SUO: Re: Link Grammar and Parser - RRGs
Rich,
The presence of one paper with the title "Grammatical
Relations: The Evidence Against Their Necessity and
Universality" is not strong evidence by itself.
What do the authors mean by "grammatical relation"?
Are they talking about syntactic relations, such as
"subject" and "object" or about the case relations
or thematic roles (which are the main topic of RRG).
Or do they merely mean that some relations are
expressed syntactically in one language but by
lexical items (words or morphemes) in other
languages?
In any case, the issues are very complex, and
different people can express their conclusions
about the same data in very different terms.
One linguist who has published many valuable
results drawn from semantic studies of multiple
languages is Len Talmy. His collected papers have
been published in two volumes, with the title
"Toward a Cognitive Semantics". They're available
on Amazon.com for $65.28 in paperback.
I would recommend Talmy's papers as useful data
both for ontology and for linguistics.
John