Encounters with Language
Charles J. Fillmore · Computational Linguistics · 2012
First of all, I am overwhelmed and humbled by the honor the ACL Executive Committee has shown me, an honor that should be shared by the colleagues and students I've been lucky enough to have around me this past decade-and-a-half while I've been engaged in the FrameNet Project at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.I've been asked to say something about the evolution of the ideas behind the work with which I've been associated, so my remarks will be a bit more autobiographical than I might like. I'd like to comment on my changing views of what language is like, and how the facts of language can be represented. As I am sure the ACL Executive Committee knows, I have never been a direct participant in efforts in language engineering, but I have been a witness to, a neighbor of, and an indirect participant in some parts of it, and I have been pleased to learn that some of the resources my colleagues and I are building have been found by some researchers to be useful.I offer a record of my encounters with language and my changing views of what one ought to believe about language and how one might represent its properties. In the course of the narrative I will take note of changes I have observed over the past seven decades or so in both technical and conceptual tools in linguistics and language engineering. One theme in this essay is how these tools, and the representations they support, obscure or reveal the properties of language and therefore affect what one might believe about language. The time frame my life occupies has presented many opportunities to ponder this complex relationship.This story begins in the 1930s and 1940's, in St. Paul, Minnesota. There was nothing linguistically exotic about growing up there, except perhaps the Norwegian-accented English of some of my mother's older relatives. But during much of my childhood I was convinced that I personally had difficulties with language: The symptom was that I could never think of anything to say. I was tongue-tied. I now suspect that it was mainly a problem of the shyness and awkwardness that goes along with growing up confused, and not an actual matter of language pathology. Nevertheless, it led me into my earliest attempt to work with language data.At around age 14, I presented my problem to a librarian in the St. Paul Public library, and she found me a book called 5,000 Useful Phrases for Writers and Speakers. A memorable example was “With a haggard lift of the upper lip…” I took the book home, cut sheets of typewriter paper into eight pieces to make file slips, chose phrases I thought I should memorize, and copied them onto these slips. I held them together with rubber bands, and I kept them in a secret place in my room. Thus supported with the early 1940s technologies of paper, scissors, pencil, and rubber bands, my earliest theory of language began to develop: Linguistic competence is having access to a large repertory of ready-made things to say.I added to the collection over the years, as I came upon clever or wise expressions, and consulted a selection of them every night, scheming to create situations in which I could use them, in speaking or writing. In later years I held on to the suspicion that much of ordinary conversation in real life involves calling on remembered phrases rather than creating novel expressions from rules. Much later I learned that in many Eastern European countries influenced by the Moscow School, the divisions of the field of Linguistics were Phonology, Morphology, Lexicology, Phraseology, and Syntax. The study of phraseological units—phraseologisms—was seen as central, not peripheral, to linguistic inquiry.My first exposure to the actual field of Linguistics came a year later, around age 15, when a missionary lady on leave, living on my block in St. Paul, gave me a copy of Eugene Nida's little book, Linguistic Interludes (Nida 1947). The text of this book takes the form of conversations in a college campus co-op between a clever and wise linguist and a caricatured collection of innocent and unsuspecting students and colleagues, among them a classicist who strongly defended the logical perfection of the classical languages Greek and Latin.This book succeeded in conveying simply many of the things that linguists believe: Relevant linguistic generalizations are based on speech, not writing.Almost all concepts of “correct grammar” are inventions, with no basis in the history of the language.There may be primitive communities, but there are no primitive languages. The minor protagonists in the conversation contested each of these principles, and the linguist hero, from his vast knowledge of the most exotic of the world's languages, kept showing them how wrong they were. I liked the idea of knowing things that most people, including college professors, had wrong opinions about. I also liked the idea of being able to help them change their wrong opinions, so I decided to study Linguistics.Before long I was enrolled in a fairly small linguistics program at the University of Minnesota. I could live at home, take a streetcar to Minneapolis for classes, and take another streetcar to Montgomery Wards in St. Paul, where I wrapped venetian blinds to support my studies.In those days there were no linguistics textbooks in the modern sense; we studied two books titled Language—one by Edward Sapir 1921 and the other by Leonard Bloomfield 1933—and we read grammars and treatises. I took two years of Arabic. I supplemented my training in linguistic methods through Summer Linguistic Institutes put on by the Linguistic Society of America, one in Michigan and one in Berkeley, where I learned about Thai, Sanskrit, and Navajo with Mary Haas, Franklin