grad f: I 'm What ? Really ? Oh , that 's horrible ! Disincentive ! grad a: OK , we 're recording . So , So basically 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 . And so one on one side is on one side is a sort of the revised sort of updated semantic specification . grad e: This is just one sheet , right ? grad d: Ah ! Just one sheet . And in some ways it 's it 's it 's very similar to There are very few changes in some ways from what we 've , b done before but I don't think everyone here has seen all of this .  , 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 I have more linguistic things to settle in the next few days , it 'll probably change again some more . grad f: 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 sort of a sort of abstract nota it 's sort of like , listings of the kinds of things that we can have . grad f: So something like ,  Well , there 's an example the textual example at the end has clausal construction . So , just to show it doesn't have to be beautiful It could be , you know , simple old text as well . professor c: So so the current syntax is if it s if there 's a type it 's before construct grad f: Yeah , right . And as usual I guess all the constructions her all the examples here have only , tsk one type of constituent , that is a constructional constituent . But in general instead of the word " construct " , th here you might have " meaning " or " form " as well . OK ? So if there 's some element that doesn't that isn'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 it 's pro it 's often sometimes the case in the first case here that you know what kind of construction it is . So for example whatever I have here is gonna be a form of the word " throw " , or it 's gonna be a form of the word , you know , I don't know , " happy " , or something like that . Or , you know , 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 a very common example of this is that , you know , in directed motion , the first person to do something should be an agent of some kind , often a human . Right ? So if I you know , the  , run down the street then I I I run down the street , it 's typed , " I " , meaning category is what 's there . The the new kind is this one that is sort of a pair and , sort of skipping fonts and whatever . The idea is that sometimes there are , general constructions that you know , that you 're going to need . It 's it 's the equivalent of a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase , or something like that there . 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 , you know , " the big th " , you you know , " the big the tall dark man " , you know , " walked into the room " . grad f: But because of the nature of this particular construction you know not just that it 's nominal of some kind but in particular , that it 's some kind of animate nominal , and which will apply just as well to like , you know , a per you know , a simple proper noun or to some complicated expression .  , so I don't know if the syntax will hold but something that gives you a way to do both constructional and meaning types . None of these examples have anything different for formal constraints ? But you can refer to any of the , sort of available elements and scope , right ? which here are the constructs , to say something about the relation . And I think i if you not if you compare like the top block and the textual block , we dropped like the little F subscript . So so by saying if I just 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 " . Right ? Or Actually it 's more often that , only to handle this one special case of , you know , " George and Jerry walk into the room in that order " . grad f: 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 gonna 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 the relations , you know , as usual they 're before and ends . I should have put an example in of something that isn't an interval relation but in form you might also have a value binding . You know , you could say that , you know , " name - one dot " , t you know , " number equals " , you know , a plural or something like that . grad f: 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 value fillers , right ? OK , and then again semantic constraints here are just are just bindings . And Johno and I I you you and I can like fight about that if you like ? but about changing it to " semantic n effects " , which I thought was a little bit too order - biased grad b: Well Th grad f: and " semantic bindings " , which I thought might be too restrictive in case we don't have only bindings . And so it was an issue whether constraints  , there were some linguists who reacted against " constraints " , saying , " oh , if it 's not used for matching , then it shouldn't be called a constraint " . But I think we want to be uncommitted about whether it 's used for matching or not . Right ? Cuz there are I think we thought of some situations where it would be useful to use whatever the c bindings are , for actual , you know , sort of like modified constraining purposes . professor c: Well , 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 grad e: Yeah . professor c: but we don't want to grad f: Yeah , there was one time when when Hans explained why " constraints " was a misleading word for him . grad f: And I think 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 , well both of you don't like it ? professor c: It 's g it 's gone . grad b: But grad f: So that that 's why That 's why I 'll stick with it . grad a: Well , you know what ? grad f: So grad a: If you have an " if - then " phrase , do you know what the " then " phrase is called ? professor c: Th grad f: What ? Con -  , a consequent ? grad a: Yeah . Anyway , so the other the other strategy you guys could consider is when you don't know what word to put , you could put no word , grad f:   grad b: So that 's why you put semantic constraints up top and meaning bindings down down here ? grad f: Oh , oops ! No . grad b: So this should be semantic and grad f: Sometimes I 'm intentionally inconsistent grad b:  grad f: cuz I 'm not sure yet . grad b: Th - so this definitely should be " semantic constraints " down at the bottom ? grad e: Sure . grad f: Well , unless I go with " meaning " but i  , I kind of like " meaning " better than " semantic " grad b: Or professor c: Oh , whatever . grad f: but I think there 's vestiges of other people 's biases . grad f: OK , so I think the middle block doesn't really give you any more information , ex than the top block . And the bottom block similarly only just illus you know , all it does is illustrate that you can drop the subscripts and and that you can drop the , that you can give dual types . grad f: So basically now , this is actually this little change actually goes along with a big linguistic change , which is that " designates " isn't only something for the semantics to worry about now . grad f: So we want s " designates " to actually know one of the constituents which acts like a head in some respects but is sort of , really important for say composition later on . So for instance , if some other construction says , you know , " are you of type is this part of type whatever " , the " designates " tells you which sort of part is the meaning part . OK , so if you have like " the big red ball " , you know , you wanna know if there 's an object or a noun . 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 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 sort of the semantic head in some ways of of this sort of , in interesting larger element . And there 's  there 's ca some cases where the grammar depends on some form property of the head . 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 , you know the formal head as opposed to the rest of the form having to be at the end of that decision . grad f: So that 's a useful thing so that you can get some internal structural constraints in . Were you finished ? grad f: there was a list of things that isn't included but you you can you can ask a question . So , i if I understand this the aside from , construed and all that sort of stuff , the the differences are mainly that , we 've gone to the possibility of having form - meaning pairs for a type grad f:   professor c: if we go back far enough grad f: Well , except for their construction meaning , so it 's not clear that ,  Well , right now it 's a c  contr construction type and meaning type . A well , and a previous , you know , version of the notation certainly allowed you to single out the meaning bit by it . I don'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 think . grad f: I I don't know 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 , you know that 's kind of weird . grad e: I professor c: In fact , these are , as long as as Mark isn't around , these are form constraints . The fact that it 's n  , a nominal expression I would say on most people 's notion of of f you know , higher form types , this i this is one . grad e: It 's that now , I 'm mentioned this , I I don't know 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 , you know , 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 basically ? So you wanna , you know you sort of have this problem like " OK , well , I 'll put the word " , let 's say , the word " dog " , you know . And then we have a construction that says , oh , you can have " the " preceding a noun . And so you 'd have this sort of problem that the verb has to meet the designatum . grad e: And you could get , you know , " the kicked dog " or something like that , meaning " kicked the dog " . grad e: so you kind of have to let this phrase idea in there professor c: That I I have no problem with it at all . Right , n s you may be you may not be like everyone else in in Berkeley , grad e: Yeah . grad e: we we we sort of thought we were getting away with ,  with , a p grad f: we don't mind either , so grad e: this is not reverting to the X - bar theory of of phrase structure . grad e: I just know that this is Like , we didn't originally have in mind that ,  that verbs would subcategorize for a particular sort of form . grad f: Well , there 's an alternative to this grad e: At least in English . grad f: which is ,  The question was did we want directed motion , professor c: Yeah . grad f: did we want it to worry about , anything more than the fact that it , you know , has semantic You know , it 's sort of frame - based construction . So one option that , you know , Keith had mentioned also was like , well if you have more abstract constructions such as subject , predicate , basically things like grammatical relations , grad e:   grad f: those could intersect with these in such a way that subject , predicate , or subject , predicate , subject , verb , ob you know , verb object would require that those things that f fill a subject and object are NOM expressions . But it y y it 's yeah , just moving it moving the c the cons the constraints around . professor c: OK , so that 's grad f: But there does basically , the point is there has to be that constraint somewhere , right ? professor c: Right . professor c: And so that was the grad f: Robert 's not happy now ? grad a: No ! grad f: Oh , OK . professor c: OK , and sort of going with that is that the designatum also now is a pair . grad f: Yeah , the un sort of the un - addressed questions in this , definitely would for instance be semantic constraints we talked about . grad f: Here are just bindings but , right ? we might want to introduce mental spaces You know , there 's all these things that we don't professor c: The whole the mental space thing is clearly not here . grad f: Right ? So there 's going to be some extra you know , definitely other notation we 'll need for that which we skip for now . professor c: By the way , I do want to get on that as soon as Robert gets back . professor c: obviously , construal is a b is a b is a big component of that grad e:   But sort of as soon as he gets back I think  , we ought to grad f:   grad e: So what 's the what 's the time frame ? I forgot again when you 're going away for how long ? grad a: Just , as a sort of a mental bridge , I 'm not I 'm skipping fourth of July . grad f: What ? You 're missing like the premier American holiday ? What 's the point of spending a year here ? grad a: I 've had it often enough . grad f: Construal , OK , so Oh , so there was one question that came out .  , which is , so something like " past " which i you know , we think is a very simple  , we 've often just stuck it in as a feature , professor c: Right . grad f: you know , " oh , 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 , professor c: Right . grad f: So there 's this issue of well sometimes there are really exotic explicit space builders that say " in France , blah - blah - blah " , grad e:   grad f: and you have to build up you ha you would imagine that would require you , you know , to be very specific about the machinery , whereas past is a very conventionalized one and we sort of know what it means but it we doesn't don't necessarily want to , you know , unload all the notation every time we see that it 's past tense . grad f: So , you know , we could think of our  , just like X - schema " walk " refers to this complicated structure , past refers to , you know , a certain configuration of this thing with respect to it . grad f: So so we 're kind of like having our cake and eating it professor c: Yeah . No , I think I think that i we 'll have to see how it works out when we do the details grad f: So , i i   grad a: Do you want to do the same for space ? grad f: Wha - sorry ? grad a: Space ? grad f: Space ? grad a: Here ? Now ? grad f: Oh , oh , oh , oh , instead of just time ? grad a:   So there are very conventionalized like deictic ones , right ? And then I think for other spaces that you introduce , you could just attach y whatever grad a:  . grad a: well this this basically would involve everything you can imagine to fit under your C dot something grad e: N grad a: you know , where where it 's contextually dependent , grad f: Yeah . grad a: what is in the future , where is this , what is here , what is there , what is " grad f: we 'll we 'll get that on the other side a little , like very minimally . grad f: And you know , 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 know , 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 , grad e: I 'm I 'm s curious about how much of the mental  , I 'm not sure that the formalism , sort of the grammatical side of things , is gonna have that much going on in terms of the mental space stuff . You know , basically all of these so - called space builders that are in the sentence are going to sort of I think of it as , sort of giving you the coordinates of , you know assuming that at any point in discourse there 's the possibility that we could be sort of 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 gonna sort of give you a cue as to which one of those that you 've already got going , you 're supposed to add structure to . grad e: So " in France , Watergate wouldn't have hurt Nixon " or something like that .  , well , you say , " alright , I 'm supposed to add some structure to my model of this hypothetical past France universe " or something like that . The information in the sentence tells you that much but it doesn't tell you like exactly what it what the point of doing so is . So for example , depending on the linguistic con  , context it could be like the question is for example , what does " Watergate " refer to there ? Does it , you know 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 , " oh , you know , if Nixon had apologized right away it wouldn't you know , Watergate wouldn't have hurt him so badly in the US and in France it wouldn't have hurt him at all " . Now we 're s now that " Watergate " we 're now talking about the real one , grad f: They 're real , right . grad e: and the " would " sort of it 's a sort of 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 . grad e: In the second case we 're imagining hypothetically that Nixon had apologized right away grad f:   grad f: It seems like , the grammatical things such as the auxiliaries that you know introduce these conditionals , whatever , give you sort of the the most basi grad e:   grad f: th those we I think we can figure out what the possibilities are , right ? grad e:   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 grad e: Yeah . grad f: You know , one is a more specific version of the general pattern that the grammat grammar gives you . But , you know , whatever , professor c: Yeah , in the short run all we need is a enough mechanism on the form side to get things going . professor c: I  , you you grad e: But the whole point of the whole point of what Fauconnier and Turner have to say about , mental spaces , and blending , and all that stuff is that you don't really get that much out of the sentence . An individual sentence could mean a hundred different things depending on , quote , " what the space configuration is at the time of utterance " . grad e: And so somebody 's gonna have to be doing a whole lot of work but not me , I think . Oh , I yeah , I ,  I think that 's Not k I th I don't think it 's completely right .  , in fact a sentence examples you gave in f did constrain the meaning b the form did constrain the meaning , grad e: Yeah . professor c: and so , it isn't ,  grad e: Sure , but like what what was the point of saying that sentence about Nixon and France ? That is not there is nothing about that in the in the sentence really . professor c: that that that we 're not expecting much out of the ,  f grad e: Yeah . professor c: but , it seems to me that th these we we you know , we 've talked about maybe a half a dozen linguistics theses in the last few minutes or something . professor c: I  , that that 's my feeling that that these are really hard  , problems that decide exactly what what 's going on . grad f: OK , so , one other thing I just want to point out is there 's a lot of confusion about the terms like " profile , designate , focus " , et cetera , et cetera . grad f: for now I 'm gonna say like " profile " 's often used like two uses that come to mind immediately . So " hypotenuse " , you profiled this guy against the background of the right t right triangle . They use it to really mean , this in a frame th this is the profiles on the these are the ones that are required . Which which I 'm not saying one and two are mutually exclusive but they 're they 're different meanings . For us ,  OK , so how is it professor c: Does that Is that really what they mean in in grad f: so " designate " FrameNet ? professor c:  I didn't know that . grad f: I knew that I thought that that would be something like there 's another term that I 've heard for that thing professor c: Right , OK . Anyway , so I think the the " designate " that we have in terms of meaning is really the " highlight this thing with respect to everything else " . But the second one seems to be useful but we might not need a notation for it ? We don't have a notation for it but we might want one . So for example we 've talked about if you 're talking about the lexical item " walk " , you know it 's an action . Well , it also has this idea it carries along with it the idea of an actor or somebody 's gonna 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 I d don't yet know , I have no commitment , as to whether we need it . It might be it 's the kind of thing that w a parser might want to think about whether we require you know , these things are like it 's semantically part of it professor c: N no , no . If you walk " in " , like well , in what ? professor c: Right , there 's grad f: You know , like you have to have the So so it 's only semantically is it it is still required , say , by simulation time though professor c: Right . So it 's that I meant the idea of like that the semantic value is filled in by sim simulation . I don't know if that 's something we need to spa to to like say ever as part of the requirement ? or the construction ? or not . professor c: Or  , or or ,  so the grad f: Have it construed , professor c: Yeah , yeah . professor c: right , yeah , w this is gonna be a b you 're right , this is a bit of in a mess and we still have emphasis as well , or stress , or whatever . grad f: OK , well we 'll get , I we have thoughts about those as well . grad f: the I w I would just s some of this is just like my you know , by fiat . I don't - you know , there 's lots of different ways in the world that people use it . grad f: So , s I think that the way I we would like to think , I think is focus is something that comes up in , lots of basically this is the information structure . grad f: 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 , you know , I think Keith was telling me , things toward the end of the sentence , post - verbal , tend to be the focused focused element , grad e: Mmm . You know , if I " I walked into the room " , you tend to think that , whatever , " into the room " is sort of like the more focused kind of thing . grad f: And when you , you have stress on something that might be , you know , a cue that the stressed element , or for instance , the negated element is kind of related to information structure .  , so so I think that 's kind of nice to keep " focus " being an information structure term . So , like " stress " , th stress is kind of a pun on you might have like whatever , like , accent kind of stress . grad f: And that 's just a  , w we 'll want to distinguish stress as a form device . grad f: t  , and distinguish that from it 's effect which is , " Oh , the kind of 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 gonna focus on this thing and you wanna know it sort of evokes all the other possibilities that it wasn't . grad f: so my classic my now - classic example of saying , " Oh , he did go to the meeting ? " , grad e: Yeah . grad f: that was my way of saying as opposed to , you know , " Oh , he didn't g " or " There was a meeting ? " grad e: Yeah . grad f: And so , the like if you said he you know , there 's all these different things that if you put stress on a different part of it then you 're , c focusing , whatever , on ,  grad e:   grad f: " he walked to the meeting " as opposed to " he ran " , or " he did walk to the meeting " as opposed to " he didn't walk " . grad f: so we need to have a notation for that which , I think that 's still in progress . But it did one one implication it does f have for the other side , which we 'll get to in a minute is that I couldn'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 , you know , or any meaning component of anyth you know all the possible meanings you could have , any of them could be the subject of focus . grad f: But I think one the one thing you can schematize is the kind of focus , right ? So for instance , you could say it 's the the tense on this as opposed to , the the action . Or it 's  , it 's an identity thing or a contrast with other things , or stress this value as opposed to other things . So , it 's it is kind of like a profile profile - background thing but I I can't think of like the limited set of possible meanings that you would that you would focu grad e: Light up with focus , yeah . Li -  , the best thing I can come up with is that information has a list of focused elements . For instance , you Oh , one other type that I forgot to mention is like query elements and that 's probably relevant for the like " where is " , you know , " the castle " kind of thing ? grad e:   grad f: Because you might want to say that , location or cert certain WH words bring you know , sort of automatically focus in a , you know , " I don't know the identity of this thing " kind of way on certain elements . So that 's onl there are there are many more things that are uncl that are sort of like a little bit unstable about the notation but it 's most I think it 's this is , you know , the current current form . Other things we didn't totally deal with , grad e: Oh , there 's a bunch . grad f: well , we 've had a lot of other stuff that Keith and I have them working on in terms of like how you deal with like an adjective . grad f: And , we should have put an example of this and we could do that later . grad f: But I think the not inherently like the general principles still work though , that , we can have constructions that have sort of constituent structure in that there is like , you know , for instance , one  , you know , they they have constituents , right ? So you can like nest things when you need to , but they can also overlap in a sort of flatter way . So if you don't have like a lot of grammar experience , then like this this might , you know , be a little o opaque . But , you know , we have the properties of dependency grammars and some properties of constituents constituent - based grammar . So that 's I think that 's sort of the main thing we wanted to aim for grad e:   This my f grad f: As a word ? grad a: No , as as Just don't don't think about it . grad f: As a What 's that ? grad a: If grad f: Sorry . grad a: canonically speaking you can if you look at a a curve over sentence , you can find out where a certain stress is and say , " hey , that 's my focus exponent . grad a:  grad f: You mean t forget about stress , the form cue ? grad a: The form bit grad e: Yeah . grad a: because , as a form cue , not even trained experts can always well , they can tell you where the focus exponent is sometimes . grad f: OK , grad a: And all grad e: Yeah , I I 'm sort of inclined to say let 's worry about specifying the information structure focus of the sentence grad f: I believe you , yeah . Ways that you can get it come from th grad e: hhh , the phonology component can handle actually assigning an intonation contour to that . grad e: You know , later on we 'll worry about exactly how grad a: Or or map from the contour to to what the focus exponent is . grad e: But figure out how the grad a: But , if you don't know what you 're what you 're focus is then you 're you 're hopeless -  - ly lost anyways , grad e: Yeah . grad a: and the only way of figuring out what that is , is , by sort of generating all the possible alternatives to each focused element , decide which one in that context makes sense and which one doesn't . So , you know , again , that 's something that h humans can do , grad f:   Well , yeah , I wouldn't have assumed that it 's an easy problem in in absence of all the oth grad a: u u grad f: you need all the other information I guess . grad a: But it 's it 's what it  , it 's pretty easy to put it in the formalism , though . grad a: you can just say whatever stuff , " i is the container being focused or the the entire whatever , both , and so forth . professor c: Yeah , so b b but I think the poi I 'm not sure 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 in fact specify the focus . professor c:  k  , at at the very least it constrai grad f: I think that 's that 's , th that 's certainly true . And depending on the construction it may or may not f specify the focus , right ? professor c: Oh , for sure , yes . There are constrai yeah , it 's not every but there are constructions , where you t explicitly take into account those considerations grad f: Yeah . grad a: And " John is on the bus " versus " was " , and e grad f: Is on . grad a: and will we have u is it all the same constructions ? Just with a different foc focus constituent ? grad f: Yeah , I would say that argument structure in terms of like the main like sort of , grad a:   grad f: I don't know 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 , then you have a separate thing that picks out , you know , stress on something relative to everything else . professor c: oh , I 'm sorry , grad f: And it would professor c: go ahead , grad f: yeah , professor c: finish . grad f: and it w and that would have to  it might be ambiguous as , whether it picks up that element , or the phrase , or something like that . grad f: So that should , you know , 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 , or something . Well , so that 's why I was saying how since I couldn't think of an easy like limited way of doing it , all I can say is that information structure has a focused slot professor c: Right . grad f: and I think that should be able to refer to professor c: So that 's down at the bottom here when we get over there . grad f: Yeah , and , infer and I don't have I don't have a great way or great examples professor c: I 'll - I 'll wait . grad f: but I think that something like that is probably gonna be , more more what we have to do . grad f: But , grad a: So grad f: OK , that was one comment . And you had another one ? grad a: Yeah , well the once you know what the focus is the everything else is background . It 's like , " oh ! " It was an epiphany that it you know , 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 . grad f: Now I don't know whether I n I don't have as many great examples of like topic - indicating constructions on like focus , right ?  , topic it seems kind of you know , I think that might be an ongoing kind of thing . grad e: Yeah , that 's what " wa " is , just to mark which thing is the topic . grad f: and one thing that I didn't do consistently , is when we get there , is like indicate what kind of thing fits into every role . I think I have an idea of what it should be but th you know , so far we 've been getting away with like either a type constraint or , you know , whatever . You know , it 'll be it 'll be another predication or it 'll be , I don't know , some value from from some something , some variable and scope or something like that , or a slot chain based on a variable and scope . OK , so well that 's should we flip over to the other side officially then ? grad a:  -  ,  . Now we 'll go back to s OK , so this doesn't include something which mi mi may have some effect on on it , which is , the discourse situation context record , right ? So I didn't I I meant just like draw a line and like , you know , you also have , some tracking of what was going on . grad f: And sort of this is a big scale comment before I , you know , look into the details of this . But for instance you could imagine instead of having I I changed the name of  it used to be " entities " . And " scenario " is essentially what kind of what 's the basic predication , what event happened . And actually it 's just a list of various slots from which you would draw draw in order to paint your picture , a bunch of frames , bi and bindings , right ?  , and obviously there are other ones that are not included here , general cultural frames and general like , other action f grad e:   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  , you know , about some entity that you were going to talk about . So " Harry walked into the room " , " Harry " and " room " , you know , the room th but they would be represented in this list somehow . 