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.

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.

What is ‘meaning’?

Meaning is synonymous with understanding - you “understand the meaning of” something. John is driving a Mercedes. Level 1 - Language : Definitions of the words and mechanical connection of those of the words with each other, according to the rules of English. A male human being is driving (definition of driving - is seated on the front seat with his hands on the steering and his legs on the controls below and the car is moving ahead) a car - Mercedes. Level 2 - Commonsense : Strict - the tyres of the Mercedes are rotating. John is not blind. Plausible assumptions - John is headed somewhere. John is wearing clothes. Level 3 - Deeper Analysis : Something specific about the Mercedes car. (This requires domain knowledge). Say, the battery is discharging at a rate of X.

LANGUAGE AND PERCEPTION - COGNITIVE DEFINITION OF A SENTENCE

Sentences describe. What do they describe? Sentences are combinations/fusions of descriptions of aspects of things/phenomena. John was riding a bicycle. John is a thing. His aspect, namely, ‘past action’ is described by ‘riding a bicycle. Riding is a thing. Its aspect ‘beholder’/’agent’ is described by ‘bicycle’. The sentence is a combination of the above two. The ball is in the dustbin. Ball is a thing. Its aspect - location - is described by ‘in the dustbin’. I was singing while cooking. ‘I’ is the thing. Its aspect - action - is described by ‘singing’. Singing is a phenomenon. Its aspect - timing - is described by ‘while cooking’. The sentence is a combination of the above two. One can notice that this aspect that is being talked about is the hidden element, not present in the sentence as or associated with a word. This is the cognitive component of the sentence - the thought about something that arises in the mind while wanting to express something. THe mind wants to talk about the location of the ball and out pops it - “The ball is in the dustbin”. You don't use the word standing for the aspect - location.

ROLE OF LITERALNESS (IN VISUALIZATION) IN SENTENCE-UNDERSTANDING

Consider this sentence - John was filling water into the jar. Now, it occurs to us that John must be filling water FROM SOMETHING into the jar. The key here (as discussed before) is visualization. Even if you go by the possibility-gauging procedure discussed before, you still spot the lacuna at the level of the visualization only - of a connection/link (John ---filling---> water). The point is that there is also a LITERAL construction step of the components of the sentence that happens. It is only when you try to connect ‘John’, ‘filling’ and ‘water’, by trying to visualize “John filling (with his hands ( which comes with the definition of filling)) water” LITERALLY, that you realize that the water needs to be held by something. (And this very specific realization is obviously because of the commonsense knowledge of gravity/support that gets invoked in the aforesaid mental process - literal visualization). So now we have so far discussed 3 mental conceptual elements of sentence-understanding (they might be overlapping each other) - Visualization Literalness Possibility-gauging Question about a different topic - ‘commonsense’ - arising from the above discussion : Consider this sentence - John was riding a bicycle. Here we commonsensically understand and assume that obviously John was riding the bicycle on the ground (or some base). But this doesn't “occur to us”, like it occurs to us that John must be filling water FROM SOMETHING into the jar (when given the earlier sentence) even though the basis for that too is commonsense. Why so? My guess is that in the earlier sentence, there was “a jar being filled with water into”. So there was a need for a “‘complement’ to the jar, from where the water was filled” for the completion of the story. Also the bicycle scenario is much more commonplace in terms of riding a bicycle ON A GROUND/BASE than that of filling water into a jar FROM SOMETHING. The basis of the invocation of the complement to the jar, as well as that of the mental-picture-building of the ‘ground’ were both commonsense. But the mental processes in which commonsense was invoked were different. This tells us something basic although noteworthy about commonsense-knowledge-invoking. It is that there is “specific/instantial” intervention of commonsense in some cases where the scenario is unique/specific, versus that in more general scenarios in others. The piece of commonsense is the same - gravity - but the scenarios in which it got invoked were opposite. In the first case, it “occurs to us”, in the latter it gets passively assumed.

LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING DATA - A THEORETICAL IDEA

Suppose someone tells you or you read somewhere - Person X gave a ball to person Y. Now, the definition of a ball is - a spherical object used in playing games. But when I am listening to or reading the sentence at the very very first sight, what is my mind’s idea of a ball? I take just a tiny aspect of the definition of a ball. I don't process it as “a spherical object used in playing games” at that time. I am not “in touch with” the actual definition of a ball while merely reading the sentence. I just faintly, quickly, hazily visualize a typical ball, which is my “understanding of the read word ‘ball’ and move ahead. I similarly do the same visualization for “some person X” (just say a blurred image of a vertical human being), “some person Y” (just say a faint image of a vertical human being), and “giving” (which is a 1 second video clip of hand(s) jerking ahead). This is LEVEL 1 - understanding the sentence at a mere Syntactic English level or making sense of just the English of the sentence. LEVEL 2 - If I then reflect, think, pay closer attention to or begin to ponder over the data, I will draw leads and inferences and clues from it. One thing you might say is - “were they playing a game or something?” LEVEL 2 immediately follows LEVEL 1 in time. In fact they are over ‘chunks of words’ of a sentence at a time, if the sentence is not short like the example above. Meanings of words are like Graphical User Interface operating system files presented in the mind as icons with a symbol and a name. The name of the file is the very word. The icons (symbols on top of the words) are the representative faint, hazy visualizations of the “meaning” of the word. The mind accesses just these symbols during the first-sight reading of or decoding the mere English (syntax) of the sentence. Thinking or reflecting( LEVEL 2 - understanding the Semantics) is when you “double-click” on the icons of the files and “open” those files which have their definitions/properties stored inside them. In LEVEL 2 mode, (after the basic syntax is congnized), you access the contents of the files, and also inter-connect the contents of the different files to draw inferences/leads/clues from the sentence. So when you open the file ‘ball’, one thing you immediately see (say, written at the very “beginning” of the file) is “..playing games..”, which makes you pass the remark - “were X and Y playing or going to play some game?” (Basically, was this related in any way to playing some game?).

POSSIBILITY OF THE SEMANTICS OF A SENTENCE

Reference - The knowledge representation scheme above. Consider this sentence - John killed the bird with a gun. We think about the HOW / POSSIBILITY when given a sentence (i.e. the “way” in which it is possible, if so). In the above case that is - There was John. There was a bird. And John fired a bullet from it to hit the bird. The bird died. This is how what the sentence says is possible. (The other non commonsensical way in which this can be true is that John took a bird in his control and hammered a gun on it repeatedly to kill it. But commonsense is not what we are discussing here. We are only discussing possibilities). This possibility-gauging is a primal component of understanding any sentence. How do we judge this possibility, given a sentence? First step - We form a literal mechanical connective model of the English components of the sentence. (Ref the knowledge representation scheme before). The second step is checking the above with our experiences of the real world i.e. we check the validity of 1) the connections and 2) the properties (of the entities and of the connections). There can be invalidity at 3 levels - 1) one node of a connection is wrong 2) both nodes of a connection are wrong 3) a property is wrong. *The connection itself cannot be wrong by itself unless its a word out of the dictionary. Examples - One node is wrong : E.g. The dead man fired a bullet at the police. The connection here is ‘fired bullet’ between the ‘dead man’ and the ‘police’. Clearly the node dead man is wrong. Both the nodes are wrong - e.g. the dead man killed another dead man. The dead man cannot kill and a dead man cannot be killed. So both the nodes are wrong. Property is wrong - The blue phosphorus reacted with oxygen. The property ‘blue’ of phosphorus is wrong. There is nothing like blue phosphorus. Invalidity in possibility-gauging is almost equivalent to not understanding something, (the other case of not understanding being if you don't know the meaning of a word or a phrase).

