From: CJ FINE Message-Id: <520.9208041113@mail.bradford.ac.uk> Subject: Grammar changes 20 & 21 To: Bob Le Chevalier Date: Tue, 4 Aug 92 12:13:21 BST Content-Length: 4258 Lines: 96 Bob, What can I say? I am very appreciative of the effort you and Cowan and Nora have gone to on this matter, and the respect that, as you say, you are showing me. I was going to send a further response to your interim paper disagreeing with how you interpreted me in a few places, but I won't now: that's all swept away in your excellent proposal. [What particularly delights me is that your proposal in effect matches both much of my recent suggestion, and also the call I made the other month for pre-posed relatives. I did not expect this bounty.] I understand le do'o reluctance to make a change of this size this late, but I believe it is a noticeable improvement to the grammar, so I certainly support it. I definitely favour option 1) (which is the closest to my suggestion), but would accept 3). I am least happy with 2). A few more specific comments: No, I'm not looking at anything else at this level! "le pe ci mi broda" was exactly what I argued for the other month. I have one or two queries about the grammar you exhibited: 1) the bnf has "gek" in both sumti-3 and sumti-6, which surprised me, and indeed it seems to be only in sumti-3 in the YACC. This prevents you from saying *ci ge le broda gi ko'a and *[ge le broda gi ko'a ] poi melbi which seems fine to me - they're not very intuitive, and if you really want them you can nest explicitly though sumti-6 with LAhE or else LE . I take it that this is actually just a bug in the BNF. 2) I found it a bit odd that both sumti-4 and sumti-5 can start with quantifier, but I take it LALR-1 can handle this. 3) I also found it odd that multiple zi'e zei cau relative clauses are sometimes left-branching sisters of a constituent (sumti-tail), sometimes right-branching ditto (sumti-4) and sometimes a constituent in their own right (nested-relative-clauses). I accept that this is an artifact of writing grammar for YACC, but I think it is unfortunate for a nu'o syntactic-semantic description of the language, not to mention any transformational account. But for the time being, your note in relative-clause-120 will have to serve. 4) You've also left the old sumti-tail-113 in the BNF, and omitted a ket in the second branch of sumti-tail. The three options: I favour option 1) because it is the most orthogonal - I don't like the way that forethought/afterthought either have different meanings (2) or depend on other structures, whose relevance may not be immediately obvious (3). Note that the part of my argument which you have rejected is my claim that the unmarked position for incidentals should be external, while that for restrictives is internal; option 1 reflects that belief in the (more important pe'i) case of restrictives. Preposed relatives: I didn't say that "post-posed relatives are abnormal to all but English speakers in an AN-ordered language"! That's a much stronger claim than I ever intended to make. I said that some languages have only pre-posed relatives, and I don't see why Lojban should not extend its flexibility to allow those. I note that we will now have the option of teaching pseudo-possessives as a special case of preposed-relatives, thus le mi zdani as elliptic for le pemi zdani just as ze mensi is elliptic for ze lo mensi I don't say we have to do this, but it is an option. Other changes: I have no special comment on most of these. I'm generally in favour of what seem to be improvements in simplicity and regularity - I especially favour 10 and 16 15: If we are to allow SE NAhE selbri, we must specify that the place structure of the NAhE selbri is the same as that of the selbri. This is probably obvious, but worth making explicit. 13: If it doesn't complicate the grammar, why take it out? I argued for eliminating some special cases in sumti grammar, but they were both anomalous syntactically, and required extra rules. That is not the case here. Isn't part of what we're doing looking for meanings for things we find we can say? (Particularly if somebody has now found a use for it). 18: I like this n the abstract, though I am not in a position to evaluate its effect in use. VAU vs KUhO - no change. It's not clear that it's worth it, and it's a big change to existing documents.