Semantical: reviews on meaning & representation

An operational definition of "meaning" (in a formal language)

2010-09-21T00:39:00.000-07:00

Working notion of meaning

... we shall accept that the meaning of A is the set of sentences S true because of A. The set S may also be called the set of consequences of A. Calling sentences of S consequences of A underscores the fact that there is an underlying logic which allows one to deduce that a sentence is a consequence of A.

Wladyslaw M. Turski and Thomas S. E. Maibaum, The specification of computer programs (Wokingham: Addison-Wesley, 1987), p. 4.

cited in: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Meaning and interpretation of markup: a report on the Bechamel Project, slides from talk sponsored by the W3C German/Austrian Office at the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Institut Medienkommunikation in Sankt Augustin, Germany, 1 October 2004.

How would one define "the epistemic sense of the utterance of a natural language expression"? What is the semantic contribution of individual lexical items that occur in that expression?

The slides are about the meaning of markup, which is a technological vocabulary for describing the representamen of a text (a character stream in Unicode, a layer of content and markup, a layer of syntax tree, a layer of Infoset graph). The representamen of a text or expression is described in terms of a type-vocabulary for its parts.

So ...

what inferences are licensed by each element type?
by each attribute?
for each location? (i.e. how do you associate the meaning with a particular instance?)

Part of the use-context of markup is it describes parts of the representamen that currently or at some time may get different treatment, in terms of stylistic rendering or some other (semantic?) application. Element names are typically in the everyday language of users of the text. Attribute names tend to be more technical, of interest more to technologists than end-users.

Some premises

Rules are vocabulary-specific.
The coding a is both visually and semantically parallel to Fa
Definition of F to be provided ...
In many cases, the relevant property has arity > 1: F(a,b), F(a,b,c), ...
As a consequence:

We need deixis.
Argument structure is crucial.

This may embody a rather extensional view of the representamen. The minimal character strings are individuals, an element type is predicated of one or more individuals. Deixis implies a need for reflexive content as well as referential.

Challenges:
technical / plumbing
- distributed / non-distributed properties
- overriding inheritance
- milestone elements
- unique identity of individuals

design / philosophical
- completeness
- fertile valley vs. desert landscape
- meta-markup

A ‘desert landscape’ view

The Wittgenstein transcripts postulate

the manuscript
the transcription
pages
text blocks (main block, left margin, ...)
characters

And possibly also

the von Wright catalog and its entries
words and sentences as described by Duden
people
dates
MECS-WIT version numbers

The name desert landscape is borrowed from W.V.O. Quine.

A ‘fertile valley’ view

We may also postulate

sections
revisions
acts of deletion
insertions
formulae
quotations
names, dates, things, ...

Markup is not used to classify utterances signaling a speech act display. Historically, it emerged to classify a text as a renderable document. This is a display of a persistent artifact, made of parts which are visually distinguishable in the rendering.

Further research on Lexical Semantics of Construal

2010-09-19T02:59:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts about the broader significance of LSCon

The LSCon Methodology could be applied to bilingual resources, fixing a signature that bridges two languages

I am interested in

German-English and English-German (perhaps using the Collins dictionary)

Chinese-English
English-Filipino, Cebuano-English
Indonesian-English and English-Indonesian
Tok Pisin-English

study AktionsArt, as empirically analyzed in PL-Onto and exemplars
develop applications in computer assisted language learning

explore games and interactive learning environments with a NLU interface
another area for collaboration with undergraduates or masters students

What tasks are involved in manually compiling an MRD suitable for conversion into MRS?

cluster KWIC data from a corpus into candidate senses
isolate a distinctive Recognition Situation for a cluster, and enumerate the typical Grammar Patterns
initially characterize the Distinguishing Situations of candidate senses, including implicit participants and logical alternatives (which may still be split off into separate senses)
fix a set of senses, choosing the Head Relations (e.g. the more specific verb to use) in the Distinguishing Sits

Head Relations are the symbols used to partition a word-level concept into sense-level concepts according to a fixed sense signature. For example, catch_capture_hrel and catch_seize_hrel are two senses out of 24. They are called Head Relations, because they characterize the head of a clause with a symbol for the head of an infon.

choose exemplars for each sense and Grammar Pattern
write the definition of each sense
verify the definition against exemplars and the KWIC data. Check there is adequate coverage (all corpus data fits well into a sense, or is close enough, or is an obscure usage)
compare the definition to what is available about related words (near-synonyms, antonyms, semantic sets)

How would these tasks change if a team were to develop a LSCon research directly from corpus data, with no pre-existing MRS?

an MRS could be automatically generated as one of the outputs from the LSCon Resource database
This approach could be used in developing resources for less-studied languages
It would be nice to provide integration with FieldWorks Language Explorer, so that SIL data could be massaged into a LSCon resource. Perhaps it is useful to develop a standard sense signature for bilingual dictionaries with English (and other languages of wider communication).

This could take the form of a defining vocabulary for senses and exemplars in the Source language, with tools for (graphically?) constructing logically precise definitions.
Since included among the target users of a FLEx dictionary are local translators and language workers, who have limited competence in English or other LWC, it is useful to have a restricted and precise defining vocabulary.
In fact, the production of a full bilingual DevelopmentLanguage-English dictionary with well written English definitions and glosses could be postponed if there are enough resources, it is sufficient to create sense definitions that are clear enough in LSCon, then move directly to other tasks like

Producing an English-DevLang dictionary, where local workers do have the linguistic competence to compose good definitions and glosses. Their reading knowledge of English may be sufficient for this work, more than trying to write good definitions and glosses in English. This also has important applications in schooling and literacy education.

This could start with matching the LSCon-EN encoded sense definitions of a DevLang headword from the DevLang-EN dictionary with the closest senses in English (senses from one or more English headword). This ensures that well-described words in the DevLang are maximally utilized in a precise and consistent way.
This approach seems to be more sensitive to the sense-level nuances of meaning, compared to the typical reversal index.
Perhaps I should experiment with doing this for an English-Filipino dictionary for the most common verbs.

Producing a monolingual dictionary in the Development Language. This could include the construction of an LSCon sense signature for that language (informed by the choices made in producing a English-DevLang dictionary, if there is one). It includes encoding the dictionary entries and exemplars using LSCon Notation into a lexical resource that could be readily integrated into existing software and interactive applications.

It might be useful to populate the SIL DDP topics with LSCon-EN senses....

One motivation for producing an LSCon resource during early stages of lexicography is to connect the language to existing NLP software and educational resources. Interactive learning resources and games might be particularly useful for literacy and multilingual education applications.

PL-Onto and common sense

2010-09-19T02:56:00.000-07:00

Part of my concept of developing Lexical Semantics of Construal LSCon is to develop a Populated Local Ontology PL-Onto

The detailed empirical results of PL-Onto in LSCon-EN should be of interest to researchers in AI because it gives a concrete window in several domains of common sense, providing a more precise characterization of what it is.
We assume that the vague notion of common sense is constructed with the help of general concepts about situations and how individuals and situations interact, the PL-Onto level of Situation. This level constitutes (at least in part) the upper ontology of PL-Onto.

The "upper" level of Situation abstracts from the concrete details of other levels. It embodies the common sense intuitions of how situations work across other levels

The empirical work of deriving PL-Onto from MRD data can be done gradually, by layered level. The more basic levels make less complex assumptions about the world. Presumably they use only part of the upper ontology, the more basic the level, the smaller or simpler the part.
The PL-Onto level of Physical builds on intuitions that the world is nothing but res extensa, physical bodies made of matter and occupying space and time. These bodies have physical qualities that change, and interact because of forces. The source of force is not analyzed in detail, though it may be the movement of some animate creature, an Agent. Clauses describing a Physical situation may not mention an underlying animate cause of interaction, and the SUBJ in the clause may be some inanimate participant which we can call an Actant (or Sowa's Initiator), a thematic role with fewer assumptions than Agent.
The PL-Onto level of Animate builds on intuitions that Actions in the world are caused by the movement of animate creatures, various species of animals or humans seen primarily as moving creatures with bodies (ignoring specifically human capacities, social dimensions, or mental life).

[does "function" begin here, teleological functions relating to assumed biological regularities that are long-range and homeostatically maintained by biological systems?]

The PL-Onto level of Human allows the expression of basic common sense intuitions about how humans interact with each other and the world.
The PL-Onto level of Institution allows the expression of common sense intuitions about social institutions, and how humans interact socially.

[Should Artifact be split off, to characterize objects that are intentionally constructed with a "functional" purpose? Need to investigate nouns first. Perhaps verbs like "operate, build, construct" should be moved to level Artifact]
[examples, what they tell us about common sense]

The PL-Onto level of Attitude allows the expression of common sense intuitions about Intentionality [Searle]

This level embodies "folk psychology," providing Reasons for Action from the unseen domain of internal mental causes for human action. [see Dretske]
The scheme of individuation at this level has an intrinsic 1&3P character, so intuitions about the phenomenality of mental states can be accounted for at this level.
Although mental states in others are unseen, they are readily inferrable from behavior (and language reports) as causes for human Action. Causality at this level is likely very different from physical causes when the world is seen as simply Physical.

The intuitions about these differences underly Descartes distinction between res extensa and res cogitans. Thinking things, the mental state of thinking creatures, appear not to have physical extent since they are unseen. Descartes, working under the influence of a neo-Platonist tradition about ousia (Substantive-entities), considered primarily the Type-level of mental entities, taken to be immutable Forms. As a more modern alternative conception, we can consider Type-level of mental entities to be location-parameter-absorbed situation-types where humans are in a mental state. With a nod to Perry's antecedent physicalism, there can be a purely physicalist account of the Token-situations that ground these situation-types, working within a physicalist 3P scheme of individuation. However, situation-types that are intrinsically mental are individuated through a 1&3P scheme that associates phenomenality with mental entities, providing some kind of insight into the "hard problem" of consciousness
Common sense intuitions about mental states, the stuff of folk psychology, give humans readily inferrable information about unseen causal states underlying the Actions of others. PL-Onto at this level gives a detailed characterization of (linguistic aspects of) common sense about Intentionality in human Action. It allows a characterization of what is cognitively accessible to humans as they behave motivated by mental reasons for action. This provides a window into the "easier" problem of cognitive access (what Nagel earlier called access consciousness).

This characterization does not depend on functionalism or teleology, it can derive functions and purpose from more basic entities of mental states, as expressed in the content of utterances expressing common sense intuitions about Intentionality in human Action. Functionalist and teleological explanations are not necessarily wrong, but they may be a bit backward in explaining cognitive processes from the outside in. It is admittedly difficult to come up with alternative explanations starting from "inside" the head with unseen mental states. But this task becomes easier if we make use of the window into mental states provided by the empirically-derived PL-Onto level of Attitude (and Language).
Mental state may not be epistemologically-objective because they cannot be directly seen (humans only physically "see" behavior, not mental causes). However, mental states can be readily inferred from behavior, and reliably confirmed by subsequent behavior and language. Humans can indirectly "see" mental causes of behavior through the lens of folk psychology.
Once we accept as valid both direct observations (epistemologically-objective) and indirect observations as valid empirical basis of science, we can develop a rigorous cognitive psychology account of the phenomena characterized by common sense or "folk" psychology. The indirect observations are not arbitrarily subjective, they are intersubjective is consistent and observationally-confirmable ways.
The subject matter of this characterization of mental states as entities for scientific study has been rejected out of hand the Behaviorism and related tradtions in experimental psychology. Mental states are taken to be ontologically-subjective, as well as epistemologically-subjective. This is a methodological error in psychological research, grounded in unhelpful philosophical assumptions about the lived world of psychological phenomena. The alternative is to treat mental states as ontologically-objective real entities seen through the lens of human schemes of individuation, specifically the 1&3P scheme of individuation mental states. In fact, modern technology discovered after the demise of Behaviorism allows researchers to physically "see" traces of mental states using fMRI, PET, advanced EEG, etc.
It will be difficult to characterize mental entities if only approached "bottom-up" from the physical tokens of mental phenomena. If we use the indirect inter-subjective evidence of verbal reports about mental entities, a "top-down" approach, we can come out with precise theoretical accounts that can be confirmed or refuted by physical evidence. Extracting the PL-Onto levels of Attitude and Language depends on available print resources that characterize lexical knowledge (of the English speech community) and a window into common sense about Intentional mental states.
This can be helpful to the scientific study of cognition, and also to weak AI technologists who need to characterize common sense precisely enough for some practical purpose.

Therefore, we can move beyond Cartesian dualism and start treating mental entities as ontologically-objective real entities within the purview of cognitive science, observed using direct physical and indirect inter-subjective methods. The inter-subjective methods are reliable and confirmable. Extracting PL-Onto from lexical resources is a way of moving forward with this method to characterize (the linguistically accessible part of) common sense about human mental states.

So the level of Attitude characterizes the vocabulary used in talking about the lived world of mental life, where Actions are caused by mental states inferred but not seen in other humans.
Although mental states in others are unseen, they are inferred tokens of "the same" types that a human uses to classify their own mental states. This helps account for the intuition that there is something "it is like" [Nagel] to be a human experiencing a mental state. Through the shared 1&3P scheme of individuation of types of mental states (a subset of which are the verbal concepts for mental states expressed in verbs of propositional attitude), humans can infer states that have properties of cognitive access and phenomenality [what Nagel earlier called access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness].

The PL-Onto level of Language allows the expression of common sense intuitions about utterances using the human language capacity.

Lexical Semantics of Construal

2010-09-19T02:51:00.000-07:00

Concept of LSCon

LSCon is a knowledge representation technology

I also use the acronym to refer to the underlying methodology and approach to characterizing the semantics of words in construction as a contribution to a broader process of construal. This is studied in a principled way within a broad cognitive linguistics framework, but with immediate applications in mind. In case of ambiguity, this underlying approach to designing lexical resources can also be called LSCon Methodology
LSCon Notation refers to the specific notation as it develops for modeling English with the Sense Signature fixed by
a single MRD source (COBUILD). The notation is influenced by CG and EKN: Conceptual Graphs of John Sowa and the ISO standard, and the Extended Kamp Notation of Situation Theory and Situation Semantics. See also Controlled English.
The trial lexical resource (and its specific variant of the notation given the fixed sense signature) that is built during research in LSCon is tentatively called "the LSCon Resource for English" or LSCon-EN, but this may be replaced by another name: SenseNet? Sense Graphbank?

The initial resource includes an encoding of definitions, including the Distinguishing Situations of the most basic senses of lexical entries the most frequent verbs in COCA (plus nouns mentioned in definitions).
It also includes an integrated encoding of exemplars, one or two for each Grammar Pattern

Perhaps some or all exemplars will be taken from a different corpus from COBUILD's BoE, like COCA
This will help validate the sense signature, but takes more work

The initial resource is a derived work from COBUILD, and may be subject to a restrictive copyright licensing

A future lexical resource may be developed with a liberal Creative Commons license

This may involve generating a new sense signature from a corpus, consulting and synthesizing multiple dictionaries (so that the result is fair use of various dictionaries, not similar enough to any one to be called a derived work. Do we need clean-room methods for this?)

LSCon has layered dependencies or interfaces with other domains of cognition and language processing

It is layered above phonology-syntax (initially HPSG and/or SBCG, using MRS or an extension at the syntax-semantic interface).

This includes pre-semantic uses of context, in Perry's terms (R&R 3.4)

It is layered above a populated ontology of encyclopedic knowledge. This is fixed by the sense signature, but it involves discovering an upper ontology that may be substantially universal or cross-linguistic.

Each lexical entry interfaces to encyclopedic knowledge, via a populated local ontology. This includes certain concepts underlying the substantive lexemes in the definition, specifically the information conditions expressed in Distinguishing Sits of each sense.

I have not yet decided whether to "chase down sense distinctions" so that the concepts used in the local ontology are sense-level rather than word-level

The union of populated local ontologies of all lexical entries, including the shared upper ontology, is called PL-Onto.
The upper ontology, empirically derived rather than theoretically motivated, is called Upper PL-Onto. It is theoretically influenced by situation semantics, perhaps also Peirce's triadic schema of signs and Sowa's upper ontology in Conceptual Structures.
PL-Onto is expected to be layered into levels, which are derived empirically per sense (not per lexical entry)

Initial levels include

Situation (mostly incorporated into the upper ontology)
Physical - assumes only bodies and substances interacting in space, sources of force are unanalyzed
Mixed - default level, senses that don't clearly fit elsewhere
Animate - the source of force or causation is an animal (including hominids, but not requiring human-specific capacities)
Human - a human agent is involved in a way that invokes human-specific capacities not classified in subsequent levels
Institution - involves dependencies on human social institutions such as economic institutions, marriage, schooling, etc. There may be a need to further distinguish technology and artifacts, but the initial analysis of verbs does not make this obvious
Attitude - this is the first level to distinguish mental states. It is called attitude because it includes verbs of propositional attitude (belief, desire, etc.)
Language - entities at this level involve human language capacity in essential ways

Part of the motivation of layering is to simplifying analysis by limiting the parts of the upper ontology (essentially) required for modeling.
These levels seem to capture the interface to "common sense" required by lexical entries. See the separate note on "PL-Onto and common sense"

LSCon has dependencies or interfaces with other domains that are expected to be less influential (at least on the development of LSCon), since LSCon is layered below them (more or less) in the anticipated architecture of cognition. LSCon or related outputs feed into

DRS processing, at the semantic level (resolving anaphora) and post semantic level (anchoring variables to a state or context, perhaps via some worked out dynamic semantics)
Designation processing. This includes the inference of referential content and its anchoring to individuals and worlds fixed by context. LSCon covers the ground of an intensional logic, Frege's Sinn. Designation processing is using that Sinn to get to a Bedeutung (reference, denotation).
Near-side pragmatics (which may includes parts of Designation processing)
Far-side pragmatics, including speech acts, communicative intentions, conversational implicatures
Post-semantic connections to encyclopedic knowledge. This includes specialized knowledge domains, in contrast to the very generic (common sense) knowledge domains of the layered levels of PL-Onto.
Interface of lexical information with other cognitive capacities, such as linking lexical information about physical object to "visual objects" in a scheme of concept types from Visual Object Recognition

A KR technology is focused on structured data representations, and is relatively separate from the algorithms that use the representations.
LSCon is envisioned to be used in algorithms for cognitive construal. It is hoped that it will be a "broad spectrum" resource that is of interest to a wide range of researchers and technologiest. Parts of that range can include people investigating:

logical processing, like DRS. Even if DRS, because it is closely tied to referential content, prefers to stick with word-level symbols, the sense-level distinctions of LSCon may be useful at intermediate stages then discarded
parallel distributed processing
modeling of functional schemas in the brain, like Arbib (and the Finnish guy in the US whose name escapes me)
Quillan's semantic networks (?)

Many of these uses, and their algorithms, go beyond semantics narrowly defined
The major algorithmic use of LSCon that I expect to develop as part of research into LSCon is the construction of the Semantic Contribution of a sentence (and its MRS)

Initially, I am most interested in clause constructions. Perhaps I should simplify NP's to just their heads plus a few other constituents relevant to the Distinguishing Sits of the candidate senses.

Sem Contrib is intended to be context-independent

It avoids crossing the interface to other neighboring domains of construal.

in practice, it may be necessary for any implementation to perform certain context-dependent processes in parallel (notably DRS processing and Designational processing of the referential content). I think it will be helpful to keep those conceptually separate at this stage, and see how much can be achieved by semantic representations independent of everything else.

The algorithms to construct Sem Contrib from an input sentence and a lexical resource are called Semantic Integration.

This is intended to be psychologically plausible, it is a fragment of the psychological (and neural) processes of cognitive construal of languistic information.
Any implementations of Sem Contrib and linguistic construal are expected to make large and small departures from psychological plausibility, for whatever technological or empirical reasons are at hand.

The integration of Sem Contrib is expected to be relevant to a variety of tasks, including certain shared tasks useful for evaluating the state of the art of language technology

The WSD task may include DRS and Designational processing, but Sem Contrib may be the critical factor in resolving senses within a signature
The SRL task using LSCon would involve mapping to the lexical-entry local participant roles
It would be interesting to see implemented algorithms that integrate information from LSCon and other resources, such as WordNet, FrameNet, and Pustejovsky-style resources in the Generative Lexicon tradition (I believe both Pustejovsky and Buitelaar have resources). The resources of Martha Palmer and her students may also be of interest.

Perhaps undergrad and masters students might want to explore some of this.

Other shared tasks or variants could be designed using a LSCon resource

Precursors to Language

2010-09-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

[added on Feb 2011]

Hominids experience reality and classify it. They classify scenes visually into visual objects that participate in visual scenes. Some of the visual scenes are action-scenes. Action-scenes involve other hominids visibly and audibly behaving, with their body parts like faces and eye-gaze and hand movements, and with extended vocalizations segmented into parts with different articulation. [The precursor to linguistic classification capacities is the segmental, and thus discrete, classification of display action-scenes. The breakthrough to linguistic classifications can work without vocalization, as demonstrated by the emergence of Deaf sign languages repeatedly in many communities in history. However, the typical case, which likely interacted with the biological evolution and cultural development of behavioral modernity, is that display action-scenes incorporate vocalizations classified phonemically. The breakthrough builds on prior cognitive capacities related to social behavior, conventionalized routines and intentionality. Behavior in the linguistic domain is unambiguously attained with the systematic intentionality of conventionalized phoneme sequences (or in the less common case, conventionalized sign lexical items). The intentionality of linguistic actions is marked by a sharp demarcation between the display situation of the source signal, and the described situation that becomes the cognitively accessible "content" of a linguistic display or utterance. The link is mediated by a shared lexical scheme of individuation, so that recovery of the source signal during the linguistic recognition performance of a listener depends critically on the conventionalized-arbitrary lexical association between phonemically-classified display and "cognitively established content". It is the shared lexical scheme that establishes what pragmatically available significance of vocalization displays is established. The established lexical senses extract a semantic level of meaning that is independent of the particular utterance situation, and indeed the broader linguistic context of usage. To be an established sense it is sufficient to associate with the phonemic form of a lexical item a discrete "semantic contribution" in term of other (more or less basic) lexical items in the scheme.]

[The level of "content" in the described situation is thus abstracted from particularities of the utterance display situations, with the important exception of indexicals. Content is in general practice transparently referential. (But see Perry's reflexive-referential theory of content, which analyzes the importance of additional levels of content to explicate indexicality and other reflexive phenomena, even proper names. ]

Hominids classify a visual scene into an action-scene if it involves a hominid (the Agent a) behaving in a known pattern of behavior [as mentioned by a verb], with specific success-conditions. For example, an a-grabs-f situation is one where an agent a moves parts of their body to make a significant change in the scene. Before the action, object f was located in the scene but not located in the hands of of a. If the scene satisfies the conditions to be an a-grabs-f situation, the scene changes so that at a later time f is in the hands of a.

Event:
Prior sit:
Resulting sit:
t1 part-of t, t2 part-of t, t1 before t2

We can say that an action-scene or event is the part of the world that can be classified according to such conditions. Let us say there is a hominid s, that classifies the visual scene before it as an a-grabs-f scene. Then s can visually track the various individuals involved in the event, and tracks the n-ary condition [which underlies the sense of the verb] picked out by that classification, which are relations that individuals stand in (or not) in the scene. If s registers a scene as falling under the classification a-grabs-f, they can remember it as such. If a few days later, the see a grabbing another object f2 of the same type F as f (a physical object, let us say food), they can classify the new scene as the same type of situation as earlier, call the situation-type a-grabs-F. The a-grabs-F situation-type is more general than the earlier a-grabs-f action-scene (a singular scene, involving fully identified individuals), because the participant F is parametrized to a type of object F. Similarly, s can classify the actions of another hominid b in a similar way, according to a still more general situation-type A-grabs-F. [A is the type of some particular hominid who takes the role of an Agent in the action-situation so classified.]

The world in which hominids live is full of regularities, and their ability to recognize and remember those regularities allows a troop of hominids to be successful in survival, reproduction and maintaining group cohesion. Some regularities are related to others. For example, the action of grabbing results in a situation where A-holds-F. For purposes of illustration, we do not treat hold as a significant change in a scene, but as a significant continuity or stative relation. An event that involves some A holding an F involves a stative relation rather that a proper change-based action (admittedly the boundary between actions and statives can be fuzzy or arbitrary, at some earlier time, the agent must have acted to come to hold the object).

Event:
Prior sit:
Resulting sit:
t1 part-of t, t2 part-of t, t1 before t2

Still another related situation-type to the grab action is a catch action, where the object of type F was moving in the prior situation, and when it is caught and held it no longer moves. We can distinguish two variations (at least) of the catch action. If the object is of an animate type G (it is a hominid, or an animal) it is able to move on its own and avoid the catching action of the agent. The agent will often have to chase the object it wants to catch, and may have to use some instrument like a rope or net to restrain its movement. We will call this variant a catch-capture situation. If the object is of an inanimate type H, it is typically moving because it is falling through the air due to gravity. We call this variant with inanimate objects a catch-seize situation. We can characterize the conditions for a scene to be classified as a catch situation as follows:

• Event:
o Sense1-event:
 Prior sit:
•
•
•
 Resulting sit:
• OR
•
• <>
• <>
•
 t1 part-of t, t2 part-of t, t1 before t2
o Sense2-event:
 Prior sit:
•
•
• <>
 Resulting sit:
•
• <>
• <>
 t1 part-of t, t2 part-of t, t1 before t2

Our hominid s can observe the scenes around her, and if they involve individuals of the appropriate type, s can classify situations that involve grabbing, holding and catching. We say that s has a long-term cognitive memory, with a scheme of individuation (for situations involving individuals and relations) that is attuned to precisely those types of situations, and many others. Our hominid can track scenes, classifying them as being in a certain type of situation, or as not being in that situation-type, using their working memory to judge if a situation sit1 is of a certain type (for example: a-grabs-f) or not. We say that hominid s believes that sit1 is of Situation-Type-A if her working memory tracks the relevant individuals as standing in the relations specified in the conditions for Situation-Type-A.

Hominid s lives in a troop with other hominids, and classifies their actions in ways that are relevant to the continuing social life of the troop. A hominid can call the attention of others in the troop to a certain situation of a type, perhaps by a vocalization display or by shifting their gaze in a way that can be observed by others, or by pointing. We call these attention-directing displays as referring actions. If the belief state of s is that the scene they ["they" = s and troop members who can observe her display] can see is significant because it is of a certain type, they can call attention to the scene or to the individuals involved by referring displays. Members of the troop are attuned to the situations that significant others find important, which is important to the cohesion of the group. Young hominids are socialized to be aware of the same types of situations as adult members of the troop, and develop the same sort of cognitive scheme of individuation as the others in the troop.

[In support of the idea of referring actions using monitored gaze-shift, we have the way that hominids apparently have some selectional advantage by having white scleras in their eyes. This make more prominent a referring display by shifting the gaze from one location to another.]

