There are 11 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: An ambiguous sentence
From: Mechthild Czapp
1b. Re: An ambiguous sentence
From: Garth Wallace
1c. Re: An ambiguous sentence
From: Matthew Boutilier
1d. Re: An ambiguous sentence
From: David Peterson
1e. Re: An ambiguous sentence
From: Arnt Richard Johansen
1f. Re: An ambiguous sentence
From: Allison Swenson
2a. Re: Is there a word for this?
From: Alex Fink
2b. Re: Is there a word for this?
From: Gary Shannon
2c. Re: Is there a word for this?
From: MorphemeAddict
2d. Re: Is there a word for this?
From: Roger Mills
3a. Re: Loglan[g] VS Natlang
From: MorphemeAddict
Messages
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1a. Re: An ambiguous sentence
Posted by: "Mechthild Czapp" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 2:26 pm ((PST))
Is there a language in which the 2 meanings cannot be conflated?
On 18.01.2013, at 19:16, Roger Mills wrote:
> Here's just about my favorite-- my major professor always threw it out to his
> Ling.101 students:
>
> The police were ordered to stop drinking on campus after midnight.
Messages in this topic (8)
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1b. Re: An ambiguous sentence
Posted by: "Garth Wallace" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 2:29 pm ((PST))
On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 2:25 PM, Mechthild Czapp <[email protected]> wrote:
> Is there a language in which the 2 meanings cannot be conflated?
Only two? I think there are more possible parsings than that.
Messages in this topic (8)
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1c. Re: An ambiguous sentence
Posted by: "Matthew Boutilier" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 2:30 pm ((PST))
Just to be clear, we're talking about the two meanings of "to stop
drinking," right?
1. "the police were ordered to put a stop to [other people's] drinking on
campus after midnight"
2. "the police were ordered to abstain from drinking on campus after
midnight"
I'm a bit slow today.
matt
On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Mechthild Czapp <[email protected]> wrote:
> Is there a language in which the 2 meanings cannot be conflated?
>
>
> On 18.01.2013, at 19:16, Roger Mills wrote:
>
> > Here's just about my favorite-- my major professor always threw it out
> to his Ling.101 students:
> >
> > The police were ordered to stop drinking on campus after midnight.
>
Messages in this topic (8)
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1d. Re: An ambiguous sentence
Posted by: "David Peterson" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 2:33 pm ((PST))
A couple more:
3. "after midnight passed, the police were ordered to put a stop to other
people's drinking on campus"
4. "the police were ordered to put a stop to other people's drinking on campus
which occurs after midnight"
That, however, is just two. Hopefully this will open the doors to the other
meanings (note that "on campus" can also attach in different spots).
David Peterson
LCS President
[email protected]
www.conlang.org
On Jan 18, 2013, at 2:29 PM, Matthew Boutilier <[email protected]> wrote:
> Just to be clear, we're talking about the two meanings of "to stop
> drinking," right?
> 1. "the police were ordered to put a stop to [other people's] drinking on
> campus after midnight"
> 2. "the police were ordered to abstain from drinking on campus after
> midnight"
> I'm a bit slow today.
>
> matt
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Mechthild Czapp <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Is there a language in which the 2 meanings cannot be conflated?
>>
>>
>> On 18.01.2013, at 19:16, Roger Mills wrote:
>>
>>> Here's just about my favorite-- my major professor always threw it out
>> to his Ling.101 students:
>>>
>>> The police were ordered to stop drinking on campus after midnight.
>>
Messages in this topic (8)
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1e. Re: An ambiguous sentence
Posted by: "Arnt Richard Johansen" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 3:50 pm ((PST))
> > On 18.01.2013, at 19:16, Roger Mills wrote:
> >
> > > The police were ordered to stop drinking on campus after midnight.
On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 04:29:57PM -0600, Matthew Boutilier wrote:
> Just to be clear, we're talking about the two meanings of "to stop
> drinking," right?
> 1. "the police were ordered to put a stop to [other people's] drinking on
> campus after midnight"
> 2. "the police were ordered to abstain from drinking on campus after
> midnight"
> I'm a bit slow today.
My very first interpretation of the sentence was this:
“The police were ordered to cease and desist from their established practice of
drinking on campus after midnight”.
--
Arnt Richard Johansen http://arj.nvg.org/
Löylyä lisää, ei tunnu missää.
Messages in this topic (8)
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1f. Re: An ambiguous sentence
Posted by: "Allison Swenson" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 6:33 pm ((PST))
The police were ordered to stop (their own) drinking on campus after
midnight (but they can drink on campus up to that point).
The police were ordered to stop (their own) drinking on campus after
midnight (but it's OK to drink other places after midnight).
The police were ordered to stop (their own) drinking on campus after
midnight (as in, everyone meet on the campus and then never drink again).
The police were ordered to stop (their own) drinking on campus after
midnight (and never drink on campus ever again, even before midnight).
