SUO: Clause and Linguistics

[Scott O Farrar <farrar@U.Arizona.EDU>]

Hi All,

I'd like to combine the recent comments related to LinguisticExpression
and linguistic concepts in general:


JB: John Bateman
IN: Ian Niles


First of all, there was a recent question by JB:

"How can Sentence be a subclass of  Clause? ..."


A Clause is similar to a Sentence, but it's not the maximal unit, say, in
a text or dialogue. 'that Scott lives in Tucson' is an example of a
relative clause.

(subclass Clause Phrase)
(documentation Clause "A clause is a grammatical unit that includes, at
minimum, a predicate and a subject (which may be explicit or implicit) and that
expresses a &%Proposition.")

(=>
    (instance ?CLAUSE Clause)
    (exists (?PROP)
        (and
            (instance ?PROP Proposition)
            (containsInformation ?CLAUSE ?PROP))))


IN wrote:
>I'm not sure I follow all of this.  The assertion '(subclass Sentence
>Clause)' is a goof, and I'll delete it from the SUMO.

I would argue that a Sentence is a kind of Clause just like
'that Scott lives in Tucson' is a kind of Clause (a relative clause). This
noted, Clause is probably not so relevant to the SUMO, only for the specialized
linguistics domain. I would suggest deleting Clause altogether.

As for sentence:

(subclass Sentence Clause)
(documentation Sentence "A syntactically well-formed formula of a
&%Language.")

I would add that a sentence must necessarily contain a subject
(overt or implied) and predicate. The axiom would be:


(=>
    (instance ?SENTENCE Sentence)

    (and
         (exists ?SUBJECT ?VERBPHRASE ?PROP)

    (and
           (instance ?SUBJECT Subject)
           (instance ?VERBPHRASE VerbPhrase)
           (part ?SUBJECT ?SENTENCE)
	   (part ?VERBPHRASE ?SENTENCE)
           (instance ?PROP Proposition)
           (containsInformation ?CLAUSE ?PROP)))

;;By Subject, I mean a kind of NounPhrase.
;;
;;I used VerbPhrase because I wanted to avoid Predicate,
;;which is reserved for logical sentences (I think).
;;(I just saw Chris Menzel's recent posting regarding
;;logical predicates and natural language. It'd be nice to
;; unify or link these two notions.)


As for  Phrase, it  is a syntactic unit not necessarily with a subject or
predicate. Examples include:

'in the barn'
'moved to NYC'
'Santa Clause'



(subclass Phrase LinguisticExpression)
(disjointDecomposition Phrase VerbPhrase NounPhrase PrepositionalPhrase
Clause)
(documentation Phrase "A set of &%Words in a &%Language which form a unit,
i.e. express a meaning in the &%Language.")

(=>
    (instance ?PHRASE Phrase)
    (exists (?PART1 ?PART2)
        (and
            (part ?PART1 ?PHRASE)
	      (part ?PART2 ?PHRASE)
            (instance ?PART1 Word)
	      (instance ?PART2 Word)
            (not (equal ?PART1 ?PART2)))))



More to follow...


Scott Farrar