I sometimes forget how pumped I can get about linguistics, but oh man am I pumped about linguistics. I read part of a book about cognitive interpretation of English grammar in search of features to select for the specificity classification. Ani said this is a little unorthodox even for computational linguists, but I don’t see why. If humans have got it figured out systematically in grammar, then why should we not study how they do it in order to teach a computer? It was super cool though. Two of the probable relevant topics were about count vs. mass nouns and the specificity indicated by verb tense.
The latter in particular is something I’ve thought about before in relation to my Spanish studies. The verb tenses in Spanish do not quite match up temporally with the verb tenses in English. Sure, both have present tenses, but the basic present in Spanish can refer to a much larger time expanse–from a “relatively” recent past event, to an inevitable future event, to the exact moment right now that is typically reserved for the present progressive in English (interestingly, there are progressive tenses in Spanish, but they are less frequently used, especially in spoken Spanish, and most often for emphasis of the concurrency with the indicated time, as I understand it). This disparity in tenses has made me doubt my translations at times, even though they are roughly similar, saying to myself in frustration “but why isn’t the present specific?”
My reading today described the specificity of time indicated by the present progressive (“I am walking”) as opposed to the traditional present (“I walk”). Because the progressive indicates a point in time (right now), it is inherently more specific than the present. It answers the question “when?” implicitly! Isn’t that neat? When you add perfect tenses, it can get even more complicated, while still specifying a particular range in time (“I have been walking” = I am walking/I walk or have just stopped doing so, and started at some unspecified time in the past). I would discuss the specificity that English lacks but is gained in the two separate past tenses of Spanish (the descriptive imperfect and the declarative preterite) and that is the bane of all Spanish students, but I will save that for another time.
This is the kind of thing I’m incredibly interested in; studying the conventions of language and how they give meaning to language in such a way to reflect human experience. I’m also interested in how those language conventions reflect human perception as well, but that is a little less applicable at the moment! Grammar is both systematic in nature and fluid in its development, and I believe a lot can be learned by both humans (to whom language is second nature) and machines (to whom it is probably five hundred and twenty-sixth nature) by trying to grasp grammatical concepts not only as a system of syntax and semantics, but as a courier of meaning.
This entry is a lot less computer science-y than I had hoped, but I hope you’ll forgive the humanities oriented side of me for running away with it.
mintformatics 