LANGUAGE AND VISION : VISUALIZATION IS THE ONLY DIFFERENTIATOR IN MEANING

Consider these 2 sentences - Bill drives a truck. Bill stays at Campbell. Are these 2 sentences saying the same thing or different? Answer - Different. Why? Firstly it is clearly naive to say that if the words in 2 sentences are different, then those 2 sentences mean different things, since that is clearly not true. One would say that they “MEAN” different things - their meanings are different. How do you know their meanings are different? What is the meaning of the meaning of theirs in the first place? Also, you cannot do an algebra of it by expanding the constituent words into their definitions and then cancel the same words on both the sides (i.e. in the 2 sentences) and see if nothing remains on either side. One would say that the “stories” conveyed, or the relationship between the constituent entities conveyed by each sentence (which is what meaning broadly is) are different. One says that there is a man Bill and there is a truck and Bill drives that truck. The other says that there is a man Bill and a place called Campbell and Bill stays at that place called Campbell. But then this is recursive. How do you know that the meanings of “there is a man Bill and there is a truck and Bill drives that truck” and “there is a man Bill and a place called Campbell and Bill stays at that place called Campbell” are different? They may mean the same thing. The only way out of this is our visual machinery. The visualizations of these 2 sentences or of the respective sets of words in quotes just above LOOK different. It is equivalent to seeing 2 different pictures. Why is a computer mouse different from a pen? Because they mean different things. Why? Because they LOOK different or the visualizations of the functions (if you want to differentiate them by their functions) of each - “controlling the pointer on the screen” and “writing on something with a hand” - LOOK different. What makes “different” different? Why is a Compaq mouse different from a Logitech mouse which looks exactly the same? Because one is manufactured by Compaq and the other is manufactured by Logitech. Why is “manufactured by Compaq” not the same in meaning as “manufactured by Logitech”? Because they are different companies i.e. those 2 companies LOOK different from each other, or at least are at different places from each other (which makes their visualizations distinct from each other). That’s the only differentiator in meaning - VISUALIZATION.

WHY IS THE ‘VERB’ THE “KING” IN LANGUAGE?

Consider the following 3 sentences : John is playing the guitar. John was playing the guitar. John will play the guitar. These are the same things happening at different points in time. The separating or differentiating aspect of these 3 sentences is only time. So why does that differentiator have to be Linguistically manifested via the form of the verb only? Why not the noun or adjective or whatever? John exists today, existed yesterday and will exist tomorrow. The guitar exists today, existed yesterday and will exist tomorrow. The ‘playing’ (of the guitar) ALSO exists today, existed yesterday and will exist tomorrow. So why does the temporal differentiator have to be plugged into the ‘playing’ (verb/action) only? (when in fact all the 3 words - John (noun), guitar (noun) and playing (noun) are equivalent with respect to the difference in the time). Why not say that ‘John-ed plays guitar’ for ‘John was playing the guitar’, the “ed” indicating “John past”? Why is it so that whatever (that has an action/verb) that happens, becomes an “event/episode that happens i.e. verb”? (That is, say, why not “event-ed happen”?) Why does the verb carry the representative onus of the event (when there are other parts of speech hanging around)? Language is verb-centric.

Fundamental property of a sentence

EVERY string of words (collection of successive words) from the beginning of any sentence, BEARS/HAS AS A PROPERTY, the next adjacent word. Lets see this in the case of some examples - 1) John has a book. John + has : John has the property of having. (John what? John has). (John has) + a : John's having/possession has the property of oneness. (John has what? John has one 'something'). (John has a) + book : John's possession of oneness has the property of book. (John has one what? John has one book). 2) John has trouble working. John + has : John has the property of having. (John what? John has). (John has) + trouble : John's having has the property of (the possession of) trouble. (John has what? John has trouble) (John has trouble) + working : John's having trouble has as a property the attribute of working. (John has trouble with what? John has trouble with working). 3) Pictures of John have great value. Pictures + of : Pictures have the property of being owned/represented by. (Pictures what? Pictures of something) (Pictures of) + John : Ownership of pictures has the property of John as its beholder. (Pictures of whom? Pictures of John). (Pictures of John) + have : Ownership of pictures by John has the property of possessing/having. (Pictures of John what? Pictures of John have something) (Pictures of John have) + great : Ownership of pictures by John has the property of possessing/having greatness. (Pictures of John have what? Pictures of John have greatness). (Pictures of John have a great) + value : Ownership of pictures by JOhn has the property of possessing/having greatness which has the property of being the attribute of value. (Pictures of John have greatness of what? Pictures of John have greatness of value). 4) Experience has been unkind to John. "Experience has" : The experience (which John has had) bears the property of having something (unkindness). "Experience has been" : The having of the experience bears the property of being. "Experience has been unkind" : The being of the having of the experience bears the property of unkindness. "Experience has been unkind to" : The unkindness of the being of the having of the experience, bears the property of being towards something (John) "Experience has been unkind to John" : The towardness of the being of the unkindness of the being of the having of the experience, bears the property of John.

