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