Mystery Number Two - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 50

The subject position of the English clause may be filled by any non-clausal
noun such as the man with the brown coat (phrasal) and you or John (el-
ementary), with the finite verb form suitably adapted. The finite verb form is
the auxiliary do in its negated form and may take different tense forms. The
main predicate is the infinitive of the verb care , which could be replaced by
the verb mind without changing the construction.
The German sentence uses the expletive es as the subject. 21 The finite verb is
the auxiliary sein (corresponding to English be ) without negation, which may
take different tense and mood forms. The German counterpart to the subject
of the English clause is any noun in the dative case. The main predicate is the
adverbial egal , which could be replaced by gleich or wurst without changing
either the form or the meaning of the construction. 22
And accordingly for Italian. Such asymmetries between different natural lan-
guages have long been noted and have fostered a tradition within language
theory. It is known as linguistic relativism or the Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hy-
pothesis , according to which there does not exist a universal (natural, innate)
semantics which all natural languages map into and out of. 23
Even the part of speech distinctions corresponding to the DBS core attributes
noun, verb, and adj have been found to be absent in some natural languages.
For example, Cayuga , an Iroquois language, at last count spoken by fewer than
one hundred 24 native Americans living in Ontario/Canada, has been argued to
have no distinction between verbs and nouns (Sasse 1993), though Rijkhoff
(2002) and Hengeveld (1992) disagree. 25
For the outsider, such controversy is difficult to assess. First, for one not
speaking Cayuga natively, it is most precarious to judge the empirical facts;
they concern not only the surfaces provided by the tape recorder, but also the
intuitions of the speaker-hearer. Second, there is the theoretical question of
whether the claim applies to morphology, syntax-semantics, or pragmatics.
As a related phenomenon consider conversion in English: a surface like
make can be used as a noun in Jim collects all makes and as a verb in
Jim makes toys . 26 By analogy, the claimed absence of nouns in Cayuga may
21 Grammatically acceptable subject alternatives such as der Preis would compromise the equivalence
with the English counterpart.
22 Intensified versions of egal in German are schnurzegal and schnurzpiepegal .The piep in the latter
has been suggested as stand-in for a swearword.
23 For a modern argument from language typology, see J. Nichols (1992).
24 Even if a language has only a few speakers left and therefore little commercial promise, a DBS
implementation would be worthwhile for the comparison with other languages. It would also serve
research in typology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and so on.
25 Mithun's (1999) formidable overview of the Iroquois languages lists the paper by Sasse in the bibli-
ography, but does not discuss or mention it in the text.