SUO: Re: CG: Re: Link Grammar and Parser - RRGs
On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 12:58:28PM -0800, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Rich,
>
> The presence of one paper with the title "Grammatical
> Relations: The Evidence Against Their Necessity and
> Universality" is not strong evidence by itself.
As John says, one publication isn't evidence...
But, the reference is a book. Available from Amazon as special order,
library binding, $95. Or a used copy is available for $48.
>
> 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.
The issues are certainly complex. I found a table of contents of this
particular text somewhere (actually at Amazon). It seems to speak of
transitivity a good deal, distinguishing between pragmatic and semantic
constraints and relations, the notion of verb phrase and external
arguments... Languages it draws from are Kannada, Manipuri, and Maylayalam
(!).
>
> 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.
Thanks for the reference.
> I would recommend Talmy's papers as useful data
> both for ontology and for linguistics.
>
> John
Best,
John Velman