I wrote: (01)
>> That is the point I thought should not be lost: Formalization turns
>> adjectives, including colour attribution, into predicates ("verbs"). (02)
Pat Hayes wrote:
> I wouldn't say for a second that predicates in FOL have any clear
> connection with verbs in English. (03)
Upon reflection, I have to agree. Logical predicates seem to represent
nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs without prejudice. What I really
had in mind was that failing to disambiguate "is red" from "red" is what
we do with logical predicates. But "to be" is a very special verb in
every language I have encountered, so my generalization from "behaving
like 'is'" to "behaving like verbs" is at least risky. ;-) (04)
>> Now, in many of these languages, 'is red' is indistinguishable from
>> 'turns red' or 'turned red'.
>
> I wonder if these languages had a construction that we might render as
> 'staying red' or 'maintaining red' which disambiguated in the other
> direction? (05)
Now there you have me. I suppose they might, if that concept had its
own significance, like "evergreen". In nature, I think most colours
don't tend to 'stay' very long, and I assume that most of the language
of colour arose from observations of nature. As Sean said, it is all
about how language formed in the role of expressing a conceptualization
of the world. (06)
My understanding of this is limited to what I read some time ago, and I
would have to look through my cache of books (not PDF) to find it. I
think the examples were of African and native American languages, but if
it turned out to be true of Turkish and Thai, it wouldn't really
surprise me. The idea was part of undermining Western assumptions about
language structure based on ignorance, and that is a recurrent theme in
a number of the linguistics works I have read in the last 20 years. (07)
-Ed (08)
P.S. My problem is that I remember a lot of *what* I read, but it
doesn't take me very long to forget *where* I read it. So it takes me a
week to find a specific reference. "The Anthropology of Colour" sounds
like a good addition to my collection of interesting but probably
useless knowledge. (09)
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 FAX: +1 301-975-4694 (010)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority." (011)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (012)
|