RE: SUO: Axiomatizing lower level WordNet terms
John,
See my comments below.
-Ian
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Bateman [mailto:bateman@uni-bremen.de]
> Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 11:10 PM
> To: Ian Niles
> Cc: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: Re: SUO: Axiomatizing lower level WordNet terms
>
>
> Hi Ian,
>
> Been traveling so didn't get a chance to reply to the following,
> which I must rather shocked me!
>
> Ian Niles, responding to my query about the axiomiatization
> of "rescue":
>
> >>JB: >Can we specify that the location (a SUMO Object) can
> be abstract
> >>>(they were rescued from danger)? In fact, the abstract
> nature of the
> >>>object being a threat seems to be definitional for rescue.
> You can't
> >>>be rescued from something that is not a threat. An Object just
> >>>can't *be* a threat, it has to be considered as such by some one,
> >>>which makes it more of a semiotic object than just a member
> >>>of
> >>
> >
> >To my ear, expressions like "rescue from danger", "rescue
> from a threat",
> >etc. are pleonastic. Whenever someone is rescued, he is
> removed from some
> >sort of danger or threat. Accordingly, I think that we can
> still require
> >that the object of a rescue event be a physical object of
> some sort. At
> >least, I don't see that your comment constitutes a
> counterexample to the
> >requirement.
> >
> I am not quite sure what your ear has to do with it. Is this
> meant to be
> a methodology?!
Well, actually it's the methodology that many practicing linguists use.
When a linguist tries to construct or test a grammar for a natural language,
the evidence he uses is judgements of linguistic acceptability from
informants. Since in this case my own linguistic judgements were most ready
to hand, I consulted them. Note that this methodology was originally
proposed by Chomsky in chapter 1 of Aspects_of_the_Theory_of_Syntax.
>
> Here are some random extracts from the Cobuild Bank of
> English and the
> International Corpus of English:
>
> ====================================================
> COBUILD:
>
> to rescue men and women from a wreck
>
> Ascari being rescued from the harbour
>
> to rescue it from otherwise faceless, featureless oblivion
>
> fearless youngster who rescued boy from fire wins top award
>
> have any passengers been rescued from the lifeboats?
>
> rescued from the Oceanos off coffee bay
>
> would come to his aid and rescue him from the sense of being
> assailed on
> all sides.
>
> I recently helped her rescue six puppies and their mother
> frmo a man who
> had ...
>
> called out of retirement to rescue the Texas University
> Armadillos from
> the wilderness
>
> Adrian Noble was the man who rescued Stephens from the
> oblivion of the 1980s
>
> Fashion has finally rescued from the shame of the 1970s
>
> Its fire marks were rescued from storerooms around the country
>
> Montini was rescued from such routine chores
>
> ICE:
>
> but hopefully it will <,> help to rescue University College
> from <,> its
> financial embarrassments at the present time
>
> And in the fourteen forties uh Henry May of Bristol had a ship which
> rescued the Portuguese ship from pirates
>
> ==================================
Actually none of this evidence is relevant. I wasn't claiming that "rescue"
does not take an object that is specified with the preposition "from". What
I was claiming is that when this object is the word "danger", the result is
a redundant expression. Since none of the examples you adduce contain the
expression "rescue from danger", none of it has any bearing on the claim I
was making.
>
> The problem with a lot of linguistics in the 60-80s was that
> it was done in
> armchairs, dredging examples from the minds of the armchair
> linguist. Many
> now see this is a hopeless endeavor, since the mind is not
> very good at
> forgetting
> about what it is trying to prove and producing less biased more
> representative
> data. Now, in my random extractions above, I cannot yet make
> any claims
> as to representativeness, but the results are at least suggestive. To
> allocate
> what appears to be a healthy percentage of usages to
> "pleonistic" (huh?)
> seems a good way of losing touch with reality, at least as
> far as language
> judgements are concerned.
>
> Of course, it may be a way of getting an ontology up and
> running since one
> can forget about the messy details.
>
> But that just emphasizes my conviction that the formalization
> of particular
> ontologies for particular domains of discourse (e.g.,
> linguistics) should
> be left to experts and not be trampled on in a monolithic SUMO.
Well, I agree that adducing examples from corpora can be useful in
confirming or refuting general linguistic claims. However, I've tried to
show that nothing in your particular examples is relevant to the claim I was
making. Let me know if you disagree.
>
> Best,
> John B.
>
>
>
>
>