X-Digest-Num: 104 Message-ID: <44114.104.569.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Sat, 03 Apr 1999 17:36:29 +0300 From: Robin Turner Subject: Re: semantics ... X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 569 Content-Length: 5812 Lines: 115 coi rodoi {.o'i} long theoretical piece - delete if you're not interested in semantics! This current discussion on semantics has got me onto my favourite hooby-horse, categorisation theory. Briefly, there are two opposing interpretations of categorisation, with a few people like Adrienne Lehrer, Ray Jackendoff and, of course, myself, sitting (sometimes uncomfortably) in the middle. In the one camp, we have what we can call "classical semantics", which assumes that complex concepts can be broken down into simple features, which constitute the "meaning" of the word, in the sense of its truth conditions (which is not always the way the word is used - such things are removed to the lowly realm of pragmatics). For example, the English word "woman" refers to a category WOMAN, having the features [+HUMAN][+FEMALE][+ADULT]. In other words, if the statements H(x) F(x) A(x) are all true, then W(x) is true. Similarly, for Turkish KADIN, {H(x) ^ F(x) ^ ~V(x)} => K(x) , where V -> "is a virgin". In the other camp, we have the cognitivist, fuzzy, prototype-based, "all thought is metaphorical" people - George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and the rest. >From this point of view, WOMAN is a category resting on a prototypical idea of "woman", maybe with metaphorical extensions and associations. Categories are fuzzy, and some members are more central to the category than others - to give Eleanor Rosch's celebrated example, a robin is more of a bird than an ostrich. However, as Anna Wierzbicka has pointed out, this doesn't explain why an ostrich is still definitely a bird, and a bat is not. We therefore need to be careful when dealing with, in her words, "the fashionable prejudice that human thinking is 'fuzzy'." Looking at WOMAN, the feature [+ADULT] is derived from a category, ADULT, that is fuzzy (except in strictly legal terms) so you may sometimes be unsure as to whether to call a particular female human a "woman" or a "girl", but the other two features are pretty unfuzzy - an adult female bird is definitely not a woman, and when Captain Kirk says of the Enterprise, "she is a beautiful woman, and I love her," he is being obviously and deliberately metaphorical (in this case in order to confuse a hostile alien). The problem is that one cannot always, or even often, deduce the boundaries of a category from its prototype. Margaret Thatcher is, many would claim, some way removed from the prototype of WOMAN ({zo'o} or even of HUMAN), but, (zo'onai} she definitely _is_ a woman, whereas many people who possess more of the features of a prototypical woman are excluded from the category because of the rather obvious fact that they are male. What I have proposed is a division of features into "defining" and "typical" features (similar to Lehrer's "obligatory" and "optional" features). Thus WOMAN has the defining features [+HUMAN][+FEMALE][+ADULT] and a whole bundle of typical features, such as [-VIRGIN][+BREASTS] etc. etc. I also divided features into those which may change status and those which are pretty much invariable (e.g. [+ADULT] is a weak defining feature, since there are some situations where it doesn't apply. So how does all this apply to defining gismu, lujvo etc.? I would argue that a gismu definition gives the defining features of a category, but not its typical features, except perhaps in cases where one of the sumtiplaces has a default value. Thus if I say {lo ninmu} I simply mean [+HUMAN][+FEMALE] and am not making claims about anything else. If, however, I say {lo'e ninmu} - typical woman- or {le'e ninmu} - stereotypical woman, that's when things get really fuzzy and culturally specific, because I am drawing on a a load of typical features which are not present in the gismu definition. {lo'e ninmu} is bound to have different meanings in different cultures, even amongst native speakers of Lojban, if such beings ever come into existence. And of course, if I say {le ninmu}, I could mean just about anything, though Gricean maxims demand that it be something pretty closely related to {lo ninmu}, if not the same thing, and Lojban etiquette demands that I mark it with {pe'a} if it is definitely not female or humanoid in any way. When it comes down to the lexicographical business of writing authoritative definitions for gismu, we will (as I think Pablo said) run into serious problems when we move outside English. For those who weren't around during the infamous {djuno} debate - the definition of {djuno} is: x1 knows fact(s) x2 (du'u) about subject x3 by epistemology x4 Unfortunately, while the word "know" in English normally implies that what you know is true, the equivalent words in many other languages do not (e.g. in Turkish you can say "dog^ru biliyorsam" - "?if I know rightly"). This led to a massive string on whether you could use {djuno} for something which is false. What this indicates is that before going multilingual with the gismu list (which it is high time we did) we need to think carefully about our lexicography. One solution would be to adopt a feature-based analysis of the gismu involved, using features which are, as far as possible, consistent across cultures. An alternative would be to use the Natural Semantic Model proposed by Anna Wierzbicka, which aims to define terms using a limited number of universally accepted words (I think the current total is 90). I'm actually pretty sceptical about Wierzbicka's view of semantics, but lexicographically speaking, NSM makes a lot of sense. None of this, of course, will provide us with rock-solid definitions which are universally applicable - this kind of thing only existed in a pre-Wittgensteinian universe. Nevertheless, I think a bit of semantic analysis now might save us a lot of grief later. co'o mi'e robin.