Re: Troponym Structures?
> A question: Why is it that ontology construction seems to be mostly
> about nouns, and not about verbs? Are there no large ontologies
> constructed only of language verbs? Many ontologies are built around
> inheritance structures, hyponymns. Are there corresponding troponymic
> ontologies for the words that transform concepts?
There are several built around verbs (eg. EVCA and some
more recent attempts to characterize action). But the big
move is not from nouns to verb, but from nouns to clauses.
Consult the Penman/Generalized Upper Model and Halliday & Matthiessen's
Construing Experience; a move to verbs is just to stay
in the realms of lexicology and lexical terminology. Moving
to clauses can give an important boost to getting to something
deeper, semantically if not ontologically. This lets you
start getting to grips with the general structures that
you might need, rather than those that happen to turn
up as verbs in some language. For Natural Language
Processing applications, the move to consider clauses is
crucial, because it is this that gives the generalization
to range over other possibilities, including down to nouns
and verbs.
John Bateman.