Re: Response to jack Waugh on 'hard'cmavo (old posting)

["Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) <cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin>]

Folk,
    I feel compelled to comment on something, so here it is:

On Tue, 5 Mar 91 10:47:08, uunet!mcnc.org!aurs01!aurw31!waugh (Jack Waugh)
wrote:

>An adequate model to use for the first stages of listening would be to
>say that the listner parses first and then starts semantic processing.
>Parsing is casting the utterance into a tree, so as to know the grouping
>relationships.  Once this is done, the listener turns to the semantics
>of the words.  ...

I disagree strongly!

While that model may be fine for detailed analysis, the model for realtime
comprehension is more like a dictionary lookup for each word (the dictionary
may change as a result of the previous word) and the little "n", "vt",
"vi", "adj", etc. being used to perform an increment parse interleaved
with the construction of a complex semantic evaluation.
    My studies have convienced me that children privately and personally
reinvent syntax to permit them to deal with utterances that have meanings
that differ from the mere juxtapositoning of simple meanings of the
components.  It seems that this development is the alteration of the
meaning associated with the token (word) to include some form of
restriction about how this meaning may combine with other meanings
(more than what the idea alone would require).
    For example the idea for the word "carry" gets modified such that it
is more important to the understanding which agent preceeds the word
than is the relative strengths and weights of the agents.  Thus initially
the child will combine a reference to a child, a parent, and "carry"
such that the parent will always carry the child and only after the
modification will find humor in the suggestion that the child should
carry the parent.
    It is only after modifying a significant portion of a child's
vocabulary that the child will both transfer this new property to
other tokens (in complementary form as in "carry" implies an agent),
and generalize tokens as having some structure requirements (and
expect them in new vocabulary and incorporate them at introduction).
    What we call syntax is simply the abstraction of the effects of
those binding and combining requirements attached to each word of our
collective vocabularies.  And because of our limits of representation
and manipulation of ideas, we further modify those restrictions so as
to permit an infinite (or nearly so) collection of instances to be
represented by a (relatively) small set of rules.
    I believe the loglan project receives some additional impetus
from our need (strong desire?) to simplify and reduce those rules
even further.

    thank you all for this opportunity to speak,
        Arthur Protin


Arthur Protin <protin@pica.army.mil>
These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss
or this installation.