This framework allows us to propose a scenario for the evolution of language among hominids.

old NYT article on origin of language

2009-08-03T00:30:00.000-07:00

Early Voices: The Leap to Language
By NICHOLAS WADE
New York Times
Published: Tuesday, July 15, 2003

references: language documentation

2009-07-29T03:38:00.000-07:00

Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann and Ulrike Mosel. 2006. Essentials of language documentation. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

This volume consists of essays from many linguists in the field of language documentation covering a range of subjects including community fieldwork, ethnography in linguistic fieldwork, annotation and archiving methods. [Himmelmann, in Germany, has worked on Tagalog, and collaborated with Australians]

notes: models for using jyutping

2009-07-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

Models for standard Cantonese in Education and Social Life

For initial literacy (perhaps focused on families of non-Han migrants), use a system of Jyutping+Hanzi similar to Japanese writing (kana-kanji). Only introduce characters for reference if they are not the most frequent full homograph.

Use Jyutping translations of English science texts (retaining English technical terms with Cantonese glosses), then teach from the English texts later.

1. Occitan - language shift to national norm, historical vernacular disappears as a living language

2. Swiss German - Bilingual, vibrant spoken language (and sung in Cantopop) but no interest in written form, defer to a larger standard form

3. Frisian - No university teaches it, but social space enlarging.

4. Letzeburgisch - Generally accept a larger external
language as standard for literacy and writing, a belated interest in promoting vernacular into a standard

5. Catalan - Bilinguals but vigorously defend social position of written standard from vernacular. Resist language shift, social policy to promote children of non-locals to become fluent in local vernacular.

6. Dutch - Full standard language, related foreign standard
is seen much like a foreign language.

Negative model:
. Bokmal and Nynorsk - disputed standard, especially
for newspapers and fangyan characters

From
John DeFrancis, “The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform”
Sino-Platonic Papers, 171 (June, 2006)

The Zhuyin Shizi, Tiqian Duxie ‘Phonetically Annotated Recognition Promotes Earlier Reading and Writing’ experiment came into being in 1982 in the northeast province of Heilongjiang

Reference:

John S. Rohsenow, “The ‘Z.T.’ Experiment in the PRC,” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. 31, 3 (1996): 33-44.

links on learning Chinese Characters

2009-07-28T19:28:00.001-07:00

From Wikipedia HSK article:

From MDBG:
练习 Practice

ABC toc at Pleco

Encounters

Moschovakis uses Typed Lambda Calculus for the Semantics of English

2009-06-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

A LOGICAL CALCULUS OF MEANING AND SYNONYMY
YIANNIS N. MOSCHOVAKIS
date: December 13, 2004
Linguistics and Philosophy
source: A logical calculus of meaning and synonymy , Linguistics and Philosophy, v. 29 (2006), pp. 27 -- 89.

Montague: meaning (= Frege: sense) of term A is its Carnap Intension or denotation(A)(a) for each state a (= possible world, time, context of use). Too coarse for synonyms.

Other extreme: "structural" approaches to the modeling of meaning (like Russell's propositions,[n3] Church [1946], Church [1974] and Cresswell [1985]) basically tell us no more than that "the sense of a complex term A can be determined from the syntactic structure of A and the senses or denotations of the basic constituent parts of A", without explaining how this "determination" is to take place.

Judy Pelham and Alasdair Urquhart [1994], Russellian propositions, Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science IX (D. Prawitz et al., editors), Elsevier Science.
Alonzo Church [1946], A formulation of the logic of sense and denotation, abstract, The Journal of
Symbolic Logic, vol. 11, p. 31.
Alonzo Church [1974], Outline of a revised formulation of the logic of sense and denotation, part II,
Nous, vol. 8, pp. 135-156.
M. J. Cresswell [1985], Structured meanings: The semantics of propositional attitudes, The MIT
Press, Cambridge, Mass.

- This is bottom-up compositional, does not allow the construction to contribute to meaning. The syntactic structures are empty combinatorial rules, without any meaning beyond what is determined by its constituents (deductively determined, not abductively-probabilistically inferred).
- but if the method constructs an algorithm (semantic contribution) before getting to the denotation (the explicit core of pragmatic interpretation), could that algorithm be construction-dependent rather that language-wide and uniform? Would it be enough to have every sense license a particular construction that triggers that sense for the wordform?

Davidson's eloquent criticism in Davidson [1967],
Theaetetus and the property of flying do not (by themselves) amount to the meaning of "Theaetetus flies"

Donald Davidson [1967], Truth and meaning, Synthese, vol. 17, pp. 304-333, reprinted in Martinich
[1990] and in Davidson [1984].

- the meaning of the verb in use is not the (property of) the action but a situation type involving the participants dependent on the predicative verb; or better, it is both an antecedent situation-type involving the particiapants and a related consequent situation-type where the action is realized with participant-role relationships between the instantiated action-type and each mentioned or implicit participant). This verb-meaning situation type exists in the discourse situation cognitively shared by speaker and hearer, their shared information state.

In Moschovakis [1994] I argued that the meaning of a term A can be faithfully modeled by its referential intension int(A), an (abstract, idealized, not necessarily implementable) algorithm which computes the denotation of A. The basic technical tool in that paper was the Formal language of recursion FLR, [for rendering NL as formal]

Yiannis N. Moschovakis [1994], Sense and denotation as algorithm and value, Logic colloquium '90

[note4] full rendering operation is of the form

natural language expression + context -- render--> formal expression + state

where the (informally understood) context determines not only the state (as we will make it precise in Subsection x2.2), but also which precise reading of the expression is appropriate and what formal transformations should be made (e.g., co-indexing), depending on information about "what the speaker meant", intonation, if the expression was spoken, punctuation and capitalization, if it was written, etc.

- I take this to mean:

NL expr + partly-construed situation --render-->
formal semantic contribution
+ anchoring situation (concrete or discourse) as construed in a verbal scheme (= parameter-resolved psoa + location + context of use (Wittg aspect))

I will not specify with any precision the all-important rendering (or translation) operation... I think that the theory of what-happens-next proposed here may be of some value, primarily because of two reasons.
> First, the modeling of meanings by referential intensions goes far beyond the imagery and analogy with computation often used to explain the relation between Frege's sense and denotation, especially by Dummett.5

M. A. Dummett [1978], Frege's distinction between sense and reference, Truth and other enigmas, Harvard Univ.ersity Press, Cambridge, pp. 116-144.
G. Evans [1982], The varieties of reference, Clarendon Press, Oxford, Edited by J. N. McDowell.

> Second, the formal processing of L^{lambda}_ar-terms (the "calculus" of the title) sets conditions and limitations on the rendering operation, it provides new ways to implement some syntactic transformations which affect meaning (like co-indexing and co-ordination), and for some English phrases, it suggests some plausible, novel renderings directly in L^{lambda}_ar which are not referentially synonymous with any terms of the typed {lambda}-calculus.

x1. The typed {lambda}-calculus with acyclic recursion, L^{lambda}_ar. The language L^{lambda}_ar is a typed calculus of terms, an extension of the two-sorted type theory Ty_2 of Gallin [1975][sec.8]
into which the language of intensional logic LIL of Montague [1973] can be interpreted by Gallin's Theorem 8.2.[note6]

Daniel Gallin [1975], Intensional and higher-order modal logic, North-Holland Mathematical Studies, no. 19, North-Holland, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Oxford, New York.

- Moschovakis builds on the theory of typed functions, typed substitution-evaluable relations. Russell originally made a (ramified) theory of typed sets. What are typed situations? The are set like collections of individuals_s, properties_s on individuals and relations_s on pairs and sequences of individuals, where properties_s, relations_s and situations can also be individuated (reification in a cognitive schema?).

- can we make a typed calculus of terms for rendering natural language sentence in the scheme of a constructicon? A Natural Semantic Rendering Formalism, that is not truth-conditional but considers conditions of information flow and conditions of satisfaction up to a shared semantic contribution of (only) the expression. Instead of just types e~ and t~, we can have entities (individuals) e~, properties and relations r~_i for i=1..n (where n is the number of participants in the largest frame, let us call it less than 7, Miller's number for working memory), situations s, and j~ for information flow values (whether a concrete or discourse situation supports a situation-type or basic infon). Going beyond Russellian propositions, we consider that verbs have many senses, and that constructions also contribute sense-like meanings. We want our representation to support not simply deductive inference but abductive sense extension, so we can infer not only information that is already there in the expression, but can learn about the world and acquire extended schemas for classifying it.

- We would like to build on DRS, but again at the sense level rather than the proposition level. Perhaps we can refer to each signalled sense as a microsign, and we are interested in its semantic contribution to pragmatic construal.

- in SBCG, every verb is taken to have one _rel. If we model at the granularity of senses, one _rel per sense. However, in Sowa's conceptual graphs, a verb is a relational concept that has (labelled) relations with each participant mentioned in the expression. Using FrameNet, but at the level of senses + constructions, we can have a small set of participant-relations that identify how the mentioned individuals relate to the event-situation of the verb, call them _prel. We may want to classify each _prel in a way local to the frame, or using a language-wide or universal collection of generic _prels (agent, accessory, goal, location, instrument, beneficiary). We can have grammatically-compulsory _prels and optional (adjunct) _prels.

the set of types is the smallest set which includes the distinct "symbols" e; t; s
and is closed under the pairing operation ({sigma}-->{sigma}). A type is pure (or state-free) if the state type s does not occur in it.

- Moschovakis only has a single pairing operation to generate his types, perhaps we need several.
- M uses the Curry-Howard isomorphism to handle multiple arguments to a function. We may instead shift to a finer grain level of _prels relation a verb's event-situation and its participants.
- in DRS we resolve referential indexes by equating i=j. But for events, we may need to place them in a partial order of a consistent discourse situation (one channel) and be prepared to shift channels. This is done pragmatically so we can abductively infer the best shared information state for information to flow in a successful communication context. Within this broad contingent pragmatic field, the semantic contribution is more predictable across similar and distinguished situations.

Constants, variables, terms

We assume given a (finite) set K of typed constants, the "vocabulary", and we write c : {sigma} to indicate that c has type {sigma}
For each type {sigma}, L^{lambda}_ar has two infnite sequences of variables,
- the pure variables v^{sigma}_0, v^{sigma}_1, ... and
- the recursion variables or locations p^{sigma}_0, p^{sigma}_1, ...
Syntactically, pure variables are quantified, while locations are assigned-to.

Terms are defined recursively, starting with the variables and the constants and using application, {lambda}-abstraction and (mutual) acyclic recursion. The definition also assigns a type to every term and specifies the free and bound occurrences of variables in it.

- locations are used for referential indexes

"referentially synonymous"

Formally, congruence is the smallest equivalence relation =_c between terms which respects alphabetic replacement of bound
variables (of both kinds), application, {lambda}-abstraction and acyclic recursion, and permuting the indexes of locations (so the system of assignments is a set, not a sequence)

Both the denotational and intensional semantics of L^{lambda}_ar(K) will respect congruence, and so we will sometimes tacitly identify congruent terms.

- we can model the acquisition of new vocabulary in a known wordsense group as associating a new constant with some idiosyncratic meaning to a wordsense group existing in the constructicon. If the new vocabulary item (a new form, or a new sense of an existing form) fits into the pattern and makes sense in terms of semantic analysis and pragmatic construal, it supports abduction to a particular semantic and pragmatic meaning, and the constructicon is (defeasibly) incremented with the new vocabulary item.

{beta}-conversion almost never preserves meaning, just as logical deduction does not--otherwise all theorems would be synonymous, which is absurd

States. To be specific,we will assume in this paper that a state is a quadruple
a = <>
which speciÞes a possible world i , a moment of time j, a point in space k, a speaker (or "agent") A, and a function ä which assigns values to all possible occurrences of proper names and demonstratives, indexed by the order in which they appear in
terms

More interesting for the natural language examples are the state-depended versions of these [logical] operations, [where t evaluates to 1, 0, or er] summarized in Table 3.

We assume the language has a constant [] for the basic ne-
cessity operator, Montague's "full necessity", or "necessarily always", as Thomason calls it.
Kaplan [1978b] argues convincingly that this interpretation is inappropriate for terms which contain demonstratives, but in our determination to avoid philosophical commitments, it is best to allow his interpretation as a de re reading of the modality, without forbidding the de dicto reading.

David Kaplan [1978b], On the logic of demonstratives, Journal of Philosophical Logic, pp. 81-98, reprinted in Salmon and Soames [1988].

The natural definition of the description operator returns an
error if the existence and uniqueness conditions are not fulfilled

Local, modal

An object is local[n16] if each value p(x; a) depends only on x(a) and not on any other values x(b).

[16] See Montague [1973][Section 4]. Montague and Gallin use extensional and intensional for our local and modal, but this adds one more use to the already overloaded extension-intension distinction and suggests a connection between modality and meaning which is not in the spirit of this article.

What seems (at first) surprising is that some common nouns and verbs are also modal, in this abstract sense, and that the
distinction is worth noting.

e.g. the temperature is rising

then rises cannot be reasonably interpreted by a local object: because we cannot tell whether the temperature is rising in state a from the mere knowledge of its value in state a.

For another example, consider the sentence
the color of the sky ranged from light pink to deep, brooding red;
the verb "ranges" is modal in this usage since to determine whether ranges(color; a) we must evaluate color(b) for various states b which differ in "observed location" from the current state a--assuming, for the example, that "observed location" is
part of the state.

Roughly speaking, co-indexing occurs when the references of one or more indexical expressions in a term are identified with that of a subterm by the introduction of a bound variable which refers to all of them.

Co-indexing is part of the rendering operation, since whether and how it should be done is determined by the informal context

One of the most original innovations in Montague [1973] is the interpretation of "John", "I" and "the blond" by quantifiers, of type ~q = (~e -> ~t) -> ~t (in the present system). I will not adopt it,
however, because the Montague renderings produce the wrong logical form for the syntactical expressions that they purport to formalize, and thus lose the intended meaning.

The evening star is the morning star (should be synonymous to) The morning star is the evening star

It is not hard to formulate rules for rendering which avoid unnecessary type-raising and give plausible results for (at least) simple expressions which involve singular terms or quantifiers (or both). The basic technique is known as type-driven rendering (or translation), cf. Klein and Sag [1985] or the more recent textbook Heim and Kratzer [1998][Chapter 3], where it is applied using phrase structure trees to represent meanings.

Ewan Klein and Ivan A. Sag [1985], Type-driven translation, Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. 8, pp. 163-201.
Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer [1998], Semantics in generative grammar, Blackwell.

For our purposes here, the main lesson is that meaning (intuitively understood) must be seriously considered in the rendering process--simply "getting the right denotation" is not enough; and that the subsequent, formal computation of referential intensions and synonymies provides some clues as to whether the informal meaning
was captured by the proposed rendering.

We call cf(A) the canonical form of A and we write
A =>_cf B () <=> cf(A) ==_c B:
The terms A0,A1,...,An are the parts of A, and A0 is its head. It will be convenient to employ the notational convention
A where { } == A
introduced in (4), which allows us to assume that all canonical forms look like
recursive termsÑperhaps with an empty body:

10 reduction rules

We claim that it preserves meaning, so it had better preserve at least denotations: Thm 3.11

Proof is simple, by induction on the definition of the reduction relation.

Main Conjecture. If the set of constants K is finite, then the relation of referential synonymy between closed terms of L^{lambda}_ar(K) is decidable.

Still open.

For a satisfactory development of a theory of belief in which the belief carriers are utterances, we would also need to establish the decidability of synonymy between the parts of utterances in which the parameter a occurs. see:

Eleni Kalyvianaki and Yiannis N. Moschovakis [], Two aspects of local meaning, in preparation.

This is because, intuitively: if you mention an individual concept,
then that (full) concept is part of the meaning of your utterance.34 In the two puzzles above, Los Angeles, LA, He and Scott are all parts of the relevant terms, but Los Angeles = LA, which dooms poor Petros, while He 6= Scott, which saves the King.
We have already discussed in x4.2 the technical fact behind this claim: the state parameter a occurs only in the head of the canonical form of an utterance A(a) and not in its body.

5. English as a programming language.

(50) program P |--> algorithm(P) |--> den(P):
It is not hard to work out the mathematical theory of a suitably abstract notion of algorithm which makes this work; and once this is done, then it is hard to miss the similarity of (50) with the basic Fregean scheme for the interpretation of a natural language,
(51) term A |--> meaning(A) |--> den(A):

Aside from the relation between algorithms and meanings, programming languages resemble natural languages more than they resemble the classical, formal languages of logic, both in their complexity and also because they exhibit some natural language phenomena which are absent from formal languages.

I will also not try to explain my take on basic philosophical questions like what it means to "define", "represent faithfully" or "explicate" meaning (or any other notion) in set-theoretic terms; I tried my best to be as clear on these issues as I can in Moschovakis [1998]

Yiannis N. Moschovakis [1998], On founding the theory of algorithms, Truth in mathematics (H. G. Dales and G. Oliveri, editors), Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 71-104.

Denotational semantics for programming languages.

Scott's theory is peculiarly incomplete in that it makes no room for the notion of algorithm which (one would think) is at the heart of the matter. Consider, for example, the problem of "sorting" (putting in alphabetical order) a long list of words u. There are many algorithms which will do this--the bubble sort, the merge sort, the quick sort etc.-- and they differ greatly in many ways, for example their efficiency. They can all be "programmed" (expressed) in every sufficently rich programming language L, but the denotational semantics of L cannot distinguish between them, as they all have the same denotation, the function which assigns to each u its alphabetized rearrangement.

And so it seemed to me that Scott semantics should be refined by the introduction of algorithms as the primary semantics values of programs, which then determine their denotations, i.e., by adopting the basic interpretation scheme (50).

5.2. What is an algorithm?

recursive equations, e.g. for Euclidean Algo for gcd

gcd(x; y) = p(x; y) where fp := {lambda}(x){lambda}(y)C(q1(x; y); y; r(x; y));
q1 := {lambda}(x){lambda}(y)rem(x; y);
r := {lambda}(x){lambda}(y)p(y; q2(x; y));
q2 := {lambda}(x){lambda}(y)rem(x; y)g

where the conditional construct
C(u; s; t) = if (u = 0) then s else t

Notice that these algorithms are always relative to the givens, and so they do not determine "absolutely computable" functions unless the givens are absolutely computable.

intended interpretation of L^{lambda}_ar(K) in x1.4 includes higher-type givens,
and the simpler, acyclic recursors sufficed.

---------------

Alonzo Church [1951a], A formulation of the logic of sense and denotation, Structure, method and meaning (P. Henle, H. M. Kallen, and S. K. Langer, editors), Liberal Arts Press, New York, pp. 3-24.
Alonzo Church [1951b], The need for abstract entities, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Proceedings, vol. 80, pp. 100-113, reprinted in Martinich [1990] under the title Intensional Semantics.
Alonzo Church [1962], A remark conerning QuineÃ•s paradox about modality, Spanish version in Analisis FilosÂ«oÃžco, pp. 25-32, reprinted in English in Salmon and Soames [1988].
Alonzo Church [1973], Outline of a revised formulation of the logic of sense and denotation, part I, Nous, vol. 7, pp. 24-33.
Donald Davidson [1984], Truth and interpretation, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
G. Frege [1952], Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege, Blackwell, Oxford,
edited by P. Geach and M. Black.
Gottlob Frege [1892], On sense and denotation, Zeitschrift f Â¬ur Philosophie und Philosophische Kri-
tik, vol. 100, Translated by Max Black Frege [1952] and also by Herbert Feigl Martinich [1990]. I have
used Ã’denotationÃ“ to render Frege's Ã’Bedeutung,Ã“ instead of BlackÃ•s Ã’meaningÃ“ or FeiglÃ•s Ã’nominatumÃ“.
David Kaplan [1978a], Dthat, Syntax and semantics (Peter Cole, editor), vol. 9, Academic Press, New York, reprinted in Martinich [1990].
Saul A. Kripke [1979], A puzzle about belief, Meaning and use (A. Margalit, editor), Reidel, pp. 239-283, reprinted in Salmon and Soames [1988].
Leonard Linsky (editor) [1971], Reference and modality, Oxford University Press.
A. P. Martinich (editor) [1990], The philosophy of language, second ed., Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford.
R. Montague [1970a], English as a formal language, Linguaggi nella Societ `a e nella Tecnica (Milan) (Bruno Visentini et al., editors), Edizioni di Comunit`a, pp. 189-284, reprinted in Montague [1974].
R. Montague [1970b], Pragmatics and intensional logic, Synth`ese, vol. 22, pp. 68-94, reprinted in Montague [1974].
R. Montague [1970c], Universal grammar, Theoria, vol. 36, pp. 373-398, reprinted in Montague [1974].
R. Montague [1973], The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English, Approaches to Natural Language: Proceedings of the 1970 Stanford Workshop on Grammar and Semantics (J. Hintikka et al., editors), D. Reidel Publishing Co, Dordrecht, pp. 221-224, reprinted in Montague [1974].
R. Montague [1974], Formal philosophy, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, Selected papers of Richard Montague, edited by Richmond H. Thomason.
Yiannis N. Moschovakis [1994], Sense and denotation as algorithm and value, Logic colloquium '90 (J. VÂ¬aÂ¬anÂ¬anen and J. Oikkonen, editors), vol. 2, Association for Symbolic Logic, Lecture Notes in Logic, pp. 210-249.
Jamal Ouhalla [1994], Introducing transformational grammar, Arnold and Oxford University Press.
G. Plotkin [1977], LCF considered as a programming language, Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 5, pp. 223-255.
Nathan Salmon and Scott Soames [1988], Propositions and attitudes, Oxford University Press.
D. S. Scott and C. Strachey [1971], Towards a mathematical semantics for computer languages, Proceedings of the symposium on computers and automata (New York) (J. Fox, editor), Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn Press, pp. 19-46.
J. van Heijenoort [1985], Frege on sense identity, Selected essays, Bibliopolis, Napoli, pp. 65-70.

reviews: creoles

2009-05-28T04:03:00.000-07:00

Contact Linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes

By Carol Myers-Scotton

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 356. paper $45.00. ISBN 0198299532.

Reviewed by Alison

Nicolle (BTL, East Africa) and Steve Nicolle (BTL, East Africa)

A creole can have several natural languages contributing to its Matrix language system, and the Embedded language is the superstratal lexifier.

-------

Defining Creole

By John H. McWhorter

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 444. paper $49.95. ISBN

0195166698.

Reviewed by Gerry Beimers

SIL International and University of New England (Australia)

ch 1 “official” statement of his Creole Prototype hypothesis. Here he explicates the three traits of the creole prototype, namely,

“few or no inflectional affixes” (p. 12),
“little or no use of tone to distinguish monosyllabic lexical items or to encode morphosyntactic distinctions” (p. 13), and
a lack of noncompositional derivation.

ch 2: four diagnostics of grammatical complexity, namely,

phonemic inventory,
more syntactic rules to be processed,
grammaticalized expressions of fine-grained semantic and pragmatic distinctions, and
inflectional morphology.

ch 3: the developmental relationship between pidgins and creoles. In it he argues against the notion that the path from source language to creole is merely via “syntax-internal” (p. 74) transformation. The argument takes the shape of an examination of six features (which he designates as ornamental—metaphorically speaking) not found in creoles, namely:

ergativity,
inalienable possessive marking,
overt marking of inherent reflexivity,
evidential markers,
grammaticalized referential marking, and
consonant mutation.

ch 5: argues that the superstratist creole genesis model (advanced mainly by Chaudenson and Mufwene) is not supported by the data.

ch 11: English is “significantly less overspecified semantically and less complexified syntactically” (p. 268) compared to its Germanic sisters. His essential thesis, that this is due to a contact-based explanation, accounts for the facts. He outlines his view of overspecification and complexification and then goes on to examine ten features, namely,

reflexivity marking,
external possessor constructions,
grammatical gender marking on the article,
derivational morphology,
directional adverbs,
be with past participles,
passive marking with become,
verb-second word order,
disappearance of thou, and
disappearance of the indefinite pronoun man.

review: reduplication

2009-05-28T03:13:00.000-07:00

SIL Review
of
Reduplication: Doubling in morphology

By Sharon Inkelas and Cheryl Zoll

Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 276. hardback $90.00. ISBN 0521806496.

Reviewed by Mike Cahill

Ch 4: "go beyond the daughter phonologies to argue there is a layer of phonology (a cophonology) associated with the mother node, that is, the construction as a whole. This is compatible with Kiparsky’s Stratal OT approach (Kiparsky 2000), though not identical."

Has examples from Tagalog in Ch 6. Argues that reduplication is mostly at level of morphology, rather than phonology.

Kiparsky, Paul. 2000. Opacity and cyclicity. The Linguistic Review 17:351-367.

For annotations to address NLU, need basic research on language-world mapping

2009-01-21T19:06:00.000-08:00

Mark-up Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Annie Zaenen

In her Last Words column in CoLi, Zaenen describes the limitations of annotation applied to NLU, and calls for fundamental research "to understand the mapping between language and the world itself better"

"The interest in machine-learning methods to solve natural-language-understanding problems has led to the use of textual annotation as an important auxiliary technique. Grammar induction based on annotation has been very successful for the Penn Treebank" "The problems with the ‘coreference’ annotation tasks of MUC and the like are well documented and not solved. Kibble and van Deemter (2000), for instance, discuss the difficulties created by the assumption that coreference is an equivalence relation, and hence transitive"

2 difficulties: "The first is inherent in the kind of annotations that are currently needed. The field is moving from information retrieval to language understanding tasks. To understand a linguistic utterance is to map from it to a state of the world, a non-linguistic reality. Language understanding always has a non-linguistic component. In computational settings, unfortunately, most of the time we do not have independent access to this non-linguistic component. This means that language understanding systems have to be more than just language understanding systems: One expects them also to take care of some minimal understanding of the world the language is supposed to describe. But relations between linguistic entities and the world have not been studied in linguistics nor anywhere else in the systematic way that is required to develop reliable annotation schemas: Traditional formal semantics says how meanings are put together and remains silent about semantic primitives. Lexical semantics is very fragmented: One part of it tends to limit its scope to lexical items that exhibit syntactic alternations, whereas another part concentrates on improving traditional lexicography." "Annotation tasks typically involve these ill-understood phenomena. Current practice seems to assume that theoretical understanding can be circumvented and that the pristine intuitions of nearly na¨ıve native speakers can replace analysis of what is going on in these complicated cases. The results that I have looked at suggest that this is wishful thinking."

"The second problem that annotation tasks face is not inherent. It is created by the current fundingmodel. In the name of accountability, current NLP practice is wedded to quantifiable results, short time horizons, and strict financial control. In this setup there is no time for fundamental research. So, when research is necessary, it has to be called by another name. Part of it will be shuffled under the heading ‘annotation’."

"We should recognize that annotations are no substitute for the understanding of a phenomenon. They are an encoding of that understanding. The encoding is different from a rule-based encodingin that it does not require a generative formalization and it allows a more piecemeal approach."

Patrick Blackburn reviews Lambalgen and Hamm, The Proper Treatment of Events

2009-01-21T19:05:00.001-08:00

The Proper Treatment of Events by Michiel van Lambalgen and Fritz Hamm, 2005
review

This is an intriguing review.

