{"id":1020,"date":"2018-02-10T09:54:05","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T14:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/?p=1020"},"modified":"2018-09-09T10:53:46","modified_gmt":"2018-09-09T15:53:46","slug":"nominal-semantics-of-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/2018\/02\/10\/nominal-semantics-of-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Nominal semantics of &#8216;meaning&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just a quick note about a natural language interpretation that came up for the following sentence:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Under that test, the rental to an oil well driller of a &#8220;rock bit&#8221; having an effective life of but one rental is a transaction in lieu of a transfer of title within the meaning of (a) of this section.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The NLP system comes up with many hundreds of plausible parses for this sentence (mostly because it&#8217;s considering lexical and syntactic possibilities that are not semantically plausible).\u00a0 Among these is &#8220;meaning&#8221; as a <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">nominalization<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>From Wikipedia:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In linguistics, <strong>nominalization<\/strong> is the use of a word which is not a noun (e.g. a verb, an  adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase,  with or without morphological transformation.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s quite common to use the present participle of a verb as a noun.\u00a0 In this case, Google comes up with this definition for the noun &#8216;meaning&#8217;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>what is meant by a word, text, concept, or action.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The NLP system has a definition of &#8220;meaning&#8221; as a mass or count noun as well as definitions for several senses of the verb &#8220;mean&#8221;, such as these:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>intend to convey, indicate, or refer to (a particular thing or notion); signify.<\/li>\n<li>intend (something) to occur or be the case.<\/li>\n<li>have as a consequence or result.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><!--more-->These senses of different &#8220;arguments&#8221; or &#8220;valence&#8221;, such as a noun or verb phrase, possibly involving a preposition such as to, at, or by.<\/p>\n<p>In this sentence, it is &#8220;(a) of this section&#8221; that means something.\u00a0 So, in effect, there is a verbal &#8220;mean&#8221; with subject &#8220;(a) of this section&#8221; which is expressed using nominalization.<\/p>\n<p>The relevant definition of the verb &#8216;mean&#8217; used here that the meaning of the section is the definition of a transaction, as in the following lexical entry from the English Resource Grammar:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>mean_v1 := v_np*_le &amp; [ ORTH &lt; &#8220;mean&#8221; &gt;, SYNSEM [ LKEYS.KEYREL.PRED &#8220;_mean_v_1_rel&#8221;, PHON.ONSET con ] ].<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This lexical entry &#8220;insists&#8221; on the verb having a noun phrase as its object, which results in a parse having &#8220;(a)&#8221; as the object of the verb &#8220;mean&#8221;, which is not ideal semantics.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/the-meaning-of-this-section.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1021\" title=\"the meaning of this section\" src=\"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/the-meaning-of-this-section.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"356\" height=\"577\" srcset=\"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/the-meaning-of-this-section.png 356w, http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/the-meaning-of-this-section-185x300.png 185w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 356px) 100vw, 356px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Thus, rather than selecting the verbal clause during disambiguation, the nominal definition of &#8220;meaning&#8221; should be selected as shown below.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/the-meaning-of-this-section-without-nominalization.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1022\" title=\"the meaning of this section without nominalization\" src=\"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/the-meaning-of-this-section-without-nominalization.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"331\" height=\"581\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I would not say this user made a mistake but that the lexical entries  within the grammar led to the incorrect result which could easily be  corrected by resetting and selecting &#8220;meaning&#8221; as a nominal rather than  as verbal (which is, effectively, what selecting a nominalization does).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just a quick note about a natural language interpretation that came up for the following sentence: Under that test, the rental to an oil well driller of a &#8220;rock bit&#8221; having an effective life of but one rental is a transaction in lieu of a transfer of title within the meaning of (a) of this &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/2018\/02\/10\/nominal-semantics-of-meaning\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Nominal semantics of &#8216;meaning&#8217;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[550,527,759,758,269],"class_list":["post-1020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-natural-language","tag-disambiguation","tag-linguist","tag-meaning","tag-nominalization","tag-semantics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1020"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1558,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020\/revisions\/1558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}