Computational Linguistics the journal is now open access. I came across this review of Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition by M. A. K. Halliday and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen where John Sowa describes the ontology they use. They acknowledge a debt to the dyadic semiotics of Saussure, Hjelmsev and Firth, but Sowa suggests they are rediscovering (or not attributing) some of the insights of Peirce. Elements, Figures, Sequences correspond to referential indices, minimal clauses and discourse. “Elements are classified as participant, circumstance, or process. Figures are classified by another triad of relational (being or having), material (doing or happening), and mental (sensing or saying).” Sowa notes the latter “corresponds to Peirce’s fundamental triad of Quality, Reaction, and Representation.”
Sowa cites early Winograd and the USC ISI group (including Bateman), now in Germany as researchers computationally applying Systemic Functional Linguistics. This reminds me that my original interest in NLP was sparked by Winograd's Language as a Cognitive Process, including his appendix on a natural language specification technique. That must have been 1988 or so, twenty years! I need access to a good university lib, where I can reread it.
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