From robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR Tue Apr 6 02:48:01 1999 X-Digest-Num: 106 Message-ID: <44114.106.582.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 12:48:01 +0300 From: Robin Turner Subject: Re: semantics ... la lojbab. cusku di'e > > >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. > Well, she obviously has to possess _some_ features, or she wouldn't have fooled anyone. I would argue that she possesses a large number of typical features, which is enough to be classed as {le nanmu} but lacks a defining feature [+MALE] and thus cannot be called {lo nanmu}. Lojban is fortunate in having this distinction embedded in the grammar, rather than having to use phrases like "so-called" , "strictly speaking" etc. > > >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. Obviously not - this is one problem we have in producing culturally neutral definitions. The same goes for other borderline cases e.g. whether seals are fish. I asked two of my Turkish friends whether a bat (yarasa) was a bird (kus^) - one said it was, one said it wasn't. The dictionary defines it as "winged mammal", but may be influenced by ... > 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. Lakoff talks about the difference between "folk" and "expert" categories, the latter tending to be more strictly defined. Both, however, are "linguistic senses". > 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".) > Funnily enough, I've just finished writing a piece of material for my students on how to write extended definitions, and the first exercise asked them to consider how many of a list of things (birds, mammals, insects, people etc.) they would consider to be 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. > True, though they would probably agree on prototypical reds and oranges, as, IIRC, Berlin and Kay discovered (and that was a cross-language study to boot). We need to distinguish, between language- , person- and situation-dependent changes in categorisation. It is less that there are abstract categories "out there" than that there are categorisation _acts_ (analogous to speech acts). In the feature-based model I proposed, I broke down features into four approximate types: 1. Strong defining features: always necessary for normal (not obviously metaphorical) categorisation. 2. Weak defining features: usually necessary, but may be over-ruled by contextual/topical/communicative factors. 3. Strong typical features: not strictly necessary but expected; can in some contexts make up for the absence of a weak defining feature. 4. Weak typical features: expected, but play no decisive role in a normal categorisation act; may be used for metaphor. For example in the English category WOMAN, [+ADULT] is a weak defining feature, in that it is necessary to distinguish WOMAN from GIRL, but not necessary in contexts where we are talking about "women as opposed to men". When this kind of variation becomes more marked, we end up with polysemy. My proposal is that gismu definitions should be restricted as far as possible to strong defining features (which is essentially what definition, as opposed to meaning, is) and leave typical features up to usage. As I've said, providing a detailed definition for {lo'e ninmu} is virtually impossible. We can then clarify the definition of {lo} ("that which really is") as "that which possesses the defining features of". > > >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). How then would you distinguish between {blanu} and {crino}? Same place-structure, different meanings. co'o mi'e robin.