THE FUNDAMENTAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT -

Given 2 (or more) pieces of data or thoughts (thoughts are ultimately, data), ADD them. Given some data or thought (say, X), delete a part of X (say, x) from it. But for doing this you should first see X as being composed of x and (X-x) for removing x. So another way of putting this point is that given (A+B), remove B from it. E.g. - I don't want this tree in this painting. So rephrasing the above - Given A and B, do A+B Given (A+B), remove B The above principle applies even in the case you want to combine A and some part/aspect of B to say, draw an inference or to create something or whatever. Taking an aspect of B is (2) and adding it to A is (1). It also similarly applies if you transform A to A’ since that is only repeated subtraction and addition with itself. So any package of thinking can be explained in terms of (as a collection of) the above 2 points. You cannot do anything with just A i.e. just with one piece of data. (Typically, you have some knowledge stored in your mind to combine it with and draw an inference from A).

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ‘MEANING’?

Of Word, Sentence & Text. WORD - Suppose I say - John likes cricket. What is cricket? It is a game. Is this sufficient? No. Why? Because you haven't mentioned what is (/what happens) in that game? So one property of the meaning of the word X is to explain ‘what does X “contain”?’ Now let’s see what this “contain” contains. What would you mention about something to explain the meaning of that thing? Physical object external form, function/use/purpose. Abstract entity/concept class, Relation between constituent entities/concepts. Process Conditions under which it happens, dynamics, results/effects. Description Manner or degree of a property, effect SENTENCE : Relationship between 2 or more words. TEXT : Relationship between 2 or more sentences. Semi-illustration (sentence) - ‘John likes cricket.’ John - Human being (external form) + who does various things (function) Likes - derives happiness from it (condition) + and hence does repeatedly (result) Cricket - game (class) + in which two teams compete with a bat and ball in such and such way (relation between constituent entities/concepts). Meaning of the sentence - Which constituents of the respective words are entangled to compose the meaning of the sentence? 3 versions : Human being + derives pleasure from and does repeatedly + engage in a game. (External form) + (condition and result) + (class) The sentence talks about the conditions and results of a certain form engaging in a certain class of thing

A new language

Consider this funny sentence : John sandwichized. Suppose adding 'ized' to anything meant in our present-day language - hold it in your hand, put into your mouth, chew, swallow. Suppose there was no word like 'ate' (or 'eat') at all taught to you. And by the above, we understood what we TRULY UNDERSTAND by "John ate a sandwich." In a sentence, there is an indicator (word/chunk of the sentence/part of a word) for every concept. Learning language is learning which indicator stands for which concept in reality. For example, the suffix 'ized' to sandwich here makes us understand that a sandwich was eaten. The trouble with our language is that - there is a PARTIAL word “ate” for the literal process of eating, standing for - 'putting in mouth + chewing + swallowing'. Hence something is left to commonsense (which here is that ‘ate with “hand”’). If our language was like the way its suggested above, there would be no need for commonsense! This vaguely inspires something like - what if we have a language in which there are words, for all different collections of words which form the "commonsense package" associated with the present-day-language partial words, in various scenarios?

Source of realms of meanings of a sentence.

Consider this sentence - Jack gave a book to John.

In any sentence, we focus on only one aspect of (the meaning of) each word, for weaving the words into the meaning of the sentence as a whole, at a time. 

For example, the word ‘Jack’ has so much to it – he is a man/male, a human being, a body, a working professional, a Christian etc. Out of all this, all that we focus on is Jack, the basic human being with a body. Take 'book'. It is a solid physical object. It is a store of knowledge. It’s a tool/resource for formal education (say, it’s a text book or something). Out of all these, here, we take the aspect – a solid physical object.

How do we take these aspects? We happen to look at nearby words to a word while reading, and the sense in which we take them influences our semi-arbitrary (suitable though in a sense) choice of aspect of the word for weaving it into the meaning of the sentence. For example, the 'gave' almost immediately preceding 'book' tells us to take the book in the sense of a physical object being transported in space. This is because 'gave' is essentially/primarily seen as a physical action. Of course, upon more reflection, the nearby word to 'book, 'gave', is seen as a "general (physical or abstract) transfer" of anything, and that may give the book the sense of a knowledge-store-house, resulting in the net meaning of the sentence being taken as - Jack transferred a lot of knowledge to John. That's another way of weaving the aspects of the words into the whole meaning of the sentence. 

