Mystery Number Five - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 113

6.6.7 C ORE VALUES IN SYNTACTIC - SEMANTIC COMPOSITION
book V the red A square N
book V the square N red A
book V the square A red N
square V the red A book N
square V the book N red A
square V the topic A red N
redden V the square A book N
redden V the topic N square A
redden V the book N square N
etc.
As the literal meaning 1 of complex language signs, each of these examples is
welldefined: the core values have straightforward procedural implementations
and the syntactic-semantic composition of the proplet shells is grammatically
well-formed. For this reason, the purely artificial examples in 6.6.7 make so
much sense intuitively when viewed from a grammatical standpoint.
The speaker's utterance meaning 2 , defined as the use of the literal meaning 1
relative to a context (FoCL'99, 4.3.3), in contrast, seems mostly to fail for the
examples in 6.6.7. Which of them can be used literally or nonliterally, or not
be used sensibly at all, depends on the context of interpretation, for humans
and talking robots alike.
Methodologically, however, we must take into account that linguistic exam-
ples as isolated signs do not have a context of interpretation. Therefore, evalu-
ating the utterance meaning 2 of the examples 6.6.7 amounts to evaluating how
easily they can be supplied intuitively with a virtual context of interpretation.
Especially for nonliteral uses, the result depends on the imagination of the
cognitive agent doing the evaluation.
For defining the proplets in 6.6.1-6.6.3 and 6.6.5, it is sufficient to represent
the core values by means of placeholders like book, red, square, food, eat,
apple, or dog . Thereby, the placeholders' literal meaning in English speaking
humans is used as a temporary substitute for a procedurally equivalent imple-
mentation in a talking robot.
In addition, the use of placeholder core values suffices for the following
cognitive procedures of DBS:
6.6.8 C OGNITIVE PROCEDURES USING PLACEHOLDER CORE VALUES
1. The time-linear syntactic-semantic interpretation in the hear mode (6.4.4),