Saturday, May 23, 2015

A relation between questions and truisms

I am not clear on it but it seems that sentence meaning evolves dynamically while the sentence is being expressed and then takes on a static final topic form when the sentence is over. In the topic form, we are prepared to answer questions. The questions line up neatly with the parts of the topic that could have been set via an expectation within the expression. For example:
(X->Y)at->[place] _/[time] _/[manner]
Each implicit slot related to the event 'X->Y' corresponds to the questions: "Where?", "when?", and  "how?". The truisms with becoming (use of '::') correspond to the questions "Why?" and "how?".

For any variable of a narrative filled in by words from an expression, we can ask afterwards: "What was the value of that variable?" Truisms are narratives where this generic question takes on the standard form of: who, how, when, where, what, why (and also "still?" for truism 4). [Hmm...I don't know a truism for "who?". Maybe there is one I have not discovered....I have a weekend to think about it.]

Friday, May 22, 2015

A restated truism

Truism 6N: What is implicit can become be followed by it being explicit

This is actually a family of truisms, for any narrative N(X) with sub-narrative 'X':

 N( [Z] ) ,  Z

For example, the definition of 'with' includes an implicit location: "Peter was with Bob, at the store"

This gives us a third type of truism. Thus we have
  • The first 4 single truisms listed here
  • Any factoid (a supposition about particulars) - truism 5N
  • Any one of the infinite family 6N
I am afraid I have made a mess of the numbering and the roll out of the ideas.