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From: stampe@uhccux.UUCP (David Stampe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: AI in the 13th Century
Message-ID: <622@uhccux.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Jun-87 10:03:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: uhccux.622
Posted: Thu Jun 25 10:03:37 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Jun-87 02:02:40 EDT
References: <1654@uwmacc.UUCP> <9810@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Organization: U. of Hawaii, Manoa (Honolulu)
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In-reply-to: mps@duke.cs.duke.edu's message of 24 Jun 87 17:03:34 GMT

Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.44.8 of Wed May 20 1987 on uhccux (berkeley-unix)


The nine questions of Ramon Lull's Ars Magna (whether? what? whence?
why? how large? of what kind? when? where? how?) seem to be what were
called the "modes of being" in the grammatical theories of the
"Modistae" during the middle ages.  They were based ultimately on
Aristotle's Categories, which have been claimed during this century
(by Ryle?) to have been based on the Greek interrogative pronouns.

Regarding the similarities to conceptual dependency theory, it's
interesting that in *syntactic* dependency theory, in a phrase, it is
only the dependent member (adjunct, modifier, operator) that can be
interrogated vis a vis the independent (head, operand) member, not
vice versa.

Examples, with (Head (Adjunct)), and * for the bad cases:
 (Verb (Object))  Q: Who does he like?  A: Mary.
		 *Q: What he Mary?   A: Likes her.
 ((Adj) Noun)     Q: Which hat did she wear?   A: The straw hat.
		 *Q: What straw did she wear?   A: The hat.
 ((Adv) Adj)      Q: How hot was it?  A: Too hot.
                 *Q: Too what was it?  A: Hot.

Etc.  Typically the head is implied by the adjunct (e.g. to like Mary
is to like [someone], a straw hat is a hat, too hot is hot).  That is,
adjuncts are rather like predicates.  That is, they correspond to the
modes of being, the ways things can be.

There's not much new under the sun.

			David Stampe, Linguistics, Univ. of Hawaii
			uhccux!stampe@nosc.mil