Linguistic inspiraton for Commonsense

Consider this sentence - John gave a ball to Jack. John -- gave a ball to -- Jack. This association between John and Jack has an explicit connector - “gave a ball to”. All sentences connect 2 or more entities with a set of words present between them as the link between them. But what about the words which immediately succeed each other? There is no word in between them. The connector between them is the commonsense in the story conveyed by the sentence. Consider the successive word-pairs - John --?-- gave. The Connector is : ‘with his hands’. The Connector comes between John and gave or rather connects John and gave. John (the body) and the physical act of giving (which is “physically further” to it) have this link between them. Gave --?-- ball. Connector : ‘supported by his palms’. The Connector connects giving and the ball by being the link between them. The physical act of giving (the jerking of the arms from John towards Jack) and the ball have this between them (the supporting palms). Ball --?-- to. Connector : ‘moved/transferred’. Moved comes as a connector between ball and the ‘to’wardness toward Jack. ‘The ball’ and ‘the ‘sense of it being directed to someone’ contain ‘it moved’ between them. To --?--Jack. Connector : ‘into Jack’s hands’. Jack's hands come between the pointing direction of ‘towardness’ and ‘Jack’ - the body - which is further to it, as the connector. That - 1) John gave it with his hands, 2) the ball was supported by his palms 3) the ball moved/trans-located 4) the ball went into Jack’s hands - are the commonsense associated with this sentence, deriving from a Linguistic “source” as shown above.

Commonsense in Language-Understanding, at the most fundamental level

Consider this sentence - A gave a ball to B. You understand from the sentence that 'a ball' was the thing given. That is, if someone asks you - what (thing) was given? or A gave what (thing)? - you would answer "a ball". Now the reason you understand that 'a ball' was given is not because 'a ball' immediately follows 'gave', since if that was the case, then in the sentence 'A gave to B a ball', you would say that 'to B' was the thing given since 'to B' immediately follows 'gave'. This leads to an important theory as regards to the coming together of two words/chunks (here, 'gave' and 'a ball'). Whenever words follow each other, their isolated meanings need to be combined in ways so as to make the combined sense match with a PLAUSIBLE REAL-WORLD STRUCTURE. And this is where commonsense (i.e. in making it match with a plausible real-world structure) comes into play. So, when 'gave' is juxtaposed with 'a ball', what do we have to do? Firstly, what is 'gave'? Well, 'gave' is 'gave' - (the act of) 'giving'. What is 'a ball'? 'A ball' is simply 'a (one) ball (that exists)' i.e '(there is) a ball'. Now the mind has to think how to combine these two meanings (word-semantics) to make a resultant sense which matches with a plausible real-world structure. How can you combine '(the act of) giving' and '(there is/exists) a ball', (in that order)? One and the only obvious way that comes to mind is that (the act of) giving was done of the ball (that exists) i.e. 'the giving of the ball' was done. This requires commonsense knowledge since you have to know of "a ball (or a thing) being given" in general. Hence the meaning of the juxtaposed chunks - 'gave' and 'a ball' - is taken (understood) as that "a ball was the thing given".

Commonsense thinking instincts

Consider this sentence - A gave a ball to B. Commonsense says that – now the ball is no longer with A. This is not explicitly stated in the sentence but something that occurs to you. How? You compare two states – A having given the ball to B (which the sentence makes you understand), with an earlier state – A about to give the ball i.e. A having the ball. Why were you inspired to or happen to compare the 2 states? Because you noticed a change in the image of A’s hands – ‘no ball after giving’ and ‘previously having the ball’. How did you notice the change in the image of A’s hands? You saw A’s hands (without a ball) and were REMINDED of a SIMILAR (with a little difference) image of A’s hands having the ball earlier. And why did you notice the change in the image of A’s hands? Well that’s one of the instincts of thinking – noticing changes in things, if and when they occur. Suppose you see a painting on a wall. Then you turn around and after some time turn back to see that the painting is not there, you may/will instinctively remark – where’s the painting gone? You were responsive to or were sensitive in catching a change. Now the only question which remains is – why did you notice A’s hands when the story of the scene is moving towards the ball being with B? Well, you just “looked around”, which is again an instinct of thinking. You would not be able to justify this with a solid reason (as to why did you, after following the ball to B’s hands, looked BACK). If you see some event happening somewhere on the street (say an accident or a crash) you will for some moments also ‘look around’ the car; whereas here there is an even stronger motivation to look around because you are having a look at an earlier-mentioned part of the whole story. If you see a movie changing focus from X to Y over some time, it is very likely that it would occur to you – What happened to X then? This example highlights some of the traits of commonsense thinking – noticing changes, comparing current and previous states of something, being reminded of something similar from something, and lastly going back to a previous state in the first place – all for no apparent preconceived reason, but just on instinct.

