a man to lead/follow-up question

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navi - 27 Sep 2010 23:43 GMT

Are these sentences correct:

1-He is a man to lead.

2-He is a man to help others.

3-He is a man to trust.

I think the first one is ambiguous (Is he to lead others or to be
lead?)
The second one means only one thing (He is the kind of person who
helps others)
The third one means one thing (he is a man to be trusted)

Am I correct?

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John Lawler - 28 Sep 2010 00:28 GMT

> Are these sentences correct:
>
[quoted text clipped - 11 lines]
>
> Am I correct?

Yes, yes, and no, respectively.

The second is unambiguous because
it already has a direct object. The third
one is ambiguous because it doesn't.
One can trust him (by far the preferred
meaning, by human speakers, because
they can see it's a common situation),
but he might just be the sort of person
who trusts a lot. Not likely, but possible.

If you think (3) is unambiguous, I
suggest you try writing an algorithm
that will decide that. If you can, your
fortune is made in CL/NLP.

-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler
"Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very
like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like
living beings, but if one asks them a question, they pre-
serve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words."
-- Socrates (according to Plato)

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navi - 28 Sep 2010 11:29 GMT

Thank you both.

> > Are these sentences correct:
>
[quoted text clipped - 34 lines]
> serve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words."
> -- Socrates (according to Plato)

I thought 'trust' could only be transitive. I was wrong. It can be
intransitive as well. So my example does not work.
I do not know what CL/NLP is.... but when a sentence has 'your
fortune is made' in it, I know that its truth value is 'false'... Do
they need someone to wash the dishes at CL/NLP? I could do
that....Need a job!!!

I was thinking maybe

4-He is a man to kill.

is unambiguous... But I think even 'kill' can sometimes be used
intrasitively...
In such situations, he is a man to kill=In such situations he kills.

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Peter Duncanson (BrE) - 28 Sep 2010 12:34 GMT

>Thank you both.
>
[quoted text clipped - 43 lines]
>they need someone to wash the dishes at CL/NLP? I could do
>that....Need a job!!!

CL/NLP is probably Computational Linguistics / Natural Language
Processing.

I was temporarily thrown by my first thought: NLP = Neuro-Linguistic
Programming.
http://www.nlpu.com/whatnlp.htm

>I was thinking maybe
>
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
>intrasitively...
>In such situations, he is a man to kill=In such situations he kills.

Signature

Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

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John Lawler - 29 Sep 2010 17:08 GMT

On Sep 28, 4:34 am, "Peter Duncanson (BrE)" <m...@peterduncanson.net>
wrote:

> >Thank you both.
>
[quoted text clipped - 61 lines]
> Peter Duncanson, UK
> (in alt.usage.english)

Yup. CL/NLP (for some reason they can't settle on
which one to use, and they both encompass the
same intellectual territory) is what allows, for example,
automatic translation, or text-to-speech, or speech-to-text,
or pinyin-to-characters, or data mining.
Et very profitable cetera.

Most of it is done with statistics, and the statistics
are generated from large (ideally multigigaword)
text or speech corpora (pl. of "corpus"), of which
there are now many, with more appearing every day.

These include ALL uses of words, including the
unusual, the unclear, and the ill-chosen. And
parsers are useless unless they provide ALL
the possible parses for a potentially ambiguous
sentence. So, at least in English, where most
words can be at least verb, adjective, or noun
(transitive, intransitive, descriptive, proper,
or common), this means that virtually every
sentence is automatically multiply ambiguous.

Therefore disambiguation is a big big headache
for CL/NLP. And any way to automatically
disambiguate is going to be worth money.

That's what I meant above.

References:

1) http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/routledge/book-7.doc
(2 chapters on CL/NLP from my book
"Using Computers in Linguistics")
2) http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/abney95c.pdf
(a famous paper by my colleague Steve Abney
on the problems of ambiguity in CL/NLP)

-John Lawler
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.

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Lewis - 28 Sep 2010 04:37 GMT

> Are these sentences correct:

> 1-He is a man to lead.

> 2-He is a man to help others.

> 3-He is a man to trust.

Yes.

> I think the first one is ambiguous (Is he to lead others or to be
> lead?)

It is not ambiguous. As written it is understood (thanks to various
election campaigns) that it means to lead others.

The other meaning would have to be phrased "He is a man to be led."

Signature

"Esprit de corpse," said the Senior Wrangler. Ridcully glared at him

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Discussion Groups / English Usage / September 2010

a man to lead/follow-up question