Levels of Ontology and Natural Language

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-211
Author(s):  
Friederike Moltmann
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
Structure Sensitive ◽  
Functional Part ◽  
Part Structure ◽  
Primitive Notion

Two levels of ontology are commonly distinguished in metaphysics: the ontology of ordinary objects, or more generally ordinary ontology, and the ontology of what there really or fundamentally is. This chapter argues that natural language reflects not only the ordinary ontology but also a language-driven ontology, which is involved in the mass-count distinction and part-structure-sensitive semantic selection (as well as perhaps the light ontology of pleonastic entities in the sense of Schiffer). The language-driven ontology does not constitute another level of representation, but is taken to be a (selective) ontology of the real, given a plenitudinous or maximalist conception of reality. The language-driven ontology aligns closely with the functional part of grammar and a commitment to it is mandatory with the use of language. This gives rise to a novel view according to which part of ontology should be considered part of universal grammar on a broadened understanding. The chapter recasts the author’s older theory of situated part structures without situations, in purely ontological terms, making use of a primitive notion of unity.

Access to Universal Grammar: The real issues

1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 718-720 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hagit Borer
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
The Real ◽  
L2 Learners

AbstractIssues concerning UG access for L2 acquisition as formulated by Epstein et al. are misleading as well as poorly discussed. UG accessibility can only be fully evaluated with respect to the steady state gram mar reached by the learner. The steady state for LI learners is self evidently the adult grammar in the speech community. For L2 learners, however, the steady state is not obvious. Yet, without its clear characterization, debates concerning stages of L2 acquisition and direct and indirect UG accessibility cannot be resolved.

scholarly journals Secure MEReq: A Tool Support to Check for Completeness of Security Requirements

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2S11) ◽  
pp. 768-771
Keyword(s):  
Software Development ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Security Requirements ◽  
Tool Support ◽  
The Real ◽  
Prototype Tool ◽  
Considerable Research ◽  
Secure Software ◽  
Secure Software Development ◽  
Key Features

Quality security requirements help secure software development to succeed. While considerable research can be discovered in the field of demands elicitation, less attention has been paid to the writing of full security specifications. The demands engineers (REs) are still challenged and tedious in implementing and reporting full safety needs derived from Natural language. This is due to their tendency to misunderstand the real needs and the security terms used by inexperienced REs leading to incomplete security requirements. Motivated from these problems, we have developed a prototype tool, called SecureMEReq to improve the writing of complete security requirements. This tool provides four important key-features, which are (1) extraction of template-based components from client-stakeholders; (2) analysis of template-based density from SRCLib; (3) analysis of requirements syntax density from SecLib; and (4) analysis of completeness prioritization. To do this, we used our pattern libraries: SecLib and SRCLib to support the automation process of elicitation, especially in writing the security requirements. Our evaluation results show that our prototype tool is capable to facilitate the writing of complete security requirements and useful in assisting the REs to elicit the security requirements.

ENGLISH LEARNERS’ LANGUAGE USED FOR CHATTING: A SYNTACTIC AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Nanik Retnowati
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
The Real

Describing language is one of the most important tasks in Linguistics. Language description may give valuable contribution to language teaching practice. This paper is concerning with describing learners’ language used for chatting. Chatting is a spoken language which is written. As a natural language it may have its own structure which can be described. From the point of view of syntax, spoken language usually has its own set of grammar patterns which sometimes may be quite different from that in written language. Language used for chatting would likely provide important information moreover if it is done by language learners who are in the process of trying to make sense of the series of knowledge both on language elements and their usage in the real communication. Chatting task with foreigners was applied to the early semester of English learners. Using Syntactical and Conversation Analysis, this study found the characteristics of the natural language used for chatting and some strategies used by the participants to survive the communication. The description gives an important clue to the benefits of chatting activities for the English learners.

Universal Grammar? Or prerequisites for natural language?

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 522-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adele E. Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Widespread Agreement ◽  
Language Universals

AbstractThis commentary aims to highlight what exactly is controversial about the traditional Universal Grammar (UG) hypothesis and what is not. There is widespread agreement that we are not born “blank slates,” that language universals exist, that grammar exists, and that adults have domain-specific representations of language. The point of contention is whether we should assume that there exist unlearned syntactic universals that are arbitrary and specific to Language.

scholarly journals Natural Language Ontology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friederike Moltmann
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Compositional Semantics ◽  
Material Constitution ◽  
Intentional Objects ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Mass Nouns ◽  
Implicit Arguments ◽  
Ontological Categories ◽  
Part Structure ◽  
Semantic Values

Natural language ontology is a branch of both metaphysics and linguistic semantics. Its aim is to uncover the ontological categories, notions, and structures that are implicit in the use of natural language, that is, the ontology that a speaker accepts when using a language. Natural language ontology is part of “descriptive metaphysics,” to use Strawson’s term, or “naive metaphysics,” to use Fine’s term, that is, the metaphysics of appearances as opposed to foundational metaphysics, whose interest is in what there really is. What sorts of entities natural language involves is closely linked to compositional semantics, namely what the contribution of occurrences of expressions in a sentence is taken to be. Most importantly, entities play a role as semantic values of referential terms, but also as implicit arguments of predicates and as parameters of evaluation. Natural language appears to involve a particularly rich ontology of abstract, minor, derivative, and merely intentional objects, an ontology many philosophers are not willing to accept. At the same time, a serious investigation of the linguistic facts often reveals that natural language does not in fact involve the sort of ontology that philosophers had assumed it does. Natural language ontology is concerned not only with the categories of entities that natural language commits itself to, but also with various metaphysical notions, for example the relation of part-whole, causation, material constitution, notions of existence, plurality and unity, and the mass-count distinction. An important question regarding natural language ontology is what linguistic data it should take into account. Looking at the sorts of data that researchers who practice natural language ontology have in fact taken into account makes clear that it is only presuppositions, not assertions, that reflect the ontology implicit in natural language. The ontology of language may be distinctive in that it may in part be driven specifically by language or the use of it in a discourse. Examples are pleonastic entities, discourse referents conceived of as entities of a sort, and an information-based notion of part structure involved in the semantics of plurals and mass nouns. Finally, there is the question of the universality of the ontology of natural language. Certainly, the same sort of reasoning should apply to consider it universal, in a suitable sense, as has been applied for the case of (generative) syntax.

