Philosophy Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Features, philosophy: Features are fundamentally characteristics, however in the philosophical terminology according to Frege it has become natural to speak of (necessary) characteristics, but in objects of (contingent) properties. Objects do not have their properties necessarily, they can always be different. Concepts, on the other hand, have their characteristics necessarily. E.g. that circles are round is a necessary characteristic of the concept circle, but not a necessary property of drawn circles. It is, however, not the concept which has the characteristic itself, but the objects which fall under it._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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John Lyons on Features - Dictionary of Arguments
I 81 Def marked/feature/linguistics/Lyons: "("positive"): For example, the plural form is often marked by an s, i.e. the s is a positive sign for the plural, while the singular is not marked by a sign but "unmarked, "neutral"). Def unmarked/without feature/linguistics/Lyons: For example, lack of a feature ("neutral") singular form due to absence of the s, while the plural ("positive") is marked by an s (order/distinction). >Order, >Distinctions. Lyons: marked/unmarked: one could also say presence contrasts with absence. General/N.B.: often the unmarked form is of more general significance than the marked one. More general, the members of the pair do not have to be characterized by the presence or absence of a feature: Example "dog"/"bitch": "dog" contains male and female form. This leads to a characteristic form of error: in pleonasm, either a tautology "female bitch" or a contradiction results: "male bitch". I 82 Marked/unmarked: the difference takes place on the paradigmatic level. >Terminology/Lyons. I 167 Grammatical features/subclasses/Lyons: the previous subclasses can then be subdivided finer, i.e. hierarchically: Na > {Na1, Na2} etc. Problem/Lyon(s): due to the hierarchical order there is not always a unique ((s) "way back") within the structure. I 167 Problem/Lyons: 1. this leads to a large number of incoherent word lists and to many multiple occurrences of a word in several lists. >Lists. 2. It complicates the formulation of grammatical rules. >Grammar, >Rules. I 168 Chomsky: in reality this subcategorization of the vocabulary is not strictly hierarchical, but leads to overlapping e.g. proper names {John, Egypt}, inanimate {book, Egypt} etc. Problem/Chomsky: if the subcategorization is expressed by substitution rules, one of the two distinctions must be superior, the other cannot be represented naturally anymore. For example, if first the division into proper names and appellatives (e.g. book, human) is made and then a division into "human"/"non-human", then the only way to establish a rule is by referring this rule to both completely incoherent classes, namely "proper name-human" and "appellative-non-human". Since the lexicon does not contain a list of "human nouns". >Lexicon/Lyons. Chomsky: this gets worse and worse with increasing refinement. Solution/Chomsky: a grammar must not consist exclusively of substitution rules. Chomsky/Lyons: we will not discuss his solution here, since we assume a very simple system. Def Grammatical Feature/Lyons: for nouns. For example, "concrete", "animate", "human", whereby "concrete" must be independent of "animate"/"inanimate". This feaeture is used for classification or "indexing". I 169 E.g. Boy: [Appellative,],[Human],[Masculine]. Notation: square brackets. Lexical substitution rules/replacement: are then formulated in such a way that one can select a word according to features. Lexicon/Lyons: new: we have to abandon the set of rules of the form Na > {boy,...} but the more general form remains valid: X > x I x e X New: X is now the word class that satisfies characterization by features. >Word classes. Lists: Lists of class compositions e.g.[Appellative],[Human],[Masculine] there is no list (order). Grammar/Semantics/Congruence/Lyons: the expressions used for the features e.g. "proper name", "appellative" were called grammatically. I 170 We have not yet departed from the principle that such expressions, when they stand for word classes, are terms for distributional categories. N.B.: this leads us to semantics! >Semantics. Classification: because of features such as "animated", etc., this often contradicts the meaning of words. >Classification. VsContent Grammar/Lyons: this is the reason why most authors have withdrawn from "content grammar". In a language description, the lexicon must contain both grammatical and semantic information for each word. Lyon's thesis: There is often congruence between semantic and grammatical classification. There the grammatical information can be partly taken from the meaning of the word. >Congruence/Lyons, >Grammar/Lyons. I 171 Neutral/Grammar/Lyons: sometimes has to be distinguished from "inanimate": e.g. "The child ate its dinner"._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Ly II John Lyons Semantics Cambridge, MA 1977 Lyons I John Lyons Introduction to Theoretical Lingustics, Cambridge/MA 1968 German Edition: Einführung in die moderne Linguistik München 1995 |
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Ed. Martin Schulz, access date 2024-04-23