Re: [ontolog-forum] Fwd: Charles Fillmore died at age 84

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

I did ask Terry Halpin about Filmore, and he said that he knew of Filmore's work because Terry's mentor, Sjir Nijssen, created the initial data modelling technique that Terry morphed into Object Role Modelling.   And Sjir Nijssen was strongly influenced by Fillmore. 

My discussion with him reminded me of the fundamental tenent in all of this work from Wittgenstein -- "The world is the totality of facts, not things."  I have found this  right phenominologically, that is, as a 'philosophical' ontology, since 'things' are more of a mental construct than (perceptions of) fields of color, say (i.e. maybe "tropes".)

But, more importantly, I have found that n-ary relations with n = 0 to *, together with roles (my 'computer science' meta-ontology or upper ontology) is a more expressive,  more flexible,  simpler, way to represent knowledge for computing purposes than 'entities', 'attributes, and 'relationships' (an can easily be done with UML diagrams).  
 

In any case ,  Fillmore's Case Grammar, Halpin's Roles, can be used to tie linguistic categories to upper ontology categories.  (the agent, the affected, the beneficiary, the instrument, etc.)   This is different from an attempt to tie ontology categories to parts of speech, which I believe is quite misguided, since a single concept can be cast in one language or another as most ANY part of speech, and in almost all languages, as several parts of speech.  (In fact, I think this is the mistake in E/R analysis, the most common computer science meta-ontology, as 'attributes' are tropes as used to describe something else.  In other words, I don't see the benefit, from an ontological or knowledge representation point of view, of distinguishing blue as a an attribute (or adjective, in English), the color blue as a 'thing', blueness as an abstraction, and the act of being blue (a verb in some languages, as the act of being silent is a verb in German) (the only color verbs in English are about the act of changing color (lighten, darken, mottle, embrown)).   I think that these differences of parts of speech can better be discerned by the USE of the concept (for example, blue) in the given context.

I strongly recommend taking a look at Halpin's work.

Wm

On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 9:08 AM, Gary Berg-Cross <gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

And it is worth noting that Zelllig Harris was Chomsky's "mentor" of  a sort at U Penn. 

"Through these interests, I happened to meet Zellig Harris, a really extraordinary person who had a great influence on many young people in those days. He had a coherent understanding of this whole range of issues , which I lacked, and I was immensely attracted by it, and by him personally as well, also by others who I met through him. He happened to be one of the leading figures in modern linguistics, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. His interests were very broad, linguistics being only a small corner of them, and he was a person of unusual brilliance and originality. I began to take his graduate courses; in fact the first reading I did in linguistics was the proofs of his book Methods in Structural Linguistics, which appeared several years later."

See influences for more.

Gary Berg-Cross, Ph.D.  

gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx     

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GaryBergCross

NSF INTEROP Project  

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0955816

SOCoP Executive Secretary

Knowledge Strategies    

Potomac, MD

240-426-0770

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 11:15 PM, William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Yes, thanks so much

I had forgotten about this, it is a very nice piece

I would surely agree with John that there were similar insights long before.   For example, in Zellig Harris's transformational grammar, he would define a set of transformations like the different buy-sell-goods-cost structures mentioned in the article.  And Harris's EXPLICIT and oft repeated fundamental assertion was that semantics is included or mplicit in grammar, not separate from it, and he acknowledge Sapir as the originator of this though.  So, reading Lakoff say that he had begun to 'suspect' this, a generation and a half after Harris,  is, oh, I don't know, ....

Also, remembering frames from Fillmore led me to recall that Terry Halpin's excellent work in Object Role Modelling, and realize finally it is ***just so close to Filmore's work*** it is astounding.  Halpin even uses the same word 'frame' in the same way, to define a sort of deep structure for a 'fact type.' 

I do not believe they knew about each other's work.  I will ask Terry. 

Wm

 

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 8:40 PM, Matthew Kaufman <mkfmncom@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Matthew Kaufman <mkfmncom@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 8:39 PM
Subject: Fwd: [ontolog-forum] Charles Fillmore died at age 84
To: Damion Nabarrete <damion.nabarrete@xxxxxxxxx>

Thanks for sharing yet another history event in play

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 3:36 PM
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Charles Fillmore died at age 84
To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


Chuck Fillmore, who is widely known for his work on case grammar and
related issues, died at age 84.  George Lakoff wrote a very nice
summary of his life and work:

http://georgelakoff.com/2014/02/18/charles-fillmore-discoverer-of-frame-semantics-dies-in-sf-at-84-he-figured-out-how-framing-works/

I agree with almost all of what Lakoff wrote.  My only reservation
is his claim that all the great ideas in cognitive science were
invented in the past 40 years -- and usually in some group in
which he participated.

Fillmore certainly deserves a great deal of credit for his work on
case grammar.  But the following articles provide some background
on related work:

Minsky's 1974 article on frames (see the bibliography):

    http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Frames/frames.html

My article on semantic networks:

    http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/semnet.htm

For my review of Lakoff's 1999 book (generally positive),
but with some criticism of his writing style:

    http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/lakoff.htm

John

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