Re: semantics ...

[Robin Turner <robin@bilkent.edu.tr>]

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.