"It provides a formalization of the notion of event (using a modification of Shanahan’s [1997] version of the Event Calculus, a many-sorted first-order theory), defines a dynamic-style semantics for the system, and discusses how constraint logic programming can be used to cash out its computational content. ... a detailed exploration of the ramifications of a single idea:... to properly understand how temporal expressions in natural language work, we must understand how human beings construct time, and that the cognitive construction of time is best explicated in terms of planning and causality. Planning is the glue that lets human minds integrate past, present, and future, and episodic memory (which Lambalgen and Hamm view as a “generalised capacity for imagining or constructing possible worlds”) is the key to this capacity." I am interested in causality and causal constraints, partly to harness in a situation theoretic semantics of verbs. The role of episodic memory may help clarify the role of consciousness.

"they broadly agree with Moschovakis’s (1993) interpretation of the Fregean notion of sense: The sense of an expression is the algorithm that computes its reference....Causality, the key relation between events, is presented in two variants: instantaneous change and continuous change. Moreover, in addition to this general background theory, they also allow for the constructions of “scenarios,” microtheories stating the specific causal relationships holding in a given situation (this machinery underlies their account of lexical meanings)....a theory that is carefully axiomatized. The authors consider various models for their theory, paying particular attention to minimal models, for they make a closed-world assumption in which anything that is not forced to happen does not happen....the authors distance themselves both from DRT (Kampand Reyle 1993) (because of its reliance on Davidson-style events with predicates corresponding to thematic roles) and from Amsterdam-style dynamic semantics (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1991) (which they view as treating computation implicitly rather than explicitly)." I definitely want to see why they reject DRT, and their ideas on events and thematic roles.

"Part III of the book (which, at around 160 pages, is by far the longest section) puts this apparatus to work to construct a theory of tense and aspect. Every VP is associated with a default scenario (that is, a microtheory) that determines the Aktionsart of the verb. The word “default” is important: temporal and aspectual operators, and many other linguistic items, may coerce the verb to assume a different Aktionsart...this book treats temporal and aspectual phenomena from a perspective very different from that of current corpusbased work. But it does so systematically and with great precision.... Interested in temporal semantics? Then this is essential reading." Again, this should help come up with a verb semantics, verb morphology construction semantics and also a clausal construction semantics.

Sowa reviews Halliday

2009-01-21T19:03:00.000-08:00

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.

statistical NLP with R

2009-01-07T20:34:00.000-08:00

One of the areas I still need to study is statistical NLP, I lack even the mathematical background although I took a probability course for Math majors at Cornell a long time ago.

I came across this article about the R programming language and open source software package (community?). It seems there are some people applying it to speech processing, with the EMU Speech Database System.

There is even work related to language corpora (book draft) and multi-language annotation (not free :( tho), which I haven't reviewed yet.

Languages of Papua New Guinea

2009-01-03T16:04:00.000-08:00

Taking data from Ethnologue 15th Edition, there are 820 living languages in PNG, of which I count 88 to have 10 thousand or more speakers. The Austronesian ones are divided into three subfamilies of Western Oceanic, listed below. So languages with 10 thousand speakers or more in PNG are 8/66 for Meso Melanesian, 4/102 for North New Guinea and 9/62 for Papuan Tip subfamily.

The biggest family in PNG is Trans-New Guinea 57/564 have over 10k speakers, I have listed only the seven with over 50k speakers. There is also Tok Pisin, English (with 50,000 speakers), and three smaller families with over 10k speakers: East Papuan 2/36, Sepik-Ramu 3/100, and Torricelli 3/53.

Meso Melanesian (66)

Kuanua	[ksd] 61,000 (1991 SIL). East New Britain Province, Rabaul District, Gazelle Peninsula. Alternate names: Tolai, Gunantuna, Tinata Tuna, Tuna, Blanche Bay, New Britain Language. Dialects:Vunadidir, Rapitok, Raluana, Vanumami, Livuan, Matupit, Kokopo, Kabakada, Nodup, Kininanggunan, Rakunei, Rebar, Watom, Masawa. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Meso Melanesian, New Ireland, South New Ireland-Northwest Solomonic, Patpatar-Tolai More information.
Halia	[hla] 20,000 (1994 SIL). Bougainville Province, North Bougainville District, northeastern Buka Island. Alternate names: Tasi. Dialects: Hanahan, Hangan, Touloun (Tulon, Tulun), Selau. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Meso Melanesian, New Ireland, South New Ireland-Northwest Solomonic, Nehan-North Bougainville, Buka, Halia More information.
Bola	[bnp] 13,746 (2000 census). Population includes 2,253 Harua. West New Britain Province, northeast coast, most of Willaumez Peninsula. Harua is on the east side of Kimbe. Alternate names: Bakovi, Bola-Bakovi. Dialects: Harua (Karua, Xarua, Garua, Mai), Bola. Harua is a dialect that has developed as a result of a group of people being resettled on an oil palm plantation. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Meso Melanesian, Willaumez More information.
Lihir	[lih] 12,571 (2000 census). New Ireland Province, Lihir Island, and 3 smaller islands. Alternate names: Lir. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Meso Melanesian, New Ireland, Tabar More information.
Nakanai	[nak] 13,000 (1981 Wurm and Hattori). West New Britain Province, Hoskins District, northwest coast. 42 villages. Alternate names: Nakonai. Dialects: Losa (Loso, Auka), Bileki (Lakalai, Muku, Mamuga), Vere (Vele, Tarobi), Ubae (Babata), Maututu. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Meso Melanesian, Willaumez More information.
Tungag	[lcm] 12,000 (1990 SIL). New Ireland Province, Lamet District, New Hanover Island, Tingwon and Umbukul Islands. Alternate names: Tungak, Lavongai, Lavangai, Dang. Classification:Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Meso Melanesian, New Ireland, Lavongai-Nalik More information.
Ramoaaina	[rai] 10,266 (2000 census). East New Britain Province, Kokopo District, Duke of York Islands.Alternate names: Duke of York, Ramuaina. Dialects: Makada, Molot (Main Island), Aalawa (Aalawaa, Alawa, Mioko, Ulu, South Islands). Makada dialect is very different. Possibly not intelligible to speakers of other dialects. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Meso Melanesian, New Ireland, South New Ireland-Northwest Solomonic, Patpatar-Tolai More information.
Uneapa	[bbn] 10,000 (1998 SIL). West New Britain Province, Talasea District, Unea (Bali) Island off the northwest coast. Alternate names: Bali. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Meso Melanesian, Bali-Vitu More information.

North New Guinea (102)

Adzera	[azr] 20,675 (1988 Holzknecht). Population includes 367 Ngariawan (1978 McElhanon), 497 Sarasira (1988 Holzknecht), 990 Sukurum (1990). Morobe Province, Markham Valley, Kaiapit District, Leron River. Alternate names: Azera, Atzera, Acira. Dialects: Yarus, Amari, Azera, Ngarowapum, Tsumanggorun, Guruf-Ngariawang (Ngariawan), Sarasira (Sirasira), Sukurum. The dialects form a cluster. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, North New Guinea, Huon Gulf, Markham, Upper, Adzera More information.
Takia	[tbc] 19,619 (2003 SIL). Southern half of Karkar Island, Bagabag Island, and coastal villages Megiar and Serang, Madang Province, Madang District. Dialects: Megiar, Serang. Classification:Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, North New Guinea, Ngero-Vitiaz, Vitiaz, Bel, Nuclear Bel, Northern More information.
Buang, Mapos	[bzh] 10,484 (2000). 30% monolingual. Morobe Province, middle Snake River area, Mumeng District. 10 villages. Alternate names: Mapos, Central Buang. Dialects: Wagau, Mambump, Buweyeu, Wins, Chimbuluk, Papakene, Mapos. Lexical similarity 61% between Mambump and Mangga. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, North New Guinea, Huon Gulf, South, Hote-Buang, Buang More information.
Bugawac	[buk] 9,694 (1978 McElhanon). 40% monolingual. Morobe Province, coast of Huon Gulf. Alternate names: Bukawa, Bukaua, Bukawac, Kawa, Kawac, Yom Gawac. Dialects: Close to Yabem. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, North New Guinea, Huon Gulf, North More information.

Papuan Tip (62)

Kilivila	[kij] 20,000 (2000 Tryon). 60% monolingual. Milne Bay Province, Trobriand Islands. Alternate names: Kiriwina. Dialects: Kitava, Vakuta, Sinaketa. Various dialects. Lexical similarity 68% with Muyuw. Kitava Island has 80% lexical similarity. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Papuan Tip, Peripheral, Kilivila-Louisiades, Kilivila More information.
Tawala	[tbo] 20,000 (2000 census). Milne Bay Province, Alotau District, from Awaiama to East Cape, north and south shores of Milne Bay, Sideia and Basilaki islands. Alternate names: Tawara, Tavara. Dialects: Awayama (Awaiama, Awalama), Huhuna, Kehelala (Keherara, East Cape), Lelehudi, Diwinai (Divinai), Labe (Rabe), Yaleba (Wagawaga, Gwawili, Gwavili, Ealeba), Bohilai (Bohira'i, Basilaki), Sideya (Sideia). Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Papuan Tip, Nuclear, North Papuan Mainland-D'Entrecasteaux, Are-Taupota, Taupota More information.
Keapara	[khz] 19,400 (2000 D. Tryon). Central Province, coast from east of Hood Peninsula to Lalaura west of Cape Rodney. 3 villages. Alternate names: Keopara, Kerepunu. Dialects: Babaga, Kalo, Keapara (Keopara), Aroma (Arona, Aloma, Galoma), Maopa, Wanigela, Kapari, Lalaura. Dialect continuum to Hula. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Papuan Tip, Peripheral, Central Papuan, Sinagoro-Keapara More information.
Mekeo	[mek] 19,000 (2003 SIL). Central Province, Kaiyuku District, inland, bounded on the west by the Waima, on the east by the Kuni and Kunimaipa. Extends into Gulf Province. Alternate names:Mekeo-Kovio. Dialects: East Mekeo, West Mekeo, North Mekeo, Northwest Mekeo (Kovio). Kovio is a peripheral dialect. The four dialects are mutually unintelligible to each other's speakers, except for North and West Mekeo, but most Mekeo are reported to have familiarity with neighboring dialects. Kovio, however, is not contiguous to the other dialects. Kovio has 81% lexical similarity with West Mekeo and North Mekeo, and 79% with East Mekeo. West and East Mekeo have 87% lexical similarity. North Mekeo has 99% lexical similarity with West Mekeo and 87% with East Mekeo. Mekeo has 41% with Waima. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Papuan Tip, Peripheral, Central Papuan, West Central Papuan, Nuclear More information.
Misima-Paneati	[mpx] 18,000 (2002 SIL). 4,000 monolinguals. Milne Bay Province, Misima District, Misima Island, Panaieti, and all the islands of the Calvados Chain to (not including) Panawina, Alcester, Ole, and Tewatewan Islands, and Bowagis on Woodlark Island. 32 villages. Alternate names: Panaieti, Panaeati, Paneyate, Paneate, Panayeti. Dialects: Nasikwabw (Tokunu), Tewatewa. Lexical similarity 33% with Nimowa and Dobu (closest). Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Papuan Tip, Peripheral, Kilivila-Louisiades, Misima More information.
Sinaugoro	[snc] 15,000 (1991 SIL). Central Province, Rigo District, south of Kwikila. Alternate names:Sinagoro. Dialects: Ikolu, Balawaia, Saroa, Babagarupu, Kwaibida, Taboro, Kwaibo, Alepa, Omene, Tubulamo, Ikega, Boku, Buaga, Wiga, Vora, Kubuli, Oruone. Boku dialect may be most central. Lexical similarity 70% to 75% with Kalo (closest), 65% to 70% with Hula. Classification:Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Papuan Tip, Peripheral, Central Papuan, Sinagoro-Keapara More information.
Waima	[rro] 15,000 (2000 census). Central Province, Bereina District, near Kairuku, shores of Hall Sound, between Yule Island and mainland, 65 miles northwest of Port Moresby. Alternate names: Roro. Dialects: Waima, Paitana, Roro. Roro and Paitana populations are smaller and scattered. Lexical similarity 45% with Kuni (closest), 99% among all three dialects. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Papuan Tip, Peripheral, Central Papuan, West Central Papuan, Nuclear More information.
Motu	[meu] 14,000 (1981 Wurm and Hattori). Central Province, in and around Port Moresby, villages along the coast from Manumanu, Galley Reach, to GabaGaba (Kapakapa). Alternate names: True Motu, Pure Motu. Dialects: Western Motu, Eastern Motu. Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Papuan Tip, Peripheral, Central Papuan, Sinagoro-Keapara More information.
Dobu	[dob] 10,000 (1998 SIL). 60% monolingual. Milne Bay Province, Esa'ala District, Sanaroa, Dobu, and parts of Fergusson and Normanby islands. 500 villages. Dialects: Galubwa, Sanaroa, Ubuia, Central Dobu, Loboda (Roboda, Dawada-Siausi). Lexical similarity 56% with Morima (closest). Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic, Papuan Tip, Nuclear, North Papuan Mainland-D'Entrecasteaux, Dobu-Duau More information.

Trans-New Guinea (564)

Enga	[enq] 164,750 (1981 Wurm and Hattori). Population includes 12,000 in Sau (1990 UBS). Enga Province. The Maramuni are nomadic, and are in the lower reaches of the central range. Alternate names: Caga, Tsaga, Tchaga. Dialects: Kandepe, Layapo, Tayato, Mae (Mai, Wabag), Maramuni (Malamuni), Kaina, Kapona, Sau (Sau Enga, Wapi), Yandapo, Lapalama 1, Lapalama 2, Laiagam, Sari. Mae is the standard dialect; all understand it. Layapo is between Mae and Kyaka. Classification: Trans-New Guinea, Main Section, Central and Western, East New Guinea Highlands, West-Central, Enga More information.
Melpa	[med] 130,000 (1991 SIL). Western Highlands Province, Hagen District. Alternate names: Medlpa, Hagen. Dialects: Tembagla. Only slight dialect differences. Classification: Trans-New Guinea, Main Section, Central and Western, East New Guinea Highlands, Central, Hagen More information.
Kuman	[kue] 80,000 (1994 SIL). 10,000 monolinguals. Simbu Province, northern third, overlapping into Minj Subprovince of Western Highlands Province. Alternate names: Chimbu, Simbu. Dialects: Kuman, Nagane (Genagane, Genogane), Yongomugi. Classification: Trans-New Guinea, Main Section, Central and Western, East New Guinea Highlands, Central, Chimbu More information.
Huli	[hui] 70,000 (1991 UBS). Southern Highlands Province around Tari, and southern fringe of Enga Province. Alternate names: Huli-Hulidana, Huri. Classification: Trans-New Guinea, Main Section, Central and Western, East New Guinea Highlands, West-Central, Huli More information.
Kamano	[kbq] 63,170 (2000 census). Eastern Highlands Province, Kainantu and Henganofi districts.Alternate names: Kamano-Kafe. Classification: Trans-New Guinea, Main Section, Central and Western, East New Guinea Highlands, East-Central, Kamano-Yagaria More information.
Golin	[gvf] 51,105 (1981 Wurm and Hattori). Simbu Province, Gumine District. Alternate names: Gollum, Gumine. Dialects: Yuri, Kia (Kiari), Golin, Keri, Marigl. Close to Dom. Classification: Trans-New Guinea, Main Section, Central and Western, East New Guinea Highlands, Central, Chimbu More information.
Sinasina	[sst] 50,079 (1981 Wurm and Hattori). Simbu Province. Dialects: Tabare, Guna. Close to Dom and Golin. Classification: Trans-New Guinea, Main Section, Central and Western, East New Guinea Highlands, Central, Chimbu More information.

Other Families

Tok Pisin	[tpi] 121,000 (2003 SIL). 50,000 monolinguals. Mainly in the northern half of the country, and now well established in Port Moresby, and into other regions. Alternate names: Pisin, Pidgin, Neomelanesian, New Guinea Pidgin English, Melanesian English. Dialects: There are dialect differences between lowlands, highlands, and the islands. The highlands lexicon has more English influence (J. Holm). Classification: Creole, English based, Pacific More information.
Terei	[buo] 26,500 (2003 SIL). Southern Bougainville Province, Buin District. Alternate names: Buin, Telei, Rugara. Dialects: Closest to Uisai. Classification: East Papuan, Bougainville, East, Buin More information.
Naasioi	[nas] 10,000 (1990 SIL). Bougainville Province, Kieta District, central mountains and southeast coast. Alternate names: Nasioi, Kieta, Kieta Talk, Aunge. Dialects: Naasioi, Kongara, Orami (Guava), Pakia-Sideronsi. Classification: East Papuan, Bougainville, East, Nasioi More information.
Ambulas	[abt] 44,000 (1991 SIL). Population includes 27,000 in Wosera (1991 SIL), 9,000 in Maprik (1991 SIL), 8,000 in Wingei (1991 SIL). East Sepik Province, Maprik District. Alternate names: Abulas, Abelam. Dialects: Maprik, Wingei, Wosera-Kamu, Wosera-Mamu. Classification: Sepik-Ramu, Sepik, Middle Sepik, Ndu More information.
Boikin	[bzf] 31,328 (2003 SIL). East Sepik Province, Yangoru District. Alternate names: Boiken, Nucum, Yangoru, Yengoru. Dialects: West Boikin, Central Boikin, East Boikin, Munji, Haripmor, Kwusaun, Kunai, Island Boikin. Classification: Sepik-Ramu, Sepik, Middle Sepik, Ndu More information.
Kwanga	[kwj] 10,000 (2001 SIL). East Sepik Province, extending beyond the western boundary of Maprik District; Makru-Klaplei Division, Nuku District; Saundaun Province, east of Mehek. 40 villages.Alternate names: Kawanga, Gawanga. Dialects: Apos, Bongos (Bongomamsi, Bongomaise, Nambi), Tau (Kubiwat), Wasambu, Yubanakor (Daina). A dialect cluster of 5 subdialects, 2 main dialects. Classification: Sepik-Ramu, Sepik, Middle Sepik, Nukuma More information.
Bukiyip	[ape] 16,233 (2003 SIL). East Sepik Province, west Yangoru District, Torricelli Mountains.Alternate names: Bukiyúp, Mountain Arapesh. Dialects: Coastal Arapesh, Bukiyip (Mountain Arapesh). Lexical similarity 60% with Mufian. Classification: Torricelli, Kombio-Arapesh, Arapesh More information.
Olo	[ong] 13,667 (2003 SIL). Sandaun Province, Lumi District. 55 villages. Alternate names: Orlei. Dialects: Payi (Pay, North Olo), Wapi (Wape, South Olo). Related to Yis, Yau, Ningil, Valman. Classification: Torricelli, Wapei-Palei, Wapei More information.
Mufian	[aoj] 11,000 (1998 SIL). Population includes 6,000 Filifita (1999 SIL). East Sepik Province, Maprik District, Torricelli Mountains, west of Maprik. 36 villages. Alternate names: Southern Arapesh, Muhiang, Muhian. Dialects: Supari, Balif, Filifita (Ilahita), Iwam-Nagalemb, Nagipaem. Classification: Torricelli, Kombio-Arapesh, Arapesh More information.

ethnographic film

2009-01-03T15:45:00.000-08:00

There is such a thing as visual anthropology (Wikipedia) (see the list of influential films), and an ethnographic film unit at ANU (there is a web page on a film about Roti). It occurs to me that linguistic documentation should increasingly use video, and not just for sign language. A good way to embed this in the local culture is to produce short films for elementary school in local languages. This can range from traditional stories, to Sesame Street (or Batibot) like educational programs. This would be particularly helpful in language maintenance programs, where the teacher is not as fluent as resource speakers like elders, who could be captured on film.

Systemic Functional Linguistics

2008-12-15T21:24:00.000-08:00

source: http://www.isfla.org/Systemics/

Systemics & Computation

SFL has been prominent in computational linguistics, especially in Natural Language Generation (NLG). Penman, an NLG system started at Information Sciences Institute in 1980, is one of the three main such systems, and has influenced much of the work in the field. John Bateman (currently in Bremen, Germany) has extended this system into a multilingual text generator, KPML. Robin Fawcett in Cardiff have developed another systemic generator, called Genesys. Mick O'Donnell has developed yet another system, called WAG. Numerous other systems have been built using Systemic grammar, either in whole or in part.

Macquarie U in Sydney is a center for SFL, and at PACLIC I met Trevor Johnston who helped develop the Australian Sign Bank. Dick Hudson's Word Grammar is considered a spin-off that is based on dependency grammar. Geoffrey Huddleston, co-author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language with Geoffrey Pullum, has worked in that tradition. CGEL was cited by Culicover and Jackendoff as the right level of analysis for their Simpler Syntax approach (which addresses the syntactic part of Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture framework).

links - logic - Fefferman on Tarskian semantics

2008-12-13T17:06:00.001-08:00

"Tarski’s Conceptual Analysis of Semantical Notions"

http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/conceptanalysis.pdf

Expanded text of a lecture for the Colloque, “Sémantique et épistémologie”, Casablanca, April 24-26, 2002.

27 pp.

T's notions of

truth for formal languages and the allied notions of
satisfaction,
definability, and
logical consequence

two questions are of interest.

what motivated Tarski to make these analyses, and
what led to their particular form?

Turing's concept of computability

how? the general notion of a computing machine
why? a precise notion of computability was needed to show that certain problems (and specifically the Entscheidungsproblem in logic) are uncomputable

Tarski's concept of truth

how? his definition of truth is given in general set-theoretical terms
why? no similarly compelling logical reason for Tarski’s work on the concept of truth, and will suggest instead a combination of

psychological and
programmatic reasons

The main puzzle to be dealt with has to do with the relations between the notions of

truth in a structure and
absolute truth

evo1: Vocalization Displays and the Recognition of Typed Object-Features

2008-11-27T15:56:00.000-08:00

The evolution of language is difficult to explain. It is a complex faculty with various aspects or components, and it is difficult to see why rudimentary versions of those aspects would have selectional advantages for differential reproduction in hominids. It would be helpful to identify preadaptations, particular characters that developed complexity in some other function, that came to be used in a new function of language-based communication.

My working hypothesis is that the capacity for visual recognition of objects and scenes, specifically recognition of physical objects and behaving animals in the shared immediate social environment of hominids, gave rise to a complex of preadaptations for language. One preadaptation is 1) a shared conceptual scheme of individuation, where certain scenes were classified as involving significant happenings or objects. This scheme would eventually give rise to the mental lexicon, and the related capacity for semantic memory. Another is 2) the capacity to represent a scene and individual objects in terms of typed structures of object-features. By the hyphenated term object-feature, I refer specifically to higher level visual features like shape outline and component shape, that are distinguished from low level features like edge or color or texture. Both these preadaptations were refined and repurposed in the context of 3) recognizing social displays of individuals of the same species. Some displays, like pointing, have 4) a property of intentionality. Intentional displays are produced to trigger an observer's attunement to a relation between the structure of the display and a scene where some salient aspects are referenced (physical objects in the immediate environment are referred to by a shift of gaze or a hand movement, happenings are referenced in relation to a doer or an undergoer). Clearly vocalization displays are core to the evolution of language, but gestural displays that support the repeated emergence of sign languages (among deaf and hearing communities) are also of research interest.

How did the use of articulatory gestures in vocalization evolve into phonology? One possibility is song, perhaps evolved from gibbon-like vocalizations to mark territory. Tone is differentiated and evolves to be worth remembering, so song is born. The continuous articulation of vowels is another dimension of song, and this could eventually evolve into a phonemic set of distinguished vowel phonemes. Why would consonants and syllabification be added to the mix? Why would song recognition and articulation capacities get repurposed for referring gestures, replacing eye gaze and pointing with nouns or noun phrases?

From studying the semantics-syntax interface, we can theorize about two large layers in the structure of utterances. These layers define the linguitic types that an utterance (or sign language expression) is recognized to instantiate. One layer is the referring expression, where an concrete object or abstraction is referred to and a corresponding mental concept takes a place in a shared information structure where it could be referred to again. In other words, referring expressions introduce referential indices into discourse, and create the possibility of anaphoric resolution. We have three levels here:

the etic level of a complex nominal utterance in the context where the speaker picks out a particular situation for the listener,
the emic level of the types from the mental lexicon and language faculty that recognize the utterance as an instance of a structure phrasal type involving lexical items and a distinguished head item, and
the level of the shared information state including referential indices.

The other large layer is that of speech acts made with clausal utterances (or the sentences used in them), that introduce a semantics and pragmatics of what Searle calls conditions of satisfaction. In a request, the shared information state is about a state which does not obtain but where the listener can act to fulfill those conditions. A promise mentions a possible future state where the the speaker (or signer) will act to fulfill the conditions. And an assertive speech act calls attention to a state where the situation referred to (a visible scene, or some abstract situation) has the participants referred to with referential indexes, and they stand in a happening-relation mentioned by the head verb or predicator. Any modifiers also introduce properties of the participants or situation. Returning to the three levels, at

the etic level, a clausal utterance is used to perform a speech act between speaker and listener
the emic level, a sentence or clause is recognized as consisting of a head verb, arguments that have dependency relations to that verb, and additional modifiers
the shared information state level, of a discourse representation structure where referential indexes are resolved to salient items in discourse, creating shared attunement to a described situation, which may be a part of the concrete situation surrounding speaker and listener, or else a more abstract situation that does not (yet) exist in the physical surroundings.

This is the rudimentary model of language that I am using. I would need to demonstrate that a language faculty that supports this model is systematically related to existing visual recognition faculties (of objects, scenes and social displays) that provided some preadaptations for the relatively rapid emergence of complex language among hominids

First I will discuss typed feature structures in language and high-level vision, then I will discuss shared schemes of information in gestural displays and language. Future posts will cover:

Feature structures for phrasal features and visual object-features and scenes
Typing and semantic memory
Schemes of individuation
Shared schemes and the first-person character of perceptual qualia
Types in the mental lexicon

A Minimalist Theory with Untyped Features

2008-11-27T04:36:00.000-08:00

I read a review by Ash Asudeh and Ida Toivonen of two introductory textbooks on Minimalism. What interests me is the book by Adger:

David Adger, Core syntax: a Minimalist approach. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+424.

This is described as developing a specific coherent theory within the Minimalist Program, and it ends up being close to a lexicalist unification grammar. Like LFG, and unlike HPSG, the feature theory is untyped.

I don't know if there will be a lot of interest, but it may be useful to have a P&P (GB and/or MP) syntax module that can be plugged in to a Linguistic Exploration Environment. Adger's version may be a candidate, because it is more formalizable, and may have some compatibility at the level of feature theory. This allows a clearer connection to the lexicon.

