SUO: linguistic concepts
Here are some further suggestions for linguistic concepts in SUMO.
SF: Scott Farrar
DW: David Whitten
IN: Ian Niles
JS: John Sowa
JA: John Awbry
The first issue concerns the multiple senses of 'Language.'
Currently, SUMO has &%Language as a subclass of &%LinguisticExpression,
and as a sister of &%Word, &%Morpheme, &%Sentence, etc. After SF's suggestion
that &%Language include a set theoretic notion, DW suggested
that 'language' really refers to at least these two concepts.
Sense 1 "a mode or method of expressing a concept in a linguistic fashion"
Sense 2 a "set of utterances"
IN added that the difference was "something like the
intensional[sense 1]/extensional[sense 2] distinction...
The intensional notion would be the set of grammatical
rules which generate the well-formed expressions of the language, and
the extensional notion would be the set of expressions which are
actually generated by these rules." IN suggests that we focus on the
extensional sense, sense 2.
To formalize this Noam Chomsky argues for a distinction between what
he calls I-Language and E-Language. I-Language is language viewed
as a mental object. On the other hand, E-Language is the product of a
mental grammar. Viewed as a mental object, then
language (I-Language) IS the grammar itself, which is an abstract concept,
call it 'Grammar'. The product of the grammar is the E-Language which is
really a set of
&%LingusticExpressions. So, I propose:
(subclass &%MentalGrammar [not sure about the superclass, but it's &%Abstract])
(generates &%MentalGrammar &%LinguisticExpression)
This implies removing &%Language from &%LinguisticExpression. We could re-use
the concept to denote the set of &%LinguisticExpressions which is language
viewed as a corpus, so we really have 3 senses of language.
(subclass &%Language &%Set)
(member-of &%LinguisticExpression &%Language)
As JA said, (disjoint &%Language &%FiniteSet) might not be valid.
DW and JA pointed out that the notion of a formal language should be
incorporated because of the commonalities with natural language.
Adding the concept of a FormalGrammar to account for non-natural languages,
we have:
(subclass &%FormalGrammar [not sure about the superclass, but it's &%Abstract])
(generates &%FormalGrammar &%LinguisticExpression)
And from formal language theory, we could add:
(subclass ContextSensitiveGrammar FormalGrammar)
(subclass ContextFreeGrammar FormalGrammar)
...
To summarize, we could have three concepts referring to what was
initially one:
1) &%MentalGrammar
2) &%FormalGrammar
3) &%Language
The second issue that was brought up is the status of &%Language as spoken,
written, and signed. IN proposed the following:
(subclass WrittenLinguisticExpression LinguisticExpression)
(subclass SpokenLinguisticExpression LinguisticExpression)
(subclass GesturalLinguisticExpression LinguisticExpression)
I think this distinction is necessary, because the spoken &%Word
is definitely a separate concept from the written or signed &%Word.
(I might change Gestural to Signed, because Gestural implies
early views of sign language when it wasn't considered 'language.')
Scott Farrar
farrar@u.arizona.edu
1049 N. Jacobus Ave
Tucson AZ 85705