I feel there's at least a couple of other ways it could be taken to mean
the police are the ones who are drinking, the location they are drinking in
is the campus, and the time they are drinking is after midnight. And that
is not getting into whether the "drinking" refers to other people, whether
"after midnight" means when the police were told or when the drinking was
supposed to stop, whether "on campus" means where the police were told or
where the drinking was supposed to stop... I suppose even "ordered" could
be interpreted ambiguously. You could take it to mean the police were
ordered, as in rows, as they prepared to set out to stop drinking. Is that
a grammatical use of "ordered", though?
On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 6:49 PM, Arnt Richard Johansen <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On 18.01.2013, at 19:16, Roger Mills wrote:
> > >
> > > > The police were ordered to stop drinking on campus after midnight.
>
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 04:29:57PM -0600, Matthew Boutilier wrote:
> > Just to be clear, we're talking about the two meanings of "to stop
> > drinking," right?
> > 1. "the police were ordered to put a stop to [other people's] drinking on
> > campus after midnight"
> > 2. "the police were ordered to abstain from drinking on campus after
> > midnight"
> > I'm a bit slow today.
>
> My very first interpretation of the sentence was this:
> �The police were ordered to cease and desist from their established
> practice of drinking on campus after midnight�.
>
> --
> Arnt Richard Johansen http://arj.nvg.org/
> L�yly� lis��, ei tunnu miss��.
>
Messages in this topic (8)
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2a. Re: Is there a word for this?
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 2:50 pm ((PST))
On Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:23:14 -0800, Garth Wallace <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 12:15 PM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 11:23 AM, Garth Wallace <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> ---snip---
>>>
>>> "Part of speech". Or "word class", or "lexical category", etc. At
>>> least if I'm understanding you correctly.
>>
>> I'm referring more to the method of collecting sets. Besides, each of
>> those terms is already loaded down with specific meanings, so if I use
>> them to describe something different there will be no end of
>> confusion.
>>
>> And apparently I'm not doing too good a job of getting my idea across.
>> Things like "part of speech" are similar, but the criteria for placing
>> a word in one part of speech or another is different. If I said that a
>> possessive pronoun and a definite article were the same part of speech
>> people would think I was incredibly stupid.
>
>But you can say that they're both specifiers and be entirely correct.
>
>If you treat classes as a flat, mutually exclusive categorization
>scheme, of course it doesn't work. But I don't think there's any
>reason to do so. Langauges have all sorts of subclasses that restrict
>the possible syntactic contexts they can appear in beyond those of the
>larger categories, or allow exceptional syntactic contexts:
>intrasitive vs. transitive verbs, verbs requiring certain oblique
>arguments, verbs requirinf "quirky subjects", deponents, mass vs.
>count nouns, pluralia tantum, prepositions with different valency (if
>you accept that theory), and so on. You can even allow for some
>overlap, for example the "specifier" class in English contains
>articles, demonstratives, and possessive NPs.
Sure. But choosing the classes you're going to enshrine as classes, and not
merely subclasses or whatever else, is a matter of analysis, and I take Gary's
point to be the reasonable one that it would do to have a name for the basic
cooccurrential facts on which the analysis into classes is predicated.
Insisting that "part of speech" and its synonyms are enough seems akin to
insisting that we do phonetics using only the terms "phoneme" and "allophone"
and eschew the simple "phone".
There are isotactic sets which I don't think anyone would be inclined to call
classes. For example, there are ones which are (approximate) unions of many
classes: "he was ___" --> {president, home, swarthy, eating, murdered, fifty,
here, out, ...}
I honestly expected someone to have chipped in with the standard word that's
used in computational natural language processing by now, with respect to the
problem of part of speech inference. Is there not one?
Alex
Messages in this topic (11)
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2b. Re: Is there a word for this?
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 2:53 pm ((PST))
On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Garth Wallace <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 12:15 PM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> And apparently I'm not doing too good a job of getting my idea across.
>> Things like "part of speech" are similar, but the criteria for placing
>> a word in one part of speech or another is different. If I said that a
>> possessive pronoun and a definite article were the same part of speech
>> people would think I was incredibly stupid.
>
> But you can say that they're both specifiers and be entirely correct.
Yes, but other things that are also "classifiers" would not fit into
either of my proposed classes. And the class "classifiers" is not
useful for tagging and parsing _using the algorithm I am experimenting
with_.
>
> If you treat classes as a flat, mutually exclusive categorization
> scheme, of course it doesn't work.
No, not mutually exclusive, but overlapping sets.
---snip---
Keep in mind that my motive has nothing to do with the study of
linguistics and everything to do with the engineering of a
computerized conlang translation program. The reason for the method is
code efficiency in C++, not "understanding" parts of speech. It's a
wrench, not a microscope.
For programming purposes the method is extremely useful, but for the
purpose of describing the algorithm I can't use existing terms like
"parts of speech" without misleading the reader. Thus the need for a
new term.