Edgerton, and Harry Hoijer.One of my professors at the University Minnesota was building concordances of some of the minor Late Latin texts, and he permitted the students in his class to work with him on these projects. For the advanced students this was a chance to get valuable hands-on research experience; for the less advanced students it was an opportunity to get “extra credit.”This was in a sense my first exposure to corpus-based linguistics. For any given document, the professor would pass on the text to that year's students. This “first generation” of students copied word tokens onto separate index cards, together with each word's “parse” in the classical sense, and its location in the document.Generation 2—the students in the next year's class—alphabetized these cards and typed up the concordances. Generation 3, in which I participated, took this same stack of cards and reverse-alphabetized them, so they could be used for research on suffixes. (Personal note: alphabetizing words from right to left is stressful at first, but you get used to it.) So with the tools of pre-cut index cards, a pencil, and a typewriter, we students constructed a concordance—we physically experienced that concordance.So you can imagine my surprise when, thirty-some years later, I came upon UNIX like and I I these were nothing to the I experienced later with by right and left and the of tools that those days it took a of and to a But it also took a of and to use a A to the was a vast index in for each you could every it and you learned where that in would to the actual it and it in its For when the take upon I to the of This will I take upon me to I to up As to 3, and for it that to the you can use while on a of of Eastern European to me to work more than I began to English to and on which of the of the in my I was to I was to learn something about and my would and I had to between for the or A me one year at the in the for my first my and I was a one had any record of an offer to a year in I was not to my I took the The were in on a record and the were in In those days the of had not been There was of a to how you could in at the could at get a and read the to the that I any of the my came as based in large on I was to for a in which I was to to a small field of the to The I to on never had anything to were which I was to days of the days days days I an to and of was to the on the most modern typewriter of the a that had separate for and ordinary typewriter at that time had separate for the through could be used for and could be used for For this work I a the long and of the a of and the word for I had been permitted to say what I was I would have I was in but of course I was the I of was what they on my time and me to around in with and to learn something about The linguistic methods I had learned at the of I had any training in of the of a but I a of for both and and I was when I found the in which could be into English word by word from the to the it was time to be I I was to the and I to another year or I I to to on my I with the help of to be the first to get a in As a there, I supported by two other I was permitted to work at University with the and was the of the of and one of the of an for his my students and I through and with the and of the of the through this essay is the that it is not to a in a or in a of a language study of me with the that for any given to what it and what is The presented me with an early of The of words is by the of a but the of complex words in this in the are not at have by but this is not in the language. 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that the is some of or or or and that the words in this frame and their with to also For the of is the of generalizations from can be by to the more they FrameNet not the but also a of where all words are that are for each In we that to and most we can those that are by the as as those that the as of and so But as we to those that simply of the we that we as This is given to expressions that are by a but that is of the As a and are for the of of In work it has to in which the of a and the of a are not we are in words in their we have support support and we with support and is that the is the that the In expressions like take a make a a say a and the frame is by the The same can be observed with in at and at The or the but also the of the of and are that in a of between the frame and the in like this a that of it is the that in of the of the may also be in the of of have that may be to upon for can have with them, to say something about the of and that can in those For and are of the This is not of as and so FrameNet is from the and for the most the of of words that of their or that have for which ordinary and so For these we would like to make with what we words with to the they For would be in where it is by and so years we have added to the FrameNet something we the which is a of of their and of the properties and of the phrases or that they and of the are in a called a of as a collection of where each a of the of the into a not by principles, from the of the collection like the that the they the they or expressions like an or expressions like I am with the The collection is not to or but also with and as a large of and of their and the is to the from the their with those by the The is to a of to the properties of the being of University in has a for the is to be able to that can be about a or a or a or knowledge of their language. This can never be but one by I came in my a program from the Institute that I was on a one the would a linguist like to in the of what I but I think that could work the we it, and the the to the the FrameNet of will a chance of being to that of I to the ACL Executive Committee for the and the for