grad f: channel fi ok . are you doing something ? ok , then i ' m doing something . so , so the result of m much thinking since the last time we met , but not as much writing , is a sheet that i have a lot of , like , thoughts and justification of comments on but i 'll just pass out as is right now . here . if you could pass this around ? and there 's two things . and so one on one side is a the revised updated semantic specification . grad f: , enough to go around ? and in some ways it 's very similar to there are very few changes in some ways from what we ' ve , , b done before but i do n't think everyone here has seen all of this . so , i ' m not where to begin . , as usual the disclaimers are there are all these things are it 's only slightly more stable than it was before . grad f: and , after a little bit more discussion and especially like keith and i have more linguistic things to settle in the next few days , it 'll probably change again some more . , maybe i will let 's start b let 's start on number two actually on the notation , because that 's , i ' m thinking , possibly a little more familiar to , to people . ok , so the top block is just a abstract nota it 's like , listings of the kinds of things that we can have . and certain things that have , changed , have changed back to this . there there 's been a little bit of , going back and forth . but all constructions have some name . i forgot to include that you could have a type included in this line . grad f: so something like , there 's an example the textual example at the end has clausal construction . so , just to show it does n't have to be beautiful it could be , simple old text as . , there are a couple of , these three have various ways of doing certain things . so i 'll just try to go through them . so they could all have a type at the beginning . , and then they say the key word construction professor c: so so the current syntax is if it s if there 's a type it 's before construct grad f: ok , and then it has a block that is constituents . and as usual i all the constructions her all the examples here have only , tsk one type of constituent , that is a constructional constituent . that 's actually gon na turn out to m be certainly the most common kind . but in general instead of the word " construct " , th here you might have " meaning " or " form " as . ok ? so if there 's some element that does n't that is n't yet constructional in the sense that it maps form and meaning . ok , the main change with the constructs which each of which has , the key word " construct " and then some name , and then some type specification , is that it 's pro it 's often sometimes the case in the first case here that what construction it is . so whatever i have here is gon na be a form of the word " throw " , or it 's gon na be a form of the word , i , " happy " , like that . or , some it 'll be a specific word or maybe you 'll have the type . you 'll say " i need a p spatial relation phrase here " or " i need a directional specifier here " . so - you could have a j a actual type here . , or you could just say in the second case that you only know the meaning type . so a very common example of this is that , in directed motion , the first person to do something should be an agent of some kind , often a human . right ? so if i , the , run down the street then i run down the street , it 's typed , " i " , meaning category is what 's there . the the new kind is this one that is a pair and , skipping fonts and whatever . the idea is that sometimes there are , general constructions that , that you 're going to need . it 's it 's the equivalent of a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase , like that there . and usually it has formal , considerations that will go along with it . grad f: and then , you might know something much more specific depending on what construction you 're talking about , about what meaning what specific meaning you want . so the example again at the bottom , which is directed motion , you might need a nominal expression to take the place of , , " the big th " , " the big the tall dark man " , " walked into the room " . but because of the nature of this particular construction not just that it 's nominal of some kind but in particular , that it 's some animate nominal , and which will apply just as to like , a per , a simple proper noun or to some complicated expression . so i if the syntax will hold but something that gives you a way to do both constructional and meaning types . so . ok , then i do n't think the , at least . none of these examples have anything different for formal constraints ? but you can refer to any of the , available elements and scope , right ? which here are the constructs , to say something about the relation . and i if you not if you compare like the top block and the textual block , we dropped like the little f subscript . the f subscripts refer to the " form " piece of the construct . grad f: and that , in general it 'll be unambiguous . like if you were giving a formal constraint then you 're referring to the formal pole of that . so so by saying if said " name one " then that means name one formal and we 're talking about formal struc which which makes sense . , there are certain times when we 'll have an exception to that , in which case you could just indicate " here the meaningful for some reason " . or actually it 's more often that , only to handle this one special case of , " george and jerry walk into the room in that order " . so we have a few funny things where something in the meaning might refer to something in the form . but but s we 're not gon na really worry about that for right now and there are way we can be more specific if we have to later on . ok , and so in terms of the relations , as usual they 're before and ends . i should have put an example in of something that is n't an interval relation but in form you might also have a value binding . , you could say that , , " name - one dot " , t , " number equals " , a plural like that . there are certain things that are attribute - value , similar to the bindings below but they 're just us usually they 're going to be value fillers , right ? ok , and then again semantic constraints here are just bindings . there was talk of changing the name of that . and johno and i you and like fight about that if you like ? but about changing it to " semantic n effects " , which was a little bit too order - biased grad f: and " semantic bindings " , which might be too restrictive in case we do n't have only bindings . and so it was an issue whether constraints , there were some linguists who reacted against " constraints " , saying , " , if it 's not used for matching , then it should n't be called a constraint " . but we want to be uncommitted about whether it 's used for matching or not . right ? cuz there are we thought of some situations where it would be useful to use whatever the c bindings are , for actual , like modified constraining purposes . professor c: , you definitely want to de - couple the formalism from the parsing strategy . so that whether or not it 's used for matching or only for verification , i professor c: s for . , i what , term we want to use but we do n't want to grad f: , there was one time when hans explained why " constraints " was a misleading word for him . and the reason that he gave was similar to the reason why johno thought it was a misleading term , which was just an interesting coincidence . , but , and so i was like , " ok , both of you do n't like it ? grad f: fine , we can change it " . but i ' m starting to like it again . grad a: if you have an " if - then " phrase , do what the " then " phrase is called ? grad f: what ? con - , a consequent ? , but it 's not an " if - then " . professor c: i know . anyway , so the other strategy you guys could consider is when you what word to put , you could put no word , just meaning . ok ? and the then let grad b: so that 's why you put semantic constraints up top and meaning bindings down here ? grad f: , ! no . that was just a mistake of cut and paste from when i was going with it . grad f: so , i ' m . i did n't mean that one 's an in unintentional . grad f: sometimes i ' m intentionally inconsistent cuz i ' m not yet . here , i actually it was just a mistake . grad b: th - so this definitely should be " semantic constraints " down at the bottom ? grad f: , unless i go with " meaning " but i , i like " meaning " better than " semantic " grad f: ok , so the middle block does n't really give you any more information , ex than the top block . and the bottom block similarly only just illus , all it does is illustrate that you can drop the subscripts and that you can drop the , that you can give dual types . , one thing i should mention is about " designates " . i ' m actually inconsistent across these as . so , strike out the m subscript on the middle block . so now , this is actually this little change actually goes along with a big linguistic change , which is that " designates " is n't only something for the semantics to worry about now . so we want s " designates " to actually know one of the constituents which acts like a head in some respects but is , really important for say composition later on . so , if some other construction says , " are you of type is this part of type whatever " , the " designates " tells you which part is the meaning part . ok , so if you have like " the big red ball " , you wanna know if there 's an object or a noun . , ball is going to be the designated element of that phrase . grad f: there is a slight complication here which is that when we talk about form it 's useful sometimes to talk about , to talk about there also being a designated object and we think that 'll be the same one , right ? so the ball is the head of the phrase , the r the , " big red ball " , and the entity denoted by the word " ball " is the semantic head in some ways of this , in interesting larger element . professor c: a a and the and there 's ca some cases where the grammar depends on some form property of the head . and and this enables you to get that , if i understand you right . grad f: and , you might be able to say things like if the head has to go last in a head - final language , you can refer to the head as a p the , the formal head as opposed to the rest of the form having to be at the end of that decision . so that 's a useful thing so that you can get some internal structural constraints in . professor c: ok , so that all looks good . let me , w . i . were you finished ? grad f: , there was a list of things that is n't included but you can ask a question . that might @ it . professor c: so , i if i understand this the aside from , construed and all that , the differences are mainly that , we ' ve gone to the possibility of having form - meaning pairs for a type or actually gone back to , grad f: , except for their construction meaning , so it 's not clear that , right now it 's a c contr construction type and meaning type . so i what a form type is . professor c: , . i ' m , you 're right . a construction type . , that 's fine . but it , grad f: a , and a previous , , version of the notation certainly allowed you to single out the meaning bit by it . so you could say " construct of type whatever designates something " . but that was mostly for reference purposes , just to refer to the meaning pole . i do n't think that it was often used to give an extra meaning const type constraint on the meaning , which is really what we want most of the time . i if we 'll ever have a case where we actually h if there is a form category constraint , you could imagine having a triple there that says , that 's weird . professor c: , these are , as long as mark is n't around , these are form constraints . so a nominal expression is , the fact that it 's animate , is semantic . the fact that it 's n , a nominal expression i would say on most people 's notion of f , higher form types , this i this is one . and that 's just fine . grad e: it 's that now , i ' m mentioned this , i if i ever explained this but the point of , i mentioned in the last meeting , the point of having something called " nominal expression " is , because it seems like having the verb subcategorize for , like say taking as its object just some expression which , designates an object or designates a thing , or whatever , that leads to some syntactic problems ? so you wanna , you have this problem like " ok , i 'll put the word " , let 's say , the word " dog " , . and that has to come right after the verb cuz we know verb meets its object . and then we have a construction that says , you can have " the " preceding a noun . and so you 'd have this problem that the verb has to meet the designatum . and you could get , " the kicked dog " like that , meaning " kicked the dog " . , so you have to let this phrase idea in there grad f: right , n s you may be you may not be like everyone else in berkeley , but that 's ok . grad e: , this is not reverting to the x - bar theory of phrase structure . but , know that this is like , we did n't originally have in mind that , that verbs would subcategorize for a particular form . grad f: which is , the question was did we want directed motion , which is an argument structure construction did we want it to worry about , anything more than the fact that it , has semantic , it 's frame - based construction . so one option that , keith had mentioned also was like , if you have more abstract constructions such as subject , predicate , things like grammatical relations , those could intersect with these in such a way that subject , predicate , or subject , predicate , subject , verb , ob , verb object would require that those things that f fill a subject and object are nom expressions . and that would be a little bit cleaner in some way . but , for now , professor c: but it y it 's , just moving it moving the c the cons the constraints around . professor c: ok , and going with that is that the designatum also now is a pair . professor c: instead of just the meaning . and that aside from some terminology , that 's it . want to b i ' m asking . grad f: , the un - addressed questions in this , definitely would be semantic constraints we talked about . here are just bindings but , right ? we might want to introduce mental spaces , there 's all these things that we do n't grad f: so there 's going to be some extra , definitely other notation we 'll need for that which we skip for now . professor c: , i do want to get on that as soon as robert gets back . so , the mental space thing . , construal is a b is a big component of that so this probably not worth trying to do anything till he gets back . but as soon as he gets back , we ought to grad e: so what 's the time frame ? i forgot again when you 're going away for how long ? grad a: just , as a mental bridge , i ' m not i ' m skipping fourth of july . so , right afterwards i ' m back . grad f: you 're missing like the premier american holiday ? what 's the point of spending a year here ? grad f: construal , ok , so there was one question that came out . i hate this thing . , which is , so something like " past " which i , we think is a very simple , we ' ve often just stuck it in as a feature , " , this event takes place before speech time " , ok , is what this means . , it 's often thought of as it is also considered a mental space , by , lots of people around here . so there 's this issue of sometimes there are really exotic explicit space builders that say " in france , blah - blah " , and you have to build up you ha you would imagine that would require you , to be very specific about the machinery , whereas past is a very conventionalized one and we it means but it we does n't do n't necessarily want to , unload all the notation every time we see that it 's past tense . so , we could think of our , just like x - schema " walk " refers to this complicated structure , past refers to , a certain configuration of this thing with respect to it . grad f: so so we 're like having our cake and eating it , having it both ways , right ? professor c: . no , i think that i we 'll have to see how it works out when we do the details grad f: same thing . so there are very conventionalized like deictic ones , right ? and then for other spaces that you introduce , you could just attach y whatever you could build up an appropriately , appropriate structure according to the l the sentence . grad a: , where it 's contextually dependent , what is now , bed015adialogueact502 106333 106429 a grad qh -1 0 what was past , bed015fdialogueact500 106284 106321 f grad b -1 0 mm - . bed015adialogueact503 106429 106519 a grad qh -1 0 what is in the future , bed015adialogueact504 106519 106561 a grad qh -1 0 where is this , bed015adialogueact505 106561 106605 a grad qh -1 0 what is here , bed015adialogueact506 106605 106664 a grad qh -1 0 what is there , bed015adialogueact507 106664 106712 a grad qh%-- -1 0 what is grad f: so time and space . , we 'll get that on the other side a little , like very minimally . there 's a there 's a slot for setting time and setting place . and , you could imagine for both of those are absolute things you could say about the time and place , and then there are many in more interestingly , linguistically anyway , there are relative things that , you relate the event in time and space to where you are now . if there 's something a lot more complicated like , or so hypothetical or whatever , then you have to do your job , like or somebody 's job anyway . i ' m gon na point to at random . grad e: , i ' m s curious about how much of the mental , i ' m not that the formalism , the grammatical side of things , is gon na have that much going on in terms of the mental space . , all of these so - called space builders that are in the sentence are going to of it as , giving you the coordinates of , assuming that at any point in discourse there 's the possibility that we could be talking about a bunch of different world scenarios , whatever , and the speaker 's supposed to be keeping track of those . the , the construction that you actually get is just gon na give you a cue as to which one of those that you ' ve already got going , you 're supposed to add structure to . so " in france , watergate would n't have hurt nixon " like that . , you say , " alright , i ' m supposed to add some structure to my model of this hypothetical past france universe " like that . the information in the sentence tells you that much but it does n't tell you like exactly what it what the point of doing so is . so , depending on the linguistic con , context it could be like the question is , what does " watergate " refer to there ? does it , does it refer to , if you just hear that sentence cold , the assumption is that when you say " watergate " you 're referring to " a watergate - like scandal as we might imagine it happening in france " . but in a different context , " , if nixon had apologized right away it would n't , watergate would n't have hurt him so badly in the us and in france it would n't have hurt him " . now we 're s now that " watergate " we 're now talking about the real one , grad e: and the " would " it 's a different dimension of hypothe - theticality , right ? we 're not saying what 's hypothetical about this world . grad e: in the first case , hypothetically we 're imagining that watergate happened in france . in the second case we 're imagining hypothetically that nixon had apologized right away . right ? so a lot of this is n't happening at the grammatical level . grad e: , and so i where that sits then , the idea of sorting out what the person meant . grad f: it seems like , the grammatical things such as the auxiliaries that introduce these conditionals , whatever , give you the most basi th those we can figure out what the possibilities are , right ? there are a relatively limited number . and then how they interact with some extra thing like " in france " or " if such - and - such " , that 's like there are certain ways that they c they can , one is a more specific version of the general pattern that the grammat grammar gives you . but , whatever , professor c: , in the short run all we need is a enough mechanism on the form side to get things going . grad e: but the whole point of what fauconnier and turner have to say about , mental spaces , and blending , and all that is that you do n't really get that much out of the sentence . , there 's not that much information contained in the sentence . it just says , " here . add this structure to this space . " and exactly what that means for the overall ongoing interpretation is quite open . an individual sentence could mean a hundred different things depending on , quote , " what the space configuration is at the time of utterance " . and so somebody 's gon na have to be doing a whole lot of work but not me , . professor c: that 's right . , i , that 's not k i th i do n't think it 's completely right . , a sentence examples you gave in f did constrain the meaning b the form did constrain the meaning , and so , it is n't , grad e: , but like what was the point of saying that sentence about nixon and france ? that is not there is nothing about that in the sentence really . grad f: that 's ok . we usually the point of the sentence . but we it 's trying to say . professor c: but , it seems to me that th these we , we ' ve talked about maybe a half a dozen linguistics theses in the last few minutes . , , that 's my feeling that these are really hard , problems that decide exactly what 's going on . grad f: ok , so , one other thing want to point out is there 's a lot of confusion about the terms like " profile , designate , focus " , et cetera . grad f: , for now i ' m gon na say like " profile " 's often used like two uses that come to mind immediately . one is in the traditional like semantic highlight of one element with respect to everything else . so " hypotenuse " , you profiled this guy against the background of the right t right triangle . and the second use , is in framenet it 's slightly different . , i was asking hans about this . they use it to really mean , this in a frame th this is the profiles on the these are the ones that are required . so they have to be there or expressed in some way . which which i ' m not saying one and two are mutually exclusive but they 're different meanings . so the closest thing so i was thinking about how it relates to this notation . for us , ok , so how is it grad f: framenet ? , i was a little bit surprised about it too . i knew that would be something like there 's another term that i ' ve heard for that thing grad f: and may maybe he 's wrong . anyway , so the " designate " that we have in terms of meaning is really the " highlight this thing with respect to everything else " . ok ? so this is what it means . but the second one seems to be useful but we might not need a notation for it ? we do n't have a notation for it but we might want one . so we ' ve talked about if you 're talking about the lexical item " walk " , it 's an action . , it also has this idea it carries along with it the idea of an actor or somebody 's gon na do the walking . or if you talk about an adjective " red " , it carries along the idea of the thing that has the property of having color red . so we used to use the notation " with " for this and that 's closest to their second one . so i d do n't yet know , i have no commitment , as to whether we need it . it might be it 's the thing that w a parser might want to think about whether we require , these things are like it 's semantically part of it professor c: n no , no . , th critically they 're not required syntactically . often they 're pres presu presupposed and all that . grad f: right , right . , definitely . in was a good example . if you walk " in " , like , in what ? grad f: , like you have to have the so so it 's only semantically is it is still required , say , by simulation time though to have something . so it 's that i meant the idea of like that the semantic value is filled in by sim simulation . i if that 's something we need to spa to like say ever as part of the requirement ? or the construction ? or not . we 'll we 'll again defer . grad f: have it construed , is that the idea ? just point at robert . whenever i ' m confused just point to him . professor c: anyway , right , w this is gon na be a b you 're right , this is a bit of in a mess and we still have emphasis as , or stress , or whatever . grad f: the i w i would just s some of this is just like my , by fiat . i ' m going to say , this is how we use these terms . i do n't - , there 's lots of different ways in the world that people use it . grad f: that , the other terms that are related are like focus and stress . so , s that the way i we would like to think , is focus is something that comes up in , lots of this is the information structure . ok , it 's like , it 's not it might be that there 's a syntactic , device that you use to indicate focus or that there are things like , keith was telling me , things toward the end of the sentence , post - verbal , tend to be the focused element , the new information . , if i " i walked into the room " , you tend to think that , whatever , " into the room " is like the more focused thing . and when you , you have stress on something that might be , a cue that the stressed element , or , the negated element is related to information structure . so that 's like the new the like import or whatever of this thing . , so that 's to keep " focus " being an information structure term . stress i th and then there are different kinds of focus that you can bring to it . so , like " stress " , th stress is a pun on you might have like whatever , like , accent stress . and that 's just a , w we 'll want to distinguish stress as a form device . , like , high volume or whatever . t , and distinguish that from it 's effect which is , " , the focus we have is we 're emphasizing this value often as opposed to other values " , right ? so focus carries along a scope . like if you 're gon na focus on this thing and you wanna know it evokes all the other possibilities that it was n't . , so my classic my now - classic example of saying , " , he did go to the meeting ? " , that was my way of saying as opposed to , " , he did n't g " or " there was a meeting ? " that was the example that was caught on by the linguists immediately . and so , the like if you said he , there 's all these different things that if you put stress on a different part of it then you 're , c focusing , whatever , on , he walked to the meeting as opposed to " he ran " , or " he did walk to the meeting " as opposed to " he did n't walk " . , so we need to have a notation for that which , that 's still in progress . so , i ' m still working it out . but it did one implication it does f have for the other side , which we 'll get to in a minute is that i could n't think of a good way to say " here are the possible things that you could focus on " , cuz it seems like any entity in any sentence , or any meaning component of anyth all the possible meanings you could have , any of them could be the subject of focus . grad f: but one the one thing you can schematize is the focus , right ? so , you could say it 's the tense on this as opposed to , the action . ok . or it 's , it 's an identity thing or a contrast with other things , or stress this value as opposed to other things . it 's it is like a profile - background thing but i ca n't think of like the limited set of possible meanings that you would focu grad f: light highlight as opposed to other ones . so it has some certain complications for the , later on . li - , the best thing come up with is that information has a list of focused elements . , you , one other type that i forgot to mention is like query elements and that 's probably relevant for the like " where is " , " the castle " thing ? because you might want to say that , location or cert certain wh words bring , automatically focus in a , " i the identity of this thing " way on certain elements . ok . anyway . so that 's onl there are many more things that are uncl that are like a little bit unstable about the notation but it 's most it 's this is , the current form . other things we did n't deal with , grad f: , we ' ve had a lot of other that keith and i have them working on in terms of like how you deal with like an adjective . , a nominal expression . and , , we should have put an example of this and we could do that later . but the not inherently like the general principles still work though , that , we can have constructions that have constituent structure in that there is like , , one , they have constituents , right ? so you can like nest things when you need to , but they can also overlap in a flatter way . so if you do n't have like a lot of grammar experience , then like this might , be a little o opaque . but , we have the properties of dependency grammars and some properties of constituents constituent - based grammar . so that 's the main thing we wanted to aim for and so far it 's worked out ok . grad a: say two things about the f maybe you want to forget stress . this my f grad a: if canonically speaking you can if you look at a curve over sentence , you can find out where a certain stress is and say , " hey , that 's my focus exponent . " grad a: it does n't tell you anything what the focus is . if it 's just that thing , grad a: the form bit because , as a form cue , not even trained experts can always , they can tell you where the focus exponent is sometimes . and that 's also mostly true for read speech . in in real speech , people may put stress . it 's so d context dependent on what was there before , phrase ba breaks , restarts . it 's just , it 's absurd . it 's complicated . and all grad e: , i ' m inclined to say let 's worry about specifying the information structure focus of the sentence grad a: but , if you what you 're focus is then you 're hopeless - ly lost anyways , grad a: and the only way of figuring out what that is , by generating all the possible alternatives to each focused element , decide which one in that context makes sense and which one does n't . and then you 're left with a couple three . so , again , that 's something that h humans can do , but far outside the scope of any anything . so . it 's grad f: ok . , , i would n't have assumed that it 's an easy problem in absence of all the oth grad a: but it 's what it , it 's pretty easy to put it in the formalism , though . , because you can just say whatever , " i is the container being focused or the entire whatever , both , and . " grad f: - , - . exactly . so the effect of it is something we want to be able to capture . professor c: , so b but the poi i ' m not i understand but here 's what i th think is going on . that if we do the constructions right when a particular construction matches , it the fact that it matches , does specify the focus . grad f: w , i ' m not about that . or it might limit it cert certainly constrains the possibilities of focus . grad f: that 's , th that 's certainly true . and depending on the construction it may or may not f specify the focus , right ? professor c: , for , yes . there are constrai , it 's not every but there are constructions , where you t explicitly take into account those considerations that you need to take into account in order to decide which what is being focused . grad a: so we talked about that a little bit this morning . john is on the bus , bed015adialogueact906 199063 199162 a grad s : s -1 0 not nancy . so that 's focuses on john . john is on the bus and not on the train . john is on the bus versus " john is on the train . " and " john is on the bus " versus " was " , and e grad a: all of these and will we have u is it all the same constructions ? just with a different foc focus constituent ? grad f: , i would say that argument structure in terms of like the main like , i the fact that you can get it without any stress and you have some whatever is predicated anyway should be the same set of constructions . so that 's why i was talking about overlapping constructions . so , then you have a separate thing that picks out , stress on something relative to everything else . grad f: and it w and that would have to it might be ambiguous as , whether it picks up that element , or the phrase , like that . but it 's still is limited possibility . so that should , interact with it should overlap with whatever other construction is there . professor c: s s the question is , do we have a way on the other page , when we get to the s semantic side , of saying what the stressed element was , or stressed phrase , . grad f: , so that 's why i was saying how since i could n't think of an easy like limited way of doing it , all say is that information structure has a focused slot and that should be able to refer to grad f: but that something like that is probably gon na be , more what we have to do . but , grad a: , the once what the focus is the everything else is background . how about " topic - comment " that 's the other side of information . grad f: , so that was the other thing . and so i did n't realize it before . it 's like , " ! " it was an epiphany that it , topic and focus are a contrast set . so topic is topic - focused seems to me like , background profile , ok , or a landmark trajector , or some something like that . there 's there 's definitely , that thing going on . grad f: now i whether i n i do n't have as many great examples of like topic - indicating constructions on like focus , right ? , topic it seems , that might be an ongoing thing . grad e: , that 's what " wa " is , just to mark which thing is the topic . it does n't always have to be the subject . grad f: so again , information structure has a topic slot . and , i stuck it in thinking that we might use it . , i stuck it in . grad f: , and one thing that i did n't do consistently , is when we get there , is like indicate what thing fits into every role . i have an idea of what it should be but th , so far we ' ve been getting away with like either a type constraint or , , whatever . i forg it 'll be a frame . , it 'll be another predication or it 'll be , i , some value from some something , some variable and scope like that , or a slot chain based on a variable and scope . ok , so that 's should we flip over to the other side officially then ? grad f: i keep , like , pointing forward to it . now we 'll go back to s ok , so this does n't include something which mi may have some effect on it , which is , the discourse situation context record , right ? so i did n't i meant just like draw a line and like , you also have , some tracking of what was going on . and this is a big scale comment before i , look into the details of this . but you could imagine instead of having i changed the name of it used to be " entities " . so you see it 's " scenario " , " referent " and " discourse segment " . and " scenario " is essentially what 's the basic predication , what event happened . and actually it 's just a list of various slots from which you would draw in order to paint your picture , a bunch of frames , bi and bindings , right ? , and there are other ones that are not included here , general cultural frames and general like , other action f , specific x - schema frames . ok , whatever . the middle thing used to be " entities " because you could imagine it should be like really a list where here was various information . and this is intended to be grammatically specifiable information about a referent , about some entity that you were going to talk about . so " harry walked into the room " , harry and " room " , the room th but they would be represented in this list somehow . and it could also have , it has this category slot . , it should be either category or in or instance . , it could be a pointer to ontology . so that everything about this could be drawn in . but the important things for grammatical purposes are for things like number , gender , ki the ones i included here are slightly arbitrary but you could imagine that , you need to figure out wheth if it 's a group whether , some event is happening , linear time , linear spaces , like , are they doing something serially or is it like , i ' m not . because this partly came from , talmy 's schema and i ' m not we 'll need all of these actually . but , and then the " status " i used was like , again , in some languages , like in child language you might distinguish between different status . so , th the big com and finally " discourse segment " is about speech - act - y information structure - y , like utterance - specific kinds of things . so the comment i was going to make about , changing entity the entity 's block to reference is that you can imagine your discourse like situation context , you have a set of entities that you 're referring to . and you might that might be a general , i , database of all the things in this discourse that you could refer to . and i changed to " reference " cuz i would say , for a particular utterance you have particular referring expressions in it . and those are the ones that you get information about that you stick in here . , i know it 's going to be plural . i know it 's gon na be feminine like that . and and these could actually just point to , the