On Aug 5, 5:39 pm, Michael Press <rub... at (no spam) pacbell.net> wrote:
In article
c067aa1b-655b-4da9-b167-537105f4d... at (no spam) c58g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote:



On Aug 4, 11:05 pm, Michael Press <rub... at (no spam) pacbell.net> wrote:
In article
e572451a-3be4-416f-a119-e7f07c0de... at (no spam) s50g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote:

On Aug 4, 6:57 am, Helmut Richter <hh... at (no spam) web.de> wrote:
On Sun, 3 Aug 2008, DKleinecke wrote:
The difficulty, as I see it, is that most of the entities of interest
to mathematicians have existence apart from being the sum of some
other things. For example, in an additive group, all the members have
independent existence in spite of being the sum of many different
pairs of group members.

Also in mathematics, there are entities whose significance is determined by
the constituents. The meaning of "(4*7+12)/(17+51/17)" is closely correlated
to the meanings of "(4*7+12)", "/", and "(17+51/17)". And this example is
much more language-like than yours. I have stressed in my other contribution
that in natural languages, things are not nearly as simple as in math, but I
deny that they are entirely different from the underlying principle.

The idea that was called "compositionality" denies this independence.
Under compositionality an entity only exists as the composition its
components. It has no independent existence. Therefore, by definition,
the meaning of the combined entity is the combination, in some
suitable way, of the meanings of its components. Hence, in this
situation most mathematicians, if forced to think about the problem,
would speak like Richter did.

If there is an example where "the meaning of a sentence is more than
the sum of the meanings of its parts" it follows that the sentence was
not created compositionally.

All new sentences, (that is, all sentences that have not occured to the
listener before, or whose last occurrence has been forgotten by the listener)
can *only* be understood compositionally. This accounts for so many sentences
that it is worth while investigating the underlying compositional process even
if it were not the only conceivable one.

Of course, the meaning of a sentence is not the unstructured *sum* of the
meanings of the constituents alone but depends also on the method of
composition -- I think I did clearly indicate that. The sentence

Ich habe die Zeitung gestern in der Küche gelesen.

requires not only knowledge of what "ich", "Zeitung", "gestern", "in",
"Küche", and "lesen" mean but also about the usage of the definite article and
of the perfect tense in German, and, not to be underestimated, the meaning
conveyed by this marked word order. All this belongs to the grammar. If the
grammar is described by conventional non-formal means, all these aspects must
be contained lest the grammar be incomplete. And with formal means, it is not
in any way different. Indeed, formalism is just another jargon, not another
content, as I will elaborate a bit in another contribution here.

But I have still to wait for the first person who would comment the sentence
in this example with "I understand each word and I find the sentence
construction grammatical but, alas, I do not understand the meaning of the
whole sentence, as it need not be compositional."

New terms emerging in the language or idioms are not counter-examples. For
those who are familiar with them, they belong to the vocabulary, and may
either render the compositional meaning obsolete, or the two meanings exist in
parallel, giving rise to ambiguities or to puns. Those who are not familiar
with them will fail to understand them or misunderstand them as compositional.

No. Some idioms retain their idiomatic sense no matter what
grammatical perturbations are done to them "The cat was let out of the
bag bv no less than three gossips before the event," some less so "The
bucket was kicked by three more victims of the heat wave," and some
not at all (of course it's hard to remember such examples!).

So what? Three or more gossips let the cat out of the bag. Simple
We could ask which gossips, which bag, which cat, and which event.
Nevertheless the meaning of the sentence is easily discovered by
analyzing and synthesizing the components.

But if you are talking about _poetry_ ...

Hunh? Did you read what I wrote? "Let the cat out of the bag" works no
matter what its syntax. "Kick the bucket" doesn't.

Poems have been written to "clarify" "Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously."

It all parses perfectly. What is your thesis?
Each sentence expresses a notion of a state of affairs.

I have no idea what you're talking about. (Brit: what you're on
about.)

"Colorless ..." is about the most famous sentence in linguistics; it's
Chomsky's pioneering example of a sentence that is perfectly
grammatical (as everyone will agree) and uninterpretable.

I believe his point was that syntax and semantics are independent.

