From - Tue Feb 10 11:50:30 2004 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Path: acsu.buffalo.edu!rapaport From: rapaport@cse.buffalo.edu (William J. Rapaport) Newsgroups: sunyab.cse.740 Subject: DRYER ON NOUNS VS. VERBS Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 11:23:34 -0500 (EST) Organization: Computer Science and Engineering Lines: 88 Sender: Ncs@buffalo.edu Distribution: sunyab Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: wasat.cse.buffalo.edu X-Trace: prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu 1076343814 25172 128.205.32.15 (9 Feb 2004 16:23:34 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@buffalo.edu NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 16:23:34 +0000 (UTC) X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test76 (Apr 2, 2001) Xref: acsu.buffalo.edu sunyab.cse.740:71 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: DRYER ON NOUNS VS. VERBS As I announced in the CVA seminar last Friday, Matthew Dryer of the UB LIN dept. will be speaking this Wednesday on the nature of nouns vs. verbs. Here is the full announcement, with abstract. This may very well prove useful to those of you working on the verb algorithm, and perhaps to the rest of you, as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CENTER FOR COGNITIVE SCIENCE University at Buffalo, State University of New York Wednesday, February 11, 2004 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm 280 Park Hall, North Campus MATTHEW DRYER, Ph.D. Department of Linguistics University at Buffalo "Why do languages have nouns and verbs". The question to be addressed is why most if not all human languages distinguish two word classes (or parts of speech) that we can call 'nouns' and 'verbs'. An initial hypothesis is that the distinction corresponds to a basic ontological or conceptual distinction between things and events. I argue that the view that nouns denote things is seriously confused. Rather nouns denote what I will call 'kinds'; it is noun phrases, not nouns, that denote things. However, I will also argue against an alternative hypothesis that the noun-verb distinction corresponds to a basic ontological or conceptual distinction between kinds and events. I will propose instead that the noun-verb distinction reflects the different frequencies with which different sorts of words are used I n different syntactic functions. In particular, words that are used more frequently as arguments group together into nouns while words that are used more frequently as predicates group together into verbs. The point is made clearer in languages with a weak noun-verb distinction, in which both nouns and verbs can freely be used as either predicates or arguments. The general idea is that the linguistic categories of noun and verb are due to different frequencies of usage and not to any ontological or conceptual categories. The kind of explanation I offer challenges a popular view in linguistics that language is a "window into the human mind". Linguists often make claims about the human mind on the basis of the nature of language, assuming that we can make inferences from the nature of human language to the nature of the mind. But usage-based explanations of the sort proposed here provide an alternative kind of explanation for the nature of language, without making assumptions about the human mind. A hardcopy of this announcement can be accessed here: http://www.cogsci.buffalo.edu/Activities/Colloquium/CLLQs04/dryerannounce.pdf Please print it out and post it in your department. Thank you! Center for Cognitive Science University at Buffalo, State University of New York 652 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 Phone: (716) 645-3794, Fax: (716) 645-3825 Email: ccs-cogsci-contact@buffalo.edu http://www.cogsci.buffalo.edu/Activities/Colloquium/CLLQs04/2004spring.htm All Center for Cognitive Science Events are sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research University at Buffalo State University of New York Heike Jones Center for Cognitive Science University at Buffalo 652 Baldy Hall Buffalo, NY 14260 P: (716) 645-2177 ext. 717 F: (716) 645-3825 Email: ccs-cogsci-contact@buffalo.edu URL: http://www.cogsci.buffalo.edu