I also have been reading the critique of GB and MP in Culicover and Jackendoff's Simpler Syntax. I am also interested in GB, because Paul Llido uses it in studying Case in Cebuano, mixing it with LFG.

forthcoming books by Stephen Wechsler

2008-11-26T19:24:00.000-08:00

Wechsler, Stephen (in progress). The Syntax-Lexicon Interface (working title). Oxford Surveys in Syntax and Morphology, General editor: Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Asudeh, Ash, Joan Bresnan, Ida Toivonen, and Stephen Wechsler (in progress). Lexical Functional Syntax. Blackwell Publishers.

It seems Wechsler is now doing LFG, although he has worked extensively in HPSG. I think the crossfertilization between the two is healthy, I Wayan Arka is also working on LFG for Indonesian, and he has collaborated with Wechsler on HPSG

Constructional Semantics

2008-11-25T22:09:00.000-08:00

There has been extensive research on Lexical Semantics (e.g. Levin, Pustejovsky), often presuming a bottom-up compositionality. This is sometimes contrasted with a Phrasal Semantics that is often in the tradition of Montague grammar, focusing on issues like anaphora and scoping, often assuming that each lexical token contributes one atomic symbol to a semantic representation.

Rather than talk about Phrasal Semantics directly, I will assume that the semantical representation of a phrasal expression can be decomposed into both a lexical contribution and a constructional contribution. Compositionality is still possible, but it involves both bottom-up and top-down contributions.

An initial focus will be Argument Structure Constructions (ASCx) of verbs, such as those analyzed by Goldberg for English. However, I am also interested in modeling Austronesian morphosyntactic alignment (comparing with Llido's analysis of Cebuano, for example). I am assuming that related but distinct senses of a lexical entry are actually expression-level construal from combining fewer word senses with meaning-contributing constructions, especially ASCx's. It is possible that a set of related lexical entry senses are actually the same underlying word sense distinguished in usage by the constructions forming different expressions. It is further possible that the constructions are actually related constructions, perhaps linked by inheritance (Goldberg proposes several distinct types of Inheritance, some of which involve Lakoff-style metaphor).

Whether this approach captures a significant amount of generality about lexical senses can be explored empirically. If this proves productive, it could later be incorporated into a linguistic exploration environment.

A gold standard for distinguishing senses in a lexical entry using a corpus-based approach is the COBUILD dictionary of English. Each entry has a stylized definition, which generally picks out the typical arguments of the verb, including a common noun as a general type constraint for each argument. To some extent, it identifies other participants in the mentioned situation which may not be explicitly realized in arguments. These additional participants may be a mechanism for characterizing the connotations of a specific sense.

I propose to explore some of the most common verbs of English (those in the top tier of of 680+ most frequent used lexical entries). For the sample sentences of each sense (and perhaps additional sentences from the underlying corpus, the Bank of English), I would try to identify any ASCx, based on typical arguments for that sense. Closely related senses may have related constructions imposed on the same underlying verb sense.

Multilingual Explorations

It may be useful to compare several languages at this level of semantics, for example Chinese or German or Filipino or Cebuano. I am interested if there are potential applications in basic education, adult L2 education, human translation, machine assisted translation, etc. This may also be relevant to the documentation and description of less studied languages by people more familiar with another more widespread language (the SIL use cases for Fieldworks).

teasing apart "word sense"

2008-11-17T22:04:00.000-08:00

Analysis of "word sense"

From the point of view of constructions, a c:lexical_sense contributes only part of the meaning of a c:word_usage. The construction itself contributes something additional, which also interacts with the larger discourse environment and the social context of successful communication.

We can divide the meaning of a c:word_usage into a purely semantic representation, which is the typical meaning of the sentence being used. Or even a simplified form of the basic sentence, with only head words and abstracting from embellishments that don't contribute to a specified lexical sense. The semantic representation includes the literal meaning, but may also introduce additional roles that follow from "typically" understood arguments and properties of the explicitly mentioned words. It covers denotation and the related intensional functions, as well as connotations relative to a "typical" mental lexicon (perhaps of an ideal listener/reader).

In addition to the purely semantic representation, competent language users can infer a more c:pragmatic_construal of the c:word_usage.

In the context of the COBUILD lexical word senses and the Bank of English used to generate them, a distinguished lexical sense classifies a class of sentences which share a similar word_usage. It should be possible to isolate the intuitions of this "gold standard" classification into a semantic representation. This abstracts from less reproducible aspects of pragmatic construal, and focuses on what is typically inferred from the sentence itself, as if it were used in isolation rather that in a larger discourse or social situation.

We would like to tease apart the characterization of each lexical sense as a purely semantic representation into two parts, the contribution of the word (e.g. a free morpheme verb, or the stem of an inflected verb) from the contribution of the construction or constructions (including morphological constructions, and argument structure constructions at least).

We would like to discover if the set of lexical senses of a word (initially, some of the more frequently used verbs) can be characterized with a set of constructions related by the inheritance relations distinguished by Goldberg. We also want to see to what extent these constructions are reused across different verbs, and if we can identify verb classes that share the same inheritance-related constructions.

Intelligent Agents for User Interface

2008-11-16T15:34:00.000-08:00

I watched a TechTalk at Google (July 25, 2008) that may be relevant to designing an annotation interface for linguistic exploration. In "Intelligent Assistance for Desktop User Tasks" Anthony Tomasic talked about work with John Zimmerman integrating machine learning with UI Design: VIO (being commercialized for SalesForce.com) selects and pre-fills forms from email, and Mixer generates database queries from email. VIO intentionally avoids NLP or domain-specific explicit engineering, looking to evaluate a lightweight solution.

The experience highlights how little I know about machine learning. VIO uses K-way classification (form suggestion), Conditional Random Fields (field s.) and Reference Resolution over instances (instance s.), which is all greek to me. The work is an example of empirical methods, they train their analyzers and evaluate them with experiements on real users.

Regional Dictionary of Biography

2008-11-11T16:17:00.000-08:00

I was browsing the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which is an ANU project that documents Australians with either 2000-6000 words, or 500-2000 words. It tries to be "representative" and has a number of biographies of Aborigines, assigning them occupations like "indigenous culture informant".

It would be great to create a similar resource about prominent Filipinos, and I suggest a regional focus to ensure that every ethnic group is covered. We could start immediately with a Cebuano region initiative, then work with the rest of UPV to cover the Visayas.

I am sure many towns would be interested in their local history, so we could start with trying to document the most prominent individuals who were born or have lived in a given municipality. I am thinking of Todd Lucero Sales' recent publication, Argao: 400 Years in Legend and History (Argao, 2008). Perhaps I can interest Madrileña de la Cerna of UP Cebu in this project.

Case and voice systems in Cebuano

2008-11-03T19:32:00.000-08:00

I have been planning to study the syntactic side of argument structure in Cebuano.

The trigger is Paul Llido's paper from ICAL 10 in Palawan, "Inflectional Case Assignment in Cebuano"

This references Yehuda Falk's paper "Case Typology and Case Theory"

I should look at the attitude towards VSO, etc. typology in WALS (World Atlas of Linguistic Structures).

There is also the following exchange from LFG98.

Introduction: The problem of voice and grammatical functions in Western Austronesian languages	Simon Musgrave	Uni. of Melbourne
Symmetrical Voice Systems and Precategoriality in Philippine Languages	Bill Foley	Uni. of Sydney
Nouns and Verbs in Tagalog: A Response to Foley	Paul Kroeger	SIL, Darwin

Describing Language 2/2 (meaning structures)

2008-10-09T03:32:00.000-07:00

Accepting phonology, the original generative problem was to model a string of tokens that are wordforms or morphs. However, the type-token distinction is abandoned with the commitment to competence modeling independent of performance. Token strings are demarcated by speech acts (clauses). A narrowly syntactic meaning of grammar is a generative production system (a set of combinatorial rules) that specifies soundly and completely the licensed set of strings. A state-machine generating strings.

This elevates the importance of not just word classes, but also the non-terminal categories or phrasal categories as the discrete tokens or alphabet for the generated strings.

Later, the alphabet of tokens can be replaced with feature-bundles. So the syntax rules can work over string of feature bundles.

An additional move in the mainstream generative grammar tradition (of Chomsky) is to allow tree-to-tree transformations. This is somewhat proof theoretic, rather than purely model theoretic. Non-reversible (thus not non-declarative) transformation rules somewhat correspond to proof steps. However, this was before the proofs-as-types approach (via the Curry-Howard isomorphism) brought out the equivalence of proof theory and model theory. For the critics in the declarative grammar traditions, the transformational move is a bad move that gives up the precision of modeling, and allows the theory to model anything rather than just reality. It also is the cultural foundation for a mainstream generative grammar to twiddle with perfecting the theory with internal concerns like minimalism, rather than sharpen the fit with ever broader data.

Graddol et al [1994] compare mainstream generative grammar with the systemic grammar alternative: "The framework that is used for analysing language has to be extravagant rather than economical. Where universal grammar seeks simplicity and economy, and draws on intuition [of competence] as its main data, systemic-functional grammar attempts to be comprehensive and gives much more emphasis to 'real' language that has been spoken or written."

Recently, declarative generative grammar approaches are converging with cognitive grammar, paying attention to performance and retaining the precision of generative models while taking on the early ambitions of systemic grammar to broadly model language in use.

Pollard in Convergent Grammar is also reclaiming a proof-theoretic approach, carried forward by Categorial Grammar, by bringing it in line with type-theoretic declarative grammars.

Jackendoff and Culicover are less concerned with building elaborate internal mechanisms for declarative grammar, although they are happy to inherit the detailed analysis of the generative tradition. They propose a flat model of syntax, returning to simple strings of tokens, with just enough structure in the representation to support the semantics-syntax interface and other interfaces in their parallel architecture.

HPSG is one of the more elaborate declarative grammar approaches, and while it remains compatible with the concerns of Jackendoff and Culicover, they make a series of moves that allow precise modeling of syntax and perhaps semantics as well. It would be nice if language specialists can model grammar in the flat simpler syntax, which the linguistic exploration environment generates the complex representations of HPSG in the background.

HPSG moves away from strings of feature bundles combined according to atomic phrasal categories. The features in a bundle allow recursive feature values, so each terminal category becomes itself a tree. The phrasal categories are also recursive feature structures, that duplicate (or in fact share) features from their constituents, notably heads pass certain features up to the phrase. By sharing rather than duplicating, the trees become directed graphs. This very expressive structure is tightly constrained by a set of type labels for nodes, with feature labels for edges. There is a type subsumption hierarchy as well.

Note that every utterance is modeled as a large graph where phrases are subgraphs, and wordforms are subgraphs in turn. These graphs are complete or sort-resolved [review Carpenter's distinctions], but the wordtypes or morphemes in the lexical unit are not complete, they are partial descriptions. These types are less specific than the token-level utterances and utterance fragments that they model, and they allow the complete structures to be generated from the partial feature descriptions in the lexicon.

HPSG was designed to work with the model-theoretic approach to modeling semantics of Montague Grammar (usually associated with Categorial Grammar for syntax). A related model-theoretic approach to modeling semantics is Minimal Recursion Semantics (and recently Robust MRS).

I am dissatisfied with the propositional level addressed by these model-theoretic approaches, but it is early days yet in semantic modeling. The traditional emphasis has been set-theoretic concerns like the scoping of quantifiers. I am interested in richer semantic representations than austere sets. Situation theory may fit the bill, but a lot of work needs to be done, especially at the semantics-syntax interface.

At this interface, I am interested in integrating the contributions of Construction Grammar and Jackendoff's parallel architecture. I am also interested in insights from lexical semantics (Levin, Pustejovsky).

A lexical unit, when we model it for some application, provides explicit and implicit information that is realized in the wordforms of an utterance. The prepositional level, including the conceptual structures of Jackendoff, is the more or less explicit level (some semantic elements in the conceptual or propositional structure may be implicit in the syntax, derivable from a fixed Event ontology). I believe that we can reuse some of this conceptual machinery for the implicit connoted information of individual word senses as well.

A lexical unit does not characterize a single unique meaning in usage, it subsumes a collection of related senses with the same wordform. Some of the meaning in usage may come from the construction, but perhaps a sense (learned from the shifting fads of usage, and construals passed on in a speaker's own utterances) brings in an additional circle of implicit concepts and conceptual relations.

For example, not all senses of "break" have an implicit participant of pieces, or the idea of sudden separation. But one fairly common sense does carry such information implicitly. What is explicit are the participant roles with arguments or complements, filled in the utterance by particular individuals of a noun (or referential index) type. What allows a hearer to zero in on one familiar sense or another, or to realize that this is a new sense in usage, is the outer circle of concepts that are implicit. So if one of the participants mentioned in an argument is a piece, then this sense or a related one is specified.

Where is the boundary between construal in performance, and precise type representation in competence? In the brain, there is certainly a fluid spectrum. For applications in computers, we would like to fix a particular discrete model. The account above can clarify some of the choices to fix.

Describing Language 1/2 (sounds and words)

2008-10-09T03:29:00.000-07:00

We observe humans making not just vocalizations (social displays) but utterances.

An utterance makes a cognitive speech act, engendering a shared information state and modulating movement and cognitively-controlled behavior. There is intentionality between that shared information state (as well as the acoustic utterance, or inscribed expression) and the actual or possbible situations that it is about.

What is perceptible in an utterance, or a sequence of utterances, is a string of phones.

The phones are clustered in cognition into words that bear a functional or substantive contribution to the shared information structure

In the thirties, it was discovered that not all distinct phones are functionally distinct. The allows the layering of distinctions between phonetic distinctions on the one hand, that may be governed for example by articulatory constraints, and phonemic distinctions on the other hand.
Phonemes classify segments (possibly a set of allophones) according to a phonological level that is the only interface with larger structure, such as semantics and morpho-syntax.

Thus the informal notion of words can be analyzed into strings of phonemic segments, as well as some supra-segmental phenomena. Some groups of segments carry conceptual contributions (substantive morphemes) to shared information structure, others only modulate how concepts are inter-related (functional morphemes, bound or free). This is hypothesized to account for the partitioning of all words into a group of open classes of words (words with a substantive morpheme at its core, possibly productively inflected with a bound morpheme; and perhaps historically derived in lexicon with a bound morpheme) and a group of closed word classes.

Can we marshall evidence for this substantive/functional = open/closed hypothesis? What about prepositions used either predicatively, as PP heads or as particles with phrasal verbs. They do contribute to conceptual structure, but are in a closed class. Perhaps there are only so many ways to stand in physical relations in a situation, and other meanings are metaphors, so the substantivity is in the construction layer rather than the morpheme layer. A predicative construction injects a substantive concept. Non-predicative uses allow participants to stand at the level of bare furniture of the mechanisms of language. The upholstery of substantivity is what contributes connotations, the implicit participants that carries meanings beyond the bare prepositions of logical form. The model of functionals allows a fixed inventory of relations, then substantives from the lexicon elaborate that bare level.

Abandoning the furniture metaphor, we could talk about three or four circles of meaning. 1) A bare level of participants (with referential indexes tracked and resolved) in (more or less) spatiotemporal relations, 2) a propositional semantics level where every substantive contributes exactly one concept type or relational concept type (like Sowa's conceptual graphs) 3) an Event semantics level (like that being developed by Levin and perhaps Jackendoff) which uses a minimal ontology of types that are revealed but perhaps implicitly in syntax, and 4) the additional implicit participants in the shared information state that are connoted by specific word senses, acquired by communicative experience.

We can distinguish wordforms in utterances, that carry the contextual meaning of a speech act (or written expression act), as a level of tokens, distinct but inextricably related to a level of types.

Types are wordtypes (lexical units) or morphemes in the shared scheme of individuation of speaker-hearers in the speech community. Wordforms are tokens of wordtypes participating in a particular utterance, and contributing in context to the shared information structure. We classify wordforms (at run-time, in occurrent cognitive states) according to their properties in the utterance and shared information state, both syntactic distribution and the situated meaning. This does not the extralinguistic significance of pragmatics, just the linguistic shared information state.

When we construct a level of description of lexical units (words, and also bound and free functional morphemes), where we model the shared regularities that allow the interpretation and semantic-syntactic generation of shared information states.

Note: Morphological rules may govern parts of the phonology-syntax interface, e.g. go + ed >> went, irregular verbs.

Leipzig glossing rules

2008-10-08T19:17:00.000-07:00

Part of Typological tools for field linguistics

a consistent and widely accepted standard for the interlinear glossing of text

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/LGR08_09_12.pdf

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php

Appendix: List of Standard Abbreviations

1	first person
2	second person
3	third person
A	agent-like argument of canonical transitive verb
ABL	ablative
ABS	absolutive
ACC	accusative
ADJ	adjective
ADV	adverb(ial)
AGR	agreement
ALL	allative
ANTIP	antipassive
APPL	applicative
ART	article
AUX	auxiliary
BEN	benefactive
CAUS	causative
CLF	classifier
COM	comitative
COMP	complementizer
COMPL	completive
COND	conditional
COP	copula
CVB	converb
DAT	dative
DECL	declarative
DEF	definite
DEM	demonstrative
DET	determiner
DIST	distal
DISTR	distributive
DU	dual
DUR	durative
ERG	ergative
EXCL	exclusive
F	feminine
FOC	focus
FUT	future
GEN	genitive
IMP	imperative
INCL	inclusive
IND	indicative
INDF	indefinite
INF	infinitive
INS	instrumental
INTR	intransitive
IPFV	imperfective
IRR	irrealis
LOC	locative
M	masculine
N	neuter
N-	non- (e.g. NSG nonsingular, NPST nonpast)
NEG	negation, negative
NMLZ	nominalizer/nominalization
NOM	nominative
OBJ	object
OBL	oblique
P	patient-like argument of canonical transitive verb
PASS	passive
PFV	perfective
PL	plural
POSS	possessive
PRED	predicative
PRF	perfect
PRS	present
PROG	progressive
PROH	prohibitive
PROX	proximal/proximate
PST	past
PTCP	participle
PURP	purposive
Q	question particle/marker
QUOT	quotative
RECP	reciprocal
REFL	reflexive
REL	relative
RES	resultative
S	single argument of canonical intransitive verb
SBJ	subject
SBJV	subjunctive
SG	singular
TOP	topic
TR	transitive
VOC	vocative

Jackendoff article

2008-10-08T18:46:00.000-07:00

Construction after construction and its theoretical challenges by Ray Jackendoff

Language 84-1

This analyzes NPN constructions like "day by day" where both N's are the same. There are five propositions that are used: by, for, to, after and upon (with on as a variant).

On the connectionist front, I came across this paper:

Vector Symbolic Architectures answer Jackendoff's challenges for cognitive neuroscience

Gayler, Dr Ross W. (2003) Vector Symbolic Architectures answer Jackendoff's challenges for cognitive neuroscience. [Conference Paper] (Unpublished)

PDF
58Kb

Central Okinawan is endangered with 1 million speakers

2008-10-07T18:04:00.000-07:00

^ Japan Focus: Language Loss and Revitalization in the Ryukyu Islands, Patrick Heinrich, posted November 10, 2005. Also | What leaves a mark should no longer stain: Progressive erasure and reversing language shift activities in the Ryukyu Islands, 2005, citing Hattori, Shirō (1954) 'Gengo nendaigaku sunawachi goi tokeigaku no hōhō ni tsuite' [‘Concerning the Method of Glottochronology and Lexicostatistics’], Gengo kenkyū [Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan] v26/27

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_language#Political_language_status

Are there Tagalog verbal roots? - Himmelmann

2008-10-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

Tagalog semantics/lexical categories (or: "word classes") from Nikolaus Himmelmann at Bochum (also working with a Monash project).

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1987. Morphosyntax und Morphologie - Die Ausrichtungsaffixe im Tagalog. München: Fink.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1991. The Philippine Challenge to Universal Grammar. Arbeitspapier Nr. 15. Köln: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. ”Regularity in irregularity: Article use in adpositional phrases”. Linguistic Typology 2:315-353.

Himmelmann is a pioneer in defining the emerging subdiscipline within linguistics of language documentation and description, as a response to the crisis of endangered languages that has been accelerating over the last century and more. He is quoted at the website of the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Project:

The aim of a language documentation is to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community... This... differs fundamentally from... language description [which] aims at the record of a language... as a system of abstract elements, constructions, and rules

[p, 166, "Documentary and descriptive linguistics", Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (1998). Linguistics 36. pp. 161-195. Berlin: de Gruyter]

At Bochum and Köln, Leila Behrens is looking at the lexical typology of Tagalog.

"Die zweite Datenbankkomponente ist als Grundstein für ein neues Tagalog-Lexikon gedacht"

Datenbanken

"Wenngleich wir nichts dagegen haben, unsere "Prinz"-Datenbank oder die "Tagalog"-Datenbank im Netz öffentlich zugänglich zu machen, erscheint uns das momentan aus dem genannten Grund noch als verfrüht."

Behrens & Sasse, H.-J. (1997), Lexical Typology: A Programmatic Sketch. Arbeitspapier Nr. 30 (Neue Folge). Institut für Sprachwissenschaft zu Köln.

- (2000), Semantics and Typology. In: Siemund, Peter (ed.), Methodology in Linguistic Typology. STUF 53 (1), 21-38.

Notes

"This proposal extends to the lexical level recent work challenging the categorial uniformity hypothesis (Bresnan 1994)"

Bresnan, Joan, 1994, ”Locative inversion and the architecture of Universal Grammar”. Language 70:72-131

"Therefore, it is not possible to define the subject simply as the phrase marked by ang. Instead, the subject is defined as the ang-phrase which follows the predicate (and there can be only one"

"if the predicate is marked with the CONVEYANCE VOICE prefix i-, then the subject expresses an argument bearing the semantic role of a displaced theme. ...(i.e. the entity viewed as moving) of the event expressed by the predicate"

"The suffix -an marks LOCATIVE VOICE. In locative voice, the subject expresses a locative argument, understood in a very broad sense. This may be the location at which something happened:
(11) tinirhán ko ang bahay na itó
Or the location to which (or from which) motion occurred:
(12) pinuntahán na namán nilá ang bata'
Locative voice is also used for recipients, addressees, and benefactees (13):
(13) tìtirán ninyó akó
Even more generally, locative voice may be used for all kinds of undergoers which are not directly affected by the action denoted by the predicate
(14) hindí'! tingnán mo si Maria
"

"The suffix -in marks PATIENT VOICE. It is the unmarked member of the undergoer-voice-marking affixes and is used for a broad variety of undergoers, including prototypical patients, i.e. entities directly affected or effected by the event denoted by the predicate:
(16) patayín natin itóng dalawang Hapón
The suffix -in differs from the other two undergoer suffixes in that it only occurs in non-realis mood (as in the preceding example). In realis mood, the predicate is simply marked by the realis undergoer voice infix -in-:"

(18) pùpunuín mo iyán ng kuto
pupunuin ng weyter ang baso ng tubigh
Why is the non-subject actor immediately after the predicate? Is linear order governed by thematic role rather than grammatical function?

"The locative marker sa marks a large variety of temporal and local adjuncts (20) and recipients/goals (21), as well as (some) definite patients and themes when they do not occur in subject function (cf. sa mga bata’ in (4) above)
(4) ang langgám rin ang tumulong sa mga bata’
"
I would analyze /bata'/ as a beneficiary, and thus a recipient rather than a patient

"To summarize: the four basic syntactic functions predicate, subject, non-subject argument or adjunct, and modifier are easily identifiable in Tagalog because there is a set of markers which in combination with a few positional restrictions allows a straightforward identification of each of these functions (with the exception of the modifier function which necessarily involves reference to the semantics of the two items joined by a linker)."

"However, it is common to assume that terminal syntactic categories and lexical categories are commensurate in that lexical categories are but further subcategorisations of the more general terminal syntactic categories. That is, declension classes are but a further subcategorisation of the superclass of nouns, verb classes just a further subcategorisation of the superclass of verbs, etc. Such a neat correlation between terminal syntactic categories and lexical categories in fact appears to exist in a number of languages (including, in particular, the Indo-European languages), but this is not universally so."

Of major interest

DeWolf, Charles M. 1979. Sentential Predicates: A Cross-Linguistic Analysis. Honululu: University of Hawaii dissertation.
DeWolf, Charles M. 1988. ”Voice in Austronesian languages of Philippine type: passive, ergative, or neither?”. In: Shibatani (ed.) 143-193.
Wolff, John U. 1993. ”Why roots add the affixes with which they occur”. In: Reesink (ed.) 217-244.
Gil, David. 1993. ”Tagalog Semantics”. BLS 19: 390-403.
Guzman, Videa P. de. 1978. Syntactic Derivation of Tagalog Verbs. Honululu: University Press of Hawaii.
Guzman, Videa P. de. 1997. ”Verbal affixes in Tagalog: Inflection or derivation?”. In: Odé, Cecilia & Wim Stokhof (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, 303-325. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Naylor, Paz B. 1980. ”Linking, Relation-Marking, and Tagalog Syntax”. In: id. (ed.), Austronesian Studies, Papers from the 2. Eastern Conference on Austronesian Languages, 33-49. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan.
Kaswanti Purwo, Bambang (ed.). 1984. Towards a description of contemporary Indonesian: Preliminary Studies. Part I, Jakarta: Universitas Atma Jaya (=NUSA 18).
Clynes, Adrian. 1995. Topics in the phonology and morphosyntax of Balinese, based on the dialect of Singaraja, North Bali. PhD thesis, The Australian Nationa University.
Artawa, Ketut & Barry J. Blake. 1997. ”Patient Primacy in Balinese”. Studies in Language 21:483-508.