Or the 'to' dictates us to take the sense of the ownership or control of the book now being going to John, making us take John in the sense of a controller or owner (among his many aspects, same as Jack's). Whatever signal the mind takes upon first impression of a word decides the influence on the other words.

Minsky's realms (dominion, physical, etc.) of a sentence, mentioned in Chapter 6 of The Emotion Machine, stem from this.

'Word' and 'Sentence' - 2 sides of the same coin!

Take a sentence - John gave a book to Jack. This is made up of words.

The meaning of any word in the sentence is a combination of the meanings of some other words. So why isnt there a word for this given combination of words - the original sentence?

Well, there is something like a ‘General meaning’ (given in dictionaries; of words) and ‘Instantial meaning’ which is of specific “story-sentences” (which are combinations of words). General meaning is the generalization of an instantial-meaning-sentence. 

Relationship between a word and a sentence/string - 

Given Word -> converts to general meaning string -> Case of which is -> Instantial Meaning string -> Generalize -> converts to word (in many cases)

Thus 'word' and 'string/sentence' are 2 sides of the same coin - the conversion operator being - GENERALIZE/INSTANTIATE!

E.g. - 

Give -> transfer the possession of something to someone -> John transferred the possession of a ball to Jack -> someone transferred the possession of something to someone -> gave 

Analogy between 2 kinds of "meanings" -

1) Meaning of Words -

Suppose you are given this sentence - The book is on the table. You understand "what it MEANS". It means that there is a book resting on a table. Simple. 

2) Meaning of Reality-data - 

Suppose you see someone doing repetitions of a 100 kg dumbbell bar at the speed/frequency of squatting flies. You would immediately say - "this MEANS that the dumbells are fake (say, hollow)".

Now, in both the cases you used the word 'MEANS'. You used the concept of 'meaning'. 

Let's draw analogies. In place of words composed of letters and arranged in a certain order, in the first type, you have some real entities arranged in a certain way (configuration), in the second type. In both the cases you applied a set of knowledge-rules - in the first case, the rules of language, and in the second case, the commonsense (or otherwise) rules of the world. And in both the cases you drew an inference from these which was the 'MEANING'. This gives us a general definition of meaning - The inference drawn by applying thought to a given configuration of data, using certain knowledge-rules. 

But this means that meaning is nothing but an inference. Note that the meaning of 'X' is what X STANDS FOR and not what X IMPLIES (which is a further step via thinking more, on X). What X 'stands for' is also an 'implication' of X and hence meaning is a subset of implication. In a sense, MEANING IS THE "COMMONSENSE" OF IMPLICATION, since it is the first, immediate thing implied by any configuration of data. 

This leads to a point - Coming back to a previous part of this write-up, if the knowledge-rules of the world, applied in the second type were uncommonsensical, the inference would still have been the 'meaning', as long as the thinking involved in the drawing of the inference from them,applied on the given data, was not "more" or a "complex", or in other words, was obvious. 

Now, this previous sentence raises a question - what if there is a sentence, understanding whose "meaning" is tough. In that case, would you call the 'meaning' of that sentence, (inferred from the rules of language), as an 'implication' (because it's tough and not commonsense)? No, we would still call it the 'meaning' of the sentence, because the meaning of X is what X stands for, and the understood tough meaning of the given sentence would still be what the sentence (given in words) stands for (in reality). Implication always comes AFTER 'standing for', however difficult the drawing of the inference of the 'standing-for"' is.

An idea to define 'Meaning' -

Meaning of a word is how it relates other words to each other, with those other words taken in a general sense.

For example, what is the meaning of a table? It is how it relates 'four vertical legs' and 'a top flat surface' to each other. The meaning of the 'table' lies in this relationship.

 

Let me explain this in an even stronger and simpler way. What is the meaning of a hyphen ('-')? As in, when we say : The golden rule - "leave it", (this is in the context of Psychological tricks/tips to counter your problems/stress etc., what does the '-' mean? It means that 'leave it' IS THE 'golden rule'. What have I done here? In defining or explaining the meaning of '-', I have related, I have expressed the relationship between, 2 other things ('the golden rule' and 'leave it'). And also, this is to be done in a general sense i.e. we should say "when there is 'X -Y' the '-' means that Y IS X". Similarly, the word 'go' means the relationship between 'something (some entity/concept)' and 'displacement away' with that relationship being that 'that something's displacement away'.

