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