Other references in the paper

Anward, Jan, Edith Moravcsik & Leon Stassen. 1997. ”Parts of speech: A challenge for typology”. Linguistic Typology 1:167-183.
Austin, Peter & Joan Bresnan. 1996. ”Non-Configurationality in Australian Aboriginal Languages”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14:215-268.
Broschart, Jürgen. 1997. ”Why Tongan does it differently: Categorial distinctions in a language without nouns and verbs”. Linguistic Typology 1:123-165.
Jacobs, Joachim, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld & Theo Vennemann (eds.). 1993. Syntax, Berlin: de Gruyter.
Jelinek, Eloise & Richard A. Demers. 1994. ”Predicates and pronominal arguments in Straits Salish”. Language 70:697-736.
Koptevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 1988. A typology of action nominal constructions. PhD thesis Stockholm University.
Lemaréchal, Alain. 1982. ”Semantisme des parties du discours et semantisme des relations”. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 77:1-39.
Lemaréchal, Alain. 1989. Les parties du discours. Sémantiquie et syntaxe. Paris: P.U.F.
Li, Charles N. (ed.). 1976. Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press.
McFarland, Curtis D. 1976. A Provisional Classification of Tagalog Verbs. Tokio: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.
Naylor, Paz B. 1995. ”Subject, Topic, and Tagalog syntax”. In: Benett, David, Bynon, Theodora and Hewitt, George B. (eds.), Subject, Voice and Ergativity 161-201. London: SOAS.
Pittman, Richard, 1966, ”Tagalog -um- and mag-. An Interim Report”. Papers in Philippine Linguistics 1:9-20 (Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Series A, Nr.8).
Ramos, Teresita V. 1974. The Case system of Tagalog verbs. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics (Series B-27) .
Ramos, Teresita V. 1975. ”The Role of Verbal Features in the Subcategorization of Tagalog Verbs”. Philippine Journal of Linguistics 6:1-24.
Reesink, Ger P. (ed.). 1993. Topics in Descriptive Austronesian Linguistics. Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost-Azië en Oceanië (= Semaian 11).
Rubino, Carl R.G. 1998b. ”The morphological realization and production of a nonprototypical morpheme: the Tagalog derivational clitic”. Linguistics 36:1147-1166.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1993a. ”Syntactic Categories and subcategories”. In: Jacobs et al. (eds.) 646-686.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1993b. ”Das Nomen - eine universale Kategorie?”. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 46:187-221.
"two kinds of categorisation (lexical and syntactic/phrasal) should be clearly distinguished and that there is no necessary correlation between them."
Linguistics vol. 15. Los Angeles: UCLA/Department of Linguistics.
Shibatani, Masayoshi (ed.). 1988. Passive and Voice. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Verhaar, John W.M. 1984. Affixation in contemporary Indonesian”. in: Kaswanti Purwo (ed.) 1-26.
Walter, Heribert. 1981. Studien zur Nomen-Verb-Distinktionaus typologischer Sicht. München: Fink

Standard references

Müller, Friedrich. 1882. Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft. Bd.II, Abt.2. Wien: Alfred Hölder.
31
Blake, Frank R. 1925. A Grammar of the Tagalog Language. New Haven: American Oriental Society.
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1917. Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis. 3 vols. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois.
Scheerer, Otto. 1924. ”On the Essential Difference Betweenthe Verbs of the European and the Philippine Languages”. Philippine Journal of Education 7:1-10.
Lopez, Cecilio. 1937. ”Preliminary Study of Affixes in Tagalog”. In: id. 1977, Selected Writings in Philippine Linguistics, 28-104. Quezon City: University of the Philippines.
Capell, Arthur. 1964. ”Verbal systems in Philippine languages”. Philippine Journal of Science 93:231-249.
Ramos, Teresita V. 1971. Tagalog Structures. Honululu: Univ. Press of Hawaii .
Schachter, Paul & Fay Otanes. 1972. Tagalog Reference Grammar. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Schachter, Paul. 1976. ”The Subject in Philippine Languages, Topic, Actor, Actor-Topic or None of the Above”. In: Li (ed.) 491-518.
Schachter, Paul. 1995. The Subject in Tagalog: Still none of the above. UCLA Occasional Papers in
Cruz, Emilita L. 1975. A Subcategorization of Tagalog Verbs. Quezon City: University of the Philippines (= The Archive Special Monograph No.2).
Wolff, John U. with Maria Theresa C. Centeno and Der-Hwa V. Rau. 1991. Pilipino through Self-Instruction. 4 vols. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program.
Kroeger, Paul R. 1993. Phrase Structure and Grammatical Relations in Tagalog. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Keenan, Edward L. 1976. ”Towards a Universal Definition of ‘Subject’”. In: Li (ed.) 305-333.
Foley, William A. & Robert D. Van Valin. 1984. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1983. Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge/Mass.: The MIT Press.

English, Leo J. 1986. Tagalog-English Dictionary. Manila: National Book Store.
Panganiban, José V. 1972. Diksyunario-Tesauro Pilipino-Ingles. Quezon City: Manlapaz Publishing Co.
Rubino, Carl R.G. 1998a. Tagalog Standard Dictionary. New York: Hippocrene Books.
Santos, Vito C. 1983. Pilipino-English Dictionary. 2nd revised edition. Metro Manila: National.

C.B. Martin's Mind in Nature

2008-09-28T18:04:00.000-07:00

I am reading a review of C.B. Martin's Mind in Nature (2008).

mind is just another
system of dispositional states

capable of complex,

spatially and temporally projective,

directed

regulative

adjustments and control (p. 111ff).

Martin holds that the same basic functions and properties (

positive and negative feedback,

feedforward,

use,

material of use,

correlativity of manifestation and disposition base,

representation and

content)

that are found in the non-mental, non-conscious and non-linguistic occur in the mental, conscious and linguistic as well (p. 115-116).

documentary linguistics

2008-09-09T18:44:00.000-07:00

[to do: clean up my text, give it some proper footnotes from Quakenbush and Himmelmann at least, and republish on Linguistic Exploration.]

I guess it is fair to say that "descriptive linguistics" is accepted as a term distinct from theoretical and applied linguistics, although obviously there is a gradient. Perhaps we can refer to this as (overlapping) fields within the discipline, orthogonal to the usual division by level of representation: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics. There are also the "border fields" which do not belong to the linguistics discipline exclusively, but bring in additional methods from neighboring disciplines, e.g. computational linguistics.

So perhaps we can think of documentary linguistics as that subfield of descriptive linguistics as the subfield of descriptive linguistics that borders on the distinct and applied discipline of information technology use (not computer science research, which is what computational linguists often do).

The target audience of a language engineering environment for linguistic exploration would be professional and non-professional practitioners of documentary linguistics. Non-professionals would include language teachers and students in general, which professionals would include participants in professionally managed projects (including language teachers doing graduate research in applied linguistics) whose background may be linguistic sciences, education, professional editing, creative writing, information technology or something else.

J. Stephen Quakenbush. SIL International and Endangered Austronesian Languages.

[Note 5: The concept of “language documentation” as the product of “documentary linguistics” is discussed further below. The primary distinctive of language “documenation” is its focus on primary data, collected, annotated, and made available as “a lasting multipurpose record of a language.” (cf Himmelmann 2006:1).]

Awareness of the importance of language documentation has been growing worldwide over the past couple of decades along with awareness and concern over language endangerment. Language documentation has to do with producing a lasting record of representative samples of that language. As traditionally practiced by SIL, and indeed by the whole Western linguistic enterprise, language documentation has focused on the production of resources for the linguist or academician more than on resources that directly benefit speakers of the language being documented. In the tradition of early twentieth century American linguists Sapir and Bloomfield, field linguists have gone out to produce grammatical descriptions and text collections which would be published by major universities and academic publishing companies in order to advance the understanding of their fellow linguists. [Note 23: Bloomfield’s 1917 Tagalog texts with grammatical analysis is still considered a classic of this sort.]

In summary, language data on which much linguistic analysis and description is based has rarely been published as such. This is as true of SIL-published data on Austronesian languages as much as it is true of material published by other field linguists on less commonly studied languages around the world. Where language data has been published, it has usually not been “primary data,” but rather “secondary data” that has been edited, systematized or regularized in some way.

The past decade has seen increasing interest in the documentation of representative primary data in a form that will be permanently accessible to speakers and researchers in an electronic environment.26 Indeed, a new sub-discipline of linguistics has appeared bearing the name of Documentary Linguistics. The web-site of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages credits Nikolaus Himmelmann as a catalyst for the development of this discipline, citing his 1998 paper entitled “Documentary and descriptive linguistics.” In it, Himmelmann (1998: 116) states that

"The aim of a language documentation is to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community... This... differs fundamentally from... language description [which] aims at the record of a language... as a system of abstract elements, constructions, and rules."

Himmelmann, Gippert and Mosel (2006: v) specify that documentary linguistics is concerned with the “methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language or one of its varieties.”

Selected references

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2006. Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for? In Gippert, Himmelmann and Mosel, eds. Essentials of language documentation, 1-30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2002. Documentary and descriptive linguistics (full version). In Osamu Sakiyama and Fubito Endo, eds. Lectures on Endangered Languages: 5 (Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim, Kyoto, 2002)

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. Documentary and descriptive linguistics. Linguistics 36.161-195.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P., Jost Gippert and Ulrike Mosel. 2006. Editor’s preface. In Gippert, Himmelmann and Mosel, eds. Essentials of language documentation, v-vii. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

List: researchers

2008-09-09T17:48:00.000-07:00

Linguists, digital data

Author: M. Paul Lewis, editor of next edition of Ethnologue

Title: Towards a Categorization of Endangerment of the World's Languages

Lewis, M. Paul. 2008. "Evaluating endangerment: proposed metadata and implementation."

Austronesianists

Carl Rubino's list of linguists working on Philippine languages

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. ANU and Rühr-U Bochum paper on tagalog zero anaphora (transtives)

J. Stephen Quakenbush. Agutaynen, SIL. Endangered AN

Starosta, Stanley. Austronesian ‘Focus’ as Derivation: Evidence from Nominalization. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS 3.2:427-479, 2002. Formosan and Philippine examples, seamless morphology.

General Linguistics

Lauri Karttunen. Word Play. ACL Lifetime Achievement Award talk. 26 pp.

PARC, Stanford.

reviews two lines of research that lie at the opposite ends on the field: semantics and morphology. The semantic part deals with issues from the 1970s such as discourse referents, implicative verbs, presuppositions, and questions. The second part presents a brief history of the application of finite-state transducers to linguistic analysis starting with the advent of two-level morphology in the early 1980s and culminating in successful commercial applications in the 1990s. It offers some commentary on the relationship, or the lack thereof, between computational and paper-and-pencil linguistics. The final section returns to the semantic issues and their application to currently popular tasks such as textual inference and question answering.

Historical Linguistics

Departments

Payap U, home of WeSay software project with SIL

List: Proceedings

2008-09-09T17:34:00.000-07:00

Web-Based Language Documentation and Description, Papers from the Workshop on

miscellaneous links

The Linguist List calls and conferences

Incremental Sigmoid Bayesian Networks

2008-09-06T22:44:00.000-07:00

[python obj model time 01:09:10]

Incremental Bayesian Networks for Natural Language Parsing

talk at Google Tech Talks

James Henderson, U Geneva

ISBN's provide a powerful method of feature induction

This talk reminds me that I have a lot to learn about statistical processing and machine learning.

new terms:

marginalize: ... related to to summing over all data, which is avoided
fully factorized: ... without any links
beam search: ... look at 100 best options, with each new word
branching factor: ... limits blow up

Grammatical Frameworks

2008-09-06T19:36:00.000-07:00

Reference sites

a general ConstructionGrammar site

Laura A. Michaelis pubs

Paul Kay: http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/

Zwicky: "Dealing out meaning", on construction grammar (Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1994). Also local

Benjamin K. Bergen (UH Manoa) pubs

Embodied Cnstruction Grammar

HPSG

CSLI HPSG page

Ohio State

Delphin. edited collection.

Detmar Meurers OSU

Chris Brew OSU

Tibor Kiss Ruhr-U Bochum

some papers

Graham Wilcock. An OWL Ontology for HPSG. University of Helsinki. [integrated with an existing OWL ontology, GOLD, as a community of practice extension.]

Convergent Grammar

Higher Order Grammar

Miscellaneous People

Arnold Zwicky the founder of the OUTIL (OUT In Linguistics) mailing list

Peter Culicover

Erhard Hinrichs (Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft of the Universität Tübingen, ASN/ISCL)

video talks

2008-09-06T18:37:00.000-07:00

Baypiggies User Group: The Natural Language Toolkit

01:17:25

Incremental Bayesian Networks for Natural Language Parsing

01:00:58

To RE or not to RE - parsing text in Python

26:59

Learning and Inference for Hierarchically Split PCFGs

Google Tech Talks February, 28 2008

Added: 6 months ago

ABSTRACT

Treebank parsing can be seen as the search for an optimally refined grammar consistent with a coarse training treebank. We describe a method in which a minimal grammar is hierarchically refined using EM to give accurate, compact grammars. The resulting grammars are extremely compact compared to other high-performance parsers, yet the parser gives the best published accuracies on several languages, as well as the best generative parsing numbers in English. In addition, we give an associated coarse-to-fine inference scheme which vastly improves inference time with no loss in test set accuracy.

Slides: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~petrov/...

Speaker: Slav Petrov
Slav Petrov is a Ph.D. Candidate at University of California Berkeley Dept of Computer Science, where he is also a research assistant working with Dan Klein and Jitendra Malik on inducing latent structure for perception problems in vision and language.

Modeling Human Sentence Processing

Google Tech Talks April, 17 2008 ABSTRACT Modeling human sentence-processing can help us (more)

Added: 4 months ago

semantics of natural language

Grammar Based vs. Natural Language Learning, Part 1

10:00

Grammar Based vs. Natural Language Learning, Part 3

08:52

Grammar Based vs. Natural Language Learning, Part 5

02:20

Python

OSS Speaker Series: Python for Programmer
01:40:15 googletechtalks

The Python Object Model

Python 3000

01:06:41 From: googletechtalks

Cognitive Science

The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence

01:37:42 From: googletechtalks

The Cognitive and Computational ...

The Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience of Categorization, Novelty-...

Google Tech Talks November, 15 2007

Added: 8 months ago

01:02:13

ABSTRACT

Neurocomputational models provide fundamental insights towards
understanding the human brain circuits for learning new associations
and organizing our world into appropriate categories. In this talk I
will review the information-processing functions of four interacting
brain systems for learning and categorization:

(1) the basal ganglia which incrementally adjusts choice behaviors using environmental
feedback about the consequences of our actions,

(2) the hippocampus which supports learning in other brain regions through the creation of
new stimulus representations (and, hence, new similarity
relationships) that reflect important statistical regularities in the
environment,

(3) the medial septum which works in a feedback-loop with
the hippocampus, using novelty-detection to alter the rate at which
stimulus representations are updated through experience,

(4) the frontal lobes which provide for selective attention and executive
control of learning and memory.

The computational models to be described have been evaluated through a variety of empirical
methodoligies including human functional brain imaging, studies of
patients with localized brain damage due to injury or early-stage
neurodegenerative diseases, behavioral genetic studies of
naturally-occuring individual variability, as well as comparative
lesion and genetic studies with rodents. Our applications of these
models to engineering and computer science including automated anomaly
detection systems for mechanical fault diagnosis on US Navy
helicopters and submarines as well more recent contributions to the
DoD's DARPA program for Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures
(BICA).

Speaker: Dr. Mark Gluck
Mark Gluck is a Professor of Neuroscience at Rutgers University - Newark, co-director of the Rutgers Memory Disorders Project, and publisher of the public health newsletter, Memory Loss and the Brain. He works at the interface between neuroscience, psychology, and computer science, where his research focuses on the neural bases of learning and memory, and the consequences of memory loss due to aging, trauma, and disease. He is the co-author of "Gateway to Memory: An Introduction to Neural Network Models of the Hippocampus and Memory " (MIT Press, 2001) and a forthcoming undergraduate textbook, "Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior." He has edited several other books and has published over 60 scientific journal articles. His awards include the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions from the American Psychological Society and the Young Investigator Award for Cognitive and Neural Sciences from the Office of Naval Research. In 1996, he was awarded a NSF Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President Bill Clinton. For more information,

Miscellaneous

Google IPv6 Conference 2008: IPv...

Google IPv6 Conference 2008: IPv6 and the DNS

Google Tech Talks January, 29 2008 ABSTRACT IPv6 and the DNS Speaker: Suzanne Woolf (more)

jQuery

Google Tech Talks April, 3 2008 ABSTRACT jQuery is a JavaScript library that stand (more)

Added: 5 months ago

June 4, 2008

Aspect-Oriented Modeling - what ...

Aspect-Oriented Modeling - what it is and what it's good for

Google Tech Talks June 4, 2008 ABSTRACT In software engineering, aspects are concerns t Google Tech Talks
June 4, 2008

ABSTRACT

In software engineering, aspects are concerns that cut across multiple modules. They can lead to the common problems of concern tangling and scattering: concern tangling is where software concerns are not represented independently of each other; concern scattering is where a software concern is represented in multiple remote places in a software artifact. Although aspect-oriented programming is relatively well understood, aspect-oriented modeling (i.e., the representation of aspects during requirements engineering, architecture, design) is still rather immature. Although a wide variety of approaches to aspect-oriented modeling have been suggested, there is, as yet, no common consensus on how aspect-oriented models should be captured, manipulated and reasoned about. This talk presents MATA (Modeling Aspects Using a Transformation Approach), which is a unified way of handling aspects for any well-defined modeling language. The talk will argue why MATA is necessary and highlight some of the key features of MATA. In particular, the talk will motivate the decision to base MATA on graph transformations and will describe an application of MATA to modeling security concerns.

Speaker: Jon Whittle
Prof. Jon Whittle joined Lancaster University in August 2007 as a Professor of Software Engineering. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA, and, prior to that, he was a researcher and contractor technical area lead at NASA Ames Research Center. In July 2007, he was awarded a highly prestigious Wolfson Merit Award from the Royal Society in the UK. Jon's research interests are in model-driven software development, formal methods, secure software development, requirements engineering and domain-specific methods for software engineering. His research has been recognized by a number of Best Paper awards, including the IEE Software Premium prize (with João Araújo). He is Chair of the Steering
Committee of the International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering, Languages and Systems
and has been a program committee member of this conference since 2002 (including experience track PC chair in 2006). He has served on over 30 program committees for international conferences and workshops.
He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Software and Systems Modeling. Jon has also been a guest editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, the Journal of Software Quality, and has co-edited two special issues of the Journal of Software and Systems Modeling. (more)

Added: 3 months ago

ABSTRACT

In software engineering, aspects are concerns that cut across multiple modules. They can lead to the common problems of concern tangling and scattering: concern tangling is where software concerns are not represented independently of each other; concern scattering is where a software concern is represented in multiple remote places in a software artifact. Although aspect-oriented programming is relatively well understood, aspect-oriented modeling (i.e., the representation of aspects during requirements engineering, architecture, design) is still rather immature. Although a wide variety of approaches to aspect-oriented modeling have been suggested, there is, as yet, no common consensus on how aspect-oriented models should be captured, manipulated and reasoned about. This talk presents MATA (Modeling Aspects Using a Transformation Approach), which is a unified way of handling aspects for any well-defined modeling language. The talk will argue why MATA is necessary and highlight some of the key features of MATA. In particular, the talk will motivate the decision to base MATA on graph transformations and will describe an application of MATA to modeling security concerns.

Speaker: Jon Whittle
Prof. Jon Whittle joined Lancaster University in August 2007 as a Professor of Software Engineering. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA, and, prior to that, he was a researcher and contractor technical area lead at NASA Ames Research Center. In July 2007, he was awarded a highly prestigious Wolfson Merit Award from the Royal Society in the UK. Jon's research interests are in model-driven software development, formal methods, secure software development, requirements engineering and domain-specific methods for software engineering. His research has been recognized by a number of Best Paper awards, including the IEE Software Premium prize (with João Araújo). He is Chair of the Steering
Committee of the International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering, Languages and Systems
and has been a program committee member of this conference since 2002 (including experience track PC chair in 2006). He has served on over 30 program committees for international conferences and workshops.
He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Software and Systems Modeling. Jon has also been a guest editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, the Journal of Software Quality, and has co-edited two special issues of the Journal of Software and Systems Modeling.

browsed googletechtalks until 300 (WINE conf 2007)

Convergent Grammar

2008-09-06T18:33:00.000-07:00

[convert into an essay or review article at Linguistic Exploration]

CVG Course at ESSLI 08, Day 1 Slides

(23) convergent grammar (CVG): a Look Ahead

• CVG is closely related to both ACG and HPSG.
• Like ACG—but unlike other frameworks descended from EMG—
CVG uses Curry-Howard proof terms (which we will explain)
to denote NL syntactic entities.
• This makes it easy to connect CVG to mainstream generative
grammar because the proof terms are really just a more precise
version of EST/GB-style labelled bracketings.
• Like HPSG—but unlike other frameworks descended from EMG—
the relation between syntax and semaentics is not a function, but
rather is one-to-many.

Curry-Howard Correspondence

(30)
The basic ideas of CH are that, if you let the atomic formulas be
the types of a TLC, then
1. a formula is the same thing as a type.
2. A formula A has a proof iff there is a combinator (closed
term containing no basic constants) of type A.
• Hence the Curry-Howard slogan:
formulas = types, proofs = terms
(34)
• Variables correspond to hypotheses.
• Basic constants correspond to nonlogical ax-
ioms.
• Derivability of Γ ⊢ a : A corresponds to A being
provable from the hypotheses in Γ.
• Application corresponds to Modus Ponens.
• Abstraction corresponds to Hypothetical Proof.

(31) Notation for ND Proof Theory

• An ND proof theory consists of inference rules,
which have premisses and a conclusion.
• An n-ary rule is one with n premisses, and a
0-ary rule is called an axiom.
• Premisses and conclusions have the format of a
judgment:

Γ ⊢ a : A

read ‘a is a proof of A with hypotheses Γ’.

Autonomy of syntax is possible, but not at the granularity of word strings. The syntactic parallel to semantic hypotheses must be both words and constructions.

A deterministic functional interface from syntax to semantics seems to be less of a fit to real language than a non-deterministic relational interface. [find slide to quote]

"variables correspond to hypothesis" — does this mean the granularity is that established by referential indexes? Does it make sense to consider a finer granularity? Does this tie up with DRT?

Perhaps we retain the granularity of referential indexes, but consider implicit relations contributed by the constructions (and also by the individual words). This explains why schema instances in working memory have the granularity they have. There may be some finer granularity less accessible to consciousness, but the level of folk semantics demands an explanatory account.

(38) ND-Style Syntax

• The inference rules are the syntax rules.
• The formulas/types are the syntactic categories.
• The proofs/terms are the syntactic expressions.
• The basic constants are the syntactic words;
• The variables are traces.
• The context of a judgment is the list of traces still
unbound at that point in the proof.

This slide confirms the granularity of variables as referential indexes or traces. Can at least some of the syntax rules (for phrase structure) be considered as types and hypotheses from the lexicon, rather than inference rules for constructing results? You still need inference rules on how to combine the word-level and the construction level. And the elements of a the constrution semantics may be implicit, below the surface.

(40) Basic Categories

• To get started: S, NP, and N. Others will be
added as needed.
• Here we ignore morphosyntactic details such as
case, agreement, and verb inflection.
• In a more detailed CVG, these would be handled
(much as in pregroup grammars) by subtyping.

"pregroup grammars"? Does this subtyping refer to feature structures at a finer granularrity?

(41) Function Categories

• As in many frameworks (RG, HPSG, LFG, DG,
traditional grammar) grammatical functions (gram-
funs) like subject and complement are treated
as theoretical primitives.
• To start we just assume the gramfuns subject
(s) and complement (c). Others will be added
as needed.

Can gramfuns be extended to handle thematic roles? Word-specific participant roles? This could be a finer grained semantics, capturing the insights from lexical semantics and its data.

(56) An Embedded Constituent Question

⊢ [whatfill t(s Kim (likes t c))] : Q
• Here what is an operator of type NP^Q_S : it combines with an S containing an unbound NP trace
to form a Q, while binding the trace.
• Notice that the is not analyzed as a “projection”
of a ‘functional category”: there is no null com-
plementizer with respect to which the operator is
a “specifier”.

Can something like this be used to analyze "ang" in "babae ang bumili ng lasones"

Day 2

(2) Some Examples of Overt Movement

a. John_i, Fido bit t_i. [Topicalization]
b. I wonder [who_i Fido bit t_i]. [Indirect Question]
c. Who_i did Fido bite t_i? [Direct Question]
d. The neighbor [who_i Fido bit t_i] was John. [Relative Clause]
e. Felix bit [who(ever)_i Fido bit t_i]. [Free Relative]
f. It was John [who_i Fido bit t_i]. [Cleft]
g. [Who_i Fido bit t_i] was John. [Plain Pseudocleft]
h. [Who_i Fido bit t_i] was he bit John. [Amalgamated Pseudocleft]
i. [[The more cats]_i Fido bit t_i], [[the more dogs]j Felix scratched tj ].
[Left and right sides of Correlative Comparatives]
In all these examples, the expression on the left periphery that
is coindexed with the trace is called the filler, or extractee, or
dislocated expression.

It seems likely that the dislocated "ang" in the Tagalog construction above can be analyzed as Overt Movement in this sense.

This list seems to capture what Goldber 1995 referred to as nonbasic constructions:

... it is not being claimed that all clause-level constructions encode scenes basic to human experience. Nonbasic clause-level constructions such as cleft constructions, question constructions, and topicalization constructions (and possibly passives) are primarily designed to provide an alternative information structure of the clause by allowing various arguments to be topicalized or focused. Thus children must also be sensivtive to the pragmatic information structure of the clause (Halliday 1967) and must learn additional constructions which can encode the pragmatic information structure in accord with the message to be conveyed. These cases are not discussed further here (cf. Lambrecht 1987, 1994).

This would hint that passives are not to be analyzed the same way. Also, the intentional "design" might be glossed as "statistically selected to fill the social function." What representation might be suitable for this pragmatic information structure?

The dislocated "ang" introduces a trace for the intiator of the event of the specified VP, and the predicative noun characterizes that initiator with a common noun type. It is a bit like the Free Relative construction, but with a nominal-type predicate instead of a subject-specified action-verb predicator. So the pragmatic information might be glossed: "[(it) (was) a woman]_i [whoever_i bought the lanzones fruit]"

Onomasiology

2008-09-05T21:11:00.000-07:00

I learned a new word today,

a branch of linguistics concerned with the question "how do you express X?". ...as a part of lexicology, departs from a concept (i.e. an idea, an object, a quality, an activity etc.) and asks for its names. The opposite approach is known as semasiology: here one departs from a word and asks what it means, or what concepts the word refers to.

It seems to be a field relevant to the distinctions in lexical field.

English	Cebuano	Tagalog
Seed	Lisu	Butó
Bone (Tetrapod)	Bukóg	Butó
Bone (Fish)	Bukóg	Tiník
Thorn	Tunók	Tiník

I should gather data for these concepts from several Central Philippine languages, and see what it tells me about shared derived characters.

"The coinage of a new designation can be incited by various forces (cf. Grzega 2004):

difficulties in classifying the thing to be named or attributing the right word to the thing to be named, thus confusing designations
fuzzy difference between superordinate and subordinate term due to the monopoly of the prototypical member of a category in the real world
everyday contact situations
institutionalized and non-institutionalized linguistic pre- and proscriptivism
flattery
insult
disguising things (i.e. euphemistic language, doublespeak)
taboo
avoidance of words that are phonetically similar or identical to negatively associated words
abolition of forms that can be ambiguous in many contexts
word play/punning
excessive length of words
morphological misinterpretation (creation of transparency by changes within a word = folk-etymology)
deletion of irregularity
desire for plastic/illustrative/telling names for a thing
natural prominence of a concept
cultural-induced prominence of a concept
changes in the world
changes in the categorization of the world
prestige/fashion (based on the prestige of another language or variety, of certain word-formation patterns, or of certain semasiological centers of expansion)

The following alleged motives found in many works have shown to be invalid by Grzega (2004): decrease in salience, reading errors, laziness, excessive phonetic shortness, difficult sound combinations, unclear stress patterns, cacophony."