"NEWTON'S 3RD LAW" IN LINGUISTICS -

Consider these few typical sentences - 

1) John kicked the ball.

2)The ice melted.

3) The flower is beautiful

4) The phone is on the table.

Whatever you utter in language, it will be in one of these 2 'forms' - 1) A-outward, denoted by A-> OR 2) A-inward, denoted by A<-

What do these forms mean? The first means that from 'A', something is going outwards, coming out. When John kicks the ball, the kick, as an action, a force, comes "out" from John. The second means that something is coming upon / happening to 'A'. When ice melts, there is an effect "upon" the ice. Hence A-inward. When I say the flower is beautiful, the flower "hosts"/"bears" the beauty. So it is A-inward. When it is said that the phone is on the table, the phone is bestowing (or one could say "acting") ON the table. So it is A-outward.

In the case of 'A->' there will always be an effect (A'<-) simultaneously. John will receive a force exerted by the ball on his leg (by literally Newton's 3rd law). In case of 'A<-', there will be a corresponding action or effect done by A (A'->). The ice will suck in the heat from the surroundings (while melting) and make it cooler. In the case of the flower being beautiful, the corresponding A'-> is that the beauty is spread into the surroundings by the flower. In case of the phone being on the table, the A'<- is that the table supports/holds the phone (it exerts a reaction force on the phone, in Mechanics' terms). 

INTERFERENCE - Semantic spatial overlap

Consider 2 chunks of words, following each other, in a sentence.

E.g. - 1) (Break the tree) + (with an axe)

2) (Drive the car) + (on the road)

3) (Watch the match) and (cheer for the team)

The bracketed sets of words are the chunks.

In some cases, reversing the order of the chunks (or changing the order of multiple chunks in a sentence) preserves the meaning of the sentence. In some cases, it doesnt. In examples (1) and (2), the meaning is preserved. 'Break the tree with an axe' and 'With an axe, break the tree' mean the same. Similarly, in the 2nd example. In example (3) it isnt. 'Watch the match and cheer for the team' doesnt quite mean the same as 'Cheer for the team and watch the match' since the order of events changes the semantics in the 2 cases. Whats the difference? When there is "INTERFERENCE" (semantic spatial overlap) of the chunks with each other, the meaning of the sentence isnt preserved; it is affected by the order. When there is none the meaning is preserved. 

What is this "interference" of? It is of the "semantic VIDEOS" of the chunks. 

Explanation : Lets see it all in the context of the examples above.

1) What is the semantic video of 'break the tree'? A tree breaking. While constructing the video of a chunk, do not factor in or involve the other chunk. What is the semantic video of 'with an axe'? Hands holding an axe with a slight one-second movement of the axe and the hands in the air, away and besides from the tree. (The word 'with' is responsible for the one-second movement). These 2 videos are at DIFFERENT places in space. So there is no spatial overlap. Hence there is no interference. Hence the meaning is preserved upon changing the order - 'Break the tree with an axe' or 'With an axe, break the tree'.

2) What is the semantic video of 'drive the car'? It is the sheer literal video of a car being driven (even the road is missing). Only a moving car, being driven by someone. What is the semantic video of 'on the road'? A hypothetical finger being pointed (with a slight jerk!) to the top surface of a road signifying "on the road". These 2 videos are "disjoint" in space (though touching each other; but not OVERLAPPING). Hence no interference and no change in meaning upon change of order.

3) Now see the 3rd example. The video of 'Watch the match' is 'eyes staring at the TV screen'. The semantic video of 'cheer for the team' is 'jumping up and down while looking at the TV. These 2 clearly spatially overlap. Hence there is a sort of an interference in the 2 videos playing. Hence the meaning changes in the cases of the 2 different orders of the chunks.

This theory sheds light on how there being a spatial overlap between the 'visuals' of the chunks, which relates to the way the brain processes the event as a whole upon being exposed to the 2 chunks in combination, relates to the Linguistics (Semantics here) of the sentence!