From cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.bitnet!LOJBAN Mon Jul 27 15:04:56 1992 Return-Path: Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.21.1 #21.19) id ; Mon, 27 Jul 92 15:04 EDT Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA04969; Mon, 27 Jul 92 14:30:49 EDT Received: from rutgers.edu by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA13808; Mon, 27 Jul 92 14:20:04 -0400 Received: from cbmvax.UUCP by rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) with UUCP id AA23910; Mon, 27 Jul 92 13:21:51 EDT Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA29639; Mon, 27 Jul 92 11:54:15 EDT Received: from pucc.Princeton.EDU by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA12632; Mon, 27 Jul 92 11:37:46 -0400 Message-Id: <9207271537.AA12632@relay1.UU.NET> Received: from PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU by pucc.Princeton.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 3426; Mon, 27 Jul 92 11:36:39 EDT Received: by PUCC (Mailer R2.08 ptf034) id 6008; Mon, 27 Jul 92 11:35:24 EDT Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 15:06:23 BST Reply-To: CJ FINE Sender: Lojban list From: CJ FINE Subject: Response on relatives and quantifiers X-To: Lojban list To: John Cowan Status: RO I've read responses from Ian, John, Bob and Veijo, and I haven't changed my views. First, a clarification of intent. Veijo in particular seems to have assumed that my intent was to find a way to say certain things in Lojban. This is not so. I was analysing the existing structure of the language, trying to understand it and see its semantics, and I came across an area where the syntactic structure does not match what I believe to be the *current* semantic (or logical) structure. It is likely that my interpretation of this semantic structure is at least in part derived from my intuitions as an English speaker; but I do my best to avoid this. So I was a little hurt by Veijo's implication that I was coming from the point of view of translation - old Loglanists will know that I have been assiduous in questioning malglico for years. Anyway, to specific comments: As Iain and Bob rightly point out, it is not essential that the deep structure/ semantic parse follow the surface structure; but it is highly desirable. I also believe that getting this sort of disparity straightened out is a valuable step in the process of understanding what we mean and what we are skating over in learning and talking Lojban - for me probably the foremost attraction of the language. Bob on "ci le vo la djan. pu jibri ku": ===================================== - as Iain pointed out, this means "Three of the four Johns were jobs", and indeed the grammar does not allow a quantifier to the pseudo-possessive (sumti-4/sumti_E_96) John: ===== My statement in section 1 that "lo sipna noi melbi" means that all sleepers are beautiful, is of course wrong according to what we (want it to) mean. My argument precisely is that if you follow the parse, it does mean that, because it parses as (su'o) [lo sipna [noi melbi]] with the (implied) quantifier unequivocally outside the scope of the relative. It is true that I did not specifically discuss relative clauses with non-descriptive sumti; however I did not ignore them: My contention is that *as a matter of current fact* we interpret relative clauses with non-descriptions as (necessarily) outside the sumti (but inside the (external) quantifier), whereas we interpret relative clauses with descriptions as inside the sumti and the internal quantifier. (I am ignoring incidentals here, which are currently a problem, as I explained). Thus ci da poi sipna means ci [da poi sipna] three (out of) (those x who are sleepers) but lo ci prenu poi sipna means lo [ci [prenu poi sipna]] some ((persons who are sleepers) (incidentally there are three)) but our existing parse matches in the first case, but not the second. My suggestion 1(c) is to change the syntax so that these two currently valid sumti will still both be valid, but will parse reflecting the semantics I have given. Thus my proposal is not 'to separate incidental and restrictive clauses, and to place the latter within the scope of "le ... ku"'. It is to separate incidental and restrictive clauses, *and* to define two different places of attachment for the latter: one within descriptions and the other outside the sumti-4. All existing strings that do not involve incidentals will remain valid, but they will parse differently according as there is a description or not. As an extra, it will be possible to place the restrictive string outside the description explicitly (and therefore outside the internal quantifier) by using "KU". I am not happy about your description of the semantic processing of relative clauses as a block. I considered this as one possibility, but I notice that Veijo strongly favoured the other possibility, where the order of the clauses is significant. (I return to this below when I discuss his paper). I am also unconvinced by your assertion that they are necessarily associative and commutative because sentence logical connection is so. This might be persuasive if we were just talking about the "poi" series, but the intensionality of "voi" completely screws that argument. There is no requirement for a pair of successive *subjective* restrictions on the set of possible objects even to commute. Your explanation of the effect of "da poi" is very clear, and more succinct than my own. We are in complete agreement. Further, your discussion of "ke'a" exactly demonstrates my point: that logically restrictive and incidental clauses belong at different places in the parse. Obviously, I don't agree that "relative-clauses" is too far down in the hierarchy - it is both too far down and not low enough. Incidentally, the fact that it appears twice is purely a requirement of mabla indefinite descriptions. As others have since said, "lo ci mi broda" is not a sumti but a bridi. To my mind this is yet another reason for getting rid of the bare pseudo-possessive. Your argument that "mi" gets pulled out and transformed into the relative-clauses block is only persuasive if you believe in the relative-clauses block, which I don't. Further, while I would be keen to have a transformational description of the language, I would vastly prefer one limited to transformations within the syntactic structure, not just of surface strings; ie that did not allow shifts into or out of constituents, as this would require. Thanks for your support on ciboi mu denmikce. "Space the bastard". Veijo ===== Much of your paper is valid in its own right, but not an answer to mine, as I have said above. For example "le ci le sipna poi mi nelci ke'a" is fine to express what you say; my argument was about the *actual* meaning of "le ci sipna poi mi nelci ke'a". I agree with you that the order of mixed relatives should be significant; however, I believe that le prenu poi mi viska ke'a zi'egoi ko'a will be much more common than le prenu goi ko'a zi'epoi mi viska which is why I designed my proposal to allow the first to be said easily: *le prenu poi mi viska [ku'o] [ku] goi ko'a I did not specifically consider how to say the second, but I assumed it could be done (my note near the end of section 8) - and your suggestion of nesting descriptions might well be the answer. I have mixed feelings about your proposed extension to "lomi ci le cukta". On the one hand, I don't see why we shouldn't have it. On the other, as Bob said in response to my earlier proposal about preposed relatives "the pseudo-possessive is a special case, and not something to generalise from". [My suggestion was not generalising from the pseudo-possessive, but an independently motivated extension to reduce what I think are unnecessary constraints on the order of constituent, which *incidentally* happened to make a highly anomalous structure more nearly regular - though not quite.] Once again, I don't agree that "lomi ci cukta" does mean "[lo ci cukta] pe mi" - I claim that *as we use it* it means "lo ci [cukta pe mi]". I would like to end by reiterating the effect of my main proposal (1(c)) on existing texts, as there seems to have been some confusion: 1) Where restrictives and incidentals are not mixed, NO CHANGE 2) Where restrictives and incidentals are mixed, the incidentals have to be moved to the end WITHOUT zi'e, and the restrictives terminated (if necessary) by ku'o or ge'u 3) NO FURTHER CHANGE is required to distinguish internal and external restrictives - they fall out naturally. Colin