Dictionary Domains

 Let's talk about Verbs

To talk about verbs, we need to treat them as nouns.

Definition: a noun or noun phrase governed by an active transitive verb or by a preposition

We have ‘noun’, ‘verb’, and ‘preposition’ being treated as nouns for the purpose of parsing the sentence.

Definition: used with a past participle to form the passive mood

We would also need to allow ‘adverb’, ‘pronoun’, ‘conjunction’, ‘participle’, ‘tense’ – in fact every grammatical form to be parsed as a noun.

When we tag “governed by an active transitive verb”, the verb object is made the child of GrammarVerb. GrammarVerb is an invocation of Noun, so “an active transitive verb” is seen as a noun phrase, and parsing continues. There is a connection between GrammarVerb and Verb, but OBJECTONLY, so part of speech can’t be inherited by the node Verb.

 

When parsing is completed, the node representing Verb in the sentence is moved from being a child of GrammarVerb to being a child of Verb.

 

 It may be better to have a specialised operator, rather than using something lying around, like OBJECTONLY.

 Basically, the object has to pretend to be a noun for parsing, then become what it is grammatically for use as a rule (Active and Transitive will be relations on the Verb node).

 Transitive can apply to verbs, or to relations in mathematics – it may be preferable to have a grammatical version of it (or the grammatical meaning always applies when used with a grammar object).

 This sounds complicated, but children can do all this easily – they don’t need it explained in abstract terms, or shifting connections. It would be nice to know how they do it.

We need to handle punctuation the same way - sometimes it is a noun, sometimes not.

    Put a question mark at the end of the question.

    There are question marks about the policy.

    The sentence is missing a comma.