notes-cog-language-languageMisc

i guess one thing about human language is the whole verb/noun thing.

Nouns, noun phrases, and adjectives fit in well with the general mathematical and programming language formalisms that we have. Conjunctions, pronouns, and prepositions are not quite as clear but presumably can be handled simply enough.

Verbs are something different (the relationship between nouns and adjectives is presumably the same as between verbs and adverbs, so we probably don't have to worry about adverbs either). Determiners are different too, but not as important as verbs. It seems to me that verbs, and especially the fact that they are so common and even mandatory, imply a set of assumptions that human thought makes. What are these?

One of them seems to be that most nouns can be thought of as agents, often via anthropomorphization. An agent implies a linear timeline. The timeline is partititoned into segments during which the agent is doing different actions (furthermore, the default assumption seems to be that at each moment in time, the agent is doing just one thing; although this just the default, because it is accepted that an agent can be doing multiple things at once).

Furthermore the concepts of owning, wanting, trying, using, believing, and liking, and emotional/experiential state are applied to agents (i don't think this is a comprehensive list btw, it's just the ones i thought of first). That is, agents can 'have' things; they can want things; they can attempt actions; they can use things to attempt actions, they can hold beliefs; they can have preferences; and they can be happy/sad/etc and be in pain/hungry/full/etc. I mention these because, in math or computer programming, we don't generally apply those concepts to arbitrary nouns.

On the other hand, one thing which are like verbs in math and which are absent from human language are functions (another is group actions). But functions don't have an exact analog in language; a function can have arbitrarily many inputs, whereas a verb has a single subject. For example "add(2,2) = 4" does not easily/directly translate into human language's subject/verb structure.