not by looking at the collection of linguistic relationships
generally
needed to define a scene...

I tend to think that structuralist linguistics points out some important
aspects
that are commonly overlooked in other linguistic paradigms, but also
somewhat
overstates things...

Arguably Saussure was the grand-daddy of corpus linguistics...

-- Ben G

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