The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

5.3. The Semantic Perspective

To describe relationships among resources, we need to understand what the relations mean. This semantic perspective is the essence of relationships and explains why the resources are related, relying on information that is not directly available from perceiving the resources. In our Simpson family example, we noted that Homer and Marge are related by marriage, and also by their relationship as parents of Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, and none of these relationships are directly perceivable. This means that “Homer is married to Marge” is a semantic assertion, but “Homer is standing next to Marge” is not.256[Cog]

[256][Cog] “Semantic” is usually defined as “relating to meaning or language” and that does not seem helpful here.

Semantic relationships are commonly expressed with a predicate with one or more arguments. A predicate is a verb phrase template for specifying properties of objects or a relationship among objects. In many relationships the predicate is an action or association that involves multiple participants that must be of particular types, and the arguments define the different roles of the participants.257[Cog]

[257][Cog] For decades important and vexing questions have been raised about the specificity of these predicate-argument associations and how or when the semantic constraints they embody combine with syntactic and contextual constraints during the process of comprehending language. Consider how “While in the operating room, ...