tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-520807396714463309.post7519257635814398394..comments2024-02-12T02:22:30.561-05:00Comments on The Lousy Linguist: Crazy Question - The Primacy of Nouns or Verbs?Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09558846279006287148noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-520807396714463309.post-51402959013283932672013-04-12T19:09:28.719-04:002013-04-12T19:09:28.719-04:00Have you read Tom Givon's "The Genesis of...Have you read Tom Givon's "The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity" or Heine and Kuteva's "The Genesis of Grammar: A Reconstruction"? If so, what do you think of their views? Jim Mischler, Northwestern State University of Louisiananoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-520807396714463309.post-61472528841549209622013-02-25T17:25:56.511-05:002013-02-25T17:25:56.511-05:00How the brain interacts with POS is a deeply inter...How the brain interacts with POS is a deeply interesting, and complex topic. I do know that there are phenomena like slips-of-the-tongue where nouns replace nouns and verbs replace verbs, but nouns replacing verbs is rare, so POS (or grammatical structure of some sort) is clearly stored somehow.Chrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09558846279006287148noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-520807396714463309.post-78871891848176279432013-02-25T07:31:17.168-05:002013-02-25T07:31:17.168-05:00Interesting post. However, I'm really not sure...Interesting post. However, I'm really not sure whether how do we store these concepts in brain. Do we observe things in terms of their parts of speech and store so (even if there are 36 or more POS)? I feel we do not attach any part od speech when we observe things. We must be having some other attributes which characterize each of the concepts. May be POS is a inference on these attributes. Sumant S Kulkarnihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10016207083654766380noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-520807396714463309.post-11270541530489044102013-02-23T18:04:03.124-05:002013-02-23T18:04:03.124-05:00Cory, sorry foe the delay in responding. Your abst...Cory, sorry foe the delay in responding. Your abstract looks great. Have you read Bickerton's book? He makes the claim that what's crucial in the evolution of language is the rise of abstract thinking. Whatever else they are, POSs are abstract categories. A challenging topic, though. No real way to test. Chrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09558846279006287148noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-520807396714463309.post-47386200843753083242013-02-19T03:54:52.253-05:002013-02-19T03:54:52.253-05:00For the question posed form the point of view of l...For the question posed form the point of view of language origins, it's logically impossible to have 'one' part of speech type. As POS is evidenced by how its used in a sentence with other words, without that contrast you can't call a single existing category a 'noun' or 'verb' (unless you're using a solely semantic definition of POS, which is answering a different question entirely - namely what were the semantic categories of the first words - and that is a comment on function and not structure). I wrote an sbstract on this and presented a poster, but have yet to expand it to a full paper...: http://www.academia.edu/1889775/The_First_Word_Was_Not_a_Noun_EVOLANG9_Cory Cuthbertsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12000939620226412700noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-520807396714463309.post-27775486947503980482013-02-15T23:53:16.349-05:002013-02-15T23:53:16.349-05:00Matías, I agree. The psychological reality of part...Matías, I agree. The psychological reality of parts of speech is an ongoing and unsettled research question. One thing is for sure. The traditional set of 8 or 9 parts of speech in English are insufficient to account for the observed variety of word class behaviors in English (let alone other languages). From a computational perspective, the Penn Treebank required 36 parts of speech to parse their data. Are those 36 psychologically real? No clue. Not sure anyone has ever tried to experimentally validate that set. It would be an interesting research goal. Chrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09558846279006287148noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-520807396714463309.post-7109468073132771952013-02-15T23:20:03.592-05:002013-02-15T23:20:03.592-05:00It's an interesting question, although I'm...It's an interesting question, although I'm not too sure we actually have POS tags in our brains.MGNhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11557127959079200429noreply@blogger.com