id in my other list of enti active entities , right ? , th there 's all this about discourse status . we ' ve talked about . i almost listed " discourse status " as a slot where you could say it 's active . , there 's this , hierarchy there 's a schematization of , things can be active or they can be , accessible , inaccessible . it was the one that , keith , emailed to us once , to some of us , not all of us . that i noticed that , list was discourse dependent . it was like in this particular set , s , instance , it has been referred to recently or it has n't been , or this is something that 's like in my world knowledge but not active . grad f: , they 're contex and , i used to have a location thing there but actually that 's a property of the situation . and it 's again , time , at cert certain points things are located , near or far from you professor c: cuz until we do the , mental space story , we 're not quite th - th which is fine . we 'll just we 'll j grad f: so i so for now , maybe i 'll just have in this list the things that are relevant to this particular utterance , right ? everything else here is utterance - specific . , and i left the slot , " predications " , open because you can have , things like " the guy i know from school " . or , like your referring expression might be constrained by certain like unbounded na amounts of prep , predications that you might make . and it 's unclear whether , you could just have in your scenario , " here are some extra few things that are true " , right ? and then you could just not have this slot here . right ? you 're but it 's used for identification purposes . so it 's a little bit different from just saying " all these things are true from my utterance " . grad e: right , " this guy i know from school came for dinner " does not mean , " there 's a guy , i know him from school , and he came over for dinner " . that 's not the same effect . grad f: , it 's a little bit different . right ? so or maybe that 's like a restrictive , non - restrictive , it 's like it gets into that thing for , but maybe i ' m mixing , this is like the final result after parsing the sentence . so you might imagine that the information you pass to , in identifying a particular referent would be , " , some " , " it 's a guy and it 's someone i know from school " . so maybe that would , be some intermediate structure that you would pass into the disc to the , whatever , construal engine or whatever , discourse context , to find , either create this reference , in which case it 'd be created here , so you could imagine that this might not so , i ' m uncommitted to a couple of these things . grad a: but to make it m precise at least in my mind , it 's not precise . so " house " is gender neuter ? in reality grad f: semantically , . so it , a table . , a thing that c does n't have a gender . so . , it could be that , maybe you 'd maybe not all these , i wou i would say that i tried to keep slots here that were potentially relevant to most things . grad a: no , just to make that we everybody that 's completely that it has nothing to do with , form . grad a: then " predications " makes sense to have it open for something like , accessibility or not . grad f: s so again open to various things . ok , so . let 's see . so maybe having made that big sca like large scale comment , should go through each of these slots , each of these blocks , a little bit ? , mostly the top one is image schematic . and just a note , which was that , s so when we actually ha so , some of them seem more inherently static , ok , like a container or support - ish . and others are a little bit seemingly inherently dynamic like " source , path , goal " is often thought of that way or " force " , like that . but in actual fact , that they 're intended to be neutral with respect to that . and different x - schemas use them in a way that 's either static or dynamic . so " path " , you could just be talking about the path between this and this . and , " container " that you can go in and out . all of these things . and so , this came up when , ben and i were working with the spaniards , the other day the " spaniettes " , as we called them , to decide like how you want to split up , like , s image schematic contributions versus , like , x - schematic contributions . how do you link them up . , it 's gon na be something in the x - schema that tells you " is this static or is this dynamic " . so we definitely need that aspectual type gives you some of that . , that , is it , a state or is it a change of state , or is it a , action of some kind ? grad a: , i is there any meaning to when you have parameters behind it and when you do n't ? just means grad f: , ! you mean , in the slot ? , no , it 's like x - sc it 's like i was thinking of type constraints but x - schema , it has to be an x - schema . agent , the performer of the x - schema , that s depends on the x - schema . , and i in general it would probably be , grad e: so the difference is whether you thought it was obvious what the possible fillers were . grad f: , " aspectual type " probably is n't obvious but i should have so , neglected to stick something in . " perspective " , " actor " , " undergoer " , " observer " , grad f: , exactly . exactly . , and so one thing that , we had talked about is this example of like , if you have a passive construction then one thing it does is ch definitely , it is one way to for you to , specifically take the perspective of the undergoing object . and so then we talked about , whether , does that specify topic as ? , maybe there are other things . , now that it 's subject is more like a topic . and now that , anyway . so . i ' m gon na trail off on that one cuz it 's not that f important right now . professor c: n now , for the moment we just need the ability to l write it down if somebody figured out what the rules were . grad f: to know how . exactly . some of these other ones , let 's see . , one thing i ' m uncertain about is how polarity interacts . so polarity , is using for like action did not take place . so by default it 'll be like " true " , i , if you 're specifying events that did happen . you could imagine that you skip out this , leave off this polarity , not do n't have it here . and then have it part of the speech - act in some way . there 's some negation . but the reason why i left it in is cuz you might have a change of state , let 's say , where some state holds and then some state does n't hold , and you 're just talking , if you 're trying to have the nuts and bolts of simulation you need to know that , whatever , the holder does n't and professor c: no , i th at this lev which is it should be where you have it . grad e: so , i ' m still just really not clear on what i ' m looking at . the " scenario " box , like , what does that look like for an example ? like , not all of these things are gon na be here . this is just says grad e: part of what i ' m going to hand you is a whole bunch of s , schemas , image , and x - schemas . bed015edialogueact1254 276824 277096 e grad s -1 0 here are some examples of the sorts of things you might have in there . grad f: so that 's exactly what it is . and for a particular instance which i will , make an example of something , is that you might have an instance of container and path , let 's say , as part of your , " into " , definition . so you would eventually have instances filled in with various values for all the different slots . and they 're bound up in , their bindings and values . grad e: do you have to say about the binding in your is there a slot in here for that tells you how the bindings are done ? professor c: no , no . i let 's see , we 're not i do n't think we have it quite right yet . so , what this is , let 's suppose for the moment it 's complete . ok , then this says that when an analysis is finished , the whole analysis is finished , you 'll have as a result , some s resulting s semspec for that utterance in context , which is made up entirely of these things and , bindings among them . and bindings to ontology items . so that the who that this is the tool kit under whi out of which you can make a semantic specification . so that 's a . but b , which is more relevant to your life , is this is also the tool kit that is used in the semantic side of constructions . so this is an that anything you have , in the party line , anything you have as the semantic side of constructions comes , from pieces of this ignoring li , in general , you ignore lots of it . but it 's got to be pieces of this along with constraints among them . , so that the , goal of the , " source , path , goal " has to be the landmark of the conta , the interior of this container . or whate whatever . so those constraints appear in constructions but this is the full range of semantic structures available to you . grad f: except for " , that i forgot . but anyway , there 's som some causal structure for composite events . professor c: ok , good . let 's let 's mark that . so we need a c grad f: , so it gets a little funny . these are all so far these structures , especially from " path " and on down , these are relatively familiar , image schematic slots . now with " , the fillers will actually be themselves frames . right ? so you 'll say , " event one causes event b grad f: , event two " , . so that 's , these are all implicitly one within , within one world . even though saying that place takes place , whatever . , if y if i said " time " is , " past " , that would say " set that this world " , " somewhere , before the world that corresponds to our current speech time " . so . but that 's ok . the the within the event it 's st it 's still one world . , so " and other frames that could come in , unfortunately you could bring in say , , " desire " like that , like " want " . and actually there is right now under " discourse segments " , " attitude " ? volition ? could fill that . so there are a couple things where i like , " , i ' m not if i wanted to have it there grad f: or " there was a whole list of possible speaker attitudes that like say talmy listed . and , like , i do n't , it was like " hope , wish . desire " , blah - blah . and it 's like , i feel like if i wanted to have an extra meaning i if those are grammatically marked in the first place . so they 're more lexically marked , right ? at least in english . so if i wanted to i would stick in an extra frame in my meaning , saying , e so th it 'd be a hierarchical frame them , right ? , like " naomi wants su a certain situation and that situation itself is a state of affairs " . professor c: in our s terminology , " want " can be an action and " what you want " is a world . so that 's , it 's certainly one way to do it . , there are other things . causal we need . mental space we need . the context we need . , so anyway , keith so is this comfortable to you that , once we have this defined , it is your tool kit for building the semantic part of constructions . and then when we combine constructions semantically , the goal is going to be to fill out more and more of the bindings needed in order to come up with the final one . and that 's the wh and , that according to the party line , that 's the whole story . grad e: . y right . that makes sense . so , there 's this in the off in the scenario , which just tells you how various what schemas you 're using and they 're how they 're bound together . and i that some of the discourse segment is that where you would sa , that 's ok , that 's where the information structure is which is a profiling on different parts of , of this . grad e: , what 's interesting is that the information structure there 's almost , we keep coming back to how focus is like this , trajector - landmark thing . so if i say , , " in france it 's like this " . , great , we ' ve learned something about france but the fact is that utterances of that sort are generally used to help you draw a conclusion also about some implicit contrast , like " in france it 's like this " . and therefore you 're supposed to say , " boy , life " , " in france kids are allowed to drink at age three " . and w you 're that 's not just a fact about france . you also conclude something about how boring it is here in the u s . right ? and so grad f: s so i would prefer not to worry about that for right now and to think that there are , grad f: discourse level constructions in a sense , topic - focus constructions that would say , " , when you focus something " then just done the same way just actually in the same way as the lower level . if you stressed , " john went to the " , " the bar " whatever , you 're focusing that and a in a possible inference is " in contrast to other things " . so similarly for a whole sentence , " in france such - and - such happens " . so the whole thing is like again implicitly as opposed to other things that are possible . grad a: , just , look read even sem semi formal mats rooth . if you have n't read it . it 's . and just pick any paper on alternative semantics . so that 's his that 's the best way of talking about focus , is his way . grad a: mats . mats . rooth . two o 's , yes , th . i never know how to pronounce his name because he 's , grad a: and sadly enough he also just left the ims in stuttgart . so he 's not there anymore . but , i where he is right now but alternative semantics is if you type that into an , browser or search engine you 'll get tons of . grad a: and what i ' m confused about is what the speaker and the hearer is doing there . grad f: so for a particular segment it 's really just a reference to some other entity again in the situation , right ? so for a particular segment the speaker might be you or might be me . , hearer is a little bit harder . it could be like multiple people . i that 's not very clear from here grad a: , but you do n't we ultimately want to handle that analogously to the way we handle time and place , grad a: because " you " , " me " , " he " , " they " , " these guys " , all these expressions , nuh , are in much the same way contextually dependent as " here , " and " now , " and " there " grad f: right , so the constructions might will refer , using pronouns or whatever . in which case they have to check to see , who the , speaker in here wa in order to resolve those . but when you actually say that " he walked into " , whatever , the " he " will refer to a particular you you will already have figured who " he " or " you " , mmm , or " i " , maybe is a bett better example , who " i " refers to . , and then you 'd just be able to refer to harry , in wherever that person whatever role that person was playing in the event . grad a: that 's up at the reference part . and down there in the speaker - hearer part ? grad f: s so , that 's just n , speaker is known from the situation , right ? you 're when you hear something you 're told who the speaker is , who the speaker is . , that 's constraining how in some ways this before you get to the you fill in all the rest of it . , how else would you grad a: , it 's the speaker may in english is allowed to say " i . " grad a: , among the twenty - five percent most used words . but would n't the " i " then set up the s referent that happens to be the speaker this time and not " they , " whoever they are . or " you " much like the " you " could n grad f: s so ok , so i would say ref under referent should be something that corresponds to " i " . and maybe each referent should probably have a list of way whatever , the way it was referred to . so that 's " i " but , should we say it refers to , what ? , if it were " harry " it would refer to like some ontology thing . if it were if it 's " i " it would refer to the current speaker , ok , which is given to be like , whoever it is . grad a: , not always . , so there 's " and then he said , i w " - . professor c: that 's right . so so again , this is gon na to get us into the mental space professor c: and t because , " fred said that mary said " , and whatever . and and so we 're , gon na have to , chain those as . grad f: so this entire thing is inside a world , not just like the top part . that 's professor c: except s it 's trickier than that because , the reference so he where it gets really tricky is there 's some things , and this is where blends and all terribl so , some things which really are meant to be identified and some things which are n't . , all we need for the moment is some way to say that . grad f: so of having like for each referent , having the list of the things t with which it is identified . , which , you grad f: so , i , it depends on if it is a referring exp if it 's identifiable already or it 's a new thing . if it 's a new thing you 'd have to like create a structure or whatever . if it 's an old thing it could be referring to , usually w something in a situation , right ? in ontology . there 's a , whatever , it c it could point at one of these . professor c: if it worked . right , it was a space builder . , we might be able to handle context in the same way that we handle mental spaces because , you have somewhat the same things going on of , things being accessible or not . and so , i it c it , if we did it right we might be able to get at least a lot of the same structure . professor c: so that pulling something out of a discourse context is similar to other kinds of , mental space phenomena . professor c: , i ' ve never seen anybody write that up but maybe they did . that may be all over the literature . grad e: there 's things like ther , there 's all kinds of like , in i mentioned last time in czech if you have a verb of saying then grad e: , you say something like or i was thinking you can say something like , " , , you are a republican " like that . where as in english you would say , " you were " . , the past tense being copied onto the lower verb does n't happen there , so you have to say something about , tense is determined relative to current blah - blah . same things happens with pronouns . there 's languages where , if you have a verb of saying then , ehhh , where ok , so a situation like " bob said he was going to the movies " , where that lower subject is the same as the person who was saying or thinking , you 're actually required to have " i " there . , and it 's in an extended function grad e: but it 's not perceived as a quotative construction . , it 's been analyzed by the formalists as being a logophoric pronoun , which means a pronoun which refers back to the person who is speaking or that thing , right ? grad e: but , that happens to sound like the word for " i " but is actually semantically unrelated to it . grad e: there 's a whole book which operates on this assumption . , mary dalrymple , this book , a ninety - three book on , on pronoun . grad e: , . and then the same thing for asl where , you 're signing and someone says something . and then , so " he say " , and then you do a role shift . and then you sign " i , this , that , and the other " . and , " i did this " . that 's also been analyzed as logophoric and having nothing to do with " i " . and the role shift thing is completely left out and so on . so , that pronoun references , , ties in with all this mental space and so on , and . and so , professor c: so that d that does sound like it 's co consistent with what we 're saying , . grad f: ok , so it 's like the unspecified mental spaces just are occurring in context . and then when you embed them sometimes you have to pop up to the h , depending on the construction or the whatever , you 're scope is m might extend out to the base one . it would be to actually use the same , mechanism since there are so many cases where you actually need it 'll be one or the other . it 's like , actually , it 's the same operation . grad e: it 's like it 's like what 's happening that , what 's happening , there is that you 're moving the base space like that , right ? so that 's how fauconnier would talk about it . and it happens diff under different circumstances in different languages . and so , things like pronoun reference and tense which we 're thinking of as being these discourse - y things actually are relative to a bayes space which can change . grad a: and i ' m gon na read the transcript of this one . but the , but it 's too bad that we do n't have a camera . , all the pointing is gon na be lost . grad f: , that 's why i said " point to robert " , when i did it . grad a: mmm , is n't , i ' m i was dubious why he even introduces this reality , as your basic mental space and then builds up d does n't start with some because it 's so obvi it should be so obvious , at least it is to me , that whenever i say something i could preface that with " . " nuh ? so there should be no categorical difference between your base and all the others that ensue . professor c: no , but there 's a gricean thing going on there , that when you say " you 're actually hedging . grad e: , it 's an evidential . it 's semi - grammaticalized . people have talked about it this way . and , you can do special things . you can , th put just the phrase " as a parenthetical in the middle of a sentence and so on , and . so grad f: actually one of the child language researchers who works with t tomasello studied a bunch of these constructions and it was like it 's not using any interesting embedded ways just to mark , uncertainty like that . grad a: , but about linguistic hedges , those tend to be , funky anyways because they blur grad f: hedges ? hhh , i there used to be a slot for speaker , it was something like factivity . i could n't really remember what it meant so i took it out . but it 's something grad e: and the fact that i ' m , the fact maybe if it versus he thinks that might , depending on how much you trust the two of us or whatever , grad a: great word in the english language is called " about " . if you study how people use that it 's also professor c: and y if you want us to spend a pleasant six or seven hours you could get george started on that . grad b: i r i read that paper , the hedges paper ? i read some of that paper actually . grad e: would you believe that paper lead directly to the development of anti - lock brakes ? grad e: ask me about it later i 'll tell you how . when we 're not on tape . grad f: so , and , someone had raised like sarcasm as a complication at some point . grad e: i do n't really like we we do n't have to care too much about the speaker attitude , right ? like there 's not so many different hhh , i , m grad f: certainly not as some , they 're intonational markers for the most part . i too much about the like grammatical grad e: mean there 's lots of different attitudes that the speaker could have and that we can clearly identify , and so on , and . but like what are the distinctions among those that we actually care about for our current purposes ? professor c: right , so , this raises the question of what are our current purposes . right ? professor c: , so , i the answer but , it does seem that , this is coming along . it 's converging . it 's as far as tell there 's this one major thing we have to do which is the mental the whole s mental space thing . and then there 's some other minor things . , and we 're going to have to s bound the complexity . , if we get everything that anybody ever thought about , w we 'll go nuts . so we had started with the idea that the actual , constraint was related to this tourist domain and the kinds of interactions that might occur in the tourist domain , assuming that people were being helpful and were n't trying to d , there 's all sorts of god knows , irony , and like which you is n't probably of much use in dealing with a tourist guide . ? professor c: whatever . so y , no end of things th that , we do n't deal with . grad a: because in terms of the s simspec , it would just mean you put one more set of brack brackets around it , and then just tell it to negate whatever the content of that is in terms of irony grad f: maybe . , in model theory cuz the semantics is always like " speaker believes not - p " , ? like " the speaker says p and believes not - p " . professor c: anyway , so , i , let me make a proposal on how to proceed on that , which is that , it was keith 's , job over the summer to come up with this set of constructions . , and my suggestion to keith is that you , over the next couple weeks , n do n't try to do them in detail or formally but just try to describe which ones you think we ought to have . , and then when robert gets back we 'll look at the set of them . just just , define your space . professor c: and , so th these are this is a set of things that we ought to deal with . and then we 'll go back over it and w people will give feedback on it . and then we 'll have a at least initial spec of what we 're actually trying to do . and that 'll also be useful for anybody who 's trying to write a parser . knowing professor c: right , who might want et cetera . so , so a and we get this , portals fixed and then we have an idea of the initial range . and then nancy you 're gon na have to , do your set of but you have to do that anyway . professor c: so so we 're gon na get the w we 're dealing with two domains , the tourist domain and the child language learning . and we 'll see what we need for those two . and then my proposal would be to , not cut off more general discussion but to focus really detailed work on the subset of things that we ' ve we really want to get done . and then as a separate thread , think about the more general things and all that . grad a: , i also think the detailed discussion will hit , bring us to problems that are of a general nature and maybe even professor c: but what i want to do is to constrain the things that we really feel responsible for . so that we say these are the things we 're really gon na try do by the end of the summer and other things we 'll put on a list of research problems , because you can easily get to the point where nothing gets done because every time you start to do something you say , " , but what about this case ? " this is this is called being a linguist . and , grad b: there 's that quote in jurafsky and martin where it goes where some guy goes , " every time i fire a linguist the performance of the recognizer goes up . " professor c: but anyway . so , is that does that make sense as a , a general way to proceed ? grad e: , we 'll start with that , just figuring out what needs to be done then actually the next step is to start trying to do it . grad b: can i ask a quick question about this side ? is this , was it intentional to leave off things like " inherits " and grad f: i did n't want to think too much about that for now . so , maybe it was subconsciously intentional . grad e: , there should be i wanted to s find out someday if there was gon na be some way of dealing with , if this is the right term , multiple inheritance , where one construction is inheriting from , from both parents , or different ones , or three or four different ones . grad e: cuz the problem is that then you have to which of , which are how they 're getting bound together . grad f: refer to them . , and there are certainly cases like that . even with just semantic schemas we have some examples . and we ' ve been talking a little bit about that anyway . professor c: my argument is there 's nothing you can do with that you ca n't do by just having more constructions . professor c: and so i what i 'd like to do is in the short run focus on getting it right . professor c: and when we think we have it right then saying , " aha ! , can we make it more elegant ? " can can we , what are the generalizations , and ? professor c: but rather than try to a inheritance structure and all that before we 're doing . so i would say in the short run we 're not gon na b first of all , we 're not doing them yet . and and it could be that half way through we say , " aha ! , we now see how we want to clean it up . " , and inheritance is only one , that 's one way to organize it but there are others . and it may or may not be the best way . you had news . grad a: , just small . , to eva on our web site we can now , if you want to run javabayes , you could see get download these classes . and then it will enable you she modified the gui so it has now a m a button menu item for saving it into the embedded javabayes format . grad a: so that 's wonderful . and , and she , a you tested it out . do you want to say something about that , that it works , right ? with the grad d: i was just checking like , when we wanna , get the posterior probability of , like , variables . how you asked whether we can , like , just observe all the variables like in the same list ? you ca n't . you have to make separate queries every time . grad f: , all the things you want to query , you just have to like ask for separately . grad a: that 's probably maybe in the long term that 's good news because it forces us to think a little bit more carefully how we want to get an out output . , but that 's a different discussion for a different time . and , i . we 're really running late , so i had , an idea yesterday but , i whether we should even start discussing . grad a: , the construal bit that , has been pointed to but has n't been , made precise by any means , may w may work as follows . that we would , that the following thing would be in incredibly and i have no clue whether it will work or nothing . so that 's just a tangent , a couple of mental disclaimers here . , imagine you write a bayes - net , grad a: bayes - net , completely from scratch every time you do construal . so you have nothing . just a white piece of paper . grad a: you consult your ontology which will tell you a bunch of , and parts , and properties , - grad a: then y you 'd simply write , these into onto your white piece of paper . and you will get a lot of notes and out of there . you wo n't get you wo n't really get any c p t 's , therefore we need everything that configures to what the situation is , ie , the context dependent . so you get whatever comes from discourse but also filtered . , so only the ontology relevant from the discourse plus the situation and the user model . and that fills in your cpt 's with which you can then query , the net that you just wrote and find out how thing x is construed as an utterance u . and the embedded javabayes works exactly like that , that once you we have , precise format in which to write it , so we write it down . you query it . you get the result , and you throw it away . and the thing about this idea is that you do n't ever have to sit down and think about it or write about it . you may have some general rules as to how things can be construed as what , so that will allow you to craft the initial notes . but it 's in that respect it 's completely scalable . because it does n't have any prior , configuration . it 's just you need an ontology of the domain and you need the context dependent modules . and if this can be made to work , that 'd be funky . grad a: p r ms - , prm , since you can unfold a prm into a straightforward bayes - net professor c: beca - because it b because no , no , you ca n't . see the critical thing about the prm is it gives these relations in general form . so once you have instantiated the prm with the instances and ther then you can unfold it . grad a: then you can . no , i was m using it generic . so , probabilistic , whatever , relational models . whatever you write it . in professor c: , no , but it matters a lot because you what you want are these generalized rules about the way things relate , th that you then instantiate in each case . grad a: and then instantiate them . that 's ma maybe the way the only way it works . professor c: , and that 's , that 's the only way it could work . i we have a our local expert on p r , but my is that they 're not currently good enough to do that . but we 'll have to see . professor c: yes . this is that 's that would be a good thing to try . it 's related to the hobbs abduction story in that you th you throw everything into a pot and you try to come up with the , professor c: no , there is n't a theorem prover but there but the , the cove the p r ms are like rules of inference and you 're coupling a bunch of them together . and then ins instead of proving you 're trying to , compute the most likely . tricky . but you , it 's a good thing to put in your thesis proposal . grad a: i would suggest as soon as possible . do you mean by we , the whole ben gang ? professor c: n no , i did n't mean y just the two of us . we we can do this . but the question is do you want to , send the little group , a draft of your thesis proposal and get , another session on feedback on that ? or grad e: fine with me . should we do the one pm time for thursday since we were on that before or ? grad a: thursday at one ? also maybe then run through the , the talk i have to give at eml which highlights all of our work . and we can make some last minute changes on that . grad a: it 's equal to all of us , so you can decide one or four . grad a: liz actually said she likes four because it forces the meeting recorder people to cut , the discussions short .
the discussion concerned the revised semantic specification and the construction formalism. the different levels of the latter focus on what construction types are encountered and what bindings there are between them. the notation maintains properties of both dependency and constituent-based grammars. the encoding of features is still incomplete: frame profiles , focus , adjectives , nominal expressions are phenomena in the process of being integrated. similarly , ways to handle mental spaces will have to be added on top. on the other hand , the semantic specification structures information in terms of "scenario" , "referent" and "discourse segment". each category comprises a number of slots filled in by information derived from the utterance. it is , essentially , a toolkit with which to create semantic constructions , as well as the bindings between them and with the ontology. among the issues still being defined , mental spaces and context ( eg pronoun references ) present similarities that can be echoed in the specification. work on both of these formalisms will continue with circumscription of the construction space that will be studied in more detail. work on construal will use bayes-nets , which will be fed information from other modules and implement general rules to infer how utterances are construed. the semantic specification requires some adjustments. amongst other things "cause" has to be added as another x-schema. linguistic hedging will also be encoded as a demarcation of evidentiality or speaker confidence. mental spaces can be tackled with mechanisms that can also deal with context issues ( time , space etc . ): creating a base space and rules of interaction with other interconnected spaces. however , the complexity of these mechanisms has to be bound as well: it is necessary to define the range of constructions to be studied. given the domains currently used ( tourist , child language learning ) , some features , like speaker attitude , are not of equal importance at this stage. on the other hand , it was decided for the inheritance between constructions to be left out for now , as the notation can be rendered more elegant later on. finally , a preliminary presentation on the idea of how to use bayes-nets for construal will take place in the next meeting. the construction formalism is not yet complete as to the semantic constraints -the terminology has also been met with objections- and does not deal with mental spaces. on their own , constructions can only give limited information regarding mental spaces: forms can provide cues to create a different mental space , but the semantic nuances are defined by context. it is not decided at this stage whether the necessary values should be coded within the construction or as part of construal. other issues concern focus and stress: focus is seen as an information structure device , but there has been no suggestion as to how to predict its effects or break it down in possible focused elements; as to stress , it may not be useful as a form value , as it shows the focus exponent , but not what the focus is on. moving to the semantic specification , the analysis still needs mechanisms to deal with causality , as well as mental spaces and bindings between them. additionally , how referring expressions are linked to referents or even how mental spaces affect this linking are still to lay down in detail. the revised semantic specification and construction formalism are more stable than the previous versions. in the latter , we find both construction types and meaning types along with formal considerations like verb subcategorisation , or the ones a "directed motion" construction would dictate. semantic constraints also come into play. the semantic specification , on the other hand , is split into three levels: "scenario" is a list of schemas and bindings between them , which describes the current event in terms of source-path-goal , container , etc.; "referent" is about the entities in the discourse and includes grammatical information and pointers to the ontology; "discourse segment" comprises utterance-specific things. apart from the presentation , javabayes can now run through the modified web page of the project.