In article <Lri2fsCFasmIF... at (no spam) baesystems.com>,
Richard Herring <junk at (no spam) [127.0.0.1]> wrote:



In message <rubrum-9D09C2.15193506082... at (no spam) news.sf.sbcglobal.net>, Michael
Press <rub... at (no spam) pacbell.net> writes
In article
92dcf2cc-9303-4770-87d6-b5b057f01... at (no spam) m3g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote:

On Aug 5, 5:39 pm, Michael Press <rub... at (no spam) pacbell.net> wrote:
In article
c067aa1b-655b-4da9-b167-537105f4d... at (no spam) c58g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote:

Hunh? Did you read what I wrote? "Let the cat out of the bag" works no
matter what its syntax. "Kick the bucket" doesn't.

Poems have been written to "clarify" "Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously."

It all parses perfectly. What is your thesis?
Each sentence expresses a notion of a state of affairs.

I have no idea what you're talking about. (Brit: what you're on
about.)

"Colorless ..." is about the most famous sentence in linguistics; it's
Chomsky's pioneering example of a sentence that is perfectly
grammatical (as everyone will agree) and uninterpretable.

It is a deliberate contradiction in terms.

It _contains_ a contradiction, but that's not the point. If that bothers
you, delete the first word, or substitute something else.

Such sentences are often constructed for amusement.
Sometimes such a sentence is resolved.
A well constructed sentence can be mechanically analyzed.
Barring self-contradiction it has intrinsic meaning.

So consider e.g. "Rectangular green ideas sleep furiously." No
self-contradiction. What's its "intrinsic meaning"?

There are some ideas.
The ideas are green.
The ideas are rectangular.
The ideas sleep.
The sleep is furious.

[F'up to s.l only]

DKleinecke:

Hence I conclude that a speaker-free theory of language is a fantasy.

A theory as such can well be defined as a kind of fantasy.

Not only are the meanings of linguistic components relative to the
speaker and/or listener - but the very set of compositional rules is
subject to the same kind of restriction. A speaker uses (and the
listener understands) only those compositional rules she learned -
"learned" being code for the elaborate sum of linguistic experiences
so far.

No, the rules are basicly hardwired.

I would imagine that a learner of English as a "second" language
gets some kind of shock the first time they are confronted with a
sentence like "the more, the merrier".
There is no way to force this into ordinary composition. Some people,
me for example, prefer to call this a "minor sentence type" of
English. But it could just as well be called an idiom.

No, the construction "the... the..." has a well-defined meaning. It's
a bit unusual in being able to form a sentence without any overt verb
(a la Italian "ecco"), but it's far from idiomatic.

Thus anything that fails compositionally is an idiom (by definition)
and there are idiomatic compositions as well as structures. Then,
perhaps ALL compositions are idiomatic and learning idioms is the
only way language is acquired.

Sure, but most of language is inborn. The idioms are just the icing on
the cake.

Jens S. Larsen

In message <rubrum-9D09C2.15193506082008 at (no spam) news.sf.sbcglobal.net>, Michael
Press <rubrum at (no spam) pacbell.net> writes
In article
92dcf2cc-9303-4770-87d6-b5b057f014e3 at (no spam) m3g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote:

On Aug 5, 5:39 pm, Michael Press <rub... at (no spam) pacbell.net> wrote:
In article
c067aa1b-655b-4da9-b167-537105f4d... at (no spam) c58g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote:

Hunh? Did you read what I wrote? "Let the cat out of the bag" works no
matter what its syntax. "Kick the bucket" doesn't.

Poems have been written to "clarify" "Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously."

It all parses perfectly. What is your thesis?
Each sentence expresses a notion of a state of affairs.

I have no idea what you're talking about. (Brit: what you're on
about.)

"Colorless ..." is about the most famous sentence in linguistics; it's
Chomsky's pioneering example of a sentence that is perfectly
grammatical (as everyone will agree) and uninterpretable.

It is a deliberate contradiction in terms.

It _contains_ a contradiction, but that's not the point. If that bothers
you, delete the first word, or substitute something else.

Such sentences are often constructed for amusement.
Sometimes such a sentence is resolved.
A well constructed sentence can be mechanically analyzed.
Barring self-contradiction it has intrinsic meaning.

So consider e.g. "Rectangular green ideas sleep furiously." No
self-contradiction. What's its "intrinsic meaning"?

Logicians believe that uttering a statement predicates the existence
of what the statement is about, which gives them great problems when
it comes to statements abbout nonexistent things.

