From: Chet Creider (creider@csd.uwo.ca)
Date: Fri Jul 27 2001 - 11:54:36 EDT
> At 09:53 AM 7/27/2001 -0400, Chet Creider wrote:
> >Punctuate and capitalize:
>
> Actually, how about not punctuating and capitalizing, since your point is
> to prove that sentences are needed to disambiguate the meaning, and a
> counterargument would be to show that the meaning can be disambiguated
> without doing so:
>
> Dear John / I want a man who knows what
> love is all about / you are generous, kind,
> thoughtful / people who are not like you
> admit to being useless and inferior / you
> have ruined me for other men / I yearn for
> you / I have no feelings whatsoever when
> we're apart / I can be forever happy / will you
> let me be yours / Gloria
Note that you are just marking one of the two understandings of the
passage. You still need to do something similar for the other understanding,
e.g.
Dear John / I want a man / who knows what
love is / all about you are generous, kind,
etc.
The point is an abstract one and has nothing to do with any particular
punctuation and capitalisation: the passage is more than just a string
of words because English speakers can parse it and moreover can parse
it in two very different ways.
> Now the question becomes: how much additional meaning is added by
> punctuating and capitalizing? A second question: how many different ways
> could we place the sentence boundaries, given a set of clause boundaries,
> and how different would the resulting meaning be in the eyes of native
> speakers? A third question: what model are you using for English syntax,
> and how are sentences described in that model?
The point is a theoretical one, but not one which hinges on any
particular theory of English syntax or of English sentences: it could
be made using word-word dependencies (as in much traditional grammar
and in traditional sentence diagramming as well as more formal
dependency grammars such as Word Grammar) or using any one of the more
recent (since Bloomfield) theories of constituent (phrasal) structure
such as Chomsky's (_Aspects_, EST, GB-Theory) or GPSG/HPSG (Gazdar,
Sag, Pollard and others theories) or LFG (Joan Bresnan). No particular
theory is involved and no particular punctuation is involved. The only
points are that some kind of structural units are appropriate to
account for these data (which include various kinds of what are
traditionally called dependent clauses) and that one of these units
will be a sentence (whatever it may be called in a particular theory is
not relevant).
But let's stay with the Greek. I only made this point to show that for
written English, the notion of sentence makes good sense. Whether it
does for NT Greek is a different matter and one I hesitate to answer
myself as I haven't thought a great deal about it. I would love to read
what others think about it, however.
Chet Creider
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