- Onomasiology, Wikipedia, citing:

Grzega, Joachim (2004), Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Ein Beitrag zur englischen und allgemeinen Onomasiologie. Heidelberg: Winter, ISBN 3-8253-5016-9. (reviewed by Bernhard Kelle in Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik vol. 73.1 (2006), p. 92-95)

Web journals touching on lexical semantics and computational linguistics

2008-09-05T02:11:00.000-07:00

Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT)

Semantics and Pragmatics

Linguistik Online

Onomasiology Online

- Helpful Internet Sources: links to online dictionaries and linguistic atlases

papers on the Web September 2008

2008-09-04T18:41:00.000-07:00

Brett Kessler

Kessler, B. (2007). Word similarity metrics and multilateral comparison. In Proceedings of Ninth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Morphology and Phonology (6–14). Stroudsburg PA:Association for Computational Linguistics.
Kessler, B. (2007, July). Better than chance? Randomization models for evaluating whether lexical similarity implies historical connection. Paper presented at the Workshop on Alternative Approaches to Language Classification, Stanford, CA.

Kessler's encyclopedia entry on Language Families

2008-09-04T17:30:00.000-07:00

Brett Kessler. (in Press). Language Families. . In Hogan, P. C. (Ed.). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences.
http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/~bkessler/CELS/Language_Families.pdf

He points out that it is a model divergence, not similarity that is the basis of family relationships.

"... a particular model of LANGUAGE CHANGE: divergence. When innovations in one part of a language community fail to spread to other parts, differences accumulate until the community can be said to speak different languages."

"there is no requirement that cognates be similar at all (e.g., English two is related to Armenian yerku), and many sources of similarity are disavowed as being irrelevant to the model. These include borrowing (see CONTACT, LANGUAGE), onomatopoeia, universals (ABSOLUTE AND STATISTICAL UNIVERSALS), and chance similarities."

The problem I am interested in related to the Bisayan subfamily is called cladogenesis: "Subgrouping seeks to uncover the history of the divergence (cladogenesis) of a language family." What is important is not to look for cognate sets, but for a sister subfamily that has a base character rather than an member of the cognate set.

"the linguist looks for evidence that some proper subset of those languages may have descended from an intermediate common ancestor. This is done by looking for shared innovations (synapomorphies) – sound changes or new words or grammatical constructions that were not in the ancestor language but are found in two or more of the descendant languages."

"some of Greenberg’s key ideas can be transformed into algorithmic (reproducible) methodologies that introduce to language family research the benefit of statistical significance testing. Oswalt’s procedure (1998) minimized experimenter bias by requiring that a specific concept list be used and that one specify in advance specific criteria for measuring degree of similarity between two languages. Baxter and Manaster Ramer (2000) added reliable significance testing procedures based on randomization tests. Kessler and Lehtonen (2006) adapted the technique to handle multiple languages in a single test, informally confirming Greenberg’s claim that such large-scale comparisons are inherently more powerful than two-language comparisons. Ringe (1992; see Kessler 2001 for extensive discussion and methodological refinements) measured not similarity but the number of recurrent sound correspondences. This has the advantages both of being closer to the traditional comparative method and of generating correspondences useful for subgrouping and reconstruction. Disappointingly, however, none of these neo-Greenbergian techniques found evidence for the deep relations that were advertised for the original, impressionistic, method."

There may be hope for quantifying evidence.

"The recent development of computational cladistic methods similar to those used in biology (e.g., Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor 2002) is a tremendous advance in helping the linguist find optimal trees. In addition, several solutions to the problem of borrowing have emerged in the form of programs that construct networks instead of trees. Shared innovations that cannot be cleanly attributed to a shared ancestor are taken as evidence of contact, obviating somewhat the need to make a priori judgments about whether borrowing was involved (e.g., Bryant, Philimon, and Gray 2005; Nakhleh, Ringe, and Warnow 2005)."

"Recent computer techniques add simplicity, reproducibility, and quantitative rigor to methodologies for proving relationships between languages, but so far there has been no noticeable increase in power over what experts are able to do by hand."

References

Baxter, William H. and Alexis Manaster Ramer, 2000. “Beyond Lumping and Splitting: Probabilistic Issues in Historical Linguistics.” In Time Depth in Historical
Linguistics, ed. Colin Renfrew, April McMahon and Larry Trask, 167–188. Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Blust, Robert. 1999. “Subgrouping, Circularity and Extinction: Some Issues in Austronesian Comparative Linguistics.” In Selected Papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, ed. E. Zeitoun and P. J. K Li, 31–94. Taipei: Academia Sinica.
Bryant, David, Flavia Filimon, and
Russell D. Gray. 2005. “Untangling Our Past: Languages, Trees, Splits and Networks.” In The Evolution of Cultural Diversity: A Phylogenetic Approach, ed. Ruth Mace, Clare J. Holden, and Stephen Shennan, 69–85. London: UCL Press.
Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton University Press
Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.). 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 15th ed. Dallas, TX: SIL International. Content also available online at http://www.ethnologue.com/
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. “The Languages of Africa.” International Journal of American Linguistics, supplement 29(1), pt. 2.
Greenberg, Joseph H., 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H., 2002. Indo-European and its Closest Relatives: the Eurasiatic Language Family: Lexicon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kessler, Brett, 2001. The Significance of Word Lists. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Kessler, Brett and Annukka Lehtonen. 2006. “Multilateral Comparison and Significance Testing of the Indo-Uralic Question.” In Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages, ed. P. Forster and C. Renfrew, 33–42. Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Mallory, J. P. 1989. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and
Myth. London: Thames & Hudson.
Nakhleh, Luay, Don Ringe, and Tandy Warnow. 2005. “Perfect Phylogenetic Networks: A New Methodology for Reconstructing the Evolutionary History of Natural Languages.” Language 81: 382–420.
Oswalt, Robert L., 1998. “A Probabilistic Evaluation of North Eurasiatic Nostratic.” In Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence, ed. J. C. Salmons and B. D. Joseph, 199–216. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Renfrew, Colin. 1987. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. London: Pimlico.
Ringe, Don A., Jr., 1992. On Calculating the Factor of Chance in Language Comparison. Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society.
Ringe, Don, Tandy Warnow, and A. Taylor. 2002. “Indo-European and Computational Cladistics.” Transactions of the Philological Society 100: 59–129.
Swadesh, Morris, 1955. “Towards Greater Accuracy in Lexicostatistic Dating.” International Journal of American Linguistics 21: 121–37.
Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kessler's home page.

His thesis at Stanford was on:

Thesis title: Estimating the Probability of Historical Connections Between Languages. Available through UMI. However, a significantly revised version is published by CSLI Publications under the titleThe Significance of Word Lists: Statistical Tests for Investigating Historical Connections Between Languages and is distributed by The University of Chicago Press (2001; ISBN cloth 1-575862-99-9, paper 1-575863-00-6). From the preface:

recognizing different levels of regularity in a lexicogrammar model of linguistic attunement

2008-08-31T02:37:00.000-07:00

lexical rules may themselves be meaning-bearing "constructions" of several morphemes at a level smaller that a phrase.

1. utterance token
2. construction instance, wordform, morph
3. construction class, lexical item, morpheme
4. schematic construction, lexical rule, derivation pattern of morphemes (abstraction over a class, reducing it to essential elements)
5. relations of constructions (central, peripheral)
6. hierarchical lexicogrammar

2b. referring act or speech act segment of building a shared information state

For Austronesian,

study morpholexical constructions of stems in usage as different parts of speech

Goldberg + "Construction as Categorization of Language"

"Exactly which categories are formed is determined to a great extent by the usefulness of a potential category in predicting how the environment will behave. ... Function plays an obvious and important role in determining what is categorized and affords similar predictive value to the category. ... When it comes to language, clearly the relevant predictive tasks are to predict meaning, given the form (comprehension) and to predict form, given meaning (production). Thus given the fact that constructions relate critical aspects of form and meaning, their acquisition is well-motivated. Accordingly, earlier work has emphasized the role of prediction in language learning, and has shown that constructions are good predictors of overall sentence meaning, useful for conveying “who did what to whom” (Bencini & Goldberg, 2000; Goldberg, Casenhiser, & Sethuraman, 2005)."

Thomas of Erfurt on modes of signifying

Relations and roles in action verbs

2008-08-30T01:58:00.000-07:00

Language speakers or signers use a verb to pick out a constraint in a scene (or a less concrete situation, often by metaphor) where something is happening. The verb classifies the scene with as an event type, and the verb-constraint is the relation of the Before subscene-type to an After subscene type. Attunement to the verb-constraint allows a speaker-hearer who recognizes (and perhaps expresses with) the verb to construct a shared information state with a number of expected participants, some of which are obligatory in the syntax. What is happening in the action scene is there is a relevant shift from a Before configuration of participants to an After configuration. There may be many different relations picked out in the scene (to a greater or lesser extent), but the most important one is the verb-constraint linking Before and After. It allows the users of the verb-containing utterance to acquire information about the action scene in time, that the action started presupposing the participants in the Before subscene-type and resulted in a situation of an After subscene-type with the participants in a new configuation. A clausal expression predicates that the verb-constraint obtains in the action scene, and creates conditions of satisfaction for a successful communicative act. The receiver of the utterance, if attuned to the verb-constraint, can understand those conditions of satisfaction which can affect their cognition via a shared information state and subsequently their perception and action in the world.

Other relations in the action scene are between the participants. However, certain relations are made explicit by the form of the utterance, by the relation of the participant argument (typically a referring phrase, an NP) to the head verb. The most important (and thus least oblique) argument role defines a relation to the action mentioned by the head verb called a thematic role of Agent. This is in a world where relevant action is performed by other humans, or animals that behave with intentionality and volition similar to humans. A more general thematic role that does not require intention is Effector. Both Agents and Effectors pick out the Initiator of an action occurring. In the Stanford CSLI Verb Semantic Ontology, the two are sometimes not distinguished, and assigned the thematic Role of EFNT, which I guess means Effector-Agent but could simple be pronounced Initiator.

A prototypical type of action scene involves an Agent manipulating an object in the scene. That object may take the role of Patient or Theme. A Patient is structurally changed by the Action, while a Theme may be moved, said or experienced but does not undergo structural change.

Sowa's IRMPACO ontology in Appendix B of his book Knowledge Representation [Sowa 2000] sets out 18 thematic roles, classified according to four kinds that are reminiscent of Aristotle's four aitiae (singluar aitia), traditionally translated as causes (effective, material, formal, ultimate). In an orthogonal dimension, they are classified as Action, Process, Transfer, Spatial, Temporal and Ambient.

It is worth analyzing those 18 roles further, in relation to Goldberg's analysis of constructions (and FrameNet's semantic frames), but that is the subject of a different posting. This a way of exploring verbs and their arguments, and can be contributed to the Stanford CSLI Semantic Verb Ontology. That resource already considers WordNet, I would want to explore mappings to COBUILD and FrameNet.

prototypical scenes of manipulative activity in grammar, lexicon and concept acquisition

2008-08-29T17:25:00.000-07:00

I am reading Goldberg 1995 on Constructions, and she cites Slobin's observation that "children's first use of grammatical markings are applied to 'prototypical scenes'," and that transitivity ("the object of a verb") begins with "manipulative activity scenes".

We can take this thinking beyond grammar, to the cognitive grounding of object recognition. [Note that object in this context refers to an ontological object, Sowa's Independent Physical Continuant; not as in the earlier use of the word to mean the grammatical function of Direct Object] Of course children already have visual object recognition, but that may be primarily in the procedural circuit (the child's own manipulations), not yet define the the discrete schemes of semantic memory since they are still acquiring their first language. To some extent there is likely a discrete conceptual scheme of perceived objects (seen and touched, or for food tasted and smelled), but this is just starting to be mapped to a verbal scheme with phonological forms triggering lexical constructions. In a sense, the lexical constructions must be in the head, but the relationship of semantic types with the phonological form is almost completely conventional (but see my previous remarks on the motivated relationship between sign language morphology and semantics).

We may be realist about the semantic types (they are "out there" in the extra-mental world), but even if we aren't (they might be Saussure's signifieds) the conventional relationship is surely out there in the social world of conventions.

During early stages of concept then word acquisition, what is the underlying (to some extent innate) scheme infrastructure or type system and what are the culturally shaped concept or word schemas? Scheme refers to a more or less extensive scheme of individuation with situations, situation-types, object-types, relations and parametrized states of affairs (infons). A schema refers to a specific complex type that is instantiated during a particular occurrent cognitive process or utterance. Characterizing this needs to consider what happens with otherwise cognitively-normal children who can acquire concept schemas, but have disability barriers to proceeding to word schemas, i.e. language-isolated deaf children. An account adequate for normal (evolutionarily speaking) and variant humans also needs to make sense with other hominids in evolutionary time and their conceptual schemas or counterpart. Certainly all hominids have sophisticated visual object recognition, and to some extent classify visual object types (according to use value?). What is the difference with a human scheme for discrete semantic memory, verbal or non-verbal?

If children begin their grammar acquisition as observed, then "object markers is accusative languages and subject markers in ergative languages are first applied to the arguments of verbs involving direct physical action, e.g. give, grab, take, hit, and not to those of verbs such as say, see, call out."

I might point out that in basal Austronesian languages, many manipulative verbs have a preferred accusative-type transitivity, while certain other experience verbs have a preferred ergative-type transitivity (either patient or locative/dative). [Need to test this intuition with examples.]

Goldberg's objective is to characterize the most senses of common phrasal constructions, and to understand the relationship with other less central senses. Her example is the ditransitive construction in English:

Central sense: Agent successfully causes recipient to receive patient
- verbs that inherently signify acts of giving: give pass hand serve feed ...
- verbs of instantaneous cause of ballistic motion: throw toss slap kick poke fling shoot ...
- verbs of __: bring take ...

Conditions of Satisfaction imply that agent causes recipient to receive patient
- verbs of __: guarantee promise owe ...
Agent causes patient not to receive patient
- verbs of __: refuse, deny ...
A acts to cause R to receive P at some future point in time
- verbs of __: leave bequeath allocate reserve grant ...
A enables R to receive P
- verbs of __: permit allow ...
A intends to cause R to receive P
- verbs of __: bake make build cook sew knit ...
- verbs of __: get grab win earn ...

I have left some descriptions blank, to test myself on reconstructing them later. Then I need to check how the corresponding concept schemas behave with verbs in Austronesian languages.

Although this work is about grammatical objects in a transitive construction, I also want to relate it to the metaphysical-cognitive basis of objects in general. It is possible to consider situation-types and particularly events or scenes as prior to the individuation of object-types.

Hominids scanning their visual field bring attentional focus to "what is happening". They may referential actions (like pointing, or naming, or mentioning the noun of an object type, or structure noun phrases) to achieve a shared information state with an interlocutor hominid. The salience of this reference often depends of change of position or location (during manipulation, for example) or change of state. Individuating a perceived thing as a continuant object is premised on scenes where something or nothing of interest is happening. And proceeding beyond NP's to clauses, happening scenes or events get clasified by the verbal relations, where the subscene before the individuated action is a situation-type that stands in the mentioned relation to the same subscene after the action. Picking out such a dimension of an event happening is precisely what it means to mention an action with a verb.

So a verb-defined action-relation that is not just a simple relation (like those of propositions and some modifiers) but a constraint between a before-subscene and an after-subscene. The constraint is a meaning bearing relation, that among other things allows the speaker-hearer to pick out a change in the configuration of participants in the action scene. The participants as objects (or persons or creatures or stuff) are involved in the scene in a particular participant role. At the meta-level these participant roles can be considered at a fine granularity (appropriate to a specific verb), a medium granularity (in a semantic frame, possibly a role unique to only a few frames), or a the coarse granularity of thematic roles that are visible in syntax, and this may itself divide into positions in obliqueness-ordered argument structure and grammatical functions as subject and/or complements. In some Austronesian languages like Tagalog/Filipino, the ang is both determiner and marker and the ang-marked NP is both a subject and simultaneously a complement with surface case marking.

Not all verbs are action verbs, there are also stative verbs. "Words like remain, bother, appear, and exist are verbs, but do not involve any action." [Kim and Sells 2008] In agglutinative Austronesian, there are many roots which are flexibly verb or noun depending on the affixation, and yet take arguments (scene participants) in either discourse context.

So action verb relations are information-bearing constraints. The prototypical scenes that they describe or manifest speech acts involve constraints like cooccurrence, causation, volitional intention, and non-volitional intentionality (like passive perception). A set of named constraints including these might provide a controlled vocabulary or ontology for describing the meaning contributions of specific senses of a phrasal or lexical construction. What is FrameNet doing in this area?

[Kim and Sells 2008] Jong-Bok Kim and Peter Sells. English Syntax: An Introduction. CSLI, 2008.

sign language phonology-semantics is NOT unmotivated

2008-08-29T01:58:00.000-07:00

I am reading Kim and Sells 2008 [1] (http://web.khu.ac.kr/~jongbok/research/eng-syn-draft.pdf ), an HPSG undergraduate text on the syntax of English. They cite Saussure:

The first well-known property (as emphasized by Saussure 1916) is that there is no motivated relationship between sounds and meanings. This is simply observed in the fact that the same meaning is usually expressed by a different sounding-word in a different language (think of house, maison, casa). For words such as hotdog, desk, dog, bike, hamburger, cranberry, sweetbread, their meanings have nothing to do with their shapes. For example, the word hotdog has no relationship with a dog which is or feels hot. There is just an arbitrary relationship between the word’s sound and its meaning: this relationship is decided by the convention of the community the speakers belong to.

However, onomatopoeia shows there can be some link. And for sign language phonology, there is a very extensive link between the spatial and movement aspects of the gestures and the spatial and movement elements of the described situation. There is still a certain arbitrariness to the codified conventions of, let us say, vocabulary, but there is a significant relationship which plays a role in interpretation (and mnemonics).

They go on to discuss another principle:

The second important feature of language, and one more central to syntax, is that language makes infinite use of finite set of rules or principles, the observation of which led the development of generative linguistics in the 20th century (cf. Chomsky 1965). A language is a system for combining its parts in infinitely many ways. One piece of evidence of the system can be observed in word-order restrictions. If a sentence is an arrangement of words and we have 5 words such as man, ball, a, the, and kicked, how many possible combinations can we have from these five words? More importantly, are all of these combinations grammatical sentences? Mathematically, the number of possible combinations of 5 words is 5! (factorial), equalling 120 instances. But among these 120 possible combinations, only 6 form grammatical English sentences:

Now at the general level, I think this claim is quite true of sign languages. However, there is a problem in generalizing the idea that rules are strictly combinatorial. This is an artifact of the serializing channel of phonemes, while sign languages have multiple concurrent channels of emic elements, that combine in space-dependent ways. So you can't take factorials to characterize sign language rules.

They cite Chomsky's notion of grammatical competence an internalized: "Competence refers to speakers’ internalized knowledge of their language." They side with Chomsky's Cartesian "meaning-in-the-head" position. But can't meaning be at least partly in the world? Taking a Gibsonian ecological psychology stance (or the position of Clark and Chalmers), can't we use the external perceived word as a major memory support structure? This might be a bit limited for sounds of speech, but there is more opportunities with the spaces of signs. Think of how pronouns in sign language are created in discourse. Signers establish a place in space, then refer back to it by pointing. Or they might count of a set of individuals on their fingers, then come back to each finger. So knowledge, including rules, may not be completely in the head. This reminds me of Barwise's realism about types and "constraints" (relations between two situation-types) in his relational theory of meaning. If situation-theoretic constraints are realities in the extramental world, then it seems meaning is in the world, and it is attunement to constraints that is (partly) in the head. I say partly, because attunement to language in practice cannot be a "private language," it involves a shared scheme of individuation of linguistic conventions. There may be some innate base for the conventions, the neural correlates of a the bare bones of a linguistic type system, but the cognitive structures get tuned to a speech communities linguistic constraints. Even a cat gets their binocular vision tuned to the regularities of the external world, a proven by monocular cats with no depth vision.

I am sure I will have more commentary to come.

----------------

[1] English Syntax: An Introduction Jong-Bok Kim and Peter Sells

"wanna" is a lexical item, not just a contraction

2008-08-28T19:24:00.000-07:00

I was reading The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction (Georges Rey) [REVISED: August 15, 2008] and came across this:

"An ungrammatical sentence like “Bill is the man I wanna take a walk” might suffice on occasion for thought and communication (of “Bill is the man who I want to take a walk,”), but it's a striking fact that speakers of English—even four-year old ones!—nevertheless find it problematic (see Crain and Lillo-Martin 1999)."

event-types, and emic signals in sign phonology

2008-08-21T16:51:00.000-07:00

This needs cleaning up, but I figured I should post this in draft form, so I don't lose it.

How do signs pick out place?

Dominant-Hand emic signal

shape
orientation

Nondominant-Hand Shape emic signal

shape
orientation

Configuration

Start Config
Motion

path
manner
repeat

End Config

Non-Manual emic signal

Face
Eyes
Eyebrows
Lips
Shoulders

Compare with speech utterances:
Syllables

Initial
Rime

nucleus
coda

Tone (only in tonal languages like Chinese or Thai)
Prosody

Humanly relevant scene

a token situation accessible to physical perception

Event-type

a way of classifying scenes and other locations as located in Place and Time

Simple event-type

one participant + speaker

recognize object (e.g. Proper Name, or deictic Mama)

identity condition, a later ocurrent percept is the same object
discrete memory (as opposed to procedural memory)
tracked or inferred continuant

recognize happening (precursor to Action)

precondition situation
result situation
situation properties (e.g. manner)

Referential event-type

Refer to an object of a type

speaker and hearer share schema for that type in their schemes of individuation
types are made explicit in the scene, such as via an utterance (noun phrase)
conditions of success -- may fail to refer successfully
may be performed with eye gaze, head glance, deictic pointing (e.g. hand), or uttering a common noun, or a pronoun
anaphoric resolution; successive references may refer to the same index in discourse
modifiers of a head noun help resolve which of several possible objects are the target of referring

Speech Act event-type (clause, headed by a predicate that is usually a verb, or else a complement to a copula)

Request Action

Conditions of Satisfaction: hearer acts so that mentioned action results obtain in the world

Assert Action

Conditions of Satisfaction: the world matches the mentioned action result

Assert State

Conditions of Satisfaction:: the world or world objects have properties that match the mentioned state

Promise Action

Conditions of Satisfaction:: the speaker takes action so that the mentioned action results obtain in the world

Typical Humanly-Relevant Scene

Agent1

locomote
move body-part
manipulate object.graspable
perceive
display

eye gaze
body movement

facial expression

smile, frown

gesture

vocal

laughter, crying
cry out for attention
utterance

speech
sign language utterance

cause
experience

Agent2

receive
affected
beneficiary

Thing1

move

path

start
end

have-state

Thing2

instrument
channel-of-motion

Place1

Place2 (part of Place1)

Time.Duration1

Time.Duration2
Time.Point1

Action-relation

Precondition situation
Result situation
Constraint

information-bearing
causal constraint

Limits of Formal Ontology

2008-08-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

I am thinking of volunteering to help with the Stanford-CSLI Semantic Verb Ontology, which would involve studying Prolog.

A passage in Sowa's Knowledge Representation book Appendix B reminded me of how heroically radical some of the assumptions of Formal Ontology are.

An informal ontology may be specified by a catalog of types that are either undefined or defined only by statements in a natural language. A formal ontology is specified by a collection of names for concept and relation types organized in a partial ordering by the type-subtype relation.

This fixes a set of names, in a lexical ontology, the set of lexical items in the shared verbal lexicon of the speech/sign community. More questionable is that it fixes the set of types, where the cognitive reality may be dynamically changing family resemblances of language games.

This seems to be committed to the tradition of compositional semantics from lexical tokens. In construction grammar, the constructions themselves contribute meaning, not just the lexical items. Perhaps it is possible to rescue a multi-level compositionality, as in the type hierarchy of HPSG-style CxG (in Sag's draft), but again maybe not.

Also, there seems to be a tradition strong autonomy of the grammar (the syntax, and also the structural semantics) from the lexicon (with its lexical semantics). On the other hand, systemic functional theories have long emphasized an integrated lexicogrammar as the field where functional choices are made.

Verb Semantic Ontology

2008-08-17T16:56:00.000-07:00

On the Conceptual Graphs List, John Sowa mentioned this project that started at IBM and involved VivoMind, including Arun Majumdar.

Some of the people involved: Beth Levin and John F. Sowa, Bonnie J. Dorr (Lexical Conceptual Structure), Martha Palmer (VerbNet), Timothy Chklovski (VerbOcean ), and, Charles Fillmore ( FrameNet ).

The boundary between words and nonwords, the Borgmann project to list all words of English

2008-08-17T00:20:00.000-07:00

I watched a lecture by Chris Cole on Google Tech Talks:

The Borgmann Project: Listing all the Words in English
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU_CiErwkFA#

Here is a critical blog post on it:
http://cqs.livejournal.com/48862.html

By eternally stressed semanticist Lance Nathan, at U Penn Linguistics.

I am more sympathetic to the project. I like his insight that the "list" will be a process that finds a stable solution from top down (generating rules to get probabilities) and bottom up (occurrences in a corpus).

words as embedded signs

2008-07-28T17:40:00.000-07:00

cuil.com is in the news, when I tried it for "lexical semantics", it led me to discover this nice picture from http://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/classes/c661/words.html

It reminds the user of many-to-many relationships of words as signs (sound-meaning correspondences), and embeds these not-so-autonomous language modules in the perception-action loops a brain has with the word. Syntax is missing, since this diagram is restricted to content words. Where would it fit in?

Saccade perdurantism and macrobody naturalized identity theory

2008-06-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

I think that some traditional positions in ontology and epistemology are too ambitious for addressing the mind-body problem.

Since Einstein, the conception of spacetime allows us to think of ordinary objects as having worldlines, like worms in four dimensions. But as far as visual objects are concerned, this is only accessible at the granularity of saccades. The impression of an individual saccade is not accessible to consciousness. The visual object recognition faculty involves cognizing a perdurant object across saccades.

This granularity warns us that ordinary cognition is quite different from instrument-aided scientific observation. We cognize macro-bodies and the relations they stand in, not the micro-particles and interactions of traditional physicalism. So in studying the schemes of individuation underlying ordinary cognition, cognition researchers are interested in the spatial granularity that can be discerned by unaided vision, and the temporal granularity that binds successive saccades.

Primates can track moving objects, and have some innate and acquired schemas for classifying them. The motion of an object is one of the things that gives it interest value. When do social primates develop a shared acquired scheme? If we refer to a shared acquired schema (for a type of visual object) as a visual concept, how are visual concepts related to other concepts? And how do these various concepts fit into the shared scheme of individuation of cognizing hominins? In what way are these concept-level schemes a pre-adaptation for the lexical-level schemes of language?

What mechanisms are there for acquiring a shared concept schemas in the absence of language? Deaf cognition, both in acquiring sign language lexis and the concept schemas of linguistically-isolated deaf children, provide interesting evidence.

