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A key point is balancing these, sometimes fully satisfying one will ignore another. Communication is all about balance. Note that these apply to programming la
by zeckalpha 8y ago
A key point is balancing these, sometimes fully satisfying one will ignore another. Communication is all about balance.
Note that these apply to programming languages as much as they do to natural language.
- adimitrov 8y agoThey apply to communication. That's the fun thing. Ultimately, implicatures (a corollary of Grice's Maxims) are an information theoretic concept, though I haven't yet seen research that treats them as such. I would love to read about it, though.
- globbaphoul 8y agoPhil Resnik's dissertation ("A Class-Based Approach to Lexical Relationships ", https://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/10010143379/ https://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/10010143379/) uses information theory to investigate why some direct objects are optional (e.g., "I ate [food]") while others are not (e.g., *"I brought [food]"). I extended his information theory to look at how Grice's Maxims would play in to modification of these direct objects ("The Semantics of Optionality", https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1658214586.html?FMT=ABS https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1658214586.html?FMT=ABS). In terms of Grice's Maxims + information theory, does modifying a required direct object ("marking it", as noted in a comment below) informationaly/entropically different from modifying an optional direct object? (This is further clouded by the concept of syntactic optionality being separable from semantic optionality.
- adimitrov 8y agoThanks for your pointers. I had actually read (parts of) Resnik's diss and further work, but apparently it had slipped my mind, or I just forgot about it. Your work sounds really interesting, too. I hadn't heard of Firth's model yet; it sounds like it's in the spirit of distributional semantics. I hope I can find some time to give it a read!