From: Jonathan Robie (Jonathan.Robie@SoftwareAG-USA.com)
Date: Thu Jul 26 2001 - 11:08:15 EDT
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Ken wrote a very interesting message that explains how he is thinking about
grammatical categories and meaning quite well, and relates this to computer
languages.
I currently make a living largely by designing computer languages (see
http://www.w3.org/tr/xquery), and I will soon be giving a presentation on
the relationship between syntactic query languages and semantic systems
like RDF (the talk is called "The Syntactic Web", and I will be presenting
it in Montreal in mid-August), so I have been thinking about some of the
issues Ken raises.
In a well designed computer language, there is very little ambiguity in the
syntax. The languages that I design are LL(1), which means that if you read
from left-to-right, any given token may be ambiguous, but looking at the
next one will always clear up the ambiguity. The syntax of the language
does not tell you the semantics - that's done either in the specification,
in some formal language such as inference notation, or in code that is
associated with the productions. However, the semantics can be tightly and
unambiguously associated with the productions of the grammar.
Neither English or Greek is like that. The form of a sentence is often
ambiguous, to the great joy of those of us who like puns:
- I see, said the blind man, who picked up his hammer and saw.
- Those men are flying machines.
- I knew a man with a wooden leg named Sam. (What was the name of his
other leg?)
- "Your peace is beyond me; I rest in your peace. I hold to the love that
I cannot grasp."
Or consider the following example from yesterday's email:
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 03:28:05 -0500
From: "Travelocity Member Services" <feedback@travelocity.com>
Subject: Fly for Less this Summer and Fall
These sentences are all ambiguous in their form. A computer parser can not
tell you what they mean. If I designed a language that had this kind of
ambiguity, people would send me email notifying me of the bug that I would
then fix.
What Ken is asking for is quite reasonable - he would like Greek, and
probably also English, to be a "good language", as computer people define
this. He wants to know the rules that determine the semantics of the language:
> Now, if you don't like that position, then provide
>a meaningful, mediating view that enables someone who
>has read a fair amount of different kinds of Greek to
>determine not the category, which is illusory I'm
>told, but the function of the genitive modifier.
>That's all I'm asking for. Since the syntax isn't
>determinative (and I never, ever urged otherwise), how
>can one determine the semantic significance besides
>trusting one's gut? I am not being facetious. I've
>seen lots of posts about the evilness/uselessness of
>grammatical categories. So I "call" as I gather they
>say in poker (never played it so I don't know).
The categories are a way of explaining, after the fact, how a particular
person chose to classify an instance of, say, the Genitive. They are
explanatory tools. If I say that a particular use of the genitive is
subjective or objective, and you know what those words mean, then you know
how I have decided to interpret that instance, and you can take a look at
the text and tell me whether you agree. The fact that these categories have
names make some people think that they define the True Meaning of Greek in
some deep way, but telling you the category is really no different from
saying that this particular instance seems to work like the English phrase
"Man of Steel" rather than the English phrase "Bucket of Water". In either
case, you can look at the Greek sentence and legitimately disagree with me.
We are dealing with human language here. And for some deep reason that goes
beyond anything I can put into words, English or Greek are much better than
Java or XQuery when we need to express a psalm, a prayer, a parable, or a
vision.
Jonathan
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