And a demonstration that (at least) the first-order predicate calculus
is idiotically inadequate for dealing with language.

On Fri, 8 Aug 2008, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Logicians believe that uttering a statement predicates the existence
of what the statement is about, which gives them great problems when
it comes to statements abbout nonexistent things. Hence their tizzies
about unicorns -- and the ridicule I faced (including from Jim
McCawley) when I said that there's nothing wrong with the assertion
"The present King of France is bald" -- it could be verified by
inspecting the person who would have been anointed king of France
under the standard rules of succession.

What you see above is nothing but a translation of certain statements
in formal logic into English.

Or vice versa: the attempt of translating certain statements in English
into formal logic.

And a demonstration that (at least) the first-order predicate calculus
is idiotically inadequate for dealing with language.

English has a device called definite article. Using it as in "*the*
present king of France" has some meaning. After the speakers of English
have made up their minds what it means, it can be translated into some
logic calculus. Possible meanings of "the A has property B" could be:

There is a unique object rightfully called A, and that object has
property B.

(false for the present king of France)

or

If there is a unique object rightfully called A, that object has
property B.

(true for the present king of France)

or

If there is at least one object rightfully called A, each such object
has property B.

(true for the present king of France)

or something else at the discretion of the speakers of English.

Determining which assignment of meaning is meant is not the task of the
logician but of the English-speaking community. When they disagree, the
statement is ambiguous, so what?

On Sun, 3 Aug 2008, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Helmut Richter wrote:
Part D is the heart of the book. I find it valuable that language examples
precede the formal Chomsky-type stuff. Instead, the key concept is
"compositionality": the principle that if a larger syntactic structure is
composed of smaller ones, its semantics is similarly composed if the
semantics of the smaller ones and the semantics of the method of
composition.

If that's the mathematicians' claim, it's simply empirically false. It
was very early shown that the meaning of a sentence (for example) is
more than the sum of the meanings of its parts.

Mathematical formalism is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The
end is to be forced to write down unambiguously what could have been said
in plain language more or less vaguely.

- Syntactic analysis of natural languages: This consists of developing
mathematical models of how grammar works. The outset is different from
the previous item: there, the grammar was given in mathematical form.
Here, the language is given, and some people have already described its
structure as non-formal grammars. The question is whether new insight
can be expected when we translate these grammars into a vocabulary that
is borrowed from math. A mathematical model of something real -- such
as an existing language -- has always limitations, and the reality has
precedence over the model; nonetheless the study of models can lead to
insight into the reality modelled.

Again: the grammarians who have devised the notions of phrasal
constituents (such as subject, object, adverbial) and observed that they
appear nested have had all foundations to display a sentence as a tree,
and I am sure some have drawn such trees. They have thus already had what
became later known as context-free grammars, and actually devising such a
thing as a CFG was not a new idea but a new form of representing an old
idea. The problem ist not with *this* step but with the next one: to
believe that the new gadget is the solution to any problem. It is not
because it does not match the reality, as no model ever does -- more
precisely: it would be extreme good luck if it did. But there is a much
better chance to test how good or bad the match is and whether the model
can be improved to match the reality better. This is a tedious process,
and he who thinks he can take a shortcut by applying some gadget -- a
mathematical formalism or something else -- is on the wrong track. Insight
is a matter of hard labour, not of sudden inventions.

Unfortnately, after 50 years, that study hasn't paid off with such
insights.

For instance, machine translation: it has proven much more intricate than
what people dreamt in the 1950ies and 1960ies. Until now, there is nothing
which would deserve the name machine translation. But one has to look also
on the other side of the coin: There are tools which significantly aid
translators to perform good translatons, at least for specialised text. I
doubt that what has been achieved would have been possible without some of
the formal methods. And, perhaps even more importantly, understanding the
reasons why the outcome is so disappointing may also have been fostered by
such methods. I am not sure that the sweeping statement "we would know
everything we do now know also without formal methods in linguistics" can
so be stated: we simply do not know how much useful insight was achieved
by seeing attempts fail. Know-how-not is sometimes at least as valuable as
know-how.

Mathematical formalism is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The
end is to be forced to write down unambiguously what could have been said
in plain language more or less vaguely.

And you don't have to be Orwell or Machiavelli to recognize that
that's not exactly a good thing.

