Which seems natural enough to me, though I don’t disagree that what you point out is interesting. I was recently reading parts of Analytical Archaeology, David Clark (1978) where he goes into some detail about the difference between artifacts and artifact-types. Seems like you are getting at statements like
The object is a phone.
Where the is-a maps from an artifact to its type. It would make intuitive sense to me that languages would have a preferred orientation w.r.t such a mapping—this is the core of abstraction, which is at the core of language.
So it seems like in English we prefer to further up the stack of abstractions when using is-a, thus:
Phones are tools. Tools are man-made objects.
etc., and if you wanted to go down the stack you have to say eg:
Phones—of which you can see a selection here.
So is-a is just a way of moving up the ladder of abstractions? (<- movements up the ladder of abstractions such as this sentence here)
1) One could say something like, “Beagles, such as Fido, are known to...” There your four-word phrase is part of a larger construction and is subject to the rules and constraints involved in such a construction.
2) You’re correct about “is-a”. Back in the days of symbolic AI, “ISA” was often used as an arc label in semantic network constructions. “Dog,” “pony,” and “cat,” would be linked to, say, “beast” by the ISA arc, “beast,” “fish,” and “insect” would be lined to “plant” by the ISA arc, etc. So, you’re right, it’s a device for moving up and down paradigmatic trees, as linguists would call them. Such trees are ubiquitous.
That’s why that particular construction interests me. And the fact the movement along ISA chains is syntactically easy going in one direction, but not the other direction (though there are ways of doing it and contexts in which it is natural), is therefore interesting as well. Given that we are, after all, talking about computation, the way you have to move around some conceptual structure in the course of computing over/with it, that tells us something about how the mechanism works.
Interesting post. Two comments:
Which seems natural enough to me, though I don’t disagree that what you point out is interesting. I was recently reading parts of Analytical Archaeology, David Clark (1978) where he goes into some detail about the difference between artifacts and artifact-types. Seems like you are getting at statements like
Where the is-a maps from an artifact to its type. It would make intuitive sense to me that languages would have a preferred orientation w.r.t such a mapping—this is the core of abstraction, which is at the core of language.
So it seems like in English we prefer to further up the stack of abstractions when using is-a, thus:
etc., and if you wanted to go down the stack you have to say eg:
So is-a is just a way of moving up the ladder of abstractions? (<- movements up the ladder of abstractions such as this sentence here)
Two comments:
1) One could say something like, “Beagles, such as Fido, are known to...” There your four-word phrase is part of a larger construction and is subject to the rules and constraints involved in such a construction.
2) You’re correct about “is-a”. Back in the days of symbolic AI, “ISA” was often used as an arc label in semantic network constructions. “Dog,” “pony,” and “cat,” would be linked to, say, “beast” by the ISA arc, “beast,” “fish,” and “insect” would be lined to “plant” by the ISA arc, etc. So, you’re right, it’s a device for moving up and down paradigmatic trees, as linguists would call them. Such trees are ubiquitous.
That’s why that particular construction interests me. And the fact the movement along ISA chains is syntactically easy going in one direction, but not the other direction (though there are ways of doing it and contexts in which it is natural), is therefore interesting as well. Given that we are, after all, talking about computation, the way you have to move around some conceptual structure in the course of computing over/with it, that tells us something about how the mechanism works.