###dialogue: grad f: channel fi ok . are you doing something ? ok , then i ' m doing something . so , so the result of m much thinking since the last time we met , but not as much writing , is a sheet that i have a lot of , like , thoughts and justification of comments on but i 'll just pass out as is right now . here . if you could pass this around ? and there 's two things . and so one on one side is a the revised updated semantic specification . grad f: , enough to go around ? and in some ways it 's very similar to there are very few changes in some ways from what we ' ve , , b done before but i do n't think everyone here has seen all of this . so , i ' m not where to begin . , as usual the disclaimers are there are all these things are it 's only slightly more stable than it was before . grad f: and , after a little bit more discussion and especially like keith and i have more linguistic things to settle in the next few days , it 'll probably change again some more . , maybe i will let 's start b let 's start on number two actually on the notation , because that 's , i ' m thinking , possibly a little more familiar to , to people . ok , so the top block is just a abstract nota it 's like , listings of the kinds of things that we can have . and certain things that have , changed , have changed back to this . there there 's been a little bit of , going back and forth . but all constructions have some name . i forgot to include that you could have a type included in this line . grad f: so something like , there 's an example the textual example at the end has clausal construction . so , just to show it does n't have to be beautiful it could be , simple old text as . , there are a couple of , these three have various ways of doing certain things . so i 'll just try to go through them . so they could all have a type at the beginning . , and then they say the key word construction professor c: so so the current syntax is if it s if there 's a type it 's before construct grad f: ok , and then it has a block that is constituents . and as usual i all the constructions her all the examples here have only , tsk one type of constituent , that is a constructional constituent . that 's actually gon na turn out to m be certainly the most common kind . but in general instead of the word " construct " , th here you might have " meaning " or " form " as . ok ? so if there 's some element that does n't that is n't yet constructional in the sense that it maps form and meaning . ok , the main change with the constructs which each of which has , the key word " construct " and then some name , and then some type specification , is that it 's pro it 's often sometimes the case in the first case here that what construction it is . so whatever i have here is gon na be a form of the word " throw " , or it 's gon na be a form of the word , i , " happy " , like that . or , some it 'll be a specific word or maybe you 'll have the type . you 'll say " i need a p spatial relation phrase here " or " i need a directional specifier here " . so - you could have a j a actual type here . , or you could just say in the second case that you only know the meaning type . so a very common example of this is that , in directed motion , the first person to do something should be an agent of some kind , often a human . right ? so if i , the , run down the street then i run down the street , it 's typed , " i " , meaning category is what 's there . the the new kind is this one that is a pair and , skipping fonts and whatever . the idea is that sometimes there are , general constructions that , that you 're going to need . it 's it 's the equivalent of a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase , like that there . and usually it has formal , considerations that will go along with it . grad f: and then , you might know something much more specific depending on what construction you 're talking about , about what meaning what specific meaning you want . so the example again at the bottom , which is directed motion , you might need a nominal expression to take the place of , , " the big th " , " the big the tall dark man " , " walked into the room " . but because of the nature of this particular construction not just that it 's nominal of some kind but in particular , that it 's some animate nominal , and which will apply just as to like , a per , a simple proper noun or to some complicated expression . so i if the syntax will hold but something that gives you a way to do both constructional and meaning types . so . ok , then i do n't think the , at least . none of these examples have anything different for formal constraints ? but you can refer to any of the , available elements and scope , right ? which here are the constructs , to say something about the relation . and i if you not if you compare like the top block and the textual block , we dropped like the little f subscript . the f subscripts refer to the " form " piece of the construct . grad f: and that , in general it 'll be unambiguous . like if you were giving a formal constraint then you 're referring to the formal pole of that . so so by saying if said " name one " then that means name one formal and we 're talking about formal struc which which makes sense . , there are certain times when we 'll have an exception to that , in which case you could just indicate " here the meaningful for some reason " . or actually it 's more often that , only to handle this one special case of , " george and jerry walk into the room in that order " . so we have a few funny things where something in the meaning might refer to something in the form . but but s we 're not gon na really worry about that for right now and there are way we can be more specific if we have to later on . ok , and so in terms of the relations , as usual they 're before and ends . i should have put an example in of something that is n't an interval relation but in form you might also have a value binding . , you could say that , , " name - one dot " , t , " number equals " , a plural like that . there are certain things that are attribute - value , similar to the bindings below but they 're just us usually they 're going to be value fillers , right ? ok , and then again semantic constraints here are just bindings . there was talk of changing the name of that . and johno and i you and like fight about that if you like ? but about changing it to " semantic n effects " , which was a little bit too order - biased grad f: and " semantic bindings " , which might be too restrictive in case we do n't have only bindings . and so it was an issue whether constraints , there were some linguists who reacted against " constraints " , saying , " , if it 's not used for matching , then it should n't be called a constraint " . but we want to be uncommitted about whether it 's used for matching or not . right ? cuz there are we thought of some situations where it would be useful to use whatever the c bindings are , for actual , like modified constraining purposes . professor c: , you definitely want to de - couple the formalism from the parsing strategy . so that whether or not it 's used for matching or only for verification , i professor c: s for . , i what , term we want to use but we do n't want to grad f: , there was one time when hans explained why " constraints " was a misleading word for him . and the reason that he gave was similar to the reason why johno thought it was a misleading term , which was just an interesting coincidence . , but , and so i was like , " ok , both of you do n't like it ? grad f: fine , we can change it " . but i ' m starting to like it again . grad a: if you have an " if - then " phrase , do what the " then " phrase is called ? grad f: what ? con - , a consequent ? , but it 's not an " if - then " . professor c: i know . anyway , so the other strategy you guys could consider is when you what word to put , you could put no word , just meaning . ok ? and the then let grad b: so that 's why you put semantic constraints up top and meaning bindings down here ? grad f: , ! no . that was just a mistake of cut and paste from when i was going with it . grad f: so , i ' m . i did n't mean that one 's an in unintentional . grad f: sometimes i ' m intentionally inconsistent cuz i ' m not yet . here , i actually it was just a mistake . grad b: th - so this definitely should be " semantic constraints " down at the bottom ? grad f: , unless i go with " meaning " but i , i like " meaning " better than " semantic " grad f: ok , so the middle block does n't really give you any more information , ex than the top block . and the bottom block similarly only just illus , all it does is illustrate that you can drop the subscripts and that you can drop the , that you can give dual types . , one thing i should mention is about " designates " . i ' m actually inconsistent across these as . so , strike out the m subscript on the middle block . so now , this is actually this little change actually goes along with a big linguistic change , which is that " designates " is n't only something for the semantics to worry about now . so we want s " designates " to actually know one of the constituents which acts like a head in some respects but is , really important for say composition later on . so , if some other construction says , " are you of type is this part of type whatever " , the " designates " tells you which part is the meaning part . ok , so if you have like " the big red ball " , you wanna know if there 's an object or a noun . , ball is going to be the designated element of that phrase . grad f: there is a slight complication here which is that when we talk about form it 's useful sometimes to talk about , to talk about there also being a designated object and we think that 'll be the same one , right ? so the ball is the head of the phrase , the r the , " big red ball " , and the entity denoted by the word " ball " is the semantic head in some ways of this , in interesting larger element . professor c: a a and the and there 's ca some cases where the grammar depends on some form property of the head . and and this enables you to get that , if i understand you right . grad f: and , you might be able to say things like if the head has to go last in a head - final language , you can refer to the head as a p the , the formal head as opposed to the rest of the form having to be at the end of that decision . so that 's a useful thing so that you can get some internal structural constraints in . professor c: ok , so that all looks good . let me , w . i . were you finished ? grad f: , there was a list of things that is n't included but you can ask a question . that might @ it . professor c: so , i if i understand this the aside from , construed and all that , the differences are mainly that , we ' ve gone to the possibility of having form - meaning pairs for a type or actually gone back to , grad f: , except for their construction meaning , so it 's not clear that , right now it 's a c contr construction type and meaning type . so i what a form type is . professor c: , . i ' m , you 're right . a construction type . , that 's fine . but it , grad f: a , and a previous , , version of the notation certainly allowed you to single out the meaning bit by it . so you could say " construct of type whatever designates something " . but that was mostly for reference purposes , just to refer to the meaning pole . i do n't think that it was often used to give an extra meaning const type constraint on the meaning , which is really what we want most of the time . i if we 'll ever have a case where we actually h if there is a form category constraint , you could imagine having a triple there that says , that 's weird . professor c: , these are , as long as mark is n't around , these are form constraints . so a nominal expression is , the fact that it 's animate , is semantic . the fact that it 's n , a nominal expression i would say on most people 's notion of f , higher form types , this i this is one . and that 's just fine . grad e: it 's that now , i ' m mentioned this , i if i ever explained this but the point of , i mentioned in the last meeting , the point of having something called " nominal expression " is , because it seems like having the verb subcategorize for , like say taking as its object just some expression which , designates an object or designates a thing , or whatever , that leads to some syntactic problems ? so you wanna , you have this problem like " ok , i 'll put the word " , let 's say , the word " dog " , . and that has to come right after the verb cuz we know verb meets its object . and then we have a construction that says , you can have " the " preceding a noun . and so you 'd have this problem that the verb has to meet the designatum . and you could get , " the kicked dog " like that , meaning " kicked the dog " . , so you have to let this phrase idea in there grad f: right , n s you may be you may not be like everyone else in berkeley , but that 's ok . grad e: , this is not reverting to the x - bar theory of phrase structure . but , know that this is like , we did n't originally have in mind that , that verbs would subcategorize for a particular form . grad f: which is , the question was did we want directed motion , which is an argument structure construction did we want it to worry about , anything more than the fact that it , has semantic , it 's frame - based construction . so one option that , keith had mentioned also was like , if you have more abstract constructions such as subject , predicate , things like grammatical relations , those could intersect with these in such a way that subject , predicate , or subject , predicate , subject , verb , ob , verb object would require that those things that f fill a subject and object are nom expressions . and that would be a little bit cleaner in some way . but , for now , professor c: but it y it 's , just moving it moving the c the cons the constraints around . professor c: ok , and going with that is that the designatum also now is a pair . professor c: instead of just the meaning . and that aside from some terminology , that 's it . want to b i ' m asking . grad f: , the un - addressed questions in this , definitely would be semantic constraints we talked about . here are just bindings but , right ? we might want to introduce mental spaces , there 's all these things that we do n't grad f: so there 's going to be some extra , definitely other notation we 'll need for that which we skip for now . professor c: , i do want to get on that as soon as robert gets back . so , the mental space thing . , construal is a b is a big component of that so this probably not worth trying to do anything till he gets back . but as soon as he gets back , we ought to grad e: so what 's the time frame ? i forgot again when you 're going away for how long ? grad a: just , as a mental bridge , i ' m not i ' m skipping fourth of july . so , right afterwards i ' m back . grad f: you 're missing like the premier american holiday ? what 's the point of spending a year here ? grad f: construal , ok , so there was one question that came out . i hate this thing . , which is , so something like " past " which i , we think is a very simple , we ' ve often just stuck it in as a feature , " , this event takes place before speech time " , ok , is what this means . , it 's often thought of as it is also considered a mental space , by , lots of people around here . so there 's this issue of sometimes there are really exotic explicit space builders that say " in france , blah - blah " , and you have to build up you ha you would imagine that would require you , to be very specific about the machinery , whereas past is a very conventionalized one and we it means but it we does n't do n't necessarily want to , unload all the notation every time we see that it 's past tense . so , we could think of our , just like x - schema " walk " refers to this complicated structure , past refers to , a certain configuration of this thing with respect to it . grad f: so so we 're like having our cake and eating it , having it both ways , right ? professor c: . no , i think that i we 'll have to see how it works out when we do the details grad f: same thing . so there are very conventionalized like deictic ones , right ? and then for other spaces that you introduce , you could just attach y whatever you could build up an appropriately , appropriate structure according to the l the sentence . grad a: , where it 's contextually dependent , what is now , bed015adialogueact502 106333 106429 a grad qh -1 0 what was past , bed015fdialogueact500 106284 106321 f grad b -1 0 mm - . bed015adialogueact503 106429 106519 a grad qh -1 0 what is in the future , bed015adialogueact504 106519 106561 a grad qh -1 0 where is this , bed015adialogueact505 106561 106605 a grad qh -1 0 what is here , bed015adialogueact506 106605 106664 a grad qh -1 0 what is there , bed015adialogueact507 106664 106712 a grad qh%-- -1 0 what is grad f: so time and space . , we 'll get that on the other side a little , like very minimally . there 's a there 's a slot for setting time and setting place . and , you could imagine for both of those are absolute things you could say about the time and place , and then there are many in more interestingly , linguistically anyway , there are relative things that , you relate the event in time and space to where you are now . if there 's something a lot more complicated like , or so hypothetical or whatever , then you have to do your job , like or somebody 's job anyway . i ' m gon na point to at random . grad e: , i ' m s curious about how much of the mental , i ' m not that the formalism , the grammatical side of things , is gon na have that much going on in terms of the mental space . , all of these so - called space builders that are in the sentence are going to of it as , giving you the coordinates of , assuming that at any point in discourse there 's the possibility that we could be talking about a bunch of different world scenarios , whatever , and the speaker 's supposed to be keeping track of those . the , the construction that you actually get is just gon na give you a cue as to which one of those that you ' ve already got going , you 're supposed to add structure to . so " in france , watergate would n't have hurt nixon " like that . , you say , " alright , i ' m supposed to add some structure to my model of this hypothetical past france universe " like that . the information in the sentence tells you that much but it does n't tell you like exactly what it what the point of doing so is . so , depending on the linguistic con , context it could be like the question is , what does " watergate " refer to there ? does it , does it refer to , if you just hear that sentence cold , the assumption is that when you say " watergate " you 're referring to " a watergate - like scandal as we might imagine it happening in france " . but in a different context , " , if nixon had apologized right away it would n't , watergate would n't have hurt him so badly in the us and in france it would n't have hurt him " . now we 're s now that " watergate " we 're now talking about the real one , grad e: and the " would " it 's a different dimension of hypothe - theticality , right ? we 're not saying what 's hypothetical about this world . grad e: in the first case , hypothetically we 're imagining that watergate happened in france . in the second case we 're imagining hypothetically that nixon had apologized right away . right ? so a lot of this is n't happening at the grammatical level . grad e: , and so i where that sits then , the idea of sorting out what the person meant . grad f: it seems like , the grammatical things such as the auxiliaries that introduce these conditionals , whatever , give you the most basi th those we can figure out what the possibilities are , right ? there are a relatively limited number . and then how they interact with some extra thing like " in france " or " if such - and - such " , that 's like there are certain ways that they c they can , one is a more specific version of the general pattern that the grammat grammar gives you . but , whatever , professor c: , in the short run all we need is a enough mechanism on the form side to get things going . grad e: but the whole point of what fauconnier and turner have to say about , mental spaces , and blending , and all that is that you do n't really get that much out of the sentence . , there 's not that much information contained in the sentence . it just says , " here . add this structure to this space . " and exactly what that means for the overall ongoing interpretation is quite open . an individual sentence could mean a hundred different things depending on , quote , " what the space configuration is at the time of utterance " . and so somebody 's gon na have to be doing a whole lot of work but not me , . professor c: that 's right . , i , that 's not k i th i do n't think it 's completely right . , a sentence examples you gave in f did constrain the meaning b the form did constrain the meaning , and so , it is n't , grad e: , but like what was the point of saying that sentence about nixon and france ? that is not there is nothing about that in the sentence really . grad f: that 's ok . we usually the point of the sentence . but we it 's trying to say . professor c: but , it seems to me that th these we , we ' ve talked about maybe a half a dozen linguistics theses in the last few minutes . , , that 's my feeling that these are really hard , problems that decide exactly what 's going on . grad f: ok , so , one other thing want to point out is there 's a lot of confusion about the terms like " profile , designate , focus " , et cetera . grad f: , for now i ' m gon na say like " profile " 's often used like two uses that come to mind immediately . one is in the traditional like semantic highlight of one element with respect to everything else . so " hypotenuse " , you profiled this guy against the background of the right t right triangle . and the second use , is in framenet it 's slightly different . , i was asking hans about this . they use it to really mean , this in a frame th this is the profiles on the these are the ones that are required . so they have to be there or expressed in some way . which which i ' m not saying one and two are mutually exclusive but they 're different meanings . so the closest thing so i was thinking about how it relates to this notation . for us , ok , so how is it grad f: framenet ? , i was a little bit surprised about it too . i knew that would be something like there 's another term that i ' ve heard for that thing grad f: and may maybe he 's wrong . anyway , so the " designate " that we have in terms of meaning is really the " highlight this thing with respect to everything else " . ok ? so this is what it means . but the second one seems to be useful but we might not need a notation for it ? we do n't have a notation for it but we might want one . so we ' ve talked about if you 're talking about the lexical item " walk " , it 's an action . , it also has this idea it carries along with it the idea of an actor or somebody 's gon na do the walking . or if you talk about an adjective " red " , it carries along the idea of the thing that has the property of having color red . so we used to use the notation " with " for this and that 's closest to their second one . so i d do n't yet know , i have no commitment , as to whether we need it . it might be it 's the thing that w a parser might want to think about whether we require , these things are like it 's semantically part of it professor c: n no , no . , th critically they 're not required syntactically . often they 're pres presu presupposed and all that . grad f: right , right . , definitely . in was a good example . if you walk " in " , like , in what ? grad f: , like you have to have the so so it 's only semantically is it is still required , say , by simulation time though to have something . so it 's that i meant the idea of like that the semantic value is filled in by sim simulation . i if that 's something we need to spa to like say ever as part of the requirement ? or the construction ? or not . we 'll we 'll again defer . grad f: have it construed , is that the idea ? just point at robert . whenever i ' m confused just point to him . professor c: anyway , right , w this is gon na be a b you 're right , this is a bit of in a mess and we still have emphasis as , or stress , or whatever . grad f: the i w i would just s some of this is just like my , by fiat . i ' m going to say , this is how we use these terms . i do n't - , there 's lots of different ways in the world that people use it . grad f: that , the other terms that are related are like focus and stress . so , s that the way i we would like to think , is focus is something that comes up in , lots of this is the information structure . ok , it 's like , it 's not it might be that there 's a syntactic , device that you use to indicate focus or that there are things like , keith was telling me , things toward the end of the sentence , post - verbal , tend to be the focused element , the new information . , if i " i walked into the room " , you tend to think that , whatever , " into the room " is like the more focused thing . and when you , you have stress on something that might be , a cue that the stressed element , or , the negated element is related to information structure . so that 's like the new the like import or whatever of this thing . , so that 's to keep " focus " being an information structure term . stress i th and then there are different kinds of focus that you can bring to it . so , like " stress " , th stress is a pun on you might have like whatever , like , accent stress . and that 's just a , w we 'll want to distinguish stress as a form device . , like , high volume or whatever . t , and distinguish that from it 's effect which is , " , the focus we have is we 're emphasizing this value often as opposed to other values " , right ? so focus carries along a scope . like if you 're gon na focus on this thing and you wanna know it evokes all the other possibilities that it was n't . , so my classic my now - classic example of saying , " , he did go to the meeting ? " , that was my way of saying as opposed to , " , he did n't g " or " there was a meeting ? " that was the example that was caught on by the linguists immediately . and so , the like if you said he , there 's all these different things that if you put stress on a different part of it then you 're , c focusing , whatever , on , he walked to the meeting as opposed to " he ran " , or " he did walk to the meeting " as opposed to " he did n't walk " . , so we need to have a notation for that which , that 's still in progress . so , i ' m still working it out . but it did one implication it does f have for the other side , which we 'll get to in a minute is that i could n't think of a good way to say " here are the possible things that you could focus on " , cuz it seems like any entity in any sentence , or any meaning component of anyth all the possible meanings you could have , any of them could be the subject of focus . grad f: but one the one thing you can schematize is the focus , right ? so , you could say it 's the tense on this as opposed to , the action . ok . or it 's , it 's an identity thing or a contrast with other things , or stress this value as opposed to other things . it 's it is like a profile - background thing but i ca n't think of like the limited set of possible meanings that you would focu grad f: light highlight as opposed to other ones . so it has some certain complications for the , later on . li - , the best thing come up with is that information has a list of focused elements . , you , one other type that i forgot to mention is like query elements and that 's probably relevant for the like " where is " , " the castle " thing ? because you might want to say that , location or cert certain wh words bring , automatically focus in a , " i the identity of this thing " way on certain elements . ok . anyway . so that 's onl there are many more things that are uncl that are like a little bit unstable about the notation but it 's most it 's this is , the current form . other things we did n't deal with , grad f: , we ' ve had a lot of other that keith and i have them working on in terms of like how you deal with like an adjective . , a nominal expression . and , , we should have put an example of this and we could do that later . but the not inherently like the general principles still work though , that , we can have constructions that have constituent structure in that there is like , , one , they have constituents , right ? so you can like nest things when you need to , but they can also overlap in a flatter way . so if you do n't have like a lot of grammar experience , then like this might , be a little o opaque . but , we have the properties of dependency grammars and some properties of constituents constituent - based grammar . so that 's the main thing we wanted to aim for and so far it 's worked out ok . grad a: say two things about the f maybe you want to forget stress . this my f grad a: if canonically speaking you can if you look at a curve over sentence , you can find out where a certain stress is and say , " hey , that 's my focus exponent . " grad a: it does n't tell you anything what the focus is . if it 's just that thing , grad a: the form bit because , as a form cue , not even trained experts can always , they can tell you where the focus exponent is sometimes . and that 's also mostly true for read speech . in in real speech , people may put stress . it 's so d context dependent on what was there before , phrase ba breaks , restarts . it 's just , it 's absurd . it 's complicated . and all grad e: , i ' m inclined to say let 's worry about specifying the information structure focus of the sentence grad a: but , if you what you 're focus is then you 're hopeless - ly lost anyways , grad a: and the only way of figuring out what that is , by generating all the possible alternatives to each focused element , decide which one in that context makes sense and which one does n't . and then you 're left with a couple three . so , again , that 's something that h humans can do , but far outside the scope of any anything . so . it 's grad f: ok . , , i would n't have assumed that it 's an easy problem in absence of all the oth grad a: but it 's what it , it 's pretty easy to put it in the formalism , though . , because you can just say whatever , " i is the container being focused or the entire whatever , both , and . " grad f: - , - . exactly . so the effect of it is something we want to be able to capture . professor c: , so b but the poi i ' m not i understand but here 's what i th think is going on . that if we do the constructions right when a particular construction matches , it the fact that it matches , does specify the focus . grad f: w , i ' m not about that . or it might limit it cert certainly constrains the possibilities of focus . grad f: that 's , th that 's certainly true . and depending on the construction it may or may not f specify the focus , right ? professor c: , for , yes . there are constrai , it 's not every but there are constructions , where you t explicitly take into account those considerations that you need to take into account in order to decide which what is being focused . grad a: so we talked about that a little bit this morning . john is on the bus , bed015adialogueact906 199063 199162 a grad s : s -1 0 not nancy . so that 's focuses on john . john is on the bus and not on the train . john is on the bus versus " john is on the train . " and " john is on the bus " versus " was " , and e grad a: all of these and will we have u is it all the same constructions ? just with a different foc focus constituent ? grad f: , i would say that argument structure in terms of like the main like , i the fact that you can get it without any stress and you have some whatever is predicated anyway should be the same set of constructions . so that 's why i was talking about overlapping constructions . so , then you have a separate thing that picks out , stress on something relative to everything else . grad f: and it w and that would have to it might be ambiguous as , whether it picks up that element , or the phrase , like that . but it 's still is limited possibility . so that should , interact with it should overlap with whatever other construction is there . professor c: s s the question is , do we have a way on the other page , when we get to the s semantic side , of saying what the stressed element was , or stressed phrase , . grad f: , so that 's why i was saying how since i could n't think of an easy like limited way of doing it , all say is that information structure has a focused slot and that should be able to refer to grad f: but that something like that is probably gon na be , more what we have to do . but , grad a: , the once what the focus is the everything else is background . how about " topic - comment " that 's the other side of information . grad f: , so that was the other thing . and so i did n't realize it before . it 's like , " ! " it was an epiphany that it , topic and focus are a contrast set . so topic is topic - focused seems to me like , background profile , ok , or a landmark trajector , or some something like that . there 's there 's definitely , that thing going on . grad f: now i whether i n i do n't have as many great examples of like topic - indicating constructions on like focus , right ? , topic it seems , that might be an ongoing thing . grad e: , that 's what " wa " is , just to mark which thing is the topic . it does n't always have to be the subject . grad f: so again , information structure has a topic slot . and , i stuck it in thinking that we might use it . , i stuck it in . grad f: , and one thing that i did n't do consistently , is when we get there , is like indicate what thing fits into every role . i have an idea of what it should be but th , so far we ' ve been getting away with like either a type constraint or , , whatever . i forg it 'll be a frame . , it 'll be another predication or it 'll be , i , some value from some something , some variable and scope like that , or a slot chain based on a variable and scope . ok , so that 's should we flip over to the other side officially then ? grad f: i keep , like , pointing forward to it . now we 'll go back to s ok , so this does n't include something which mi may have some effect on it , which is , the discourse situation context record , right ? so i did n't i meant just like draw a line and like , you also have , some tracking of what was going on . and this is a big scale comment before i , look into the details of this . but you could imagine instead of having i changed the name of it used to be " entities " . so you see it 's " scenario " , " referent " and " discourse segment " . and " scenario " is essentially what 's the basic predication , what event happened . and actually it 's just a list of various slots from which you would draw in order to paint your picture , a bunch of frames , bi and bindings , right ? , and there are other ones that are not included here , general cultural frames and general like , other action f , specific x - schema frames . ok , whatever . the middle thing used to be " entities " because you could imagine it should be like really a list where here was various information . and this is intended to be grammatically specifiable information about a referent , about some entity that you were going to talk about . so " harry walked into the room " , harry and " room " , the room th but they would be represented in this list somehow . and it could also have , it has this category slot . , it should be either category or in or instance . , it could be a pointer to ontology . so that everything about this could be drawn in . but the important things for grammatical purposes are for things like number , gender , ki the ones i included here are slightly arbitrary but you could imagine that , you need to figure out wheth if it 's a group whether , some event is happening , linear time , linear spaces , like , are they doing something serially or is it like , i ' m not . because this partly came from , talmy 's schema and i ' m not we 'll need all of these actually . but , and then the " status " i used was like , again , in some languages , like in child language you might distinguish between different status . so , th the big com and finally " discourse segment " is about speech - act - y information structure - y , like utterance - specific kinds of things . so the comment i was going to make about , changing entity the entity 's block to reference is that you can imagine your discourse like situation context , you have a set of entities that you 're referring to . and you might that might be a general , i , database of all the things in this discourse that you could refer to . and i changed to " reference " cuz i would say , for a particular utterance you have particular referring expressions in it . and those are the ones that you get information about that you stick in here . , i know it 's going to be plural . i know it 's gon na be feminine like that . and and these could actually just point to , the