From: matthew@uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Works on WHO,WHEN,WHAT,WHERE...
Date: 7 Jan 93 18:51:24 GMT
Organization: Nokia Telecommunications, Cambridge, UK

In article <1993Jan7.130658.22948@ghost.dsi.unimi.it> leva@ghost.dsi.unimi.it (paolo leva) writes:
   Pautler Says:

   >BTW, your choice of 'slots' seems pretty arbitrary to me -- maintaining
   >a distinction between WHO's and WHAT's at this level seems unimportant
   >compared to the loss of information due to collapsing all actors, recipients,
   >patients, etc. to WHO's and all causes, intentions, etc. to WHY's.

   >	-dp-

   I will try to explain WHY we choose to start a new taxonomy from those six
   items. The reason is so simple that it is difficult to make it sound worth
   a scientifical research. If you think of what can be asked about any situation
   that is possible to describe with language, you will find out that you have
   to use one of the wh-words, among those the following six seem to be the most
   essential: WHO, WHAT, WHY, HOW, WHERE, and WHEN. We are ignoring the yes/no
   questions as you surely noticed.

   The power of this taxonomy (to be developed, of course) is in its intuitive
   power. There is no problem explaining somebody how to recognize a WHO, a WHAT
   and so on. The biggest problem is to convince people trying to approach the
   language from a perspective (apparently) so down to earth.

   Think about it a little,

I have thought about it a little, and it seems to me that:

Who   = Which/What person          } (Flameproofing: Yes I know they mean
What  = Which/What thing           } other things as well, I'm just trying
Why   = (for) Which/What reason    } to make a point.  Please don't flame
How   = (through) Which/What means } me because I haven't mentioned that
Where = Which/What place           } Why can also mean (for) What cause
When  = Which/What time            } etc.  Thankyou. :-)

i.e. they are "short forms" of more fundamental questions.  They also seem
to be rather ill-defined categories to use, especially if this system is to
be applied to other languages for a number of reasons:

a) Some of the words have secondary meanings e.g. in the phrase "What does
   it matter to you?", "What" is behaving as "Why"; in "How are you
   feeling?", "How" is behaving as "What" (sort of).

b) The shades of meaning covered by each question word in a language differ
   according to the language.  Some of the words in English cover multiple
   shades of meaning which in other languages would be distinguished by
   different words, e.g. "Why" could be translated into Spanish as "por que"
   or "para que", corresponding (more or less) to "for what reason" and
   "with what aim".

   Conversely some languages cover multiple English words with a single one
   of their own, e.g. Finnish "Mill"a" can mean "How", "Where", "(in) What"
   and probably some other ones as well that I've missed.

c) The system seems to miss a number of distinctions which may be important,
   e.g. (as shown by my use of Which/What above), the categories as they
   stand don't distinguish between the question being asked with an answer
   in mind e.g. "Who's Bill?" asked of a group known to contain Simon is a
   different question to "Who's Bill?" asked about a letter signed by
   someone unknown called Bill.

Having said all this, if you're just using the WHO, WHAT etc. as convenient
labels for a number of categories which are actually better defined and not
just slavishly saying "Well this question contains a 'What' so it's in the
What category" then the comments above are less relevant.  I still think
that you might run into problems in other languages though e.g. where "When"
is a completely different thing depending on whether the event has happened
or is going to happen, where two types of "Why" distinguishes between cause
and motivation, or where reindeer are asked about as "Who" rather than
"What".

Cheers,


Matthew



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---* Amnesiac the Wizard *------------------* matthew@uk.tele.nokia.fi *---
 Opinions expressed here are not those of my company.    | NB. ntl02 is EN
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---* matthew@ntl02.decnet.nokia.fi *------------------* Matthew Faupel *---