GRAHAM JOHN

Writer & teacher exploring faith, history, and language. Agnostic by nature, drawn to clarity over certainty.

From Semantic Markers to Machine Meaning: How Linguistics Prepared the Way for AI

From Chomsky’s early search for rules to today’s learning machines, this essay traces how linguistics tried — and failed — to explain meaning through structure. The story leads from semantic markers to Large Language Models, showing how the statistical approach once dismissed as mechanical has achieved a sophistication that mirrors the very act of writing itself.

An Linguistic Investigation of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats (1795-1821)

Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci transforms the simplicity of the traditional ballad into a vehicle of emotional and psychological depth. Beneath its haunting repetitions and musical structure lies a meditation on love, death, and the limits of human understanding. This study examines the poem’s form, language, and symbolism, relating its patterns to Keats’s life and to wider questions of communication and meaning.

The Architecture of Language: From Aristotle to Artificial Intelligence

The Seven Parts of Speech The familiar seven parts of speech — noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection — have a lineage stretching back over two millennia. Their origins lie in the work of Dionysius Thrax (c. 170–90 BCE), whose Téchnē Grammatikē (The Art of Grammar) classified Greek words into eight categories. The …