How do hominins individuate the mental causes of the macro-behavior of other hominins. What can we say about the imputed psychic-substance (in the Aristotelian sense of ousia, not in the Cartesian sense of res cogitans) that bears beliefs and desires? For Aristotle, the psyche is the form of a human being that is hylomorphically inseparable from the body. Descartes had reasons for insisting on a separation are historically interesting, but no longer contemporarily relevant (I suspect they have to do with a compromise with theology about the domain of scientific truth, after the lesson of Galileo's house arrest; and Descartes' Platonic focus on Reason as a precursor to the enlightenment). Today, cognitive researchers focus on the embodied mind.

One hypothesis is that there is a mental-state-recognizing faculty, perhaps not so different from the face-recognizing faculty, an innate competence that acquires specific content in performance. It undergirds a capacity to individuate macro-objects. There is a relatively limited set of dimensions of classifying faces (certainly male vs. female, child vs. adult; but most faces are sui generis), what about the classification of mental states, in hominins with and without language?

Faces are directly perceived (for the blind, using hands not eyes), while a mental state is a "causal object" that is readily-inferred and not directly perceived. In a sense, mental-state recognition is more like phonology or melody recognition, which is layered above the impressions of direct acoustic perception. Recognizing beliefs and desires is related to causal explanation of hominin action. Here I mean explanation in a pre-linguistic sense, accounting for the constraints relating a motivating situation to an action result.

Even non-linguistic hominins need to classify hominin behavior, and recognizing the beliefs and desires (among other mental states) is clearly selective for the species. It would be interesting to review the data from research on ape language. We can be quite skeptical about whether chimp behavior is language, but we would still like to understand the capacity of chimps to cognize the beliefs and desires of other hominins (chimp and human). This is related to their own repertoire of facial, gestural and vocal displays, and how they recognize intended displays in others. Unlike the colors in a butterfly wing, primate displays are muscle-controlled, and a caused by intention-in-action. How does a primate discern the underlying intentions-in-action, and what is the "vocabulary" (which may be infra-lexical concepts) that are shared between intentions-in-action, desires, and beliefs?

What makes two mental states "the same"? Let us start with recognizing that two visual objects are the same object and the same type of object. If an object is visually tracked, they our unconscious visual processing and visual object recognition individuates a single object with identity over time. If we lose sight of an object, or go to sleep, how does a hominin identify a later sighting as the same object, or the same type of object? We may distinguish between the categories of objects that receive proper names (people, places, pets), and those that don't. Even those that are referred to only by common nouns, some may be relevant to action as particular objects, and hominins may refer to them indexically (and deictically) as this fruit here, or my handaxe.

To the extent a hominin's cognitive ontology recognizes two sightings of a visual object as the same particular object, there is a moderate risk of error. If it is sufficient to guide action to recognize an object as of the same type (a mouse, a vegetable), the hominin may not distinguish particular instances.

The identity of persons is different from that of most animals (pets being a transitional case). We attribute a psyche to persons, and we recognize and remember details of that psyche (what does that person believe, or typically desire) as a basis of classifying their macro-behavior in terms of occurrent causal mental states.

When are two mental states "the same" mental state? We can distinguish between an occurrent thought, and a remembered mental state. Generally, there is no relevance to action associated with the continuous identity of an occurrent thought, a belief held yesterday and today is a single belief, for purposes of classifying observed behavior in terms of causal intention-in-action. When humans think of the same type of mental state, they use a discrete scheme of individuation at the lexical or sub-lexical concept level. These concept schemals (including lexical schemas, if present) are shared by a social group.

The shared concept schemas of mental states are unique relative to other cognized entitites, because they can be shared between the observed hominin and the observing hominins. Perhaps a new concept is acquired at first as a commonality between two observed hominins. However, it seems inevitable that the observing hominin will also experience that mental state in sympathy. At any rate, it seems most mental states have a first-person character or qualia. The entire scheme of individuating mental states is distinguished from other parts of the cognitive scheme of individuation because of this intrinsic first-and-third person character, while non-mental entities have only a third-person character. This accounts of Descartes' intuition (and Ewing's) that res cogitans is a different substance from res extensa. However, with our improved understanding of biological matter and processes, we can in fact provide a hylomorphic account of mental entities, and the lead to substance dualism is unjustified. But mental properties are different from non-mental properties, but not in a way that requires supernatural intervention. We can naturalize our scientific explanations of mental states, and folk psychology of mental states, with a natural (but dual aspect) theory of cognition.

The material basis for a mental entity is to some extent the occurrent neural pattern that fires during an occurrent thought, but also the dynamical memory and innate genetic-ontogenic dynamical structures of the innervated body. This neurophysiological characterization suffices for explaining the third-person characteristics of mental states. To account for the first-and-third person characteristics, we need to layer on top of this the shared schemes of individuating the mental, which don't exist within a single innervated body, but are a social construct (over a shared species competence) of a group.

Cognition of Cognizing Psyches, its nature and epistemology

2008-05-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

CP cognition is a phenomenon that can be elaborated using a combination of and modern science concepts and Aristotelian concepts, recognizing that Aristotle's thought is valued and even prestigious in major religious traditions (notably both Christianity and Islam), . The analysis of CP cognition can provide a set of useful distinctions in wider ethical debates, for example those triggered by rapid changes in biotechnology.

The basic idea is that hominins evolved with a capacity to recognize the unseen causes of the behavior of other hominins. The mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions-in-action, plans, volitional-thoughts, memories of perception, memories of thought experience, etc) recognized by folk psychology are mental types, properties of an unseen mental entity that causes hominin behavior. In the terminology of Aristotle, this is a rational psuchos. The innervated bodies of hominins (including a brain made of neurons, that somehow "represents" information about the world with mental states) is a seen entity with behavior, and the behavior is caused by an unseen psyche that is nevertheless reliably cognized by (non-autistic) hominins.

Transitional Pinyin, a mixed semantic orthography

2008-05-19T22:13:00.000-07:00

I propose that some Web pages of interest to learners of Chinese language be made available in a new intermediate orthography that mixes Han Chinese characters and Latin letters. The new orthography can have several stages of difficulty, for learners at different levels. Certain words or elements that are targets for learning will have an special underline (or other visual indicator) so that a mouse over the target will cause additional information to pop up.

The orthography is nor phonologically regular like Pinyin, it recognizes the semantic value of characters and emphasizes that.

General objectives

Allow learners of spoken chinese to read as much as possible using their phonetic knowledge of spoken forms, but supplemented with semantic knowledge of the most common characters or components. The key obstacle for learners of Chinese, which is not found in languages using alphabets, is that they cannot acquire vocabulary from reading, especially if they reside outside a Chinese speaking locality. With Transitional Pinyin, they can acquire vocabulary much more quickly, especially when reading on the Web.
Use Web display technologies to allow user control of options for display.

Common policies (all stages)
Secondary readings are always transcribed as Pinyin (or some other visual indicator consistent with chosen display mode).

Stage 1: Familiarity with up to 500 characters, and a corresponding vocabulary (identify what part of HSK vocabulary should be covered)

Objective:
Develop familiarity with about 170 Radical Characters that are frequently used. Develop familiarity with the most important Hanzi families, by frequent exposure to the family "head": base component characters, or the most frequently-used radical+base form. Hanzi family is defined as a group of characters which share a phonetic component, as well as a pronunciation with the same initial and rhyme, but may have a different tone. All tones for characters are marked.
Stage 1 will use Hanzi to distinguish homophonic variants of a syllable or word (considering two syllables homophones if they have the same initial and rhyme, but possibly differing tones), considering only the most productive families and open class words.

Policies

All functional morphemes are spelled in Pinyin.
Foreign proper names and loan words are spelled as in international English (with Pinyin available as a mouse over).
Only 500 Han characters are used, and tones are marked for them. All other words and morphemes are written in Pinyin with tone marks.
Other characters in the same family as the 500 are optionally displayed, some simpler indicator is the default with Han character displayed upon mouse-over.
All the 500 Han characters are selected from the 1000 most frequently used based on corpus studies. Families with more or more productive members are preferred.
Words are separated by spaces, following a standard to be defined. As an intermediate policy, it will follow the spacing of words in the ABC Dictionary of John DeFrancis and WenLin software.
The Han characters are used as syllables in open class words (notional word categories, like noun, verb, adverb).

Stage 2: 1000 character forms (head forms of families, or selected singletons) of open class words.

Objective
Use characters to distinguish common syllables that are homophonic (ignoring tone, which is explicitly marked). Near-homophones (that have a different but related initial or rhyme or both) are prioritized for Pinyin representation.

Policies.

1000 forms are displayed.
All family-related forms (differing in radical and tone) will also be displayed by default. Some options: the radical is displayed in a different color, with a brief definition of the character and word upon mouse-over.
In addition to the 1000 character forms, all functional morphemes can be displayed as characters as a non-default option.

Stage 3. 2000+ forms

Policies
By default, all text is Hanzi but readings of a character that is not homophonic to the base form have an underline and Pinyin is displayed upon mouseover. Other options are 1) selective interlinear Pinyin (ruby text) 2) Pinyin is default for any reading not in homophonic to the regular Hanzi families, with the Hanzi form available as mouse-over, ruby or after the syllable/word.

Semantically-Annotated Pinyin Variants

All text is in Pinyin, but homophonic families (of open class words) are identified by various display options. Semantically related near-homophones are also available with a different visual indicator. The display options include: two kinds of underlining, with mouse overs; display base character and and radical separately, with a mnemonic available for exploration. Differen variants can be aligned with the various stages.

Related Concepts

Productivity
The productivity of a family base form is a function of the number of members, the closeness of pronunciation (including identical tones), the frequency of the characters in a corpus, and the frequency of words using the character in the HSK and similar learner vocabularies.

Next Steps

Prepare a text in this style, perhaps Quotations of Chairman Mao, or a culturally annotated reader based on it.

Consider how web display technology can allow the various options.

1-3P Scheme solution to zombies and Mary's Room

2008-05-13T03:18:00.000-07:00

I believe I have some useful elements to a solution to the mind-body problem. It is consistent with Searle's biological naturalism (Rediscovery of Mind) and Nagel's expansionist conception of physical mind. It partly comes from a dissatisfaction with the Antecedent Physicalism defended by John Perry in his Nicod Lectures (Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness). Perry defend's type-identity property physicalism, but doesn't point out how same token situation seen under differing aspects can have two compatible situation-types of an intrinsically different epitemological nature.

For me we need to recognize that mental entities are viewed from a qualitatively different aspect than reductively-physical entities. Mental-and-still-physical entities are picked out using a First-and-Third-Person scheme of individuation, while r-physical entities are picked out using a strictly Third-Person scheme. Mental entities are physical in an expanded sense, not in the reductive sense of traditional physicalism. Mental types are not directly perceived, but are "unseen things" reliably inferred from cognizing the behavior of conspecifics as meaningfully caused by internal mental states. This "theory of other minds" faculty is innate in (non-autistic) humans, and endows mental entities with qualia in addition to r-physical properties.

Qualia have a special kind of warrant compared to r-physical properties. Of course there are many physical properties we know without directly perceiving, properties that are directly inferrable from what we know about how the world works. This could be common sense constraints based on unaided perception, but in today's educated discourse in includes scientific constraints that ultimately rely on elaborate instrument-aided observations and (empiricist) theory-building within a strictly 3P scheme. Human knowledge of mental entities is warranted by 1-3P properties of entities that we don't directly observe. We have a cognitive certainty that a causal mental state token that is readily inferrable in a conspecific is of the same type (simple or compositionally constructed) that we would use to classify a possible token of that type in ourselves. We associate a 1P property with the token in ourselves, and extend it via the mental type to reliably attribute the same 1P property (qualia) to the observed conspecific with that mental state.

So from this perspective, are philosophical zombies possible? No, because the proposal of a creature that is physically identical to a thinking person, but has no qualia, ignores some of the 1-3P interactions of neural cells (and physical entities beyond) that dynamically shape a thinking person (both biological ontogenic development such as normal grammar, and cultural learning such as vocabulary). Mentally capable humans are explainable in terms of physical microparticles and their interactions, only if we admit 1-3P schemes as interactions between firing nerve cells and the intentional object situations (including situation with mental states) they are directed towards. And instances of these intentional mental types do cause behavior in the world, they do not merely supervene. Causation involves types, constraints between situation types, not just token situations. And some types are from 1-3P schemes.

What does Mary know when she comes out of the black and white room? First of all, her 1-3P scheme for colored entities is not relevantly similar to that of most color-sighted people. It is as if Mary is developmentally color-blind. If by some chance it turns out that Mary (or let us say her brother Mario) is genetically color-blind as well, then we have no reason to think that Mario will have qualia relevantly identical to normally color-sighted people, he will have a neural basis more like color-blind people with no qualia for red. Now if Mary has normal rod cells in her retina, she will be like the cats whose v1 was altered so that they do not have normal binocular rivalry. Mary will have to acquire a scheme of individuation for colors like red, and since it has a developmentally delayed neural basis, it may or may not be normal in its functional capacities, and the associated qualia may be quite different. We can't really know about the similarity of qualia, since we cannot assume a relevantly similar neural-cultural infrastructure.

Returning to the two-aspect terminology we can say that a naturalistic explanation of mind requires a recognition of supra-structural interactions in a 1-3P scheme, as well as infra-structural physical interactions at the level of neurophysiology that a reductive physicalist would recognize. The phrase supra-structural is not meant to imply anything supernatural. On the contrary, culture is embedded in nature and layered above the level of interactions that can be reduced to microparticles and the regularities of their 3P interactions.

1-3P regularities in cognitive schemes are not ontologically suspect, their existence is in the same token situations that a physiologist can observe with instruments, but the mental entities are individuated with the (innate then culturally developed) human cognitive capacity to pick out other minds, to readily infer the mental states causing observed behavior in conspecifics. Part of the the special warrant for these unseen mental entities in the attributed qualia, which to the extent we can confirm them with verbal communication give us an irrefutable confidence that other humans experience mental states just like we experience ourselves via our neuro-"kinesthetic" intuitions above and beyond our perceptual intuitions (in Kant's sense). External perceptions are extra-subjective, and thus epistemologically-objective "presentations" (Kant's representations) of uncontroversially ontologically-objective external entities. Cognition of mental states is inter-subjective, and in some way e-subjective (but grounded in e-objective perceptions of behavior, and confirmed by interactive social and verbal communication) "presentations" of inner causal states. Those inner causal states are just as o-objective as any other kind of entity, its just that they are of a kind within a 1-3P scheme, with their warrant supported by specifically 1-3P properties or qualia attributed to the observed conspecific. Socially (especially verbally) we cannot deny that other humans have experience and a mental life, the specific mental states of those unseen causes are just what we classify in ourselves with the same 1-3P scheme we use for the mental causes of all human behavior. Beliefs, desires and mental states are not mysterious supernatural entities, they are o-objective entities that we pick out with a e-subjective (or epistemologically inter-subjective, and socially certain) scheme. The extension of the mental state is not merely internal to a brain, it is the species-wide innate uniformity of neural structures, and society-wide (including speech-community-wide) conventions that make up a shared scheme of individuation. With a broad view of mental content, the world situations that shape the intentional mental states of humans are also part of the regularities in a 1-3P scheme, and are part of the extension of a mental state.

A theory of intentionality is not sufficient, though that can explain 3P schemes used to pick out reductively-physical entities. In addition, we have other kinds of social (but still physical, in an expansionist conception) interactions embodied in innate-cultural schemes. The mental types of these schemes cause behavior, that is a certainty we have about experience and mental life in ourselves and conspecifics. It is a kind of knowledge that is warranted, not by reductive empiricism, but by the special warrant of 1-3P schemes. We need an expanded physicalism that accepts those 1-3P schemes a supra-structural level of interaction between physiological bodies and their physical microparticles. The vocabulary of physical science (biochemistry, physiology) is not sufficient to explain experience and our certainties about mental life in ourselves and others, we need to expand it to cover mental entities and 1-3P schemes, things that are not ontologically suspect but a sound foundation for continuing research in cognitive science.

In a way, these elements are very much in tune with Perry's interests in reflexivity and indexicality. He pioneered with Barwise the use of schemes of individuation underlying situation-types. Although he may be still unwilling to take some of the steps I suggest, his use of the term "antecedent physicalism" makes me think that he is open to going beyond reductive physicalism, especially if the additional apparatus can account for indexicality and reflexivity. I think a broad research agenda in cognitive science is opening up along the path that Perry is blazing, and it only takes a few more steps to see key elements to a solution to the mind-body problem.

Balancing Fossil Energy Consumption and Population

2008-05-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

I have long been planning to write an essay debunking some myths about overpopulation, but still promoting family planning as part of a larger package for community development. I just watched a TV Ontario show (the Agenda with Steve Paikin, "Population and the Planet") thanks to Miro. This started me thinking about this again, and an outline follows. I could try to write this up and send it to a national newspaper for their editorial page.

- balancing life extension and birth rates
- demographic transition is happening, pace of transition needs managing
- false trade off with economic development, eco growth means fossil energy consumption growth
- Malthus and Ehrlich
- technology, much is
- urgency: hundred months
- illusion of national aggregates in both pop and econ

- draw down natural "capital"
- biocapacity with dynamic technology, footprint
- disaggregate: big-provincial-small islands, urban rural, top-quarter mid-half bottom-quarter income distribution

Solution
- community management capacity building
- participatory planning
- manage consumption-population balance, under dynamic technique
- change the shape of the community population pyramid
- identify state of exploitation-development of natural and built-up resources
- shift from fossil-energy consumption model to sustainable model
- incorporate closest cities, island and income distribution into model
- population side interventions, in order of priority
- education and health of women
- late maternity (pledge and incentives)
- available family planning services (both natural and artificial contraception work)
- health care participation
- spacing (schooling-related incentives)
- explicit fertility reduction targets at community level

Explicit fertility reduction targets at a national level only make sense when over half of communities have been organized to define targets at community level (a community is a metropolitan area or a cluster of similar municipalities within a province, about the size of a congressional district)

Legislative support is a discretionary spending package to municipalities which plan and manage their resource-population balance

Notes on Kant's Vocabulary

2008-05-09T01:04:00.000-07:00

So far, this is just a rearrangement of Palmquist's Glossary of Kant. It helps me clarify Kant's system, I juxtapose the key distinctions. Later I may try to add some notes. For Kant, "ideas" means something big and eternal, like Plato's Ideas or Forms, special concepts like God, freedom and immortality. My earlier posts on ideas relate to what Kant calls "concepts," of a pedestrian type.

Kant uses four perspectives, and rejects a fifth. This approach is what he means by a critical approach. He applies this approach to three standpoints, producing his three Critiques.

I take what might be called a cognitivist stance towards Kant's transcendental perspective. Rather that have some inflated ontological importance, the transcendental approach is simply a precursor to modern cognitive psychology. It generates hypothesis of the underlying structure of mind, which can be studied at various levels. I would apply at least two levels: an expansionist conception of mind, while allowing this to be grounded in the neurophysiology of the brain and ennervated bodies.

Kant's main argument is about whether "synthetic a priori judgements" are possible, so those distinctions are presented next. Other distinctions are his representations and faculties, and a few other contrasts. Then there is a set of concepts related to his Ethics, then a bunch of leftover terms

4 Perspectives
transcendental, empirical, logical and hypothetical
old metaphysics: speculative

perspective: a way of thinking about or considering something; or a set of assumptions from which an object can be viewed. Knowing which perspective is assumed is important because the same question can have different answers if different perspectives are assumed. Kant himself does not use this word, but he uses a number of other expressions (such as standpoint, way of thinking, employment of understanding, etc.) in precisely this way. The main Critical perspectives are the transcendental, empirical, logical and hypothetical.

transcendental: one of Kant's four main perspectives, aiming to establish a kind of knowledge which is both synthetic and a priori. It is a special type of philosophical knowledge, concerned with the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. However, Kant believes all knowing subjects assume certain transcendental truths, whether or not they are aware of it. Transcendental knowledge defines the boundary between empirical knowledge and speculation about the transcendent realm. 'Every event has a cause' is a typical transcendental statement. (Cf. empirical.)

transcendental object: an object considered transcendentally insofar as it has been presented to a subject, but is not yet represented in any determined way-i.e., not yet influenced by space and time or by the categories. Also called an 'object in general'.

empirical: one of Kant's four main perspectives, aiming to establish a kind of knowledge which is both synthetic and a posteriori. Most of the knowledge we gain through ordinary experience, or through science, is empirical. 'This table is brown' is a typical empirical statement. (Cf. transcendental).

logical: one of Kant's four main perspectives, aiming to establish a kind of knowledge which is both analytic and a priori. Hence it is concerned with nothing but the relationships between concepts. The law of noncontradiction (A is not -A) is the fundamental law of traditional, Aristotelian logic. (If we call this 'analytic' logic, then 'synthetic' logic would be based on the opposite law of 'contradiction' [A is -A].) 'All bachelors are unmarried' is a typical logical statement. (Cf. hypothetical.)

hypothetical: one of Kant's four main perspectives, aiming to establish a kind of knowledge which is both analytic and a posteriori (though Kant himself wrongly identified it as synthetic and a priori). Most metaphysical knowledge is properly viewed from this perspective, instead of from the speculative perspective of traditional metaphysics. 'There is a God' is a typical hypothetical statement. (Cf. logical).

speculative: the illusory perspective which wrongly uses reason in a hopeless attempt to gain knowledge about something transcendent. Sometimes used loosely as a synonym of theoretical.

Critical: Kant's lifelong approach to philosophy which distinguishes between different perspectives and then uses such distinctions to settle otherwise unresolvable disputes. The Critical approach is not primarily negative, but is an attempt to adjudicate quarrels by showing the ways in which both sides have a measure of validity, once their perspective is properly understood. Kant's system of Critical philosophy emphasizes the importance of examining the structure and limitations of reason itself.

Critique: to use the method of synthesis together with a critical approach to doing philosophy. This term appears in the titles of the three main books in Kant's Critical philosophy, which adopt the theoretical, practical and judicial standpoints, respectively. The purpose of Critical philosophy is to prepare a secure foundation for metaphysics. (Cf. metaphysics.)

metaphysics: the highest form of philosophy, which attempts to gain knowledge of the ideas. Because the traditional, speculative perspective fails to succeed in this task, Kant suggests a new, hypothetical perspective for metaphysics. Metaphysics can succeed only when it is preceded by Critique. (Cf. Critique.)

3 Standpoints
theoretical, practical and judicial

standpoint: the special type of perspective which determines the point from which a whole system of perspectives is viewed. The main Critical standpoints are the theoretical, practical and judicial.

theoretical: one of Kant's three main standpoints, relating primarily to cognition-i.e., to what we know as opposed to what we feel or desire to do. Theoretical reason is concerned with questions about our knowledge of the ordinary world (the world science seeks to understand). Finding the source of such knowledge is the task of the first Critique, which would best be entitled the Critique of Pure 'Theoretical' Reason. (Cf. practical and judicial; see speculative.)

practical: one of Kant's three main standpoints, relating primarily to action -i.e., to what we desire to do as opposed to what we know or feel. Practical reason is a synonym for will; and these two terms are concerned with questions of morality. Finding the sources of such action is the task of the second Critique. (Cf. theoretical and judicial.)

judicial: one of Kant's three main standpoints, relating primarily to experience-i.e., to what we feel, as opposed to what we know or desire to do. Judicial reason is virtually synonymous with 'Critique' itself, and is concerned with questions about the most profound ways in which we experience the world. Finding the source of two examples of such experiences is the task of the third Critique. (Cf. theoretical and practical.)

system: a set of basic facts or arguments (called 'elements') arranged according to the order of their logical relationships, as determined by the architectonic patterns of reason. Kant's Critical philosophy is a System made up of three subordinate systems, each defined by a distinct standpoint, and each made up of the same four perspectives.

