The question was addressed to JFS, but I'll offer a reply.
In a talk about child language acquisition, Paul Vogt of Tilburg University first plays a soundtrack of a woman saying something in a foreign language, and asks the audience to guess what she's saying. No one can guess, since the language is from Africa, and the audience speaks only European languages. He then plays a video, which shows the woman standing in a small village near a bucket of water and a cup, with a small child, perhaps only 3 years old. She points to a cup on the ground and points to the bucket of water, and says the words no one in the audience could understand. It's now clear from the visual information that what she is saying means "Give me some water". The young child picks up the cup, fills it with water from the bucket, and gives it to her mother.
This simple example illustrates the relative importance of pragmatics, semantics, and syntax, for child language acquisition. The pragmatics (context information including visual information about the scene and gestures) enables understanding the semantics of speech, when a child is learning a language and doesn't yet understand syntax. It must be this way because there is arguably no "universal grammar" that specifies the syntax of all natural languages, yet any infant with normal intelligence can learn any natural language, if it is raised by a parent who speaks that language. So very young children have to use pragmatic information to learn the semantics of speech in a language, and to also gradually learn the syntax. Anyone fortunate enough to watch a child learn to talk can observe that understanding pragmatics and semantics precedes and enables acquisition of syntax, for very young children.
> From:
rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To:
ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 20:05:48 -0700
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Paraconsistent Logic
>
> John F. Sowa wrote:
> I believe that the reason why is,
> or should be, obvious: a child
> (or an adult learning a second
> language) begins with pragmatics,
> then semantics, and finally
> syntax. Of the three, syntax is of
> the most value for understanding
> fine details. But the main
> points can be understood even with
> badly mangled syntax.
>
> Would you give some exemplars of kids using first
> pragmatics then semantics and finally syntax? I
> suppose pragmatics comes in when the infant is
> hungry, or has a messy diaper, or other motive to
> signal the humans around her. Semantics in a 3
> year old? A good example would help.
>
> -Rich
>
> Sincerely,
> Rich Cooper
> EnglishLogicKernel.com
> Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
> 9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of John F Sowa
> Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2014 7:15 PM
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Paraconsistent Logic
>
> Leo and Rich,
>
> Leo
> > the semantics and the syntax are associated at
> each point in the NL
> > derivation (in a compositional fashion), though
> each uses different
> > "logics" that are correlated.
>
> That short description summarizes the fundamental
> Fregean principle,
> which has been very successful for implementing
> parsers for formal
> languages. But NLs are not formal languages.
>
> Leo
> > This is of course old-fashioned symbolic
> computational linguistics,
> > not new-fangled corpus-based computational
> linguistics -- though
> > of course both styles should be reconciled.
>
> I agree that any method that has had some
> successful applications
> should be taken into consideration. Most of the
> successes of the
> corpus-based methods come from processing large
> amounts of actual
> data -- instead of Chomsky's naval gazing.
>
> But their semantic representations are weak or
> almost nonexistent.
>
> Rich
> > can anyone shed some more light on why how and
> what you would
> > use a labeled deductive system for?
>
> For YAFMFNLP (Yet Another Formal Method For NLP).
> Following is a
> quotation from the last paragraph of the LDS paper
> by Finger et al.
>
> FKGK
> > The interpretation of natural language
> expressions qua expressions is,
> > as before, strictly syntactic -- a set of
> metalevel procedures on the
> > building of logical configurations.
>
> The formal system that devoted the longest, most
> sustained effort
> to this strategy is probably Ron Kaplan's group at
> Xerox PARC, which
> was spun off as PowerSet, which was bought by
> Microsoft to enhance
> the capabilities of Bing, and which was finally
> disbanded as one
> more formal failure.
>
> There were many very intelligent people working on
> these systems,
> who devoted many person-centuries to their
> development. But none
> of them can understand language as well as a
> 3-year-old child.
>
> I believe that the reason why is, or should be,
> obvious: a child
> (or an adult learning a second language) begins
> with pragmatics,
> then semantics, and finally syntax. Of the three,
> syntax is of
> the most value for understanding fine details.
> But the main
> points can be understood even with badly mangled
> syntax.
>
> John
>
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