Timeline for Did case systems dissappear to make embedding easier?
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29 events
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| Mar 6, 2012 at 19:30 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Alenanno: I might have made some small mistakes, like misusing the phrase "noun clause" but the mistakes the professionals make are big and of principle. I only opened EL&U after closing BTW. | |
| Mar 6, 2012 at 11:58 | comment | added | Alenanno | @RonMaimon Why should I open the meta discussion? You should open it, as you did on EL&U. You're right in one thing "Closing is a preliminary step to deleting", but it's incomplete, because it actually is: "Closing is a preliminary step to deleting, unless you fix it according to the suggestions". You said you're self-taught, but here there are real linguists, that do this as their profession, so maybe you can at least suspect that you made some mistakes. Let's stop commenting here, I'm currently in the Linguistics Chat, you can answer there. | |
| Mar 6, 2012 at 11:53 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Alenanno: Closing is a preliminary step to deleting, and I will not edit my question, as it is fine as it stands. It has as many upvotes as downvotes right now, but even if it were at -70, it is a legitimate question that is motivated by genuine curiousity, and the thesis it is promoting explains several otherwise mysterious language phenomena. You have a choice--- you can not close it. There is nothing in it that merits closure. If you open a discussion on meta, I'll be happy to comment there. | |
| Mar 6, 2012 at 11:33 | comment | added | Alenanno | @RonMaimon Closing is not censoring. It's a pause state that you can use at your advantage to improve your own question. I can't force you to edit it, as it is in your best interest. If you decide not to do it, I don't have much choice. | |
| Mar 6, 2012 at 11:32 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Alenanno: If my question is closed, I will take it as an attempt by the linguists on this site to censor it, which is certainly what it will be, and I will not cooperate with this site any further. I will certainly not modify the question, because I believe it is a correct and important original insight. As far as your "extended discussion nonsense" I was ignoring that, as I always do, and as everyone should. You can always delete the comments later. | |
| Mar 6, 2012 at 8:58 | comment | added | Alenanno | @RonMaimon Have you not seen my comment? I explicitly asked everyone something. If you need to extend your discussion, please move to the Linguistics Chat. By the way, your question has a close-vote already. If your question gets closed, do not edit your question randomly, please post a question on the Linguistics Meta so we can see if we can fix this. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 16:15 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Alex B. It is embedded into "I walked to NP quickly". This is the standard parsing of "I walked to the ugly white room where sue had an epileptic seizure quickly". The words "ugly" "white" and the "where sue had an epileptic seizure" all attach to "room" to make the NP "the ugly white room where sue had an epileptic seizure" and this is embedded into "I walked to NP quickly", taking the place of NP. This is not "my theory" of sentence processing (if only!), it is the standard theory of generative grammar. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 16:10 | comment | added | Alenanno | If there is a need for an extended discussion (which comments are not meant for), please use the Linguistics Chat or the Linguistics Meta | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:50 | comment | added | Alex B. | [I walked to the ugly white room] [where Sue had an epileptic seizure]. I'd argue that the relative clause [where Sue had an epileptic seizure] attaches to [room] etc. Now, that's not an issue here. When you say there is an embedded NP [[the white ugly room [where Sue had an epileptic seizure]], what is it embedded into? | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:47 | comment | added | user483 | @RonMaimon sorry, I don't want to discourage you from participating (nor do I want to inflate this comment thread). "Noun-clause" is not a big deal, but what is eluding me is your theory of sentence processing, which I cannot recognize, and which most of your claims are hinging upon. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:38 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Alex B.: Not at all: "I walked to the ugly white room where Sue had an epileptic seizure, quickly". The NP is [the ugly white room where Sue had an epileptic seizure], the "where Sue had an epileptic seizure" attaches at a lower level to "ugly white room". This is the right parenthesization, and the bracketed constituents you identify are not useful because they don't respect the parse-tree. In the example I gave [the ugly white room where I walked to the corner where I walked to the wall] is the embedded NP. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:35 | comment | added | Alex B. | [I walked to the ugly white room] [where I walked to the corner]. These bracketed constituents are the only two clauses in this sentence. [where I walked to the corner] is not an NP. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:34 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @jlovegren: There was no confusion to anyone reading this, everyone knows what I was talking about. You should not exclude people because you don't like the words that they use. I will try to use standard terms in the future. Although, I notice that I used the phrase "noun-phrase" right in the first comment correctly, I just conflated it with "noun-clause". Sorry. It won't happen again. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:27 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Alex B.: If you make the sentences above Russian, it would really clarify how the case system works with NPs in Russian. In my experience, people tend to introduce separate function words that mean "to" in addition to and separate from the case markings, to deal with embedded NPs. Then the cases disappear as the embedding words take over from the case markings, even for those single-word situations where the cases would work with no problem. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:27 | comment | added | user483 | @RonMaimon your knowledge of how languages work seems to be at variance with that of most other participants. You are going to have to interpret your insights in terms of standard vocabulary or point people to suitable references when you employ non-standard terminology, lest your insights be lost on people who cannot understand them correctly. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:25 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Alex B.: I explained what I meant by "noun clauses", I meant NPs, and there was no confusion, since I explained the term precisely. I will use the correct term from now on, although I hate linguistics jargon, since it seems to only be used as a barrier to entry for linguists to protect their field from outsiders. It mostly is describing trivial stuff. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:23 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Gaston Umlaut: I think it was clear enough. I know how languages work, you don't need to explain. Case markings need to modify the NP in a nontrivial way, to attach the function to the NP, and I guess they modify the "leading noun" (although the "leading noun" might be "whatever", as in "I walked to whatever that thing is". So you need to learn to case leading nouns and "whatever"s in NPs, and to search for leading nouns in transformations, so as to de-case them and re-case them when you change the function of the phrase. This is annoying, and easier if you drop the case for function words. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:22 | comment | added | Alex B. | See Huddleston and Pullum 2005: 176 for examples of what is sometimes known as a noun clause in non-generative theories of grammar. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:14 | comment | added | Alex B. | @RonMaimon, your examples don't have embedded "noun clauses', all I can see is relative clauses. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 8:53 | comment | added | Gaston Ümlaut | @RonMaimon Yes, that's non-standard terminology. What you're calling a 'noun-clause' is normally called a noun phrase (or 'NP' for short). This is the term standardly used in linguistics (and in computational linguistics). It's weird to talk about making a NP accept a case marker. Rather, a NP is used in a particular grammatical role in a clause, and therefore requires the appropriate marking. In some languages this marking of the grammatical role is done by case inflections, in others by indexing on the verb, in still others by word order. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 6:41 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Gaston Umlaut: a "noun-clause" is a collection of words that make up a unit which acts the same as a noun in a sentence. For example "I dropped the egg on the floor", vs. "I dropped the round semispherical oblong object with whites and yolks, which can sometimes turn into a chicken, on the floor." "the round semispherical oblong object with whites and yolks, which can sometimes turn into a chicken," is a noun-clause. Casing it means making the whole phrase accept a case marker, the same way "egg" would. This is all basic computational linguistics, but I might be using nonstandard terminology. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 6:38 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Alex B: I am not doubting that it can be done, I am just wondering whether it is convenient: make Russian: "I walked to the ugly white room where I walked to the corner where I walked to the wall." and "The ugly white room where I walked to the corner where I walked to the wall was hot." The nounphrase in both cases is "the ugly white room where I walked to the corner where I walked to the wall", and the question is whether the case-markings on "room" have to annoyingly change between the first and second version of the same embedded phrase, in a way that requires looking inside the clause. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 6:32 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @jlovegren: "requires scanning" means that if you have a cased head noun, and you want to do a transformation, you have to decase the head noun, which means scanning the interior of a lexical unit. For example: "I walked the-mountain-ward with the presidents heads carved in" the clause is "the-mountain with the president's heads carved in", and the "ward" is sitting right in the middle of the clause. This means I need to look inside the clause to get rid of the "ward" marker, and this is inconvenient for embedding. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 5:06 | comment | added | Gaston Ümlaut | @RonMaimon I don't understand what a 'noun-clause' is, nor what it means to 'embed a noun clause'?? Nor am I sure what it means to 'case clauses'. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 3:39 | comment | added | Alex B. | If you need examples with glosses, give me an English example and I'll post it in Russian. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 3:36 | comment | added | Alex B. | I disagree that "embedding noun clauses in a language that has noun cases is difficult." In Modern Russian there are six (structural) cases (semantically much more) and they embed noun clauses just fine. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 2:55 | comment | added | user483 | @RonMaimon so I think the point you are interested in is much narrower than the question suggests. You are interested in how relative clauses are formed in languages with elaborate case-marking systems. Btw, what do you mean by "requires some scanning to do a transformation" ? | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 0:55 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | This is reasonable, +1, but I am not saying that cases compete with embeddings, or that they serve the same purpose. Rather, I am saying that embedding noun-clauses in a language that has noun cases is difficult, because you need to know how to case clauses. The different interpretations of nesting are not particularly relevant--- just use a simple noun-phrase and try to case it, and you'll see that it is not so simple, or if it is, that it requires some scanning to do a transformation. | |
| Mar 3, 2012 at 19:57 | history | answered | user483 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |