Re: Fw: Intro to natural language processing
> Thanks for giving me an opportunity to reply, John. It is good to see that my
> crude ideas seem to have touched a nerve. I must be doing something right.
I am not sure if I am the John referred to here. But
just in case, I would like to suggest that the above
statement is curious: I guess it depends on the ontology
(and grammar and lexicon and ...) of the subject;
I doubt if it would be very well supported when dealing
with, e.g., dentists.
> So John, my ideas may be raw and unpolished, full of errors of fact even, but
> is the orthodoxy really so satisfactory? 20 years with no results. Aren't you
> bored? Why not look at something new? I think my arguments (and others on
> similar lines) merit a more thorough exploration.
New? I think you exaggerate.
Embodiment is very in. I expect that many models of language,
including functionally sophisticated ones and ones which
include the obviousness of construction-based meaning
(cf. Firth from the 30s and 40s right up to the flavor
of the month: construction grammar) [and unlike the
caricatures of linguistics that you appear to present:
it almost makes me think that it
is a pity that such discussion lists are not
moderated! (so it must be pretty bad... :-) ],
will be being tied with embodiment models in the near
future. And these will not be looking
at constrasting strings overmuch. For a nice,
understated and empirically well grounded
discussion and construction of models involving
spatial language and embodiment, see:
Saying, Seeing and Acting: The Psychological Semantics of Spatial
Prepositions (Essays in Cognitive Psychology)
by Kenny R. Coventry, Simon Garrod (January 1, 2004)
No misguided history, no overstated claims, no
rhetorics of dismissal and separation. Just
science. There'll be a lot more of this fortunately;
it would be great if some of it makes it way
on to these rather more free-for-all discussion lists; I
must admit to not being that hopeful.
No need to rant and rave and reinvent history.
The three R's of the month it seems.
John Bateman.
For extensive treatments of Singlish: see David Gil
at the MPI, Leipzig.
"Wegen den Regen" huhhh?
> But the the consensual concept of
> meaning does not explain the creation of new meaning by syntax
Try Jo Goguen and blending via institutions for some
discussion and mechanisms: a long way from "contrasting
strings".
For each word and construction having its own meanings:
see John Sinclair throughout the 80s and 90s, construction
grammar, and and ... The interesting thing is to try
and get control of this within useful theoretical
frameworks: the phemonenon is not controversial. Not
in the real linguistic world anyway.
...