Re: Fw: Intro to natural language processing
On Wednesday 22 December 2004 05:46, Rich Cooper wrote:
> Rob Freeman wrote:
> <snip/>
>
> > I've seen enough. Professional Functionalists spend most
> > of their time trying to squeeze a subjective reality into an
> > objective description, just like the Generativists. The only
> > difference is they do it for categories of meaning.
>
> Yes, that's what bothers me about most of the NLP work going
> on today and in the past. All our perspectives on NL have
> been through a disembodied, ungrounded view of the world.
> All good practitioners of language (i.e., people)
> are emodied, self-interested, and grounded in a very complex reality.
Bear in mind that by subjective I principally meant subjective to the
construction, not subjective to the speaker. Language is also subjective to
the speaker, but what principally interests me is that even for a given
speaker, grammar is different from construction to construction. So the
grammar of "three blind mice" is different to "three white mice" in some
subtle and elusive way, as is the grammar of the German "Regen" if Mark Twain
is to be believed when he reports:
"I was informed, later, by a higher authority, that there was an "exception"
which permits one to say "wegen den Regen" in certain peculiar and complex
circumstances, but that this exception is not extended to anything BUT rain."
-Rob Freeman