6 ms·

Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends u

by bane 11y ago

Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends up defying this simplification. The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.

hyperpape 11y ago
Reading this, I have no idea if you're saying it because you know how modern syntactic theories work and how they're developed or if you're just saying it because you thought it sounded good. Don't leave us hanging!
- bane 11y ago
  I'll be perfectly honest, I'm half-serious, half-drunk-posting. But on simple inspection, the idea that a word can fit into a single category is obviously wrong. So to generalize the idea, you have to assume that a word can fit into multiple categories. Biology is undergoing a similar transformation from simple "this animal looks kinda like this one" to genomics classification, which is revolutionizing the tree of living things used by biologists to organize living things. There's not really any reason why words, a biological artifact, have been correctly classified all along. Hell! A copy-editor neighbor and I have minor quarrels over the capitalization of college subject names. Trees are a specialization of graphs, and they're usually wrong. Just assume graphs to start with and your data will organize much better, even if the properties of the organizational metaphor aren't quite as nice.
  - hyperpape 11y ago
    Well, I share some of the instinctive scepticism about tidy theories of syntax/semantics. But I don't have any real reason to claim that they don't work. Syntactic theories aim to explain why particular sentences are grammatical or ungrammatical (in the judgments of native speakers). If you can accurately do that, then yes, you've put each word into one category (as far as making up grammatical sentences). So to say the kind of thing you're saying, you'd have to explain why the current research programs in syntax are misguided.
sethjgore 11y ago
That's true. Ask a simple group of 5 linguists and they all will give you different answers. This literally happened in a workshop we gave at a college months ago. Quite funny. While working on grmmr (green-bridge.org) we recognized that so many of us are densely confused when it comes to these metalinguistics. So we just stopped using knives that dissected (metalinguistics) words into words and went for friendlier marker (symbols and colors). We need to be reminded that a lot of it is just pretend and educated guesses, no absolutes. Markers seem to work better here than knives do when teaching and categorizing language grammar.
unhammer 11y ago
You may find http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Grammar-Reader-Bas-Aarts/dp/0199262578/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436174326&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Grammar-Reader-Bas-Aarts/dp/0199... interesting

by bane 11y ago

hyperpape 11y ago

Reading this, I have no idea if you're saying it because you know how modern syntactic theories work and how they're developed or if you're just saying it because you thought it sounded good. Don't leave us hanging!

bane 11y ago
I'll be perfectly honest, I'm half-serious, half-drunk-posting. But on simple inspection, the idea that a word can fit into a single category is obviously wrong. So to generalize the idea, you have to assume that a word can fit into multiple categories. Biology is undergoing a similar transformation from simple "this animal looks kinda like this one" to genomics classification, which is revolutionizing the tree of living things used by biologists to organize living things. There's not really any reason why words, a biological artifact, have been correctly classified all along. Hell! A copy-editor neighbor and I have minor quarrels over the capitalization of college subject names. Trees are a specialization of graphs, and they're usually wrong. Just assume graphs to start with and your data will organize much better, even if the properties of the organizational metaphor aren't quite as nice.
- hyperpape 11y ago
  Well, I share some of the instinctive scepticism about tidy theories of syntax/semantics. But I don't have any real reason to claim that they don't work. Syntactic theories aim to explain why particular sentences are grammatical or ungrammatical (in the judgments of native speakers). If you can accurately do that, then yes, you've put each word into one category (as far as making up grammatical sentences). So to say the kind of thing you're saying, you'd have to explain why the current research programs in syntax are misguided.

sethjgore 11y ago

That's true. Ask a simple group of 5 linguists and they all will give you different answers. This literally happened in a workshop we gave at a college months ago. Quite funny. While working on grmmr (green-bridge.org) we recognized that so many of us are densely confused when it comes to these metalinguistics. So we just stopped using knives that dissected (metalinguistics) words into words and went for friendlier marker (symbols and colors). We need to be reminded that a lot of it is just pretend and educated guesses, no absolutes. Markers seem to work better here than knives do when teaching and categorizing language grammar.

unhammer 11y ago

You may find http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Grammar-Reader-Bas-Aarts/dp/0199262578/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436174326&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Grammar-Reader-Bas-Aarts/dp/0199... interesting