Internal subjects and predicates

Why does “gave a ball” make sense and “a ball gave” doesn’t? What does this tell us about language? The format of subject-predicate doesn’t just limit to the whole sentence. It also extends to internal chunks of a sentence. Lets see how. Firstly, what is a subject and what is a predicate? Subject is what you want to talk about, whereas predicate is what you want to talk about what you want to talk about. Now it is a fundamental structure of language that first we mention the former – what we want to talk about – and then the latter. This appeals to commonsense also. IF we mentioned the predicate first and subject later, the listener wouldn’t know what is being talked about, till the end when the subject would be mentioned. That would be odd for cognition purposes. Consider the sentence – John gave a ball to Jack. Here John is what is being talked about and the predicate is – gave a ball to Jack. But even internal to this sentence, look at the chunk – “gave a ball”. Why do we say “gave a ball” and not “a ball gave”? Because we begin with the subject, which is “giving” or “something what given” and the follow it up with the predicate – talking about the “giving” – which here happens to be ‘what was given’ i.e. a ball. Hence every other chunk in a sentence is a pair of “subject-predicate”, if we take this term in its broad sense. The very left-to-right progressive order of a sentence is inherently driven by the ‘subject-predicate’ pairs of chunks of words. Just as another example, “gave a ball to Jack” is the subject-predicate pair of ‘gave a ball’ and ‘to Jack’ respectively.

"Neat" sentences v/s "fuzzy" sentences -

"Neat" sentences v/s "fuzzy" sentences - This is a short write-up. This is just to classify sentences into 2 kinds – Those whose semantic story can be built from their elements (words) step-by-step, and most often also with a clear-cut picture for each element, and those which cannot be built so. Consider this sentence - Peter is holding a basket in his hand. Here the whole story can be built part-by-part by attaching one new element (word) to the previous and that too with a clear picture for each. Peter is a clear entity. Then comes Peter's hand (attached to him). Then comes a basket. And then comes Peter's hand, on the handle of the basket. Now consider this - The two cars crashed against each other. This story cannot be built step-by-step from the constituent words of the sentence. You can begin by saying - there are 2 cars. But then the accident is understood by the cumulative gelled semantic effect of "crashed against each other". This cannot be split as {crashed + against + each + other} in a step by step semantic-cognition process. If at all one has to construct a story like the first-type above, of this sentence, then one might say - There is a car. Its front came to a point. There is another car. It came from the opposite side. It came with its front to the same point. Thus there was a collision of the 2 cars.

COMMONSENSE DEFAULT EMPHASIS -

Every sentence contains multiple items, which make up the total information to be conveyed to the listener. But some item is “critical”. Critical because that is the end-point, or the bottomline amongst the information that the speaker wants to convey. For example, when someone says the sentence – ‘water bodies on maps are shown in blue’, it appeals to us via commonsense that the most important thing which he wants to convey is ‘BLUE’. That’s the endpoint emphasis. Of course he wants to talk ABOUT water bodies and talk WITH REFERENCE TO maps. But somehow it is clear to us that the intended point of the sentence is ‘blue’ – that they are shown in blue. Consider another sentence – John is the culprit. Here it appears that people were trying to identify who is the culprit and this information came from somewhere/someone that John is the one. So the intended point of information in this sentence is ‘JOHN’. This point is also important in the cognitive regard because more often than not, this intended point is the point from where the thought occurred/began in the mind which later became the expressed given sentence. ‘John’ struck someone (in the thought) as the answer to the mystery of who is the culprit, and he later expressed the sentence – John is the culprit. This is the commonsense story behind the sentence. Another point here is that we involuntarily imagine contexts from sentences. This imagined context is principally inspired from this intended point of information. For example, if you hear -John sat on the office chair for the first time, the intended point of information that you automatically sense is ‘the first time’ (and very close in importance comes the part ‘office chair’) which makes up build up a background/context that John is appointed to some new position/post and today is the beginning. So we see three concepts about a sentence, intertwined here – the intended point of information, which is related to (inspires) the imagined context of the occurrence of the speech by the listener and the inception of the thought in the speaker’s mind which was later converted into the spoken sentence.

Why do we make commonsense assumptions?

Consider this sentence: Jack opened the door. Whenever we are given a sentence we make commonsense assumptions about it - things that are not explicitly stated in the sentence. But why do we make them? A part of what makes a door a door is its surroundings. (Just like the meaning of a sentence resides partly in the surrounding text). A sentence tells a story. To imagine anything about a story, we need to imagine the individual elements with something in each one’s surroundings. The way the words of a sentence fuse with each other (to create meaning) contributes to these surroundings of these individual elements. The above sentence has a door. So that’s just a rectangular wooden piece which is a door. But “opening the door” makes it mandatory to imagine a frame or a wall around it since you cannot “open a door” which is just an isolated wooden rectangle standing on the ground. Hence come the other assumptions like John was wearing clothes, that he opened it with his hands, he was looking at the door while opening it etc. Another point- sometimes what happens is that we imagine a context for the sentence. This happens because once all the risings of the words have been done or the sentence has been fused fully, there is a need for a surrounding for the sentence as a whole, which manifests as the context. In other words, the earlier part refers to what can be called internal or sub-contexts whereas the latter can be referred to as external context.