On Aug 8, 4:20 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote:

Mathematical formalism is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The
end is to be forced to write down unambiguously what could have been said
in plain language more or less vaguely.

And you don't have to be Orwell or Machiavelli to recognize that
that's not exactly a good thing.

What is so bad about having available formal languages in which one
can make ones mathematical arguments perfectly precise, especially as
no one is coerced into using such languages.

On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 16:15:55 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote in
news:104c36bf-

in sci.lang,sci.math:
On Aug 8, 2:01 pm, Helmut Richter <hh... at (no spam) web.de> wrote:

[...]



English has a device called definite article. Using it as
in "*the* present king of France" has some meaning.
After the speakers of English have made up their minds
what it means, it can be translated into some logic
calculus. Possible meanings of "the A has property B"
could be:
There is a unique object rightfully called A, and that object has
property B.
(false for the present king of France)
or
If there is a unique object rightfully called A, that object has
property B.
(true for the present king of France)
or
If there is at least one object rightfully called A, each such object
has property B.
(true for the present king of France)
or something else at the discretion of the speakers of English.

And as you note below, different speakers may have different
interpretations. For that matter, a single speaker may have
different interpretations.

Determining which assignment of meaning is meant is not
the task of the logician but of the English-speaking
community. When they disagree, the statement is
ambiguous, so what?
Let's see if any of the mathematical-logicians answer.

Speaking as a mathematician with a better than average
background in logic, I've no quarrel with Helmut's comments.

On Aug 8, 2:01 pm, Helmut Richter <hh... at (no spam) web.de> wrote:

English has a device called definite article. Using it as
in "*the* present king of France" has some meaning.
After the speakers of English have made up their minds
what it means, it can be translated into some logic
calculus. Possible meanings of "the A has property B"
could be:

There is a unique object rightfully called A, and that object has
property B.

(false for the present king of France)

or

If there is a unique object rightfully called A, that object has
property B.

(true for the present king of France)

or

If there is at least one object rightfully called A, each such object
has property B.

(true for the present king of France)

or something else at the discretion of the speakers of English.

Determining which assignment of meaning is meant is not
the task of the logician but of the English-speaking
community. When they disagree, the statement is
ambiguous, so what?

Let's see if any of the mathematical-logicians answer.

On Aug 8, 3:14 pm, Helmut Richter <hh... at (no spam) web.de> wrote:

Mathematical formalism is not an end in itself but a
means to an end. The end is to be forced to write down
unambiguously what could have been said in plain
language more or less vaguely.

And you don't have to be Orwell or Machiavelli to
recognize that that's not exactly a good thing.

On Aug 8, 11:43 pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc... at (no spam) csuohio.edu> wrote:

On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 16:15:55 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote in
news:104c36bf-
e24f-495d-8833-3c439305b434 at (no spam) e53g2000hsa.googlegroups.com
in sci.lang,sci.math:

Determining which assignment of meaning is meant is not
the task of the logician but of the English-speaking
community. When they disagree, the statement is
ambiguous, so what?

Let's see if any of the mathematical-logicians answer.

Speaking as a mathematician with a better than average
background in logic, I've no quarrel with Helmut's comments.

But you don't answer the question "So what?"

Peter T. Daniels (in sci.lang):

On Aug 9, 4:29 am, Joachim Pense <s... at (no spam) pense-mainz.eu> wrote:
Adam Funk (in sci.lang):

On 2008-08-08, Michael Press wrote:

["Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."]

From a human perspective, if I say that to you, you may rightly
respond, "Huh? Ideas aren't like that, and they don't sleep!" (How
many of Grice's maxims would it violate?)

I can imagine a story where young people enter the land of ideas, which
are rectangular green things, wake them up and chat with them.

metaphor/poetry

So? Outside the realm of language?

On Aug 9, 2:45 pm, Joachim Pense <s... at (no spam) pense-mainz.eu> wrote:

Peter T. Daniels (in sci.lang):

On Aug 9, 4:29 am, Joachim Pense <s... at (no spam) pense-mainz.eu> wrote:

I can imagine a story where young people enter the land of ideas, which
are rectangular green things, wake them up and chat with them.

metaphor/poetry

So? Outside the realm of language?

Outside the realm of linguistics -- and certainly outside the realm of
symbolic logic.