Xref: utzoo sci.lang:5267 comp.ai:4800 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!fluke!ssc-vax!bcsaic!rwojcik From: rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik) Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.ai Subject: Re: What's the Chinese room problem? Message-ID: <15362@bcsaic.UUCP> Date: 29 Sep 89 16:43:38 GMT References: <822kimj@yvax.byu.edu> Reply-To: rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik) Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle Lines: 26 In article <822kimj@yvax.byu.edu> kimj@yvax.byu.edu writes: >Could you elaborate what you mean by "the semantic stuff"? Say I translate >"kick the bucket" into "die" in Chinese. Does the translation lose what >you call "the semantic stuff"? I want to recommend to you Ronald Langacker's tour de force Foundations_of_ Cognitive_Grammar. v.1. Stanford U. Press, 1987. I particularly call your attention to the discussion on and around p. 93, where he lays out a clear distinction between literal and figurative senses. He argues quite convincingly that you can take neither a purely compositional, nor a purely conventional, approach to meaning. I do not know how his work, and that of other 'cognitive grammarians' will end up affecting the world of computational linguistics, but it does help to point up many areas for future research. I do not think that there is any precise way to translate 'kick the bucket' into Chinese, and I don't think that the opening scene of the movie 'It's a Mad, Mad World' can be properly understood by Chinese speakers, even in its dubbed version. (That scene has a great sight gag involving the 'kick the bucket' idiom.) Semantic stuff is very often lost when idioms get translated. But it is the compositionally-derived stuff that gets lost, not the conventional stuff. -- Rick Wojcik csnet: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com uucp: uw-beaver!bcsaic!rwojcik