NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/bit/listserv/csgl/2309

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Date:         Wed, 27 Jan 1993 11:23:51 EST
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From:         "Bruce E. Nevin" <[e-mail]>
Subject:      writing, NP-VP, Kropotkin, Occam
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[From: Bruce Nevin (Wed 930127 08:54:45)]

(Avery Andrews 930123.1350) --

>          People appear to have a fixed handwriting
>style that is invariant over a substantial size range, from blackboard
>writing done with arm muscles, to ordinary writing done with fingers.

Not exactly invariant.  It changes according to mood, energy
level, even illness (where the illness has no direct debilitating
effect on control of hand/arm movements).  Even more interesting
are correlations of gestural characteristics of handwriting with
attributes of personal character.  People who cross multiple ts
in the same word, for example, tend in other areas of life also
to integrate tasks rather than treat them atomically, in
isolation; people who write with more pressure tend to be more
forceful and emphatic than those who write with light pressure;
the slant of the writing correlates with emotional expressiveness
vs. reserve, and so on.  (My mother in law has for more than 50
years worked for individuals and corporations and testified in
legal proceedings as a handwriting analyst.)  Correlations of
this sort suggest that perceptual control at some higher level
("take in a larger picture and integrate on the fly") has
consequences that are incidental to the effecting of lower-level
control (crossing each t in a word) and also incidental to the
higher-level purposes for which that lower-level control is
enlisted (writing a note saying you went out to get some beer for
Avery).  Reminiscent of Manfred Clynes' "sentics" also.  The
claim is made that the correlation can be used not only for
diagnosis but also for therapy.  (There was a book some years
back called something like _Grapho-Therapeutics_ that presented
this application of handwriting analysis.)  Well, *you* try
changing some characteristic of your handwriting (writing with
more pressure if you write lightly, dotting every i and crossing
every t if you sometimes omit them in haste, writing with more
forward slant, or the reverse of one of these, and try making it
habitual, and see what sort of resistance you run into.
Changing the character of one's handwriting is a disturbance.
The interesting question is, what controlled perceptions are
being disturbed?

(Bill Powers (930126.0830) ) --

> I've seen this in linguistics. In a top-down model, some global
> feature of a sentence is specified. This feature is then
> exemplified by some element of a specific sentence at a lower
> level. But why that sentence, and not a totally different one
> that is also an example of the higher form? In fact the detailed
> sentences used as examples vary all over the place, so there is
> clearly no constraint on which sentence is to be used as an
> example. This is a major problem for top-down models (at least as
> far as implementing them is concerned).

This characterization does not apply to operator grammar, which
does not involve abstract structures.  The lack of abstract
structures is taken as a fault in Generativist circles--there is
talk of being "data-bound" for example, as a pejorative.  But the
abstract structures of the various flavors of Generative grammar
are due to the historical happenstance that Chomsky formalized a
particular type of sentence-analysis in the early 1950s, called
immediate-constituent analysis, and neither he nor any of his
followers (save a very few) have ever stepped outside its frame,
so that phrase-structure trees with NPs and VPs have become
institutionalized as an almost obligatory notational convention
for presenting ideas about syntax and semantics.

In this type of analysis, a sentence (S) is first divided into
two parts or immediate constituents.  In English these are
typically a noun phrase (NP) followed by a verb phrase (VP).
These constituents are each in turn segmented into two immediate
constituents, and so on, until one arrives at morphemes that have
no further immediate constituents.  The result is a
pseudo-hierarchy of phrase-classes, and (reversing the steps of
analysis) a "phrase-structure grammar" (PSG) employing rewrite
rules adapted from Post production systems in mathematical logic.
In a rewriting rule, the name of a phrase class appears on the
left side of an arrow (glossed "goes to" or "yields"), and on the
right side of the arrow appears the set of sequences of phrase
classes next below it in the pseudo-hierarchy.

Taking the names of the phrase-classes (NP, VP, etc.) as
primitives of the grammar means that one cannot refer to meaning
during the course of producing a sentence.  It means, further,
that the grammar cannot produce a sentence, but only a structure
for a sentence.  The choice of words at the "leaves" of the tree,
and the semantic considerations that drive the choice of words,
are seen as orthogonal to the processes that generate syntactic
structures for those words.

