Monday, August 21, 2023

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".

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