On 7/26/23, Ada Wan <[email protected]> wrote: > Re there is no grammar: this has been a perennial issue in CL/NLP.
What do you mean when you say "there is no grammar"? Do you mean in those kinds of "tensors" they use or factually, in general "in reality"? ~ > Different people have grown up with different relations to language. I would have said: "different people have grown giving more or less importance to different aspects of their life about which they talk to one another in particular ways ..." Most importantly, people do change their views towards what they had believed in some era's to be their very essence! ~ > Some > take some habits more seriously than others. Some give some habits more > value/authority/status than they deserve, so they become rules. And some > obey rules more than others, so rules get internalized and one ends up > believing that there is something "magical" about language. Yes, there definitely is. Hegel explained it to us ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phenomenology_of_Spirit https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/ https://www.dw.com/en/hegel-the-philosopher-who-viewed-history-as-inevitable-progress/a-54707032 ~ > (Some also try > to exploit rules enough to make others' lives miserable --- this is how > language/grammar can be used as a weapon [language attitudes]!). Thank to Hollywood, when most people think of "'the' land of 'the' 'free' ..." they think of the Apollo landing, their skyscrapers, computers, Beyoncé's rear end, ... to me the most amazing thing I have learned in the U.S. (even if cosmically hopeless) is that thing of using lies not just as "tools", but industries! What the preposterous eff does USG care about "freedom", "democracy", "the rule of law", ...?!? I lived in NYC for 25 years and, I don't watch TV I don't even own a TV set, but you couldn't live there without being aware of the Seinfeld show (penned by Seth Meyers) one of the memes they repeated was: "remember, it is not a lie anymore if you believe it". Silly me would have thought of it as some sort of odd joke (even if you believe a lie it doesn't make it true, right?), but then I realized that there was more to it and started interpreting it as some sort of Anthropology about the U.S. I noticed once gringos arguing with British people online and their argument went like: "don't make fun of our media and we won't make fun of your royalty" ... I was once telling an European lady who minded such issues how they keep people in the U.S. I noticed how she was getting anxious but chose to keep parsing me. At some point she couldn't take it anymore and told me: "but what you are telling me is so stupid that it can't possibly work with people". I just smiled. I saw myself. I wouldn't have believed any of what I was telling her hadn't I experienced it myself. USG manages to very easily and cheaply do that fine job with "language" and some "social control" as good Christians call -repression- (-torture- being "enhanced interrogation techniques"). The other day I noticed CNN folks talking as if they cared about people in "Afghanistan and Yemen, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, and so on, countries that desperately need that food assistance" and they were saying such thing quite naturally with a straight face (youtube.com/watch?v=MorNgyUyV10&t=85) But then I wondered about those who have a hard time digesting USG's lies. One of my girlfriend' best friends who was an eye witness of the incident in which the IDF run a bulldozer over Rachel Corrie told us how she was murdered. What I have related may not exactly relate to corpora research, but IMO it does definitely relate to "language" among other things. lbrtchx _______________________________________________ Corpora mailing list -- [email protected] https://list.elra.info/mailman3/postorius/lists/corpora.list.elra.info/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
