The word is not enough: on morphemes, characters and ontological concepts
The word is not enough: on morphemes, characters and ontological concepts
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DOI：
10.1111/cla.12145
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发表时间：
2016-12-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.6
通讯作者：
Richter, Stefan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Goepel, Torben;Richter, Stefan
在形态学领域，最近出现了计算机辅助本体论，这些工具允许对定义的概念进行语义组织，因此有望在涉及形态数据的计算机中介方法中非常有用，例如在分支学中。然而，本体论和分支学之间的理论关系几乎没有被探索过。在这里，我们考察了形态分支学中主要术语的本体论地位，即语素、字符、字符状态和本体论概念。语素是描述性视角的单位，而字符状态是进化视角的单位，指的是相同的转化阶段。语素和字态都代表事物，即真实的实体。然而，字符状态和语素表示对这些实体的不同观点(描述与进化)。字符(变换系列；亨尼格的表意字符概念)和本体论概念都是类，但性质不同。用来对语素进行分类的本体论概念是构造物，即完全是人造的类，只是用作对真实实体进行分类以便人类识别的一种方式。然而，字符是包含所有共同血统的字符状态的类，因此具有客观的、人类独立的属性。因此，字符是自然的种类，表现出与单子叶植物相同的自然同一性的类别，例如，也具有作为客观属性的共同血统。在这种背景下，基于本体论的形态学可以成为系统发育系统学的一个有价值的补充。形式化的、机器可解析的描述允许在大型数据集中泛化语素，并有助于识别相同的字符状态。然而，研究人员的专业知识是不可或缺的，因此，从描述层面到进化层面的完全自动化似乎是不可能的。
The field of morphology has recently seen the arrival of computer-aided ontologies, tools which permit the semantic organization of defined concepts and which therefore promise to be extremely useful in computer-mediated approaches involving morphological data, for example in cladistics. The theoretical relationship between ontologies and cladistics, however, has hardly been explored. Here we examine the ontological status of the main terms in morphological cladistics, i.e. morpheme, character, character state and ontological concept. Morphemes are units of the descriptional perspective, whereas character states are units of the evolutionary perspective and refer to identical stages of transformation. Both morphemes and character states represent things, i.e. real entities. However, character state and morpheme denote different perspectives on these entities (description vs. evolution). Characters (transformation series; Hennig's ideographic character concept) and ontological concepts are both classes, but not of the same nature. Ontological concepts which are used to classify morphemes are constructs, i.e. totally man-made classes that serve only as a way of classifying real entities for human recognition. Characters, however, are classes that encompass all character states of common descent and which therefore have objective, human-independent properties. Characters, then, are natural kinds, classes which exhibit a natural identity in the same way as monophyla do, for example, which also have common descent as an objective property. Against this background, ontology-based morphology can be a valuable addition to phylogenetic systematics. Formalized, machine-parsable descriptions permit the generalization of morphemes in large datasets and can facilitate the recognition of identical character states. However, the expertise of the researcher is indispensable, and full automation of the transfer from the descriptive level to the evolutionary level thus appears impossible.