Glossary of Kant's Technical Terms

by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)

The following Glossary lists Kant's most important technical terms, together with a simple definition of each. (The terms 'judicial', 'perspective' and 'standpoint' are the only ones Kant himself does not use as technical terms.) It was originally written as a study aide to help make the intricate web of Kant's terminology comprehensible to students who had little or no familiarity with Kant's writings. Where relevant, the opposite term is given in curved brackets at the end of the definition. When a word defined herein (or a slightly different form of such a word) is used in the course of defining some other word in this Glossary, its first occurrence in that definition will be in italics.

a posteriori: a way of gaining knowledge by appealing to some particular experience(s). This method is used to establish empirical and hypothetical truths. (Cf. a priori.)

a priori: a way of gaining knowledge without appealing to any particular experience(s). This method is used to establish transcendental and logical truths. (Cf. a posteriori.)

analytic: a statement or an item of knowledge which is true solely because of its conformity to some logical laws. (Cf. synthetic.)

synthetic: a statement or item of knowledge which is known to be true because of its connection with some intuition. (Cf. analytic.)

analysis: division of a representation into two opposing representations, with a view towards clarifying the original representation. Philosophy as metaphysics employs analysis more than synthesis. (Cf. synthesis.)

synthesis: integration of two opposing representations into one new representation, with a view towards constructing a new level of the object's reality. Philosophy as Critique employs synthesis more than analysis. On the operation of synthesis in the first Critique, see imagination. (Cf. analysis.)

appearance: an object of experience, when viewed from the transcendental perspective. Though often used as a synonym for phenomenon, it technically refers to an object considered to be conditioned by space and time, but not by the categories. (Cf. thing in itself.)

thing in itself: an object considered transcendentally apart from all the conditions under which a subject can gain knowledge of it. Hence the thing in itself is, by definition, unknowable. Sometimes used loosely as a synonym of noumenon. (Cf. appearance.)

phenomenon: the object of knowledge, viewed empirically, in its fully knowable state (i.e., conditioned by space and time and the categories). (Cf. noumenon.)

noumenon: the name given to a thing when it is viewed as a transcendent object. The term 'negative noumenon' refers only to the recognition of something which is not an object of sensible intuition, while 'positive noumenon' refers to the (quite mistaken) attempt to know such a thing as an empirical object. These two terms are sometimes used loosely as synonyms for 'transcendental object' and 'thing in itself', respectively. (Cf. phenomenon.)

representation: the most general word for an object at any stage in its determination by the subject, or for the subjective act of forming the object at that level. The main types of representations are intuitions, concepts and ideas. In the first Critique, the understanding is the dominant faculty in processing representations, while in the third Critique the faculty of imagination is dominant. Sometimes translated as 'presentation'.

concept: the active species of representation, by means of which our understanding enables us to think. By requiring perceptions to conform to the categories, concepts serve as 'rules' allowing us to perceive general relations between representations. (Cf. intuition.)

intuition: the passive species of representation, by means of which our sensibility enables to have sensations. By requiring appearances to be given in space and time, intuitions allow us to perceive particular relations between representations, thereby limiting empirical knowledge to the sensible realm. (Cf. concept.)

categories: the most general concepts, in terms of which every object must be viewed in order for it to become an object of empirical knowledge. The four main categories (quantity, quality, relation and modality) each have three sub-categories, forming a typical example of a twelvefold, architectonic pattern. (Cf. space and time.)

architectonic: the logical structure given by reason (especially through the use of twofold and threefold divisions), which the philosopher should use as a plan to organize the contents of any system.

ideas: the species of representation which gives rise to metaphysical beliefs. Ideas are special concepts which arise out of our knowledge of the empirical world, yet seem to point beyond nature to some transcendent realm. The three most important metaphysical ideas are God, freedom and immortality.

experience: the combination of an intuition with a concept in the form of a judgment. 'Experience' in this 'mediate' sense is a synonym for 'empirical knowledge'. The phrase 'possible experience' refers to a representation which is presented to our sensibility through intuition, but is not yet known, because it has not been presented to our understanding through concepts. 'Experience' in this sense is 'immediate' and contrasts with 'knowledge'.

judgment: in the first Critique, the use of the understanding by which an object is determined to be empirically real, through a synthesis of intuitions and concepts. The third Critique examines the form of our feelings of pleasure and displeasure in order to construct a system based on the faculty of judgment (= the judicial standpoint) in its aesthetic and teleological manifestations. (Cf. reason.)

object: a general term for any 'thing' which is conditioned by the subject's representation, and so is capable of being known. The thing in itself is a thing which cannot become an object. (Cf. subject; see thing in itself.)

subject: a general term for any rational person who is capable of having knowledge. (Cf. object; see also representation.)

objective: related more to the object or representation out of which knowledge is constructed than to the subject possessing the knowledge. Considered transcendentally, objective knowledge is less certain than subjective knowledge; considered empirically, objective knowledge is more certain. (Cf. subjective.)

subjective: related more to the subject than to the object or representation out of which knowledge is constructed. Considered transcendentally, subjective knowledge is more certain that objective knowledge; considered empirically, subjective knowledge is less certain. (Cf. objective.)

faculty: a fundamental power of human subjects to do something or perform some rational function.

understanding: in the first Critique, the faculty concerned with actively producing knowledge by means of concepts. This is quite similar to what is normally called the mind. It gives rise to the logical perspective, which enables us to compare concepts with each other, and to the empirical perspective (where it is also called judgment), which enables us to combine concepts with intuitions in order to produce empirical knowledge. The first Critique examines the form of our cognitions in order to construct a system based on the faculty of understanding (= the theoretical standpoint). (Cf. sensibility.)

sensibility: the faculty concerned with passively receiving objects. This is accomplished primarily in the form of physical and mental sensations (via 'outer sense' and 'inner sense', respectively). However, such sensations are possible only if the objects are intuited, and intuition depends on space and time existing in their pure form as well. (Cf. understanding.)

imagination: the faculty responsible for forming concepts out of the 'manifold of intuition' and for synthesizing intuitions with concepts to form objects which are ready to be judged.

schematism: the function of the faculty of imagination, through which concepts and intuitions are combined, or synthesized, according to a rule (called a schema). In the first Critique, this function is presented as one of the steps required in order for the understanding to produce empirical knowledge.

conscience: the faculty of the human subject which enforces the moral law in a particular way for each individual by providing an awareness of what is right and wrong in each situation.

reason: in the first Critique, the highest faculty of the human subject, to which all other faculties are subordinated. It abstracts completely from the conditions of sensibility. The second Critique examines the form of our desires in order to construct a system based on the faculty of reason (= the practical standpoint). Reason's primary function is practical; its theoretical function, though often believed to be more important, should be viewed as having a secondary importance. (Cf. judgment.)

will: the manifestation of reason in its practical form (see practical). The two German words, 'Willkür' and 'Wille' can both be translated in English as 'will'. Willkür refers to the faculty of choice, which for Kant is just one (empirical) function of the more fundamental faculty of practical reason (= Wille).

knowledge: the final goal of the understanding in combining intuitions and concepts. If they are pure, the knowledge will be transcendental; if they are impure, the knowledge will be empirical. In a looser sense, 'knowledge' also refers to that which arises out adopting any legitimate perspective.

constitutive: playing a fundamental role in making up some type of knowledge. (Cf. regulative.)

regulative: providing important guidelines for how knowledge should be used, yet not itself playing any fundamental role in making up that knowledge. (Cf. constitutive.)

sensible: presented to the subject by means of sensibility. (Cf. intelligible.)

pure: not mixed with anything sensible. Although its proper opposite is 'impure', Kant normally opposes 'pure' to 'empirical'.

intelligible: presented to the subject without any material being provided by sensibility. It is more or less equivalent to the terms supersensible and transcendent. (Cf. sensible.)

supersensible: see intelligible and transcendent.

transcendent: the realm of thought which lies beyond the boundary of possible knowledge, because it consists of objects which cannot be presented to us in intuition-i.e., objects which we can never experience with our senses (sometimes called noumena). The closest we can get to gaining knowledge of the transcendent realm is to think about it by means of ideas. (The opposite of 'transcendent' is 'immanent'.)

rational: grounded in the faculty of reason rather than in sensibility. (See also intelligible.)

formal: the active or subjective aspect of something-that is, the aspect which is based on the rational activity of the subject. (Cf. material.)

material: the passive or objective aspect of something-that is, the aspect which is based on the experience a subject has, or on the objects given in such an experience. (Cf. formal.)

moral law: the one 'fact' of practical reason, which is in every rational person, though some people are more aware of it than others. The moral law, in essence, is our knowledge of the difference between good and evil, and our inner conviction that we ought to do what is good. (See categorical imperative.)

categorical imperative: a command which expresses a general, unavoidable requirement of the moral law. Its three forms express the requirements of universalizability, respect and autonomy. Together they establish that an action is properly called 'morally good' only if (1) we can will all persons to do it, (2) it enables us to treat other persons as ends and not merely as the means to our own selfish ends, and (3) it allows us to see other persons as mutual law-makers in an ideal 'realm of ends'.

duty: an action which we are obligated to perform out of respect for the moral law.

religion: the way of acting, or perspective, according to which we interpret all our duties as divine commands.

autonomy: an action which is determined by the subject's own free choice (see will). In the second Critique, moral action is defined as being autonomous. (Cf. heteronomy.)

heteronomy: an action which is determined by some outside influence (i.e., some force other than the freedom given by practical reason, such as inclination) impelling the subject to act in a certain way. Such action is nonmoral (i.e., neither moral nor immoral). (Cf. autonomy.)

inclination: the faculty or object which motivates a person to act in a heteronomous way. Following inclinations is neither morally good nor morally bad, except when doing so directly prevents a person from acting according to duty-i.e., only when choosing to obey an inclination results in disobedience to the moral law.

disposition: the tendency a person has at a given point in time to act in one way or another (i.e., to obey the moral law or to disobey it). (Cf. predisposition.)

predisposition: the natural tendency a person has, apart from (or before having) any experience, to be morally good or evil. (Cf. disposition.)

maxim: the material rule or principle used to guide a person in a particular situation about what to do (e.g., 'I should never tell a lie'). It thus provides a kind of bridge between a persons inner disposition and outer actions.

aesthetic: having to do with sense-perception. In the first Critique this word refers to space and time as the necessary conditions for sense-perception. The first half of the third Critique examines the subjective purposiveness in our perception of beautiful or sublime objects in order to construct a system of aesthetic judgment. (Cf. teleological.)

Copernican revolution: in astronomy, the theory that the earth revolves around the sun; in philosophy, the (analogous) theory that the subject of knowledge does not remain at rest, but revolves around (i.e., actively determines certain aspects of) the object. Thus, the formal characteristics of the empirical world (i.e., space and time and the categories) are there only because the subject's mind puts them there, transcendentally.

faith: a rational attitude towards a potential object of knowledge which arises when we are subjectively certain it is true even though we are unable to gain theoretical or objective certainty. By contrast, knowledge implies objective and subjective certainty, while opinion is the state of having neither objective nor subjective certainty. Kant encouraged a more humble approach to philosophy by claiming to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith-i.e., by distinguishing between what we can know empirically and what is transcendent, which we can approach only by means of faith.

reality: if regarded from the empirical perspective, this refers to the ordinary world of nature; if regarded from the transcendental perspective, it refers to the transcendent realm of the noumenon.

space and time: considered from the empirical perspective, they form the context in which objects interact outside of us; considered from the transcendental perspective, they are pure, so they exist inside of us as conditions of knowledge. (Cf. categories.)

summum bonum: Latin for highest good. This is the ultimate goal of the moral system presented in the second Critique; it involves the ideal distribution of happiness in exact proportion to each person's virtue. In order to conceive of its possibility, we must postulate the existence of God and human immortality, thus giving these ideas practical reality.

teleological: having to do with purposes or ends. The second half of the third Critique examines the objective purposiveness in our perception of natural organisms in order to construct a system of teleological judgment.

time: see space and time.

On the ontology of ideas

2008-05-08T23:15:00.000-07:00

Plato, Aristotle, Saussure

Plato thought Ideas, or the Forms, existed in an ultimate reality of essential types whose immutable existence demoted the world of experience to a lower ontological status of of appearances. Aristotle rejected Ideas, and proposed hylomorphic substances (ousia, perhaps this could be translated as Substantives to avoid the confusion with ordinary and chemical substantives), that those beings that could bear predicates had inseparable matter and form.

Descartes was familiar with Aristotle's hylomorphism of Substantives, but felt that it only applied to res extensa (extensional things). He was searching to demarcate the domain of natural philosophy from the domain of theology, with Galileo's censure from the church posing an ethical and philosophical dilemma for him (but not for us). Descartes solution was a Substantive dualism, to accept hylomorphism for concrete things in spacetime (res extensa) but not for moral beings (res cogitans) like angels and souls. For the domain of moral beings, Descartes accepted the principles of theology, and used a Platonic ontology of pure ideas.

Descartes' Substantive Dualism is still with us, not that many philosophical thinkers actually advocate it, but it sets up some ontological distinctions that still bedevil us in dealing with the mind-body problem. Descartes linked the ontological distinction of Material-Substantives and Ideal-Substantives with the epistemological distinctions of empirical grounding of certainty and a rational grounding of certainty. On the issue of first principles, Descartes came down on the rationalist side, using a priori introspection to achieve certainty of self. This inaugurates an individualist stance in Western philosophy, and attributes to introspection powers that perhaps exceed what is justified by science or philosophy. Decartes put the Ideal part of the distinction of Material-Substantive and Ideal-the issue of Substantive, as the basis for a rationalist a priori certain knowledge, conceding this crucial territory to the authority of theology. It was a strategic retreat from Galileo's theory-informed empiricism, that lead to the Copernican convictions that got him in trouble with the church. Descartes retreated to secure a large territory for empirical science, which flourished in the succeding centuries.

After Newton put celestial mechanics on a mathematical foundation, Galileo's Copernican outlook gained dominance with the New Physics that he inaugurated. Kant revisited issue of the ontological grounding of certain knowledge, and sided with Hume rather than Descartes. he introduced the additional distinction of synthetic vs. analytical judgments. A posteriori judgments were already the domain of science, but a priori judgments were still subject to old-style metaphysics. Kant's new critical metaphysics tried to recover the synthetic part of a priori judgments for science. (Analytic a priori judgments were already the domain of logic). Kant did this my limiting the powers of what was accessible to human knowledge in principle. We cannot know the thing-in-itself.

Signifier and signified, applying an expansionist conception mind to language evolution

2008-05-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

I've been writing some notes an how an expansionist solution (via 1-3P schemes) to the Mind-Body program can be relevant to linguistic signs.

Sign

Actual-Signifier

Acoustic-Event-Instance classified as a Phoneme-String in a Utterance Situation-Type; or
Inscription-Token classified as a Parsed-Character-String (distinguish alphabetic and Chinese character cases)

Mental-Signified

Mental-Event-Instance (Instance of a Mental-State, a type)

A Mental-Sentence (at type, a Mental-State), constructed from lexical types in a mental lexicon using the combining rules of syntax with to generate a Shared Information State

Intentional-Object (the extramental situation of a cognized situation-type)

The propositional content of the mental sentence
Further constrained by the pragmatic situation, where speaker and hearer have Desires, Volitions and Commitments as they use Sentences in speech acts

Scheme of Individuation

3P Scheme for situations where all individuals are physical

Scheme applied to concrete physical situations, the immediate utterance context
Scheme applied to possible physical situations, e.g. planning for the future or recovering an uncertain past

1-3P Scheme where some individuals are Mental-States (Sign-using Agent uses a propositional attitude verb to characterize the cause of behavior -- belief, desire, plan -- of another Agent)

Scheme applied to immediate situation involving concrete persons with souls, the intelocutor or directly observed people
Scheme applied to possible situations involving persons with souls

Future situations, e.g. plans involving people, the people in the past and the causes of their behavior
Recovering uncertain past situations involving people and their behavior
Fictional situations

Case 1: Spoken Utterrances about Immediate Concrete Situation, No Mental States involved

Spoken Utterance, Assertive

Acoustic Event (channel is the air)
Phoneme String (generation at source and recognition at receiver)
Sincerity conditions involve the Volitional Act of the Speaker
3P Scheme of Individuation includes the Language Code shared by Speaker and Hearer

Case 2: Speech Acts involving the Desires, Volitions and Commitments of Interlocutors
- propositional content involves only 3P Scheme
- conditions of satisfaction involve mental states of the 1st-Speaker; replies may involve the mental states of the Hearer-2nd-Speaker

Case 3: Written Communication Acts about purely physical situations

The writing situation
The reading situation
The described situation

Concrete situation of writer
Concrete situation of reader (e.g. a manual with a task description)
Possible situations remote from reader and writer

Fictional situations

Case 4: Spoken Assertive Utterances about Human Behavior and Mental Causes

Case n: Written Communication Acts about physical-intentional situations

Animals with nervous systems can control motor schemas
- usually routine motor patterns
- sometimes involving selection between alternative motor-responses
- generally reflexive or instinctive, pro-volitional choice not higher cognitive Volition
- ingesting food, avoiding pain, acquiring prey, fleeing predators, mating behaviors, grooming behaviors

Animals with eyes and other sensory organs (molluscs, insects, vertebrates)
- neurally generate a percept
- percept-schemas can modulate behavior routine
- information-use behavior, where perception classifies a situation for selecting action
- this is a information-mediated feedback cycle, the nervous system is an analog control which internally governs its set points (constrained by biological survival and function)

Social animals classify the behavior of conspecifics (as well as prey, predators and commensals)

gestural and vocal displays create a shared 1-3P scheme to classify display behaviors
A mutually understood display carries a shared information state between producer and receiver
A display is a Signifier, the Shared Information State (including the mental types that combined to create it, and the occurrent representation of the state in working memory) is the Signified
The Signified is itself an intentional mental state, that has the property of directedness to some extramental situation

The extramental situation classified as a Shared Information State may be concrete, but may also have a possible situation as referent.

How did hominid memory evolve with language? Birds already have something like phonological organization of birdsong, and can recognize songs as well, presumably by their "phonemes". But they may have only a fixed repertoire of pattern schemas, perhaps nothing as productive as human speech (which is recursively generative). Also, the Signifier of a bird's song apparently has no signified, there is no lexical semantics behind the musical phrases of the song to construct a shared information state.

Presumably, the specialized vocalizations of primates (hawk-warning call vs. snake-warning call produces run-down vs. run-up behaviors) create some kind of shared information state. This could be part of the ready structure innovatively applied to semantically enable language in hominids.

Stage 1. Let us imagine a hominid species that can consistently make referring vocalizations (noun phrases), but does not yet have verbs and predications. The hominids can classify individuals using arbitary vocal signifiers. The culturally acquired repertoire of Signs is a shared scheme. it may be only a 3P scheme.

Stage 2. Let us imagine that in addition to referring vocalizations, the hominids evolve certain basic verbs to classify non-mental actions. Perhaps they use learn the 5 constructions often used by human children, and this protolanguage includes the 14 basic verbs observed (by Adele Goldberg) in those constructions:

put	X causes Y to move Z
go	X moves Y
do	X acts on Y
make	X causes Y to become Z
give	X causes Y to receive Z

Similar to go: get-1, fall, come, look, live, sit
Similar to put: get-2, take, do-2, pick
Similar to give: tell

These verbs already involve the intentional action of agents, but do not yet individuates their mentals state that might be causing their behavior.

Presumably the hominids with this 14-verb language already have a theory of other minds, they are normal social mammals not autistic. However, they still lack a vocabulary of pick out unseen mental causes as individuals.

Stage 3. Let us not imagine that the use of language of this hominid species evolves to include words like: believes, wants, plans, intends, sees, hears, requests, and promises.

How does the structure of cognitive memory of this hominid species have to evolve through each stage?

Nagel on an expansionist conception of mind

2008-05-07T21:09:00.000-07:00

"Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem"

Nagel says his position is similar to Colin McGinn but less pessimistic. I see that his position is compatible with Searle's biological naturalism, perhaps he is just dissatisfied with Searle's vague comments about emergent phenomena. He accepts supervenience, but claims that is not yet an explanation.

My own explanation has been evolving for years, basically trying to apply Barwise's concept of a scheme of individuation, where I see the scheme for mental states to be intrinsically first-person as well as third person. This accounts for the explanatory gap.

Below are some rough notes I compiled while reading Nagel's article, perhaps I will have time to clean them us some day. If I need to clarify the concept of a "verbal scheme of individuation" as part of the foundation of lexical semantics (for my planned thesis work), maybe I will need to set aside some time to come up with a clearly argued essay.

Notes on Mind:

Elements of a solution to the mind-body problem

1. Nagel: expansionist conception of mental entities.
2. Peirce: type-token distinction
3. Frege, Russell, early Wittgenstein, Barwise-Perry: atomism of situation-types
4. Searle: biological naturalism, introspection does not have complete access, epistemological-subjective can be ontological-objective
5. Perry: indexical reference?

Physicalists want an explanation of mind in terms of microparticles and their interactions. We don't need to invent any new particles, but we may need to expand the concept of interaction to allow for First-Person-Third-Person (1-3P) Schemes of Individuation.

A percept (available to any animal with eyes) is a (realist) type linking two glances at the same external object.
- below the level accessible to consciousness is the unity of neural activation patterns between saccades
- at the level of consciousness is the scanning of a scene, and integrating the successive visual impressions into a single recognition experience
- integration between perceptual modalities highlights the synesthetic experience, highly e-subjective

An occurrent concept is the interaction (within a type-level shared scheme of individuation) of two brain situation-types picking out "the same" shared information state.
- this generalizes the type-equivalence of two saccadic situation-types into a larger abstract situation-type which classifies the external token situations picked out by the two saccades, as well as future possible situation-tokens into the same type. The regularity of the external world is the wider type, but the narrow type is grounded in the regularities of a brain or several brains.
- social communication between mammals establishes externally communicated "concepts", including the precepts of a shared immediate situation.
- eye gaze ...

The token microparticles of a particular mental experience are primarily the spacetime-located firing brain cells of several individuals who shared the information states the caused the constituent concept-type elements of the experience, and secondarily the spacetime-located environment (both perceptible and enabling action) that is causally linked with those elements. The type of the mental experience is a complex relation classifying the firing processes of those brain cells and the relevant material environment via a shared scheme of individuation. The scheme is itself a biological (innate) and cultural (acquired) regularity grounded in the brain cells of an individual.

What is the gap between physical description and 1st-and-3rd-Person mental description? Physical description uses a 3P scheme, and the relations are non-dynamical and deterministic. Mental description uses a 1-3P scheme, which crucially references the 1P qualia of the mental entities.

A 1-3P scheme individuates mental entities that are literally unseen, but are readily inferrable from the observed behavior of a relevantly similar conspecific. The mental states are seen to cause the observed behavior, much as the observers own ocurrent mental states cause self-behavior via intention-in-action. The ability to cognize the unseen causal states in the minds of others is innate (in non-autistic individuals) in humans, and those mental states have intrinsic 1P properties (qualia) that are inherent in the use of a 1-3P scheme of individuation.

Mental causality is behavior caused by unseen mental states individuated through a 1-3P scheme.

Attunement to caused behavior, and the unseen mental causes that explain it, engages the hominid 1P understanding of the subject's ("my") mental will (states of intending-in-action) causing the kinesthetically accessed behavior. The kinesthetics of intention-in-action are 1P properties of the mental type, and thus are associated with an externally cognized token of that mental type as well as an introspectively cognized self-token.

The verbal-mental scheme is also 1P. The words for describing mental action (propositional attitudes) associate the "kinesthetics" of thinking a mental state with any external or internal token of that verbal type. Mental signifieds have 1P properties.

In this model, there are two layers. A mental event is a relation between nerve cells (not just the brain, the ennervated body is important) and the real or possible intentional-object of the event's mental "state". That Level One relation is part of a scheme of individuation, which could potentially be a private scheme (let us say for music at a high pitch that most humans can't hear). Then we ask what is the ontological grounding of that scheme? It turns out that there are two types of scheme, depending on an epistemological issue. Some schemes are strictly 3P, while schemes for classifying the mental states of others are 1-3P schemes, and attribute qualia to any token of the type. The qualia associated (felt, what-it-is-like-to-be) with a mental token of the observer is a neurophysiological "kinesthetic" access and very real. The qualia associated with the mental state of others is inferred, with the presupposition that they are physiologically relevantly similar in structure. The schemes are types that are grounded in species-innate regularities as well as acquired cultural concepts (notably verbal concepts), so cannot be reduced to the structure of one brain.

So occurrent mental events are tokens of a relation (a type of parametrized state of affairs where a hominid cognizes a real or possible situation). This relation exists as part of a scheme of individuation. A mental event of an actual physical object/event engages a strictly 3P scheme, so it is a ontologically objective brain state that is 3P cognized (thus epistemologically objective as well). If a mental event is about a possible situation, then it o-objective existence is in doubt, although that could be resolved to true with more information. Mental events about fictional 3P situations have no o-objective existence, their ontological status is purely o-subjective, although these cultural fictions may play an important role. So we can have 3P e-objective cognizing of o-subjective fictional situations. Now what if the observer is cognizing mental states in a conspecific? They cannot see mental states, but they can reliably infer the o-objective existence, using their 1P neurophysiological "kinesthetic" qualia to support a feeling of certainty about the existence of souls and their causal mental states. This is at some level a e-subjective cognizing of an o-objective mental state in others. We have intuitions of certainty about the o-objective existence of that unseen state, which we know using a 1-3P scheme. When a hominid cognizes its own mental state, it uses its 1-3P scheme to e-subjectively cognize, but their is even greater certainty of the o-objective existence of "clear and distinct ideas" with "kinesthetic" qualia. Of course even this 1P certainty can be mistaken, such as optical illusions, or confabulations, or delusions.

So a mental state does not require substance dualism, it is merely a token of a type in a scheme which may be 3P or 1-3P. It does not require property dualism either, since the gap between between 3P and 1-3P schemes can be explained by an expansionist conception of mind. Our expanded conception of "interaction of microparticles" only needs to encompass cognitive schemes of individuation. The explanatory gap about mental qualia emerges from the difference of 1-3P schemes (e-subjective, but usually o-objective if the mental state being picked out is actual) from 3P schemes (o-subjective, and usually o-objective if the intentional-object is actual).

Level One invokes Brentano's (and later Searle's) insight about Intentionality as the mark of the mental. At Level 2, we need Barwise's insights about schemes of individuation, and the recognition that some schemes (for recognizing mental states) are inherently 1-3P schemes. Level One is not controversial, but we need Peirce's insight about the type-token distinction, for use at level 2. The ontology of a scheme is controversial, since the 3P schemes lend themselves to a functionalist-physicalist reductionism. But I would take a neuro-chauvinist view that functionalist role-relation type is not adequate, a silicon realization would lack the physiological grounding to be physically the same. This is highlighted when we consider schemes of classifying mental states, where the phenomenology would be unavailable to funcationally similar robots, since the absence of physiology would make any "kinesthetic" qualia implausible, and two functionally similar states would not be the same mental state in a 1-3P scheme.

The explanatory gap can now be understood, and strong AI recedes as a prospect. Zombies turn out to be a confusion of reductionism, since a physiological zombie would not be functionally identical if it did not have a 1-3P scheme. The phenomenology cannot be separated from the physiology, and the e-subjective certainty about the identity of mental states is species-specific. Even if chimpanzees in a space colony were to evolve into human like intelligence, we wouldn't know what it is like to be a chimpanzee smelling a rose or eating a tea cake.

Semantical: reviews on meaning & representation

An operational definition of "meaning" (in a formal language)

Working notion of meaning

Some premises

A ‘desert landscape’ view

A ‘fertile valley’ view

Further research on Lexical Semantics of Construal

Some thoughts about the broader significance of LSCon

PL-Onto and common sense

Lexical Semantics of Construal

Concept of LSCon

Precursors to Language

old NYT article on origin of language

references: language documentation

notes: models for using jyutping

links on learning Chinese Characters

Encounters

Moschovakis uses Typed Lambda Calculus for the Semantics of English

reviews: creoles

review: reduplication

For annotations to address NLU, need basic research on language-world mapping

Patrick Blackburn reviews Lambalgen and Hamm, The Proper Treatment of Events

Sowa reviews Halliday

statistical NLP with R

Languages of Papua New Guinea

Meso Melanesian (66)

North New Guinea (102)

Papuan Tip (62)

Trans-New Guinea (564)

Other Families

ethnographic film

Systemic Functional Linguistics

Systemics & Computation

links - logic - Fefferman on Tarskian semantics

evo1: Vocalization Displays and the Recognition of Typed Object-Features

A Minimalist Theory with Untyped Features

forthcoming books by Stephen Wechsler

Constructional Semantics

teasing apart "word sense"

Intelligent Agents for User Interface

Regional Dictionary of Biography

Case and voice systems in Cebuano

Describing Language 2/2 (meaning structures)

Describing Language 1/2 (sounds and words)

Leipzig glossing rules

Jackendoff article

Vector Symbolic Architectures answer Jackendoff's challenges for cognitive neuroscience

Central Okinawan is endangered with 1 million speakers

Are there Tagalog verbal roots? - Himmelmann

C.B. Martin's Mind in Nature

documentary linguistics

List: researchers

List: Proceedings

Incremental Sigmoid Bayesian Networks

new terms:

Grammatical Frameworks

video talks

Python

OSS Speaker Series: Python for Programmer01:40:15 googletechtalksThe Python Object Model

Cognitive Science

Convergent Grammar

(23) convergent grammar (CVG): a Look Ahead

Curry-Howard Correspondence

(31) Notation for ND Proof Theory

(38) ND-Style Syntax

(40) Basic Categories

(41) Function Categories

(56) An Embedded Constituent Question

(2) Some Examples of Overt Movement

Onomasiology

Web journals touching on lexical semantics and computational linguistics

papers on the Web September 2008

Kessler's encyclopedia entry on Language Families

recognizing different levels of regularity in a lexicogrammar model of linguistic attunement

Relations and roles in action verbs

prototypical scenes of manipulative activity in grammar, lexicon and concept acquisition

sign language phonology-semantics is NOT unmotivated

"wanna" is a lexical item, not just a contraction

event-types, and emic signals in sign phonology

Limits of Formal Ontology

OSS Speaker Series: Python for Programmer
01:40:15 googletechtalks

The Python Object Model