yang1991ffs

Alright, I basically spent the whole day trying to read yang1991ffs. It was tough in the beginning because I kept wanting to something else, anything but read, but after a few hours of just being stupid I finally managed to coax myself into it. This article is a bit longer than the other two I've read in this series, which is good because they can afford to put a bit more meat on their technical bone. Indeed, if ever there was a text that would help me to "get" SFG, this might be the one. My head is still kinda swimming from trying to understand what's going on, but here we go:

SFG in my terms

The thing that makes SFG confusing for newbie eric is that there different kinds of "decomposition". I have a hard time telling them apart, or even knowing if they are genuinely different. As I understand it now, there are three kinds: the network hierarchy, conjunction/disjunction of networks, decomposition of the input specification, and rank-wise decomposition (?!). Oh wait, the last two are the same thing.

The other thing is that SFG throws around the word "function" alot -- this is just me being stupid -- whereas for a functional programmer like me, that word triggers all sorts of irrelevant associations. (Although AR seems to say something about representing Functions in the SFG sense with functions in the FP sense). So let's say we don't like the word function; let's call it something else like "purpose" or "ixiwubble". Ayup, SIL, Systemic Ixiwubblistic Linguistics.

decomposition of input specification

So here's the new thing I learned about today: rank-wise decomposition of the input specification. Ditch the rank-wise, for now; don't really know what it means. The big deal here is that when you're traversing the network, you sometimes hit a certain trigger (PRESELECT) which causes part of the input specification to be cut out and realised completely independently of what you're actually doing. In programmer terms, the thing spawns a new thread and now you got two network traversals going on in parallel. The big secret is that the new thread consists of re-entering the network! It's a recursive call: traverse net foo(bar) = traverse net bar ++ bunch of other crap

So what? Well, it means my mental model of SFG has been all wrong. I somehow thought there was ONE network traversal but different things going on in parallel, right? I somehow imagine that the whole input was just there as a resource, that gets consulted whenever one piece of network wants to know something. But nope, it's not like that. That sounds soooo similar, but it's not the same thing. What we got here is decomposition of the input specification, and a whole separate traversal. In fact, you start over! (Actually, the PRESELECT operator can make it so that you start from a specific point in the network, but in order to get what's going, it really helps to just think of this being a whole new traversal starting out in a separate thread).

SFG vs TAG

This paper explains why SFG wants TAG (and why TAG wants SFG) in terms that stupid programmer/engineer eric can understand, sort of. It's really like trying to clean up a computer program: you've got a big messy SFG grammar that's trying to do too many things. It's trying to represent how ixiwubbles (functions) relate to each other, and it's trying to say enough things about syntax so that you don't get output like "Who Mary John love did?". A better way to do it is strip all that syntax crap out of your SFG and just talk ixiwubbles, ixiwubbles and only ixiwubbles.

pick this up later

Aww man I'm too tired for this. I'm just going to go home and talk about this in my free-writing exercise tomorrow. WYD 15 min/day suggests that I try to get into a habit of (1) writing every day (2) writing first. Like, literally first. The desired outcome is that from now on, the first thing I do whenever I get to the lab is write 1000 words. Like really first: remove your jacket, sit down, write 1000 words. The reward for which is that I get to check my email.

For now we focus on regularity, not on content or on quality. 1000 words of anything, as long as it's the very first thing I do. What should hopefully happen is that after a while, it just gets easier to associate go-to-lab with write-1000-words (ding ding ding! salivate...). Once we've established this habit, we start increasing the roughage: slowly turn up the dial on the structure and focus (i.e. write about work stuff, instead of whatever random crap just passes through my head). But the important thing is crank ze words out.

I realise that koweynlg means that I already spend lots of time 'writing' (especially writing crap). The two key differences are that (1) this one is first thing in the morning (2) this is eventually going to be my thesis-writing time.