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 , you know , are are they doing something serially or is it like ,  I 'm I 'm not sure . Because this partly came from , Talmy 's schema and I 'm not sure we 'll need all of these actually . But  , and then the " status " I used was like , again , in some languages , you know , like for instance in child language you might distinguish between different status . So , th the the big com and and finally " discourse segment " is about sort of 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 sort of referring to . And you might that might be sort of a general , I don't know , 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 and these could actually just point to , you know , the the ID in my other list of enti active entities , right ? So , th there 's there 's all this stuff about discourse status . You know , there 's this , hierarchy  there 's a schematization of , you know , things can be active or they can be , accessible , inaccessible . grad f: It was the one that , you know , Keith , emailed to us once , to some of us , not all of us . It was like in this particular set , s you know , instance , it has been referred to recently or it hasn't been , grad e: Yeah . grad f: Yeah , they 're contex and for instance , I used to have a location thing there but actually that 's a property of the situation . And it 's again , time , you know at cert certain points things are located , you know , near or far from you professor c: Well , this is recursive grad f: and professor c: cuz until we do the  , mental space story , we 're not quite sure Th - th grad f: Yeah . So I so for now I thought , well 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 " . grad f: Or , you know , like your referring expression might be constrained by certain like unbounded na amounts of prep you know , 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 ? grad e:   grad f: So it 's 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 " . Right ? So Or maybe that 's like a restrictive , non - restrictive grad e: Yeah . grad f: you know , it 's like it gets into that kind of thing for  , but maybe I 'm mixing , you know this is kind of like the final result after parsing the sentence . grad f: So you might imagine that the information you pass to , you know in identifying a particular referent would be , " oh , some " you know , " it 's a guy and it 's someone I know from school " . grad f: So maybe that would , you know , be some intermediate structure that you would pass into the disc to the , whatever , construal engine or whatever , discourse context , to find you know , either create this reference , grad e:   grad f: in which case it 'd be created here , and you know , so 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 . grad a: So " house " is gender neuter ? In reality grad f: it could be in grad a: or in professor c: Semantically .  , 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 most things . grad a: No , just to make sure that we everybody that 's completely agreed that it it has nothing to do with , form . grad a: Then " predications " makes sense to to have it open for something like , accessibility or not . So maybe having made that big sca sort of like large scale comment , should I just go through each of these slots  , each of these blocks , a little bit ? grad e: Sure . And just a note , which was that ,  s so when we actually ha so for instance , some of them seem more inherently static , OK , like a container or sort of support - ish . And others are a little bit seemingly inherently dynamic like " source , path , goal " is often thought of that way or " force " , or something like that . But in actual fact , I think that they 're intended to be sort of neutral with respect to that . And so , I think 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 . And I think again , it 's gonna be something in the X - schema that tells you " is this static or is this dynamic " .  , that , you know , is it , a state or is it a change of state , or is it a , action of some kind ? grad a: i i i is there any meaning to when you have sort of parameters behind it and when you don't ? grad f:  . grad a: Just means grad f: Oh , oh ! You mean , in the slot ? grad a:   grad f: no , it 's like X - sc it 's it 's like I was thinking of type constraints but X - schema , well it obviously has to be an X - schema . " Agent " , the the performer of the X - schema , that s depends on the X - schema . You know , and I in general it would probably be , you know grad e: So the difference is basically whether you thought it was obvious what the possible fillers were . grad f: " aspectual type " probably isn't obvious but I should have So , I just neglected to stick something in . " Perspective " , " actor " , " undergoer " , " observer " , grad b: Mmm . grad f: I think we 've often used " agent " , " patient " , obser grad e: " Whee ! " That 's that one , right ? grad f: Yeah , exactly .  , and so one nice thing that , we had talked about is this example of like , if you have a passive construction then one thing it does is ch you know definitely , it is one way to for you to , you know , specifically take the perspective of the undergoing kind of object . And so then we talked about , you know , whether well , does that specify topic as well ? Well , maybe there are other things . I 'm gonna 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 l write it down if if somebody figured out what the rules were . So by default it 'll be like " true " , I guess , you know , if you 're specifying events that did happen . You could imagine that you skip out this you know , leave off this polarity , you know , not don't have it here . 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 doesn't hold , and you 're just talking , you know if you 're trying to have the nuts and bolts of simulation you need to know that , you know , whatever , the holder doesn't and professor c: No , I th I think at this lev which is it should be where you have it . grad f: OK , it 's so it 's it 's it 's fine where it is . professor c: how you get it may may in will often involve the discourse grad f: So , OK . professor c: but but by the time you 're simulating you sh y you should know that . 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 gonna be here . It 's a grab bag of grad e: " part of what I 'm going to hand you is a whole bunch of s  , schemas , image , and X - schemas . grad f: And for a particular instance which I will , you know , make an example of something , is that you might have an instance of container and path , let 's say , as part of your , you know , " into " you know , definition . grad f: So you would eventually have instances filled in with various various values for all the different slots . grad f: And they 're bound up in , you know , their bindings and and and values . 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 , no . I let 's see , I think we 're we 're not I don't think we have it quite right yet . 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 , grad e: OK . professor c: So that that the who that this is the tool kit under whi out of which you can make a semantic specification . 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 . professor c: 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 grad e: OK . professor c: so that the , you know , goal of the , " source , path , goal " has to be the landmark of the conta you know , the interior of this container . These are all so far these structures , especially from " path " and on down , these are sort of relatively familiar , image schematic kind of slots . grad f: So you 'll say , " event one causes event B professor c: And and and and this this this again may ge our ,  and we and and , of course , worlds .  , if y if I said " time " is , you know , " past " , that would say " set that this world " , you know , " somewhere , before the world that corresponds to our current speech time " . Yeah , so " cause " and Other frames that could come in  , unfortunately you could bring in say for instance , " desire " or something like that , grad e:   And actually there is right now under " discourse segments " , " attitude " ? grad e:   So there are a couple things where I like , " oh , I 'm not sure if I wanted to have it there grad e: Well that 's grad f: or " Basically there was a whole list of of possible speaker attitudes that like say Talmy listed . And , like , well , I don't you know , it was like " hope , wish . And it 's like , well , I feel like if I wanted to have an extra meaning I don't know if those are grammatically marked in the first place . 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 ? You know , like " Naomi wants wants su a certain situation and that situation itself is a state of affairs " . So so , " want " itself can be i i i i i grad f: u Can be just another frame that 's part of your professor c: Well , and it i basically it 's an action . professor c: in in our in our s terminology , " want " can be an action and " what you want " is a world .  , 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 . professor c: 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 . professor c: And that 's the wh and and  , that according to the party line , that 's the whole story . So  , there 's this stuff 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 guess that some of the discourse segment stuff is that where you would sa grad f:   grad e: that 's OK , that 's where the information structure is which sort of is a kind of profiling on different parts of , of this . There 's almost  , we keep coming back to how focus is like this this , trajector - landmark thing . grad e: So if I say , You know , " In France it 's like this " . You know , 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 sure " grad f: Right . grad e: And so grad f: S so I would prefer not to worry about that for right now grad e: OK . grad f: and to think that there are , grad e: That comes in and ,  grad f: discourse level constructions in a sense , topic topic - focus constructions that would say , " oh , when you focus something " then grad e:   If you stressed , you know , " John went to the " , you know , " the bar " whatever , you 're focusing that grad e:   grad f: So similarly for a whole sentence , you know , " in France such - and - such happens " . grad f: So the whole thing is sort of like again implicitly as opposed to other things that are possible . grad a: So that 's his that 's the best way of talking about focus , is I think his way . grad a: I never know how to pronounce his name because he 's sort of , professor c: S Swede ? grad a: he is Dutch professor c: Dutch ? grad a: and ,  but very confused background I think . grad a: But ,  I don't know where he is right now but alternative semantics is if you type that into an , browser or search engine you 'll get tons of stuff . grad a: And what I 'm kind of confused about is is what the speaker and the hearer is is sort of 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 . I guess that that that that 's not very clear from here grad a: Yeah , but you Don't we ultimately want to handle that analogously to the way we handle time and place , grad f: that 's not allowed here . grad a: because " you " , " me " , " he " , " they " , you know , " these guys " , all these expressions , nuh , are in in much the same way contextually dependent as " here , " and " now , " and " there " grad f:   professor c: So it 's it 's Fred and Mary , grad f: So th professor c: so the speaker would be Fred and the grad a: Ah ! grad f: Right , so the constructions might of course will refer , using pronouns or whatever . grad f: 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 , you know , in wherever that person whatever role that person was playing in the event . grad a: And down there in the speaker - hearer part ? grad f: S so , that 's I think that 's just n for instance , Speaker is known from the situation , right ? You 're when you hear something you 're told who the speaker is  , you know who the speaker is . In fact , that 's kind of constraining how in some ways you know this before you get to the you fill in all the rest of it . grad f: how else would you  grad a: You know , it 's the speaker may in English is allowed to say " I . grad a: But wouldn't the " I " then set up the the s s referent that happens to be the speaker this time grad f:   grad a: Or " you " grad f: So grad a: 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 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 , you know , whoever it is . So so again , this  , this this is gonna to get us into the mental space stuff grad f: Yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah . professor c: Except s it 's it 's trickier than that because  , the reference for example So he where it gets really tricky is there 's some things , grad f: Yeah . professor c: and this is where blends and all terribl So , some things which really are meant to be identified and some things which aren't . So I thought of having like for each referent , having the list of of the things t with which it is identified . grad f: for instance ,  So , I guess , it sort of depends on if it is a referring exp if it 's identifiable already or it 's a new thing . grad f: 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 ? Or something in ontology . grad f: So , there 's a you know , whatever , it c it could point at one of these . professor c: I just had a I just had an an idea that would be very nice if it works . grad f: For what ? professor c: I haven't told you what it is yet .  , 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 . professor c: it c it it ,  I think 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 I think similar to other kinds of , mental space phenomena . And And professor c: I 've I 've I 've never seen anybody write that up but maybe they did . grad e: There 's things like ther you know , there 's all kinds of stuff like , in I think I mentioned last time in Czech if you have a a verb of saying then grad f: So so by default grad e: you know , you say something like or or I was thinking you can say something like , " oh , I thought , you are a republican " or something like that . grad e: you know , sort of the past tense being copied onto the lower verb doesn't happen there , so you have to say something about , you know , tense is determined relative to current blah - blah - blah . grad e: 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 . grad e: and it 's sort of in an extended function professor c: So we would have it be in quotes in English . grad e: 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 sort of thing , right ? professor c: OK . grad e: but  , that happens to sound like the word for " I " but is actually semantically unrelated to it . grad f: Oh , no ! professor c: Oh , good , I love the formali grad e: grad f: Really ? grad e: Yeah .  , Mary Dalrymple , this book , a ninety - three book on ,  on pronoun stuff . And then the same thing for ASL where , you know , you 're signing and someone says something . And then , you know , so " he say " , and then you sort of do a role shift . So , the point is that pronoun references , you know , sort of ties in with all this mental space stuff and so on , and so forth . professor c: So that that d that does sound like it 's co consistent with what we 're saying , yeah . grad f: OK , so it 's kind of 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 you know , depending on the construction or the whatever , you you you 're scope is m might extend out to the the base one . grad f: It would be nice to actually use the same , mechanism since there are so many cases where you actually need it 'll be one or the other . grad f: It 's like , oh , actually , it 's the same same operation . grad e: It 's like it 's like what 's happening that , yeah , what what 's happening , there is that you 're moving the base space or something like that , right ? grad f: Yeah , yeah . grad e: So that 's that 's how Fauconnier would talk about it . grad e: 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 . professor c: cuz it it it to the extent that it works , it y grad f: Ties it all into it . grad f: Yeah , that 's why I said " point to Robert " , when I did it . Mmm , isn't  , I 'm I was sort of dubious why why he even introduces this sort of reality , you know , as your basic mental space and then builds up grad e:   grad a: d doesn'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 " I think . grad a: So there should be no categorical difference between your base and all the others that ensue . professor c: No , but there 's there 's a Gricean thing going on there , that when you say " I think " you 're actually hedging . You can , th put just the phrase " I think " as a parenthetical in the middle of a sentence and so on , and so forth . grad e: 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 kind of interesting embedded ways just to mark , you know , uncertainty or something like that . grad a: Yeah , but about linguistic hedges , those those tend to be , funky anyways because they blur professor c: So we don't have that in here either do we ? grad e: Yeah . grad f: Hhh , I there used to be a slot for speaker , it was something like factivity . grad f: But it 's something grad e: Well we were just talking about this sort of evidentiality and stuff like that , right ? grad f: we we were talking about sarcasm too , right ? Oh , oh . grad e: that 's what I think is , sort of telling you what percent reality you should give this professor c: So we probably should . grad e: Yeah , and the fact that I 'm , you know the fact maybe if I think it versus he thinks that might , you know , depending on how much you trust the two of us or whatever , grad f: Yeah . grad e: you know grad a: If you study how people use that it 's also grad f: What 's the word ? grad a: " about . professor c: And I think And I think y if you want us to spend a pleasant six or seven hours you could get George started on that . grad e: Would you believe that that paper lead directly to the development of anti - lock brakes ? grad f: What ? professor c: No . grad f: So , and and I think , someone had raised like sarcasm as a complication at some point . Yeah , let 's I I don't I think grad f: And we just won't deal with sarcastic people . professor c: Yeah ,  grad e: I don't really know what like We we don't have to care too much about the speaker attitude , right ? Like there 's not so many different hhh , I don't know , m grad f: Certainly not as some Well , they 're intonational markers I think for the most part . grad f: I don't know too much about the like grammatical grad e: I just mean There 's lots of different attitudes that that the speaker could have and that we can clearly identify , and so on , and so forth . grad e: But like what are the distinctions among those that we actually care about for our current purposes ? professor c: Right . grad f: Oh , yeah , do we have any ? grad e: Here it is three - fifteen already . professor c: so , I I don't know the answer but but , it does seem that , you know , this is this is coming along . It 's as far as I can tell there 's this one major thing we have to do which is the mental the whole s mental space thing . professor c: 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 weren't trying to d you know , there 's all sorts of God knows , irony , and stuff like which you isn't probably of much use in dealing with a tourist guide . So y  , no end of things th that that , you know , we don't deal with . grad a: But it professor c: And grad a: i isn't that part easy though professor c: Go ahead . 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 sort of negate whatever the content of that is in terms of irony grad e: Yeah . grad f: Yeah , in model theory cuz the semantics is always like " speaker believes not - P " , you know ? professor c: Right . grad f: Right , right , but , professor c: Anyway , so so , I guess  , let me make a proposal on how to proceed on that , which is that , it was Keith 's , sort of 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 grad e: Mmm . professor c: don't try to do them in detail or formally but just try to describe which ones you think we ought to have . professor c: And , so th these are this is a set of things that I think we ought to deal with . professor c: And then we 'll we 'll we 'll go back over it and w people will will give feedback on it . professor c: And then then we 'll have a at least initial spec of of what we 're actually trying to do . professor c: And that 'll also be useful for anybody who 's trying to write a parser . professor c: So a and we get this this , portals fixed and then we have an idea of the sort of initial range . And then of course Nancy you 're gonna have to , do your set of but you have to do that anyway . professor c: So so we 're gonna get the w we 're basically dealing with two domains , the tourist domain and the and the child language learning . And then my proposal would be to , not totally 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 . professor c: And then as a kind of separate thread , think about the more general things and and all that . grad a: Well , I also think the detailed discussion will hit you know , bring us to problems that are of a general nature and maybe even professor c: without doubt . professor c: But what I want to do is is is to to constrain the things that we really feel responsible for . professor c: So that that we say these are the things we 're really gonna try do by the end of the summer grad e:   professor c: and other things we 'll put on a list of of research problems or something , because you can easily get to the point where nothing gets done because every time you start to do something you say , " oh , yeah , but what about this case ? " grad e:   Anyways grad b: There 's that quote in Jurafsky and Martin where where it goes where some guy goes , " every time I fire a linguist the performance of the recognizer goes up . So , is is that does that make sense as a ,  a general way to proceed ? grad f: Sure , yeah . grad e: Yeah , yeah , 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 . The one big grad b: Ooo , can I ask a grad e: You ran out of power . grad a: Huh ? grad b: Can I ask a quick question about this side ? grad a: Yeah . grad b: Is this ,  was it intentional to leave off things like " inherits " and grad f: Oops . grad f: not really just on the constructions , right ? grad b: Yeah , like constructions can inherit from other things , grad f: grad b: am I right ? grad f: yeah . grad e: yeah , there should be I I wanted to s find out someday if there was gonna be some way of dealing with , if this is the right term , multiple inheritance , professor c:   grad e: where one construction is inheriting from ,  from both parents , grad f:  - huh . So let me grad e: Cuz the problem is that then you have to grad f: Yeah . professor c: my argument is there 's nothing you can do with that that you can't do by just having more constructions . professor c: It 's uglier and it d doesn't have the deep linguistic insights and stuff . grad e: No , by all means , professor c: And so I what I 'd like to do is is in the short run focus on getting it right . professor c: And when we think we have it right then saying , " aha ! , grad e: Yeah . professor c: can we make it more elegant ? " grad e: Yeah , that 's professor c: Can can we ,  What are the generalizations , and stuff ? grad e: Yeah . professor c: But rather than try to guess a inheritance structure and all that sort of stuff before we know what we 're doing . professor c: So I would say in the short run we 're not gonna b grad e: Yeah . And and it could be that half way through we say , " aha ! , we we now see how we want to clean it up . professor c: and inheritance is only one  , that 's one way to organize it but there are others .  , thanks 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 m a button menu item for saving it into the embedded JavaBayes format . 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 . You know how you asked whether we can , like , just observe all the variables like in the same list ? You can't . grad a: OK , that 's that 's a bit unfortunate grad d: So Yeah . grad a: but for the time being it 's it 's it 's fine to do it grad d: You just have to have a long list of , you know , all the variables . grad f: all the things you want to query , you just have to like ask for separately . grad a: Well that 's probably maybe in the long term that 's good news because it forces us to think a little bit more carefully how how we want to get an out output . We 're really running late , so I had , an idea yesterday but , I don't know whether we should even start discussing . grad a: the construal bit that , has been pointed to but hasn't been , made precise by any means , may w may work as follows . I thought that we would ,  that the following thing would be in incredibly nice and I have no clue whether it will work at all or nothing .  , imagine you you write a Bayes - net ,  grad f: Bayes ? grad a: Bayes - net , grad f: OK . grad a: You consult consult your ontology which will tell you a bunch of stuff , and parts , and properties ,  -  -  grad f: Grout out the things that that you need . grad a: then y you 'd simply write , these into onto your your white piece of paper . You won't get you won't really get any C P T 's , therefore we need everything that that configures to what the situation is , IE , the context dependent stuff . grad a: And that fills in your CPT 's with which you can then query , the 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 , you know , precise format in which to write it , so we write it down . And the the nice thing about this idea is that you don'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 can be construed as what , so that will allow you to craft the the the initial notes . professor c: it sounds to me like you want P R 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 can't . So once you have instantiated the PRM with the instances and ther then you can then you can unfold it . In professor c: Well , 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 . professor c: Yeah , and that 's grad a:  professor c: Yeah , that 's the only way it could work . I we have a our local expert on P R  , but my guess is that they 're not currently good enough to do that . 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 ,  grad a: Except there 's no no theorem prover involved . professor c: No , there isn't a theorem prover but there but but the , The cove the the P R Ms are like rules of inference and you 're you 're coupling a bunch of them together . professor c: And then ins instead of proving you 're trying to , you know , compute the most likely . But you yeah , it 's a good it 's a it 's a good thing to put in your thesis proposal . grad a: What 's it ? professor c: So are you gonna write something for us before you go ? grad a: Yes . So , what 's what when are we gonna meet again ? grad f: When are you leaving ? grad a: Fri -  , grad f: Thursday , Friday ? grad a: Thursday 's my last day here . Do you mean by we , the whole ben gang ? professor c: N no , I didn't mean y just the two of us . But the question is do you want to , for example , send the little group , a draft of your thesis proposal and get , another session on feedback on that ? Or grad a: We can do it Th - Thursday again . Should we do the one PM time for Thursday since we were on that before or ? grad a: Sure . grad a: Thursday at one ? I can also maybe then sort of run through the ,  the talk I have to give at EML which highlights all of our work . grad a: If it 's equal for all ? What should we do ? grad f: Yeah , it 's fine . 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 , you know the discussions short


grad b: Actually grad f: I just had one of the most frustrating meetings of my career . grad a: So that 's why Keith and I are going to be a little dazed for the first half m the meeting . Yeah , I I I avoided that as long as I could for you guys , grad f: growl . grad d: Oh yeah , how di how d exactly did , that paper lead to anti - lock brakes ? grad f: Oh , I could tell you had a rough day , man ! grad d: Nah . grad c: Oh yeah , Liz suggested we could start off by  , doing the digits all at the same time . professor e: e grad a: Really ? Do we have to like , synchronize ? professor e: Well , I think you 're supposed to OK . grad f: Are you being silly ? grad d: Oh wait do we have t professor e: Everybody 's got different digits , grad c: Yep . professor e: right ? grad d: Yeah , do we have to time them at the same time or just overlapping grad f:  . grad a: And any rate ? professor e: e yeah , the grad f: Alright . professor e: Well , they they have s they have the close talking microphones for each of us , grad a: Yeah , that 's true . grad a: Are we gonna start all our meetings out that way from now on ? professor e: No . grad d: Are we to r Just to make sure I know what 's going on , we 're talking about Robert 's thesis proposal today ? Is that grad c: We could . grad d: Is professor e: Well , you you had s you said there were two things that you might wanna do . grad c: Not not rehearse , I have just not spent any time on it , so I can show you what I 've got , get your input on it , and maybe some suggestions , that would be great . I don't know how much of a chance you had to actually read it grad a: I haven't looked at it grad c: because grad a: yet , grad c: but you could always send me comments per electronic mail grad a: but I will . grad c: the It basically says , well " this is construal " , and then it continues to say that one could potentially build a probabilistic relational model that has some general , domain - general rules how things are construed , and then the idea is to use ontology , situation , user , and discourse model to instantiate elements in the classes of the probabilistic relational model to do some inferences in terms of what is being construed as what grad a:  . grad c:  ? grad d: OK , we can we can we can pass pass my ,  we can pass my extra copy around . grad d: Er , actually , my only copy , now that I think about it , grad f: Alrigh grad a: OK . grad c: actually this is the the newest version after your comments , grad f: OK . grad c: and professor e: Yeah , no I s I s I see this has got the castle in it , and stuff like that . grad d: Oh , maybe the version I didn't have that I mine the w did the one you sent on the email have the professor e: Yeah . grad c: if you would have checked your email you may have received a note from Yees asking you to send me the , up - to - d grad a: Oh . grad c: And any type of comment whether it 's a spelling or a syntax or grad a:   grad c: readability grad f: There 's only one " S " in " interesting " . grad c:  ? grad f: There 's only one " S " in " interesting " . And y  , email any time , but most usefully before grad d: The twenty - first I 'm assuming . grad f: That 's grad d: What , today 's the twenty - first ? grad f: Well , better hurry up then ! grad d: Oh , man ! grad a: Before the twenty - ninth , grad c: The twenty - ninth . grad c: That 's when I 'm meeting with Wolfgang Wahlster to sell him this idea . grad c: OK ? Then I 'm also going to present a little talk at EML , about what we have done here and so of course , I 'm I 'm gonna start out with this slide , so the most relevant aspects of our stay here , and  , then I 'm asking them to imagine that they 're standing somewhere in Heidelberg and someone asks them in the morning The Cave Forty - Five is a is a well - known discotheque which is certainly not open at that that time . grad c: they 're supposed to imagine that , you know , do they think the person wants to go there , or just know where it is ?  , which is probably not , the case in that discotheque example , or in the Bavaria example , you just want to know where it is . So basically we can make a point that here is ontological knowledge but if it 's nine nine PM in the evening then the discotheque question would be , for example , one that might ask for directions instead of just location . Then what have we done so far ? We had our little bit of , SmartKom stuff , that we did , everth grad f: Oh , you 've got the parser done . Then I 'm going to talk about the data , you know these things about  , actually I have an example , probably . grad c: But they 're they 're mimicking the synthesis when they speak to the computer , grad f: Oh , OK . grad c: the you can observe that all the time , they 're trying to match their prosody onto the machine . grad c: Yeah , you have to grad a: Wh grad f: The system breaking .  , I will talk about our problems with the rephrasing , and how we solved it , and some preliminary observations , also , I 'm not gonna put in the figures from Liz , but I thought it would interesting to , point out that it 's basically the same .  , as in every human - human telephone conversation , and the human - computer telephone conversation is of course quite d quite different from , some first , observations . Then sort of feed you back to our original problem cuz ,  how to get there , what actually is happening there today , and then maybe talk about the big picture here , e tell a little bit as much as I can about the NTL story . I I wa I do wanna ,  I 'm not quite sure about this , whether I should put this in , that , you know , you have these two sort of different ideas that are or two different camps of people envisioning how language understanding works , and then , talk a bit about the embodied and simulation approach favored here and as a prelude , I 'll talk about monkeys in Italy . And , Srini was gonna send me some slides but he didn't do it , so from but I have the paper , I can make a resume of that , and then I stole an X - schema from one of your talks I think . So X - schemas , then , I would like to do talk about the construction aspect and then at the end about our Bayes - net . Should I mention the fact that , we 're also actually started going to start to look at people 's brains in a more direct way ? professor e: You certainly can .  I y I you know , I don't know grad a: You might just wanna like , tack that on , as a comment , to something . professor e: Well , the time to mention it , if you mention it , is when you talk about mirror neurons , then you should talk about the more recent stuff , about the kicking grad c: Yeah . professor e: and , you know , the yeah , yeah and that the plan is to see to what extent the you 'll get the same phenomena with stories about this , so that grad c:   professor e: which , actually , i i even on your five - layer slide , you you 've got an old one that that leaves that off . grad c: But , you know , it would But I don't think I I am capable of of do pulling this off and doing justice to the matter .  , there is interesting stuff in her terms of how language works , so the emergentism story would be nice to be you know , it would be nice to tell people how what 's happening there , plus how the , language learning stuff works , professor e: OK , so , so anyway , I I agree that 's not central . professor e: What you might wanna do is , and may not , but you might wanna this is rip off a bunch of the slides on the anal there the there we 've got various i generations of slides that show language analysis , and matching to the underlying image schemas , and , how the construction and simulation that ho that whole th grad c: Yeah , th that that 's c that comes up to the X - schema slide , grad a: OK , right . grad c: so basically I 'm gonna steal that from Nancy , grad a: OK , I can give you a more recent if you want grad c: one of Nancy 's st grad a: well , that might have enough . grad c: I yeah , but I also have stuff you trash you left over , professor e: OK . professor e: You could get it out of there , or some grad a: Which I can even email you then , you know , like there probably was a little few changes , not a big deal . Sorry grad c: Well , I I don't feel bad about it at all grad a: No , you shouldn't . grad c:  on the the , you 're that 's see , that 's you . grad c:  I might even mention that this work you 're doing is sort of also with the MPI in Leipzig , so . grad a: It 's it 's certainly related , grad c: Because , EML is building up a huge thing in Leipzig . Would professor e: Yeah , it 's different , this is the , DNA building , or someth the double helix building . professor e: The yeah it was it turns out that if if you have multiple billions of dollars , y you can do all sorts of weird things , and grad d: Wait , they 're building a building in the shape of DNA , grad a: What ? grad d: is that what you said ? professor e: Roughly , yeah . grad f: Oh ! Oh boy ! grad a: O professor e: Including cr cross - bridges , grad a: What ? professor e: and grad a: Oh my god ! grad f: That 's brilliant ! Hhh . professor e: You d you really now I I spent the last time I was there I spent maybe two hours hearing this story which is ,  grad a: Of what grad d: Y You definitely wanna w don't wanna waste that money on research , grad a: the building ? grad d: you know ? professor e: Right . grad c: Well , the the offices are actually a little the , think of  , ramps , coming out of the double helix and then you have these half - domes , glass half - domes , and the offices are in in the glass half - dome . grad c: But I th professor e: So , yeah , I think that 's that 's a good point , th th that the date , the , a lot of the this is interacting with , people in Italy but also definitely the people in Leipzig and the the b the combination of the biology and the Leipzig connection might be interesting to these guys , yeah . grad f: You might want to , double - check the spellings of the authors ' names on your references , you had a few , misspells in your slides , there . grad f: unless there 's a person called " Jackendorf " , grad a: On that one ? professor e: No , no , no . grad a: I 'll probably I c might have I 'll probably have comments for you separately , not important . professor e: So I did note i i it looks like the , metaphor didn't get in yet . grad c: it did , there is a reference to Srini professor e: Well , s reference is one thing , the question is is there any place Oh , did you put in something about , grad a: Metonymy and metaphor here , right ? professor e: the individual , we 'd talked about putting in something about people had ,  Oh yeah , OK . professor e: But , what I meant is , I think even before you give this , to Wahlster , you should , unless you put it in the text , and I don't think it 's there yet , about we talked about is the , scalability that you get by , combining the constructions with the general construal mechanism . professor e: OK , so where where is it , cuz I 'll have to take a look . grad c: but I I did not focus on that aspect but ,  Ehhh , it 's just underneath , that reference to metaphor . grad c: But that 's really grad a: That 's not about that , is it ? grad c: Yeah . professor e: No , it it it s says it but it doesn't say it doesn't it d it d grad c: Why . professor e: Cuz let me tell the gang what I think the punch line is , because it 's actually important , which is , that , the constructions , that , Nancy and Keith and friends are doing , are , in a way , quite general but cover only base cases . And to make them apply to metaphorical cases and metonymic cases and all those things , requires this additional mechanism , of construal . And the punch line is , he claimed , that if you do this right , you can get essentially orthogonality , that if you introduce a new construction at at the base level , it should com  , interact with all the metonymies and metaphors so that all of the projections of it also should work . professor e: And , similarly , if you introduce a new metaphor , it should then  , compose with all of the constructions . professor e: And it to the extent that that 's true then then it 's a big win over anything that exists . grad d: So does that mean instead of having tons and tons of rules in your context - free grammar you just have these base constructs and then a general mechanism for coercing them . So that , you know , for example , in the metaphor case , that you have a kind of direct idea of a source , path , and goal and any metaphorical one and abstract goals and all that sort of stuff you can do the same grammar . But , the trick is that the the way the construction 's written it requires that the object of the preposition for example be a container . Well , " trouble " isn't a container , but it gets constr construed as a c container . So that 's that 's where this , grad d: So with construal you don't have to have a construction for every possible thing that can fill the rule . So 's it 's it it 's a very big deal , i i in this framework , and the thesis proposal as it stands doesn't , I don't think , say that as clearly as it could . That is , there are physical containers , there are physical paths , there you know , et cetera . grad c: But " walked into the cafe and ordered a drink , " and " walked into the cafe and broke his nose , " that 's sort of professor e: Oh , it doesn't mean that they 're unambiguous . professor e: a cafe can be construed as a container , or it can be construed you know as as a obstacle , grad f:  - huh . professor e: But it does say that , if you walked into the cafe and broke your nose , then you are construing the cafe as an obstacle . professor e: And if that 's not consistent with other things , then you 've gotta reject that reading . grad d: You con you conditioned me with your first sentence , and so I thought , " Why would he walk into the cafe and then somehow break his nose ? "  , oh ,  grad f: He slipped on the wet floor . grad c: You don't find that usage , I checked for it in the Brown national corpus . grad c: The " walk into it " never really means , w as in walked smack professor e: But " run into " does . grad c: Yeah , but , y y if you find " walked smacked into the cafe " or " slammed into the wall " professor e: Yeah , no , but " run into " does . professor e: Because you will find " run into , "  , grad d: Cars run into telephone poles all the time . grad a: Yeah , " run into " might even be more impact sense than , you know , container sense . professor e: But Like , " run into an old friend " , it probably needs its own construction .  , you know , George would have I 'm sure some exa complicated ex reason why it really was an instance of something else grad a:   professor e: and maybe it is , but , there are idioms and my guess is that 's one of them , but ,  I don't know . grad f: Sudden surprising contact , professor e: Yeah , but it 's it 's it 's it 's Right . It 's sort of partially inspired by the spatial professor e: Well , this is this motivated but yeah grad f: Yeah . professor e: oh yeah , mo for sure , motivated , but then you can't parse on motivated . grad a: There 's there 's lots of things you could make T - shirts out of , but , this has gotten  wh We don't need the words to that . grad a: What ? Oh , no no no no no no no no no , we 're not going there . professor e: anything else you want to ask us about the thesis proposal , you got grad c: Well , professor e: We could look at a particular thing and give you feedback on it . grad c: Well there actually the i what would have been really nice is to find an example for all of this , from our domain . grad a:  wh when you say all this , do you mean , like , I don't know , the related work stuff , grad c: How grad a: as well as , mappings ? grad c: w Well we have , for example , a canonical use of something professor e: Right right r grad c: and y it 's , you know , we have some constructions and then it 's construed as something , and then we we may get the same constructions with a metaphorical use that 's also relevant to the to the domain . professor e: OK , f let 's let 's suppose you use " in " and " on " . professor e: So " in the bus " and " on the bus , "  , that 's actually a little tricky in English because to some extent they 're synonyms . grad c: I had two hours w with George on this , so it , professor e: OK , what did he say . Oh , h that 's grad c: " On the bus " is a m is a metaphorical metonymy that relates some meta path metaphorically and you 're on on that path and th w  it 's he there 's a platform notion , professor e: Yeah , I I believe all that , it 's just grad c: right ? " he 's on the standing on the bus waving to me . grad c: But th the regular as we speak " J Johno was on the bus to New York , " professor e: Yeah . grad c: he 's that 's , what did I call it here , the transportation schema , something , professor e: Yeah . grad c: where you can be on the first flight , on the second flight , professor e: Yeah . professor e: like " under the bus , " or something , where grad c: But it 's it 's unfortunately , this is not really something a tourist would ever say . grad c: And there 's a lot of " out of " analysis , so , professor e: Right . grad c: could we capture that with a different construal of grad a: Yeah , it 's a little it 's ,  we 've thought about it before ,  t  to use the examples in other papers , and it 's it 's a little complicated . Cuz you 're like , it 's a state of there 's resource , grad f: Out of out of film , in particular . You 're out of the state of having film , right ? and somehow film is standing for the re the resour the state of having some resource is just labeled as that resource . grad f: yeah , grad a: It 's a little bit grad f: but and plus the fact that there 's also s  , can you say , like , " The film ran out " you know , or , maybe you could say something like " The film is out " grad a: Yeah , is film the trajector ? grad f: so like the the film went away from where it should be , namely with you , or something , right ? You know . The the film the film is gone , right ?  , I never really knew what was going on ,  I I find it sort of a little bit farfetched to say that that " I 'm out of film " means that I have left the state of having film or something like that , grad a: It 's weird . professor e:  b but the difference grad c: Is the d the final state of running out of something is being out of it . professor e: But ,  grad f:  ! professor e: Yeah , so so nob so no one has in in of the , professional linguists , grad a:  . grad a: There was ? Who ? professor e: Well , there I thought or there was a paper on it . professor e: Huh ? grad f: There was one on on " out " or " out of " ? professor e: There was a Well , it may be just " out " . professor e: I think there was " over " but there was also a paper on " out " . grad f: Yeah , Lind - Susan Lindner , grad a: Oh , yeah , you 're right . grad f: right ? The the " the syrup spread out " ? professor e: Yeah , and all that sort of stuff . And undoubtably there 's been reams of work about it in cognitive linguistics , professor e: OK . So ,  grad a: It 's not one of the y it 's more straightforward ones forward ones to defend , so you probably don't want to use it for the purposes grad c:   grad a: th these are you 're addressing like , computational linguists , professor e: OK . Or are you ? grad c: There 's gonna be four computational linguists , grad a: OK . But more emphasis on the computational ? Or emphasis on the linguist ? grad c: computer it 's More there 's going to be the just four computational linguists , by coincidence , but the rest is , whatever , biocomputing people and physicists . I 'm - we 're worrying about the th the thes grad c: Oh , the thesis ! grad a: Oh , I meant this , professor e: it 's just for one guy . grad c: That 's that 's computa should be very computational , grad a: you know , like OK . grad a: You know , it 's an obvious one grad f: Totally weird stuff . grad c:  the the old bakery example might be nice , grad a: but ,  grad c: " Is there a bakery around here " . grad a: Around ? grad c: No , it 's the bakery itself grad a: Oh . grad c: is it a building ?  , that you want to go to ? or is it something to eat that you want to buy ? grad a: Oh , oh yeah . The question is d do you wanna do you wanna construe do you wanna constr - strue grad f: Sh grad d: It 's a speech - act . It 's because do you wanna c do you want to view the bakery as a p a place that that i for example , if y grad a: Yeah . But the other is , yo you might have smelled a smell and are just curious about whether there 'd be a bakery in the neighborhood , or , grad f:   professor e: pfff you know , you wonder how people here make their living , and there 're all sorts of reasons why you might be asking about the existence of a bakery grad f: Yeah . professor e: But  , those are interesting examples but it 's not clear that they 're mainly construal examples . grad a: So it 's a lot of pragmatics , there , that grad f: Yeah . professor e: So let 's so let 's think about this from the point of view of construal . So let 's first do a So the metonymy thing is probably the easiest and a and actually the Though , the one you have isn't quite grad a: You mean the s You mean " the steak wants to pay " ? professor e: N no not that one , that 's that 's a the sort of background . grad c: How old is it ? How much does it cost ? grad d: Oh . grad a: To go in , that 's like grad f: Two hundred million dollars . grad a: Like , " it " doesn't refer to " thing , " it refers to acti you know , j thing standing for activ most relevant activity for a tourist you could think of it that way , but . grad f: Well , shoot , isn't that  , that 's what grad c: Well , my argument here is it 's it 's it 's the same thing as " Plato 's on the top shelf , " grad f: figuring that out is what this is about . grad c: I 'm con you know , th that you can refer to a book of Plato by using " Plato , " grad a: Yeah . No no , I I 'm agreeing that this is a good ,  grad c: and you can refer back to it , and so you can Castles have as tourist sites , have admission fees , so you can say " Where is the castle , how much does it cost ? "  . grad c: So , You 're also not referring to the width of the object , or so , grad a:  . Can we think of a nice metaphorical use of " where " in the tourist 's domain ?  . professor e: So you know it 's you you can sometimes use " where " f for " when " grad f: O professor e: in the sense of , you know , where wh where where was , " where was Heidelberg , in the Thirty Years ' War ? " Or something . grad f: Like what side were they on , grad a: What ? professor e: Yeah .  , grad a: Ah ! Or like its developmental state or something like that , you could I guess you could get that . grad f: there 's also things like  , s  , I guess I could ask something like " Where can I find out about blah - blah - blah " in a sort of doesn't nece I don't necessarily have to care about the spatial location , just give me a phone number professor e: Yeah . grad f: and I 'll call them or something like that ? professor e: You know , " Where could I learn its opening hours , " or something . professor e: So we 're thinking about , or we could also think about ,  grad c: Well , I I I professor e: How about " I 'm in a hurry " ? grad a: State . professor e: It i But it 's a state and the the issue is , is that it may be just a usage , grad f:  ? professor e: you know , that it 's not particularly metaphorical , I don't know . grad a: I 'm really into professor e: Ah ! How about I I I you know , " I 'm in I 'm in a state of exhaustion " ? grad a: Do you really say that ? professor e: or something like that , which a tourist w Huh ? grad a: Would you really say that ? professor e: A st  , well , you can certainly say , you know , " I 'm in overload . grad a: Yeah , I was gonna say , like grad d:  professor e: Oh , you can do that ? Really ? Of course that 's that that 's definitely a ,  grad f: Fixed . grad a: There 're too there 're all sorts of fixed expressions I don't like  " I 'm out of sorts now ! " professor e: Right . grad a: Like " I 'm in trouble ! " grad c: Well I when ,  just f u the data that I 've looked at so far that rec professor e: Yeah . grad c: So , you know , mak re making reference to buildings as institutions , as containers , as build professor e: Right .  , so ib in mus for example , in museums , you know , as a building or as something where pictures hang versus , you know , ev something that puts on exhibits , so forth . grad a: Why don't you want to use any of those ? grad c:  ? grad a: So y you don't wanna use one that 's grad c: Yeah , well No , but this that 's what I have , you know , started doing . professor e: The castle the that old castle one is sort of grad c: Metonymy , polysemy . grad c: But I think the argument should be  , can be made that , you know , despite the fact that this is not the most met metaphorical domain , because people interacting with HTI systems try to be straightforward and less lyrical , professor e: Yeah . grad c: construal still is , you know , completely , key in terms of finding out any of these things , so ,  . So that 's that 's that 's a that 's a reasonable point , that it in this domain you 're gonna get less metaphor and more metonymy . grad c: We ,  I with a I looked with a student I looked at the entire database that we have on Heidelberg for cases of metonymy . grad c: But OK this is just something we 'll we 'll see , professor e: Right . I guess if anybody has additional suggestions , grad c:  maybe the " where is something " question as a whole , you know , can be construed as , u i locational versus instructional request . grad c: So , if we 're not talk about the lexic grad a: Location versus what ? grad c: instruction . grad a: Oh , I thought that was definitely treated as an example of construal . grad a: Right ? grad c: Yeah but then you 're not on the lexical level , that 's sort of one level higher . grad c: Also it would be nice to get ultimately to get a nice mental space example , professor e: We grad c: so , even temporal references are just in the spatial domain are rare . professor e: What was this p instead of wh what you know how was this painted , what color was this painted , was this alleyway open . grad c: We c we can show people pictures of objects and then have then ask the system about the objects and engage in conversation on the history and the art and the architecture and so forth . grad d: For some reason when you said " feedback electronically " I thought of that you ever see the Simpsons where they 're like the family 's got the buzzers and they buzz each other when they don't like what the other one is saying ? grad a: Yeah