Thursday, November 5, 2009

The semantic unit

The basic unit of semantics is the unit. Since "unit" is a really overloaded word, I'll call it a semantic unit, or a su or something. A unit is just a box. It can be thought of (loosely) as the meaning behind a single word.

A unit is made up of other units, which all stand in relationship within it. It also stands in relationship with other units within a domain. If you surmise that a unit is itself a domain for its inner units, you are quick. Domains and units are the same kind of thing, sort of.

A unit is associated with other units by dint of its inclusion with them in domains, and by dint of the nature of the structure they all participate in. Semantic nets that draw lines between nodes and assign weights to those lines are explicitly representing those associations; we can think of this as a sort of precalculated index of association values that could be derived from study of the semantic structures of a given domain. But those linear values are dangerous - they change according to context. They're best thought of in the abstract as an approximation.

A unit is also associated with syntax. I'll speak of a unit's "semantic pole" and its "syntactic pole", but I'm not sure how valid those labels are for what I'm doing here. (In case you're wondering, a lot of this is based on the work of Ronald Langacker, whose talk at Indiana University in, um, about 1994 really knocked my socks off. I've been imprinted on his theory of cognitive linguistics ever since.)

Since syntax is ultimately how semantic structures interact with the world - and in the programming context, syntactic structures are what actually does all the work - they're going to be quite important. A "cognitive linguistics parser" will have to be part of any toolset we come up with during this venture.

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