Re: semantics ...

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 05:36 PM 4/3/99 +0300, Robin Turner wrote:
>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.

I suspect that I am firmly in this latter camp.  Why?  because in Lojban we
can use the descriptive "le" about an referent that is not in truth what it
is described to be, and a listener can still understand.  Thus the classic
Lojban example "le nanmu cu ninmu" about a woman who is dressed up as a
man, being identified as such by a speaker. The woman does not have the
features of "nanmu" but can still be identified as such.  This is possible
with prototype/metaphorical logic.

>However, as Anna Wierzbicka has pointed out, this doesn't explain why an
>ostrich is still definitely a bird, and a bat is not.

The first and most obvious question is: do ALL languages of peoples
interacting with these creatures identify ostriches with birds and bats
with non-birds.  Modern/western languages are strongly influenced by
Linnean classification and modern science into categorizing things based on
the scientific system of classification, but this is not inherent to the
linguistic sense of the words.

But not all do this. Thus my sister-in-law, an artist and serious nature
lover, seems to attribute to "animal" the exclusion of birds (this led to
an awkward semantics argument one day).  It might be for her that "animal"
is synonymous with "mammal" or even with "beast" (I never thought to ask
her whether a lizard or a bat was an "animal".)

>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.

I think that to some extent the boundaries of a category may be person and
situation dependent, and hence are idiolect and not descriptive of the
language as a whole.  Again, I cite my sister-in-law's example.  But I
think also that individuals speaking the same language might have slightly
different boundaries between, say, red and orange.

>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.

A thought. The primary constraint on gismu definitions is that they conform
to their place structures.  It is possible that if you adequately define
the semantics of the place structures you will have defined the gismu.
That this would be adequate has been an assumption of mine. This is, I
think, unlike what is possible with non-predicate languages.  (I hope this
thought is not too incoherent).

lojbab