Mystery Number Two - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 49

Bach-Peter sentence, 11.5.9, in which we implicitly adopt the terminology of
Transformational Grammar. We also call a word form like man a noun, but
this use is on the level of morphology rather than syntax.

3.6 Linguistic Relativism vs. Universal Grammar

The parsing of natural language expressions in the hear mode of DBS results
in contents which are partially language-independent. This applies to the fol-
lowing aspects of a content represented as a set of proplets.
First, many content words in different languages, e.g., dog , chien , Hund ,
and cane , are represented by proplets with the same core value, e.g., the con-
cept dog . 17 Second, function words and morphological markings of different
languages, for example, singular or past tense , are interpreted using the
same values of the cat and sem attributes whenever appropriate. Third, the
word order of the surface 18 is dissolved into an order-free set of proplets.
Conversely, DBS content representations are language-dependent in that dif-
ferent languages may use different lexicalizations 19 and different syntactic-
semantic constructions 20 to code the same content. This applies not only to
languages which are distant from each other, such as English and Chinese, but
also to neighboring languages such as English, German, and Italian.
For example, the following sentences have the same meaning 1 ,buttheir
syntactic-semantic structure in English, German, and Italian is different:

3.6.1 E QUIVALENT CLAUSES WITH DIFFERENT CONSTRUCTIONS

English: I don't care.

German: Es ist mir egal. ( It is me equal. )

Italian: Mi lascia indifferente. ( Me leaves-it indifferent. )

17 Cf. 6.6.3 for the explicit proplet definitions.
18 For a uniform method of mapping the different word orders in declarative main clauses of Ger-
man (second position of the finite verb with free order of the obligatory arguments), English (post-
nominative position of the verb with fixed order of the obligatory arguments), Korean (final position
of the verb with free order of the obligatory arguments), and Russian (free order of the verb and its
arguments) into equivalent contents, see Hausser (2008). The order of optional modifiers is usually
relatively free.
19 The literature on lexicalization is vast. See Talmy (1985), Jackendoff (1990), Pustejovsky (1995),
Brinton and Traugott (2005), and others. Lexicalization is one area in contemporary linguistics in
which the crucial distinction between the literal meaning 1 of a sign and the speaker meaning 2 of an
utterance is more or less properly observed. See FoCL'99, 4.3.3, First Principle of Pragmatics.
20 This notion is central to Construction Grammar (cf. Fillmore et al. 1988, Croft 2000). Constructions
are susceptible to a DBS grammatical analysis in terms of parts of speech, functor-argument, and
coordination. It is just that they are of a more pronounced collocational and/or idiomatic nature.