Three ways to argue over arguments
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009UPDATE: Contribute information on how your language identifies its arguments here.
When we execute a command in Ubiquity, in very simple terms, we’re hoping to do something (a verb) to some arguments (the nouns). Every sentence in every language uses some method to encode which arguments correspond to which roles of the verb. Here are a couple examples:
1 2 | He sees Mary. 彼が Maryを 見る。 (Kare-ga Mary-o miru.) |
As speakers of English, you can read sentence (1) above and know exactly who is doing the seeing and who is being seen and speakers of Japanese can get the same information from (2). How do different languages code for arguments in different roles? There are, broadly speaking, three different ways:

We’ll take a brief look today at these three different strategies, all of which a localizeable natural language interface will surely encounter.