id in my other list of enti active entities , right ? , th there 's all this about discourse status . we ' ve talked about . i almost listed " discourse status " as a slot where you could say it 's active . , there 's this , hierarchy there 's a schematization of , things can be active or they can be , accessible , inaccessible . it was the one that , keith , emailed to us once , to some of us , not all of us . that i noticed that , list was discourse dependent . it was like in this particular set , s , instance , it has been referred to recently or it has n't been , or this is something that 's like in my world knowledge but not active . grad f: , they 're contex and , i used to have a location thing there but actually that 's a property of the situation . and it 's again , time , at cert certain points things are located , near or far from you professor c: cuz until we do the , mental space story , we 're not quite th - th which is fine . we 'll just we 'll j grad f: so i so for now , maybe i 'll just have in this list the things that are relevant to this particular utterance , right ? everything else here is utterance - specific . , and i left the slot , " predications " , open because you can have , things like " the guy i know from school " . or , like your referring expression might be constrained by certain like unbounded na amounts of prep , predications that you might make . and it 's unclear whether , you could just have in your scenario , " here are some extra few things that are true " , right ? and then you could just not have this slot here . right ? you 're but it 's used for identification purposes . so it 's a little bit different from just saying " all these things are true from my utterance " . grad e: right , " this guy i know from school came for dinner " does not mean , " there 's a guy , i know him from school , and he came over for dinner " . that 's not the same effect . grad f: , it 's a little bit different . right ? so or maybe that 's like a restrictive , non - restrictive , it 's like it gets into that thing for , but maybe i ' m mixing , this is like the final result after parsing the sentence . so you might imagine that the information you pass to , in identifying a particular referent would be , " , some " , " it 's a guy and it 's someone i know from school " . so maybe that would , be some intermediate structure that you would pass into the disc to the , whatever , construal engine or whatever , discourse context , to find , either create this reference , in which case it 'd be created here , so you could imagine that this might not so , i ' m uncommitted to a couple of these things . grad a: but to make it m precise at least in my mind , it 's not precise . so " house " is gender neuter ? in reality grad f: semantically , . so it , a table . , a thing that c does n't have a gender . so . , it could be that , maybe you 'd maybe not all these , i wou i would say that i tried to keep slots here that were potentially relevant to most things . grad a: no , just to make that we everybody that 's completely that it has nothing to do with , form . grad a: then " predications " makes sense to have it open for something like , accessibility or not . grad f: s so again open to various things . ok , so . let 's see . so maybe having made that big sca like large scale comment , should go through each of these slots , each of these blocks , a little bit ? , mostly the top one is image schematic . and just a note , which was that , s so when we actually ha so , some of them seem more inherently static , ok , like a container or support - ish . and others are a little bit seemingly inherently dynamic like " source , path , goal " is often thought of that way or " force " , like that . but in actual fact , that they 're intended to be neutral with respect to that . and different x - schemas use them in a way that 's either static or dynamic . so " path " , you could just be talking about the path between this and this . and , " container " that you can go in and out . all of these things . and so , this came up when , ben and i were working with the spaniards , the other day the " spaniettes " , as we called them , to decide like how you want to split up , like , s image schematic contributions versus , like , x - schematic contributions . how do you link them up . , it 's gon na be something in the x - schema that tells you " is this static or is this dynamic " . so we definitely need that aspectual type gives you some of that . , that , is it , a state or is it a change of state , or is it a , action of some kind ? grad a: , i is there any meaning to when you have parameters behind it and when you do n't ? just means grad f: , ! you mean , in the slot ? , no , it 's like x - sc it 's like i was thinking of type constraints but x - schema , it has to be an x - schema . agent , the performer of the x - schema , that s depends on the x - schema . , and i in general it would probably be , grad e: so the difference is whether you thought it was obvious what the possible fillers were . grad f: , " aspectual type " probably is n't obvious but i should have so , neglected to stick something in . " perspective " , " actor " , " undergoer " , " observer " , grad f: , exactly . exactly . , and so one thing that , we had talked about is this example of like , if you have a passive construction then one thing it does is ch definitely , it is one way to for you to , specifically take the perspective of the undergoing object . and so then we talked about , whether , does that specify topic as ? , maybe there are other things . , now that it 's subject is more like a topic . and now that , anyway . so . i ' m gon na trail off on that one cuz it 's not that f important right now . professor c: n now , for the moment we just need the ability to l write it down if somebody figured out what the rules were . grad f: to know how . exactly . some of these other ones , let 's see . , one thing i ' m uncertain about is how polarity interacts . so polarity , is using for like action did not take place . so by default it 'll be like " true " , i , if you 're specifying events that did happen . you could imagine that you skip out this , leave off this polarity , not do n't have it here . and then have it part of the speech - act in some way . there 's some negation . but the reason why i left it in is cuz you might have a change of state , let 's say , where some state holds and then some state does n't hold , and you 're just talking , if you 're trying to have the nuts and bolts of simulation you need to know that , whatever , the holder does n't and professor c: no , i th at this lev which is it should be where you have it . grad e: so , i ' m still just really not clear on what i ' m looking at . the " scenario " box , like , what does that look like for an example ? like , not all of these things are gon na be here . this is just says grad e: part of what i ' m going to hand you is a whole bunch of s , schemas , image , and x - schemas . bed015edialogueact1254 276824 277096 e grad s -1 0 here are some examples of the sorts of things you might have in there . grad f: so that 's exactly what it is . and for a particular instance which i will , make an example of something , is that you might have an instance of container and path , let 's say , as part of your , " into " , definition . so you would eventually have instances filled in with various values for all the different slots . and they 're bound up in , their bindings and values . grad e: do you have to say about the binding in your is there a slot in here for that tells you how the bindings are done ? professor c: no , no . i let 's see , we 're not i do n't think we have it quite right yet . so , what this is , let 's suppose for the moment it 's complete . ok , then this says that when an analysis is finished , the whole analysis is finished , you 'll have as a result , some s resulting s semspec for that utterance in context , which is made up entirely of these things and , bindings among them . and bindings to ontology items . so that the who that this is the tool kit under whi out of which you can make a semantic specification . so that 's a . but b , which is more relevant to your life , is this is also the tool kit that is used in the semantic side of constructions . so this is an that anything you have , in the party line , anything you have as the semantic side of constructions comes , from pieces of this ignoring li , in general , you ignore lots of it . but it 's got to be pieces of this along with constraints among them . , so that the , goal of the , " source , path , goal " has to be the landmark of the conta , the interior of this container . or whate whatever . so those constraints appear in constructions but this is the full range of semantic structures available to you . grad f: except for " , that i forgot . but anyway , there 's som some causal structure for composite events . professor c: ok , good . let 's let 's mark that . so we need a c grad f: , so it gets a little funny . these are all so far these structures , especially from " path " and on down , these are relatively familiar , image schematic slots . now with " , the fillers will actually be themselves frames . right ? so you 'll say , " event one causes event b grad f: , event two " , . so that 's , these are all implicitly one within , within one world . even though saying that place takes place , whatever . , if y if i said " time " is , " past " , that would say " set that this world " , " somewhere , before the world that corresponds to our current speech time " . so . but that 's ok . the the within the event it 's st it 's still one world . , so " and other frames that could come in , unfortunately you could bring in say , , " desire " like that , like " want " . and actually there is right now under " discourse segments " , " attitude " ? volition ? could fill that . so there are a couple things where i like , " , i ' m not if i wanted to have it there grad f: or " there was a whole list of possible speaker attitudes that like say talmy listed . and , like , i do n't , it was like " hope , wish . desire " , blah - blah . and it 's like , i feel like if i wanted to have an extra meaning i if those are grammatically marked in the first place . so they 're more lexically marked , right ? at least in english . so if i wanted to i would stick in an extra frame in my meaning , saying , e so th it 'd be a hierarchical frame them , right ? , like " naomi wants su a certain situation and that situation itself is a state of affairs " . professor c: in our s terminology , " want " can be an action and " what you want " is a world . so that 's , it 's certainly one way to do it . , there are other things . causal we need . mental space we need . the context we need . , so anyway , keith so is this comfortable to you that , once we have this defined , it is your tool kit for building the semantic part of constructions . and then when we combine constructions semantically , the goal is going to be to fill out more and more of the bindings needed in order to come up with the final one . and that 's the wh and , that according to the party line , that 's the whole story . grad e: . y right . that makes sense . so , there 's this in the off in the scenario , which just tells you how various what schemas you 're using and they 're how they 're bound together . and i that some of the discourse segment is that where you would sa , that 's ok , that 's where the information structure is which is a profiling on different parts of , of this . grad e: , what 's interesting is that the information structure there 's almost , we keep coming back to how focus is like this , trajector - landmark thing . so if i say , , " in france it 's like this " . , great , we ' ve learned something about france but the fact is that utterances of that sort are generally used to help you draw a conclusion also about some implicit contrast , like " in france it 's like this " . and therefore you 're supposed to say , " boy , life " , " in france kids are allowed to drink at age three " . and w you 're that 's not just a fact about france . you also conclude something about how boring it is here in the u s . right ? and so grad f: s so i would prefer not to worry about that for right now and to think that there are , grad f: discourse level constructions in a sense , topic - focus constructions that would say , " , when you focus something " then just done the same way just actually in the same way as the lower level . if you stressed , " john went to the " , " the bar " whatever , you 're focusing that and a in a possible inference is " in contrast to other things " . so similarly for a whole sentence , " in france such - and - such happens " . so the whole thing is like again implicitly as opposed to other things that are possible . grad a: , just , look read even sem semi formal mats rooth . if you have n't read it . it 's . and just pick any paper on alternative semantics . so that 's his that 's the best way of talking about focus , is his way . grad a: mats . mats . rooth . two o 's , yes , th . i never know how to pronounce his name because he 's , grad a: and sadly enough he also just left the ims in stuttgart . so he 's not there anymore . but , i where he is right now but alternative semantics is if you type that into an , browser or search engine you 'll get tons of . grad a: and what i ' m confused about is what the speaker and the hearer is doing there . grad f: so for a particular segment it 's really just a reference to some other entity again in the situation , right ? so for a particular segment the speaker might be you or might be me . , hearer is a little bit harder . it could be like multiple people . i that 's not very clear from here grad a: , but you do n't we ultimately want to handle that analogously to the way we handle time and place , grad a: because " you " , " me " , " he " , " they " , " these guys " , all these expressions , nuh , are in much the same way contextually dependent as " here , " and " now , " and " there " grad f: right , so the constructions might will refer , using pronouns or whatever . in which case they have to check to see , who the , speaker in here wa in order to resolve those . but when you actually say that " he walked into " , whatever , the " he " will refer to a particular you you will already have figured who " he " or " you " , mmm , or " i " , maybe is a bett better example , who " i " refers to . , and then you 'd just be able to refer to harry , in wherever that person whatever role that person was playing in the event . grad a: that 's up at the reference part . and down there in the speaker - hearer part ? grad f: s so , that 's just n , speaker is known from the situation , right ? you 're when you hear something you 're told who the speaker is , who the speaker is . , that 's constraining how in some ways this before you get to the you fill in all the rest of it . , how else would you grad a: , it 's the speaker may in english is allowed to say " i . " grad a: , among the twenty - five percent most used words . but would n't the " i " then set up the s referent that happens to be the speaker this time and not " they , " whoever they are . or " you " much like the " you " could n grad f: s so ok , so i would say ref under referent should be something that corresponds to " i " . and maybe each referent should probably have a list of way whatever , the way it was referred to . so that 's " i " but , should we say it refers to , what ? , if it were " harry " it would refer to like some ontology thing . if it were if it 's " i " it would refer to the current speaker , ok , which is given to be like , whoever it is . grad a: , not always . , so there 's " and then he said , i w " - . professor c: that 's right . so so again , this is gon na to get us into the mental space professor c: and t because , " fred said that mary said " , and whatever . and and so we 're , gon na have to , chain those as . grad f: so this entire thing is inside a world , not just like the top part . that 's professor c: except s it 's trickier than that because , the reference so he where it gets really tricky is there 's some things , and this is where blends and all terribl so , some things which really are meant to be identified and some things which are n't . , all we need for the moment is some way to say that . grad f: so of having like for each referent , having the list of the things t with which it is identified . , which , you grad f: so , i , it depends on if it is a referring exp if it 's identifiable already or it 's a new thing . if it 's a new thing you 'd have to like create a structure or whatever . if it 's an old thing it could be referring to , usually w something in a situation , right ? in ontology . there 's a , whatever , it c it could point at one of these . professor c: if it worked . right , it was a space builder . , we might be able to handle context in the same way that we handle mental spaces because , you have somewhat the same things going on of , things being accessible or not . and so , i it c it , if we did it right we might be able to get at least a lot of the same structure . professor c: so that pulling something out of a discourse context is similar to other kinds of , mental space phenomena . professor c: , i ' ve never seen anybody write that up but maybe they did . that may be all over the literature . grad e: there 's things like ther , there 's all kinds of like , in i mentioned last time in czech if you have a verb of saying then grad e: , you say something like or i was thinking you can say something like , " , , you are a republican " like that . where as in english you would say , " you were " . , the past tense being copied onto the lower verb does n't happen there , so you have to say something about , tense is determined relative to current blah - blah . same things happens with pronouns . there 's languages where , if you have a verb of saying then , ehhh , where ok , so a situation like " bob said he was going to the movies " , where that lower subject is the same as the person who was saying or thinking , you 're actually required to have " i " there . , and it 's in an extended function grad e: but it 's not perceived as a quotative construction . , it 's been analyzed by the formalists as being a logophoric pronoun , which means a pronoun which refers back to the person who is speaking or that thing , right ? grad e: but , that happens to sound like the word for " i " but is actually semantically unrelated to it . grad e: there 's a whole book which operates on this assumption . , mary dalrymple , this book , a ninety - three book on , on pronoun . grad e: , . and then the same thing for asl where , you 're signing and someone says something . and then , so " he say " , and then you do a role shift . and then you sign " i , this , that , and the other " . and , " i did this " . that 's also been analyzed as logophoric and having nothing to do with " i " . and the role shift thing is completely left out and so on . so , that pronoun references , , ties in with all this mental space and so on , and . and so , professor c: so that d that does sound like it 's co consistent with what we 're saying , . grad f: ok , so it 's like the unspecified mental spaces just are occurring in context . and then when you embed them sometimes you have to pop up to the h , depending on the construction or the whatever , you 're scope is m might extend out to the base one . it would be to actually use the same , mechanism since there are so many cases where you actually need it 'll be one or the other . it 's like , actually , it 's the same operation . grad e: it 's like it 's like what 's happening that , what 's happening , there is that you 're moving the base space like that , right ? so that 's how fauconnier would talk about it . and it happens diff under different circumstances in different languages . and so , things like pronoun reference and tense which we 're thinking of as being these discourse - y things actually are relative to a bayes space which can change . grad a: and i ' m gon na read the transcript of this one . but the , but it 's too bad that we do n't have a camera . , all the pointing is gon na be lost . grad f: , that 's why i said " point to robert " , when i did it . grad a: mmm , is n't , i ' m i was dubious why he even introduces this reality , as your basic mental space and then builds up d does n't start with some because it 's so obvi it should be so obvious , at least it is to me , that whenever i say something i could preface that with " . " nuh ? so there should be no categorical difference between your base and all the others that ensue . professor c: no , but there 's a gricean thing going on there , that when you say " you 're actually hedging . grad e: , it 's an evidential . it 's semi - grammaticalized . people have talked about it this way . and , you can do special things . you can , th put just the phrase " as a parenthetical in the middle of a sentence and so on , and . so grad f: actually one of the child language researchers who works with t tomasello studied a bunch of these constructions and it was like it 's not using any interesting embedded ways just to mark , uncertainty like that . grad a: , but about linguistic hedges , those tend to be , funky anyways because they blur grad f: hedges ? hhh , i there used to be a slot for speaker , it was something like factivity . i could n't really remember what it meant so i took it out . but it 's something grad e: and the fact that i ' m , the fact maybe if it versus he thinks that might , depending on how much you trust the two of us or whatever , grad a: great word in the english language is called " about " . if you study how people use that it 's also professor c: and y if you want us to spend a pleasant six or seven hours you could get george started on that . grad b: i r i read that paper , the hedges paper ? i read some of that paper actually . grad e: would you believe that paper lead directly to the development of anti - lock brakes ? grad e: ask me about it later i 'll tell you how . when we 're not on tape . grad f: so , and , someone had raised like sarcasm as a complication at some point . grad e: i do n't really like we we do n't have to care too much about the speaker attitude , right ? like there 's not so many different hhh , i , m grad f: certainly not as some , they 're intonational markers for the most part . i too much about the like grammatical grad e: mean there 's lots of different attitudes that the speaker could have and that we can clearly identify , and so on , and . but like what are the distinctions among those that we actually care about for our current purposes ? professor c: right , so , this raises the question of what are our current purposes . right ? professor c: , so , i the answer but , it does seem that , this is coming along . it 's converging . it 's as far as tell there 's this one major thing we have to do which is the mental the whole s mental space thing . and then there 's some other minor things . , and we 're going to have to s bound the complexity . , if we get everything that anybody ever thought about , w we 'll go nuts . so we had started with the idea that the actual , constraint was related to this tourist domain and the kinds of interactions that might occur in the tourist domain , assuming that people were being helpful and were n't trying to d , there 's all sorts of god knows , irony , and like which you is n't probably of much use in dealing with a tourist guide . ? professor c: whatever . so y , no end of things th that , we do n't deal with . grad a: because in terms of the s simspec , it would just mean you put one more set of brack brackets around it , and then just tell it to negate whatever the content of that is in terms of irony grad f: maybe . , in model theory cuz the semantics is always like " speaker believes not - p " , ? like " the speaker says p and believes not - p " . professor c: anyway , so , i , let me make a proposal on how to proceed on that , which is that , it was keith 's , job over the summer to come up with this set of constructions . , and my suggestion to keith is that you , over the next couple weeks , n do n't try to do them in detail or formally but just try to describe which ones you think we ought to have . , and then when robert gets back we 'll look at the set of them . just just , define your space . professor c: and , so th these are this is a set of things that we ought to deal with . and then we 'll go back over it and w people will give feedback on it . and then we 'll have a at least initial spec of what we 're actually trying to do . and that 'll also be useful for anybody who 's trying to write a parser . knowing professor c: right , who might want et cetera . so , so a and we get this , portals fixed and then we have an idea of the initial range . and then nancy you 're gon na have to , do your set of but you have to do that anyway . professor c: so so we 're gon na get the w we 're dealing with two domains , the tourist domain and the child language learning . and we 'll see what we need for those two . and then my proposal would be to , not cut off more general discussion but to focus really detailed work on the subset of things that we ' ve we really want to get done . and then as a separate thread , think about the more general things and all that . grad a: , i also think the detailed discussion will hit , bring us to problems that are of a general nature and maybe even professor c: but what i want to do is to constrain the things that we really feel responsible for . so that we say these are the things we 're really gon na try do by the end of the summer and other things we 'll put on a list of research problems , because you can easily get to the point where nothing gets done because every time you start to do something you say , " , but what about this case ? " this is this is called being a linguist . and , grad b: there 's that quote in jurafsky and martin where it goes where some guy goes , " every time i fire a linguist the performance of the recognizer goes up . " professor c: but anyway . so , is that does that make sense as a , a general way to proceed ? grad e: , we 'll start with that , just figuring out what needs to be done then actually the next step is to start trying to do it . grad b: can i ask a quick question about this side ? is this , was it intentional to leave off things like " inherits " and grad f: i did n't want to think too much about that for now . so , maybe it was subconsciously intentional . grad e: , there should be i wanted to s find out someday if there was gon na be some way of dealing with , if this is the right term , multiple inheritance , where one construction is inheriting from , from both parents , or different ones , or three or four different ones . grad e: cuz the problem is that then you have to which of , which are how they 're getting bound together . grad f: refer to them . , and there are certainly cases like that . even with just semantic schemas we have some examples . and we ' ve been talking a little bit about that anyway . professor c: my argument is there 's nothing you can do with that you ca n't do by just having more constructions . professor c: and so i what i 'd like to do is in the short run focus on getting it right . professor c: and when we think we have it right then saying , " aha ! , can we make it more elegant ? " can can we , what are the generalizations , and ? professor c: but rather than try to a inheritance structure and all that before we 're doing . so i would say in the short run we 're not gon na b first of all , we 're not doing them yet . and and it could be that half way through we say , " aha ! , we now see how we want to clean it up . " , and inheritance is only one , that 's one way to organize it but there are others . and it may or may not be the best way . you had news . grad a: , just small . , to eva on our web site we can now , if you want to run javabayes , you could see get download these classes . and then it will enable you she modified the gui so it has now a m a button menu item for saving it into the embedded javabayes format . grad a: so that 's wonderful . and , and she , a you tested it out . do you want to say something about that , that it works , right ? with the grad d: i was just checking like , when we wanna , get the posterior probability of , like , variables . how you asked whether we can , like , just observe all the variables like in the same list ? you ca n't . you have to make separate queries every time . grad f: , all the things you want to query , you just have to like ask for separately . grad a: that 's probably maybe in the long term that 's good news because it forces us to think a little bit more carefully how we want to get an out output . , but that 's a different discussion for a different time . and , i . we 're really running late , so i had , an idea yesterday but , i whether we should even start discussing . grad a: , the construal bit that , has been pointed to but has n't been , made precise by any means , may w may work as follows . that we would , that the following thing would be in incredibly and i have no clue whether it will work or nothing . so that 's just a tangent , a couple of mental disclaimers here . , imagine you write a bayes - net , grad a: bayes - net , completely from scratch every time you do construal . so you have nothing . just a white piece of paper . grad a: you consult your ontology which will tell you a bunch of , and parts , and properties , - grad a: then y you 'd simply write , these into onto your white piece of paper . and you will get a lot of notes and out of there . you wo n't get you wo n't really get any c p t 's , therefore we need everything that configures to what the situation is , ie , the context dependent . so you get whatever comes from discourse but also filtered . , so only the ontology relevant from the discourse plus the situation and the user model . and that fills in your cpt 's with which you can then query , the net that you just wrote and find out how thing x is construed as an utterance u . and the embedded javabayes works exactly like that , that once you we have , precise format in which to write it , so we write it down . you query it . you get the result , and you throw it away . and the thing about this idea is that you do n't ever have to sit down and think about it or write about it . you may have some general rules as to how things can be construed as what , so that will allow you to craft the initial notes . but it 's in that respect it 's completely scalable . because it does n't have any prior , configuration . it 's just you need an ontology of the domain and you need the context dependent modules . and if this can be made to work , that 'd be funky . grad a: p r ms - , prm , since you can unfold a prm into a straightforward bayes - net professor c: beca - because it b because no , no , you ca n't . see the critical thing about the prm is it gives these relations in general form . so once you have instantiated the prm with the instances and ther then you can unfold it . grad a: then you can . no , i was m using it generic . so , probabilistic , whatever , relational models . whatever you write it . in professor c: , no , but it matters a lot because you what you want are these generalized rules about the way things relate , th that you then instantiate in each case . grad a: and then instantiate them . that 's ma maybe the way the only way it works . professor c: , and that 's , that 's the only way it could work . i we have a our local expert on p r , but my is that they 're not currently good enough to do that . but we 'll have to see . professor c: yes . this is that 's that would be a good thing to try . it 's related to the hobbs abduction story in that you th you throw everything into a pot and you try to come up with the , professor c: no , there is n't a theorem prover but there but the , the cove the p r ms are like rules of inference and you 're coupling a bunch of them together . and then ins instead of proving you 're trying to , compute the most likely . tricky . but you , it 's a good thing to put in your thesis proposal . grad a: i would suggest as soon as possible . do you mean by we , the whole ben gang ? professor c: n no , i did n't mean y just the two of us . we we can do this . but the question is do you want to , send the little group , a draft of your thesis proposal and get , another session on feedback on that ? or grad e: fine with me . should we do the one pm time for thursday since we were on that before or ? grad a: thursday at one ? also maybe then run through the , the talk i have to give at eml which highlights all of our work . and we can make some last minute changes on that . grad a: it 's equal to all of us , so you can decide one or four . grad a: liz actually said she likes four because it forces the meeting recorder people to cut , the discussions short .
###summary: the discussion concerned the revised semantic specification and the construction formalism. the different levels of the latter focus on what construction types are encountered and what bindings there are between them. the notation maintains properties of both dependency and constituent-based grammars. the encoding of features is still incomplete: frame profiles , focus , adjectives , nominal expressions are phenomena in the process of being integrated. similarly , ways to handle mental spaces will have to be added on top. on the other hand , the semantic specification structures information in terms of "scenario" , "referent" and "discourse segment". each category comprises a number of slots filled in by information derived from the utterance. it is , essentially , a toolkit with which to create semantic constructions , as well as the bindings between them and with the ontology. among the issues still being defined , mental spaces and context ( eg pronoun references ) present similarities that can be echoed in the specification. work on both of these formalisms will continue with circumscription of the construction space that will be studied in more detail. work on construal will use bayes-nets , which will be fed information from other modules and implement general rules to infer how utterances are construed. the semantic specification requires some adjustments. amongst other things "cause" has to be added as another x-schema. linguistic hedging will also be encoded as a demarcation of evidentiality or speaker confidence. mental spaces can be tackled with mechanisms that can also deal with context issues ( time , space etc . ): creating a base space and rules of interaction with other interconnected spaces. however , the complexity of these mechanisms has to be bound as well: it is necessary to define the range of constructions to be studied. given the domains currently used ( tourist , child language learning ) , some features , like speaker attitude , are not of equal importance at this stage. on the other hand , it was decided for the inheritance between constructions to be left out for now , as the notation can be rendered more elegant later on. finally , a preliminary presentation on the idea of how to use bayes-nets for construal will take place in the next meeting. the construction formalism is not yet complete as to the semantic constraints -the terminology has also been met with objections- and does not deal with mental spaces. on their own , constructions can only give limited information regarding mental spaces: forms can provide cues to create a different mental space , but the semantic nuances are defined by context. it is not decided at this stage whether the necessary values should be coded within the construction or as part of construal. other issues concern focus and stress: focus is seen as an information structure device , but there has been no suggestion as to how to predict its effects or break it down in possible focused elements; as to stress , it may not be useful as a form value , as it shows the focus exponent , but not what the focus is on. moving to the semantic specification , the analysis still needs mechanisms to deal with causality , as well as mental spaces and bindings between them. additionally , how referring expressions are linked to referents or even how mental spaces affect this linking are still to lay down in detail. the revised semantic specification and construction formalism are more stable than the previous versions. in the latter , we find both construction types and meaning types along with formal considerations like verb subcategorisation , or the ones a "directed motion" construction would dictate. semantic constraints also come into play. the semantic specification , on the other hand , is split into three levels: "scenario" is a list of schemas and bindings between them , which describes the current event in terms of source-path-goal , container , etc.; "referent" is about the entities in the discourse and includes grammatical information and pointers to the ontology; "discourse segment" comprises utterance-specific things. apart from the presentation , javabayes can now run through the modified web page of the project.