<div dir="ltr">Thanks, Ann. As for Lushootseed, I think we'd need some more data. Joshua,<div>does this discussion inspire any questions/ideas?</div><div><br></div><div>Emily</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 3:49 AM, Ann Copestake <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:aac10@cl.cam.ac.uk" target="_blank">aac10@cl.cam.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<p>Yes, I would be happy with that, except that I would suggest
making use of meaningful sense labels, at least as a mnemonic. So
the pattern on the rule would be<br>
</p>
<p>_P_v_dance (e,x) <- LR -> _P_n_dance (x)<br>
</p>
The one could apply the rule productively, by specifying the
appropriate verbs as having predicates of the form _v_dance, if one
wanted. (The alternative is to just use the rule as a description
and explicitly state what it applies to, but since one could control
the application via an inventory of sense labels if the predicate is
decomposed and the senses correspond to types, I think this is
effectively equivalent.) <br>
<br>
What I would ideally want to say about the _dance_ component of the
predicate is that one should take it as commiting to the lexeme
implying dance when making inferences about the real world. I'm
deliberately stating this informally because what this actually
means is up to the grammar writer, but I would take it as allowing
that inference to be made by a computational system (using a robust
notion of inference!). This certainly does not commit one to saying
that all lexemes denoting dances will have this sense.<br>
<br>
For a language like Lushootseed this might not be enough to capture
the way that nouns and verbs behave, but at least it is a start.<br>
<br>
For what it's worth, I think of _tango_v_dance as corresponding to a
semantic space which is close to _tango_n_dance on most dimensions,
but shifted corresponding to the verb/noun shift. (There's been a
little experimental exploration of this sort of thing in
distributional semantics - there could be much more - but I'm
talking about some sort of idealised space now. What Aurelie and I
have called `ideal distributions' would work here.) In this
idealized space, these are subspaces of the dance n and v spaces.
And, for that matter _tango_*_dance (where * generalises over n/v)
has _tango_n_dance and _tango_v_dance as subspaces, and so on. <br>
<br>
Going back to what I was saying before, if one thinks there's a
meaning postulate that expresses the relationship between the verbal
and nominal form - e.g., something of the form:<br>
<br>
forall x,e [ _tango_v_dance (e,x) <=> exists y [ _dance(y)
& PERFORM(e,x,y) ]]]<br>
<br>
or whatever, where I'm using PERFORM as a placeholder, then the
alternative would be to express that in the lexical rule and not
have a separate predicate for the nominal sense. But then one would
have to work out a story about what the precise nature of the
relationship PERFORM (or whatever) is, and whether this can be
expressed in terms of properly motivated semantic predicates like
Dowty's DO, CAUSE and so on. Saying that there are related semantic
spaces is actually compatible with this but much more general -
obviously it's very vague, unless one starts to additionally express
constraints on the relationship between the semantic spaces. But my
own feeling is that doing these semantic relationships by
hand/symbolically is a dead-end (because there's lots of different
ones, and they have nuances and exceptions and so on).<br>
The alternative approach of using systematic naming conventions for
the predicates allows us to make the connection explicitly visible
to some distributional component, without commiting to the actual
lexical semantics.<br>
<br>
All best,<br>
<br>
Ann<div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
<div>On 17/09/2016 05:29, Emily M. Bender
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">Thank you for this follow up, Ann. I think I
understand your view of things. Just one piece
<div>I wanted to follow up on this evening:<br>
<div class="gmail_extra">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
On the other hand, as you said, there are other
processes where the pattern is regular but with some
exceptions, and where the precise semantic effect is
difficult to pin down. Much of English derivational
morphology falls into this class - it is useful to
represent the relationship with the stem somehow,
without claiming that we're capturing everything there
is to say. e.g., "unkind" definitely has some
relationship with (a sense of) "kind", and it's useful
to know about that, but there are some idiosyncratic
aspects of its meaning. Similarly, I'd say it's useful
to represent the relationship between nouns denoting
dances and the corresponding verbs (tango etc), which is
productive, but I'm quite content to do that via a
predicate changing operation.<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>As I currently understand things, the change in the
predicate symbol from _tango_n_1</div>
<div>to _tango_v_1 would correlate with:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>(1) Change of type of ARG0 from x to e</div>
<div>(2) Addition of ARG1 (of type x)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>... or in the other direction:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>(1) Change of type of ARG0 from e to x</div>
<div>(2) Removal of ARG1</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>In other words, I think the predicate changing
operation would also have concomittant</div>
<div>changes elsewhere in the EP. Also okay? (This has
implications, btw, for the analysis</div>
<div>of Lushootseed that Joshua is working on, where there
are lots of stems that seem to</div>
<div>be happy to serve as either nouns or verbs.)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Emily</div>
</div>
<br>
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<div><br>
</div>
-- <br>
<div data-smartmail="gmail_signature">
<div dir="ltr">Emily M. Bender<br>
Professor, Department of Linguistics<br>
Check out CLMS on facebook! <a href="http://www.facebook.com/uwclma" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/uwclma</a><br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
</div></div></div>
</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">Emily M. Bender<br>Professor, Department of Linguistics<br>Check out CLMS on facebook! <a href="http://www.facebook.com/uwclma" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/uwclma</a><br></div></div>
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