Re: ergative? I don't know...

>At 8:02 AM -0400 10/26/98, Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:
>That's exactly what I learned in the few months I was in my basic
>linguistics classes long time ago, but I could not remember that well.
>Thanks for taking the time to read my message and to go back to basics
>much more effenciently than my professors did then. That must be very
>annoying. I understand that I was naive to think that you and Sally could
>mix up semantic roles (I think it means French 'simhmes', syntactic
>functions (French 'foncthmes' ?) and grammatical cases ('grammhmes' like
>voices) so as to equate 'actor' and 'agent', or consider 'instrument' as a
>grammatical 'secondary case'. I also understand that you do not discuss
>ties between voices/cases and semantic roles. Too bad.
It's interesting, but I'm not writing a textbook on language creation. One
problem is that there are so many options, that I don't know any analysis
that's  usefully short. The general idea of voices is clear enough: to
change the mapping between cases (or syntactic functions) and semantic
categories. Voice also typically changes the optionality of core arguments,
allowing specification of an action and an object, but not the actor, for
instance. They also can be used to highlight arguments as well as to demote
them.

>I mean : if I were allowed to discuss that point I would say that
>'volitional' in Teohnat sounds to me like a desiderative crammed in a case
>with a resultative aspectivation but I can't because aspectivation is part
>of semantics :-).
Sure you can... Discuss whatever you want. I don't discuss which semantics
are right because I'm not convinced that there's enough evidence to do
so... Nor do I feel that I have arguments good enough to convince others of
my opinions, since even I doubt  most of them.

Whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent.

[as an aside, it occurs to me to mention that when I express a desire not
to discuss something that's my own opinion, not listowner rules that I'm
trying to impose. On the (relatively rare) occasions when I want to speak
as listowner and squash a topic, I try to be explicit about it.]

>Why do linguists always step out when it comes to the problem of meaning ?
>>Don't you consider it's underlying and transcending all these neat
>categories >you mention ? I mean : when you use the word 'fish' in a
>phrase, you don't mean >fish anymore from the very second you pronounce
>it, and you mean either 'food' >or 'prey' or 'oil', etc. So had it a role
>in a sentence, the predicate it >refers to would reciprocally mirror and
>refer to the semantic role of fish as >'food', 'prey', etc. It's not
>different from links between parts of 'compound >nouns' or else. That's
>why I wrote that 'cases' are only a kind of deixis to >me. Maybe I'm
>wrong. But could you please tell me whose book I should read >about that ?
I'm certainly not up-to-date on linguistic semantics, but it certainly
exists. There are lots of books on it, but I just don't read them much. I
used to read a lot of AI a decade or so ago. Fillmore introduced the notion
of "case grammar" which somewhat confounded the notions of semantic role
and case, and which is now pretty outdated, but started a general trend to
slot-style semantic formalisms. Minsky's frame theory, and Schank's script
theory were widely studied versions of this kind of thing. I never found
Schank very plausible, and while Minsky is a genius, frame theory seems
rather underconstrained to me. He's not backing frame theory either now,
from what I understand.

Montague grammar is very interesting (read one of the collections by
Barbara Partee if you want to get into it). It's _very_ mathematical,
however, but it's fascinating stuff. But true? I wouldn't want to bet on it.

Most of these people are American, and tend to want to ground things in
formal systems of some kind. Anti-logicists won't find this very atractive.

There are other schools of semantics, but as I tend to be rather formal and
logic-oriented myself, I've read almost none of that. The generative
semanticists (like Jackendoff?) are one such school.

   -- David
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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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