[Haskell-cafe] Re: categories and monoids

[Chung-chieh Shan]

Wolfgang Jeltsch <g9ks157k at acme.softbase.org> wrote in article <200903181116.37073.g9ks157k at acme.softbase.org> in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe:
> Am Dienstag, 17. März 2009 18:43 schrieben Sie:
> > There's no such implication in English. The standard example used by
> > linguists is "fake gun".
> Okay, but this is a corner case isn???t it?

Perhaps (depending on what you consider to be a corner case).
But then why not take "generalized monoid" to be a corner case too?

> And the phrase ???generalized monoid??? has another problem. It???s not a single 
> monoid that is generalized but the ???monoid concept???. The class of monoids is 
> extended to become the class of categories.

I'm not sure what problem you mean.  Perhaps you have in mind a
grammar that defines what strings are well-formed English sentences
and a semantics that specifies their denotations (say, their truth
conditions), such that it turns out that the meaning of "generalized
monoid" is inappropriate.  But what do you have in mind?

Linguists typically take adjectives to denote functions from noun
meanings to noun meanings.  Because linguists also typically take nouns
to denote functions, adjectives end up denoting higher-order functions.
That's why this message is still generalized on-topic. :)

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