In string analysis (center-and-adjunct grammar), in dependency
grammar, and in operator grammar (word dependency and reduction),
meaning-driven relations between words are the principal
motivation (controlled perceptions) in the processes that
generate syntactic structures, the other sort of motivation
being control for conformity to convention in choice among
alternatives for word selection and reductions, including matters
of emphasis, style, and expression.

Much ink has been spilled in attempts to compensate the essential
inability of PSG to show word relations (cp. the "head-of"
relation), in for example X-bar theory, theta roles, all the
elaborate abstractions of government-binding theory, and (in a
different effort) head-driven PSG, etc.  Much better would be to
jettison the whole notational commitment.  But that is like
trying to get rid of FORTRAN, or persuading all typists to
convert from QWERTY to DVORAK keyboards.  Or persuading
psychologists that there is something of value in PCT.

(Avery Andrews 930127.1000) --

> As for linguistics, what the grammars are supposed to do is define
> a set of constraints, to which others can be added.  What these
> constraints do is give you a limited number of OK pairings of overt
> strings (utterances) and semantic structures.  Then their can be additional
> constraints added, such that the structure be one involving a
> certain overt string (that's parsing) or semantic structure (that's
> production).  So I don't really see what the problem is in general
> terms, tho the specifics are obviously a mess, & I think the notion
> of `semantic structure' is especially dubious (but have no coherent
> ideas about what to replace it with).

In operator grammar, the operator words and argument words and
their word dependencies constitute the semantic structure.  There
is a hierarchy of constraints in language, each of which
contributes to the information in sentences: the constraint
specifying phonemic contrasts, redundancy in phoneme-sequences
(whether represented alphabetically or in some other way)
specifying morphemes, redundancy in morpheme-sequences specifying
word-dependencies and reductions, redundancy across periods of
discourse specifying discourse structure and information
structures in texts with respect to sublanguage grammars.  All of
this is spelled out coherently enough in _A Grammar of English on
Mathematical Principles_ (1982) and _A Theory of Language and
Information_ (1991), especially the latter.  I will have a paper
on the form/information question in _Historiographia Linguistica_
this Spring.  I could make the draft of that available to anyone
interested, and would certainly value comments on it.

([e-mail] Fri, 22 Jan 1993 11:36:31) --

    there is was a russian political theorist that concentrated
    on how most and the most beneficial interactions between
    organisms were cooperative; it was written counter to
    darwin's ideas of struggle and the social and political
    conclusions drawn from his ideas, ideas that unfortunately
    have not been played out and remain as status quo
    justifications for for the miserable lot of many. anyway, his
    name is was Kropokin and the book is Mutual Aid (stick with
    the title, i think i misspelled his name).

Prince Pyotr (Peter) Kropotkin was a first-rate biologist and one
of the early pioneers in the study of ecological systems, as well
as a leading anarchist (how's that for an oxymoron?)
theoretician, writer, and activist in the tradition of Tolstoy.
In _Mutual Aid_ he says that Darwin gave as much weight to
cooperation as to competition in determination of fitness and
survival, and argues against those many for whom Darwinism was a
convenient justification for the status quo.  Instead of saying
the peasants are poor and miserable because God made them that
way, say they're poor and miserable because they aren't fitted
for anything better, and if they die that's just evolution
weeding them out and making the human race more perfect with gems
like me and thee.  Social Darwinism is of course alive and well
today, or rather (and more generally) the human propensity to use
our thinking capacity to justify conclusions already comfortably
in hand rather than to reason our way to unforeseen conclusions.
"How wonderful a thing it is to be a rational being," said Ben
Franklin in his autobiography, recounting how he lapsed from
strict vegetarianism due to the succulent smell of a neighbor's
fish baking, "for we can make up a reason for whatever we have
decided beforehand."

Martin --

I've read through the Occam piece, but have not got to the bottom
of my disquiet.  I started to write something here, but decided
to wait until I have been able to give it more thought.
Everything ought to be re-framed, I believe, in terms of word
dependencies in the sublanguage grammar for the science in which
the hypotheses are stated.

        Bruce
        [e-mail]