Von Humboldt on Language, Contemporary Linguistics, and the Mission of a Linguist

2021 ◽  
pp. 52-56
Author(s):  
Ekaterina V. Vostrikova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Biological Feature ◽  
Perspective View ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Social Mission ◽  
The Social ◽  
Underlying Basis ◽  
Generative Approach

This article examines the ideas of W. von Humboldt on language and their simi­larities and differences with the fundamental ideas about the nature of natural languages within the generative framework founded by N. Chomsky. Chomsky famously argued that von Humboldt expressed and defended some of the key ideas of the generative approach. This paper relates Chomsky’s idea of the innate universal grammar and idea of generative rules as the underlying basis of the lan­guage creativity to the similar ideas of W. von Humboldt. The paper also dis­cusses Humboldt’s problematic from the generative perspective view that natural languages can have a primitive or an advance grammar. The paper considers a possible explanation for the fact that this idea seemed consistent to Humboldt with the idea of the innate universal grammar. The contemporary linguistics views all grammars of all languages as equal because a natural language is con­sidered to be a biological feature of our species developed in the process of evo­lution. This idea was not present in Humboldt’s philosophy, which made it possi­ble for him to think that some natural languages have not fully developed a potential hidden in its speakers. In this regard, the author considers the ques­tion of the social mission of the linguist; emphasizes that this is a fight against prejudices based on unscientific understanding of languages and dialects.

Natural Language Parsing

2009 ◽  
pp. 158-175
Author(s):  
Pauli Brattico ◽  
Mikko Maatta
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Information Management ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Inductive Learning ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Natural Language Parsing ◽  
Minimalist Theory

Automatic natural language processing captures a lion’s share of the attention in open information management. In one way or another, many applications have to deal with natural language input. In this chapter the authors investigate the problem of natural language parsing from the perspective of biolinguistics. They argue that the human mind succeeds in the parsing task without the help of languagespecific rules of parsing and language-specific rules of grammar. Instead, there is a universal parser incorporating a universal grammar. The main argument comes from language acquisition: Children cannot learn language specific parsing rules by rule induction due to the complexity of unconstrained inductive learning. They suggest that the universal parser presents a manageable solution to the problem of automatic natural language processing when compared with parsers tinkered for specific purposes. A model for a completely language independent parser is presented, taking a recent minimalist theory as a starting point.

The linguistics of Arrival

2020 ◽  
pp. 32-48
Author(s):  
Jessica Coon
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Language Documentation ◽  
The Real ◽  
The World ◽  
The Military ◽  
Life Work

If aliens arrived, could we communicate with them? What are the tools linguists use to decipher unknown languages? How different can languages be from one another? Do these differences have bigger consequences for how we see the world? This chapter addresses these questions through the lens of the 2016 science-fiction film Arrival and the real-life work of language documentation (in particular, the Mayan language Ch’ol). In Arrival, linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks is recruited by the military to translate the language of the newly arrived alien heptapods. Her job is to find the answer to the question everyone is asking: why are they here? Language is a crucial piece of the answer. This chapter discusses the themes which Arrival has brought to the mainstream, including Universal Grammar, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the importance of linguistic fieldwork.

Poetry, language, and ritual performance

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Haverkort ◽  
Jan H. de Roder
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Central Hypothesis ◽  
Structural Principles ◽  
New Perspective

In line with the proposal of de Roder (1999), we will draw an analogy between the structure of ritual, poetic language and natural language, exploiting Frits Staal’s conception of ritual as a set of recursively applicable formal procedures, and the biological ramifications of the Chomskyan postulate of Universal Grammar. The central hypothesis is that, in terms of evolution, poetry takes a position between age-old rituals and natural languages, as a sort of missing link. We will argue that the building blocks and mechanisms of natural language developed out of ritual acts and the associated rhythmic sound sequences. The formal principles underlying rituals turned out to be useful for communication and thus natural language could evolve, an example of exaptation in the sense of Gould and Vrba (1982). Under this view, the rhythmic layer of poetry — like syntactic structure — is a semantically empty, autonomous pattern, going back to the structural principles underlying ritual. Rhythmic patterns in poetry are thus instances of pure acts in the ritual sense, and as a consequence poetry is a form of language use in which the ritual basis of language is experienced. This puts T.S. Eliot’s famous dictum “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” in a new perspective. The paper thus focuses on the ritualistic substrate of language, not on the synchronic role of ritual in language. We will also discuss neurological evidence which independently supports this idea: Broca’s area — an area in the left hemisphere of the brain that has traditionally been associated with language comprehension and production — is activated when syntactically complex sentences are being processed, but it is also activated in tasks involving the perception of rhythmic patterns in music, thus supporting the idea that both (and by implication ritual too) have the same origins evolutionarily.

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