Re: CG: SUO: RE: Link Grammar and Parser
>
>
>Yes, and from my (quick) reading of the Intro paper, they find
>that English is an "... unusual language ..." in this regard.
>Apparently English is more flexible in role order because it is
>less flexible in word sequence order than many other languages.
>
This is actually a fine example of what I wrote in a previous email
about "perspectives
on information" being the way to see linguistic formalisms nowadays. RRG
was developed
before this change in emphasis had really take place--and many linguists
I would suspect
would still not realise that it *has* taken place. From the name, one
sees that RRG
already places a very strong prominence on the the notion of "role"--it
likes grammars
and languages to have nicely defined role-relations linking semantics
and grammar.
With this framework, many simpler phenomena (such as those you can
address when
looking at 100 odd languages) look even simpler. English doesn't, as is
also well
known, have a particularly simple relationship between grammatical roles and
semantic roles. But then, I wonder how many of these other languages really
do either. We know about English because it is really the language that
has received
the most study and when analysing large-scale corpora you can't pretend any
more that a simple linking relationship between roles at the two levels
is really
going to solve your problems. I expect that the situation with other
languages
will actually prove to be the same and it not such an "unusual" language as
some might want to claim.
Which just goes round to my original point: better to adopt views of
linguistic information
that are as realistic as one can make them in the face of the data
rather than
trying to sell your own flavour of formalism: something that 80s-style
linguistics
spent almost all of its energy on. And some still do....
John B.