SUO: RE: Clause and Linguistics
Scott,
The changes you propose here sound reasonable to me. I'll go ahead
and put them in the SUMO, as long as there are no objections from John B. or
anyone else.
-Ian
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott O Farrar [mailto:farrar@U.Arizona.EDU]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 1:25 PM
> To: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: SUO: Clause and Linguistics
>
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>