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| Speaker | |
| Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney | |
| Date: | Tuesday 17th March 1998 |
| Time: | 11:30am |
| Place: | Seminar Room 357, Department of Computing, Building E6A, Macquarie University |
Abstract
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage of Wierzbicka (1996, etc.) is a system that attempts to represent all meaning in terms of combinations of a finite set of primitives. In this talk I discuss a formalisation of this system, in a manner reminiscent of categorial grammar, since such a lexicalist approach seems to be the best way of describing the kind of grammar of constructions centred on lexical primes that has been explored in recent NSM work. The discrete nature of the NSM means that it can be described straightforwardly as a formal language. Indeed, the semi-artificial metalanguage of NSM is perhaps as well thought of as a formal language as a subset of natural languages. I argue that distinguishing combinatorics at the level of semantic relations from the constructions of natural languages that serve as host languages for the NSM is important for the development of an NSM syntax, if the issues are not to be confused by chance facts of a certain host language. Moreover, the rigour of formalisation offers benefits for certain lines of research: it allows one to identify more clearly where the proposed syntax is and is not sufficient, and it brings out issues of scope, coreference, and the significance of ordering relations that have been glossed over in less formalised work. I will also discuss briefly a small prototype implementation of this system. This paper is joint work with Nick Enfield.
Biography
Chris Manning is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney (within the Faculty of Arts). He works on syntax (mainly HPSG, LFG, and linguistic typology) and computational linguistics, especially on the use of corpora and statistical NLP techniques.
Before returning to Australia, Chris was an Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University (but since he left, all the CL-related work at CMU has moved to the Language Technologies Institute). Before coming to CMU, Chris was at Stanford University where he had an office at CSLI. Prior to that Chris lived in Australia, and attended the ANU.Enquiries: sals@mri.mq.edu.au
| Last modified: March, 1998 |