So the question is not "does the method work?" For programming
purposes, it does. The questions is, what shall I call it?
---snip---
>>
>> Also, I'm interested in sets of words that are BOTH grammatically AND
>> semantically _sensible_ in the specified context.
>
> "Semantically sensible" is pretty nebulous. It can depend on any
> number of other words in the sentence, and even on information outside
> of the sentence. Even the audience is part of the context. I'm not
> sure that, even given all of that, you could always strictly say that
> a word is or is not semantically sensible (possibly more or less
> semantically sensible). It'd be tough to come up with useful
> generalizations if that's a criterion.
That's true, for a scientist. An engineer is much less concerned with
that and more concerned with what "works" in the majority of cases.
--gary
Messages in this topic (11)
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2c. Re: Is there a word for this?
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 5:46 pm ((PST))
On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Working with my conlang machine translation project, I'm playing with
> the tagger code and I found a useful way to classify words during the
> process of tagging, and I'm wondering if there is a term for this
> already.
>
> Consider a template sentence with an empty slot: ___box fell.
>
> Now consider the set of words than can be put in that location in the
> template:
>
> { a the my our your his her its their one some this that every
> each }
>
> I want to say that the set has property X with respect to template Y.
> From the Greek roots for "same" and "location" I came up with
> "isotaxis" and called the set "isotaxic" WRT sentence Y.
>
> A different template might generate a different "isotaxic" set:
>
> Sentence template: ___ boxes fell.
>
> Isotaxic set = { the my our your his her its their some these those
> many few two }
>
> Is there already a word for this property, and if not, does "isotaxis"
> sound right? Or can anyone suggest a better term?
>
Blank filler?
stevo
>
> thanks.
>
> --gary
>
Messages in this topic (11)
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2d. Re: Is there a word for this?
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 6:55 pm ((PST))
On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Working with my conlang machine translation project, I'm playing with
> the tagger code and I found a useful way to classify words during the
> process of tagging, and I'm wondering if there is a term for this
> already.
>
> Consider a template sentence with an empty slot: ___box fell.
>
> Now consider the set of words than can be put in that location in the
> template:
>
> { a the my our your his her its their one some this that every
> each }
>
> I want to say that the set has property X with respect to template Y.
> From the Greek roots for "same" and "location" I came up with
> "isotaxis" and called the set "isotaxic" WRT sentence Y.
>
> A different template might generate a different "isotaxic" set:
>
> Sentence template: ___ boxes fell.
>
> Isotaxic set = { the my our your his her its their some these those
> many few two }
>
> Is there already a word for this property, and if not, does "isotaxis"
> sound right? Or can anyone suggest a better term?
>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not sure this is relevant, but... Kenneth Pike's "Tagmemic Grammar" dealt (as
best I recall, since I never studied it, and it was already way passé by the
1970s) with this sort of thing. It was an offshoot of structuralism, which had
a sort of "one from column A, one from column B" approach to this sort of sprt
of thing. A lot of early grammatical descriptions written by SIL members used
his model; I think even SIL has gone beyond it. Don't know what you might find
online.
Blank filler?
stevo
>
> thanks.
>
> --gary
>
Messages in this topic (11)
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3a. Re: Loglan[g] VS Natlang
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 18, 2013 5:40 pm ((PST))
On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 2:42 PM, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>wrote:
> <<Moreover, I would sooner stick a fork in my own hand than to suggest that
> anyone "should" learn any particular language -- although I will go so far
> as to suggest that everyone who is going to regard themselves as educated
> should make an effort to learn at least one other language (and, in my
> fantasy university, every single student will learn two languages, one
> living and one dead). But I'm not going to say "everyone must learn
> Latin!" or "Everyone should learn English!" I won't even say that everyone
> in America should learn English.
>
> As far as I'm concerned, there is precious little room in linguistics, or
> in conlanging, for shoulds.
>
> Other than as modals.>>
>
> Sorry for my badly phrased sentence. I agree that people should learn a
> language only if they want to (while on the other hand it kind of hurts to
> stick a fork in one's own hand ;) ). That's why I reformulated my though in
> a latter email asking for advantages of less logical languages because
> that's what I really wanted to know in the end. So I apologize.
>
> <<(Hmm, although I will go so far as to suggest that anyone who wishes to
> study in an American university should probably know enough English to
> understand the lectures, and anyone who doesn't shouldn't be admitted to
> that university unless the University is willing to provide translators.
> So I guess that's my prescriptive line.)>>
>
> I am American too, and there are plenty people that do not speak English in
> my university. Yes people from Quebec, Mexico, and South America are also
> Americans; what they are not is US-Americans. I would sooner stick a fork
> in
> my own hand than to suggest that my country is America.
>
One of the meanings (the primary one, now, I'd say) is that America is just
the USA. It's one part of the Americas, but USA and America are synonyms to
most people.
stevo
Messages in this topic (11)
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