**3.4 Predication without or before judgement. Propositions vs. propositional functions**

Just a couple of further statements before leaving the subject of predication.

As widely considered, we need predication before judging32. We need it to ask questions, to make requests, to give orders, to plea, to pray, to express wonder and so on. Predication deserves attention as an act of thinking, as a logical and psychological matter, as a semiotic, linguistic ability, as a communicative deed. Before judgements we utter questions, doubts, hypotheses, shaping our thoughts while still suspending our evaluations.

Formalising this distinction means distinguishing between propositional functions and propositions, between unsaturated connections and saturated ones. Saturated through what device? Completed by what?, if ever …

#### **3.5 Affirming or denying**

In a sentence deprived of its context no linguistic evidence (in the etymological sense of the word, i.e. seeable verbal constituents) can be displayed as the marker of an accomplished

<sup>29</sup> Regarding the importance of an ontology of events, for predicates referring to events, see (Davidson, 1980).

<sup>30</sup> The formula means that the predicate 'walk' being saturated by its argument identifies the truth value: either 1 (true) or 0 (false).

<sup>31 &</sup>quot;A verb by itself signifies a mere dream, an imagination unattached to any particular occasion. It calls up in the mind an *icon*" (Peirce 3.459).

<sup>32</sup> See (Davidson, 2005).

Queries and Predicate – Argument Relationship 73

relative frequencies of the eleven parts of speech as the first word of a sentence versus as the

These two don't speak to each other very often, but when they do, the corpus linguist says to the armchair linguist, 'Why should I think that what you tell me is true?', and the armchair linguist says to the corpus linguist, 'Why should I think that what you tell me is

By 'linguistic resources' we mean "Collections of data which primarily document communicative acts of humans by some form of recording and/or descriptions, both directly as in corpora, or at higher levels of abstraction in lexicons and ontologies. The

In 2010 a new initiative was launched by LREC (Language Resources and Evaluation

Compilation of a *Map of Language Resources, Technologies and Evaluation*, "a collective enterprise of the LREC community, as a first step towards the creation of a very broad, community-built, Open Resource Infrastructure; […] The map was intended to monitor the

We will now mention some of the main resources available, which can enable data collection

Firstly we shall start with lexical units, just words: WordNet "is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptualsemantic and lexical relations"35. From the point of view of our subject, predication and predicate-argument relationship, of particular note is that "The majority of the WordNet's relations connect words from the same part of speech (POS). Thus, WordNet really consists of four sub-nets, one each for nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, with few cross-POS pointers. Cross-POS relations include the "morphosemantic" links that hold among semantically similar words sharing a stem with the same meaning: observe (verb), observant (adjective) observation, observatory (nouns). In many of the noun-verb pairs the semantic role of the noun with respect to the verb has been specified: {sleeper, sleeping\_car} is the LOCATION for {sleep} and {painter}is the AGENT of {paint}, while {painting, picture} is its

MultiWordNet is a multilingual lexical database, aligned with Princeton WordNet36.

33 From the Glossary of INTERA project:: http://www.mpi.nl/INTERA/ 34 http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/lrec/lrec2010.html: see especially section 0.33,

(There isn't anybody exactly like this, but there are some approximations).

primary data can be text, video recording and/or audio tracks."33

use and creation of language resources (datasets, tools, etc.)"34.

*and* annotation at different levels about them, in a bottom-up direction.

second word of a sentence.

interesting?'" (Fillmore, 1992).

Conference) in its 7th edition, the

**4.1 WordNet and MultiWordNet** 

http://multiwordnet.fbk.eu/english/home.php

36 http://multiwordnet.fbk.eu/english/home.php

RESULT."

Question Answering.

35 http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

saturation (or, rather, as the mark of an ended task). No morpheme, no lexeme proper; intonation, rather, an unsuspended one; word order, possibly. But most of all, the plain intonation of an assertion contrasted with, for example, the rising intonation of a question.

What does this mean? Different authors in different contexts have underlined the presence of a covert constituent in judging: the personal assent or dissent which determines the affirmative or negative structure of predication itself in assertions, and constitutes its illocutionary force.

After having quoted Frege's expressions on this point (3.3), let us recall Brentano's statements about the role of assenting (or dissenting) while judging: once an object is given in presentation, with our judgements we express its acceptance or rejection (Brentano, 1995).

This way of considering the further commitment involved through an act of judgement helps us gain a unified perspective on the two different kinds of questions mentioned in § 2.3. Any assertion – this is the suggestion – qualifies itself as a yes or no answer, even if apparently no question at all has generated it; completive questions just pave the way for oriented questions. Answers will then confirm or deny the orientation proposed, thus underlining the strict relationship between predicate as sentence-centre and predication as basic syntagmatic act, whatever illocutionary act may follow, be it an assertion or not.
