My question concerns the use of "markers" in linguistics and
ontologies.
Katz and Fodor introduced markers in their seminal paper, "THE STRUCTURE OF A SEMANTIC
THEORY", 1963. The discussion presents the use of
"male" and "female" as markers that are useful in disambiguation.
"What formally characterizes a sex-antonymous pair of words is
that the members have identical paths except that where one has
the semantic marker (Male) the other has the semantic marker
(Female). Since there are indefinitely many important semantic
relations which cannot be formally reconstructed from entries in
the conventional dictionary, conventional dictionary entries have
a serious theoretical disadvantage."
OK, I get it that dictionaries are not the best source for
ontological knowledge and the authors not some deficiencies.
Further, the paper is not addressing ontologies in any manner. My
concern is that there seems to be an effort to cover semantic space
by defining a structure of marker for certain words rather than
ascribing them to properties or attributes.
My questions are:
- are markers still accepted as useful linguistic structures or
have markers morphed into other mechanisms?
- have there been accepted efforts of homologation between the
linguists' view of semantics and the ontological view? Is this even
necessary?
-John Bottoms
FirstStar Systems
Concord, MA USA
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