From cowan Sat Mar 6 22:53:16 2010 Subject: Veijo's 1994 proposal for nested relative clauses To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List) From: cowan Date: Sun, 7 Jan 1996 04:56:40 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 2164 X-From-Space-Date: Sun Jan 7 04:56:40 1996 X-From-Space-Address: cowan Message-ID: I have finally gotten around to evaluating it, and as proposed it causes shift/reduce errors. However, I suspect that it is either not necessary or not sufficient, because it conflates center-embedding with preposed relative clauses. To review, Veijo looked at the sumti: 1) le (poi le (poi le tcadu cu se klama ku'o) nanmu cu se viska ku'o) verba the (into-the-town-going man)-seeing-child and complained that the center-embedding was excessive, compared with the Finnish equivalent. The problem is that Lojban has articles which are always on the left, whereas Finnish has no articles at all. He then proposed a linearized version using a special marker: 2) le poi le tcadu cu se klama xu'o nanmu cu se viska ku'o verba wherein the two relative clauses are separated by "xu'o" rather than "ku'o", and the "le poi le poi" stutter at the beginning is removed. All the clauses except the first would necessarily be of "poi" type. Veijo then proposed a Yacc version which (unbeknownst to him) has S/R errors. I tried several more versions which also have errors, sometimes even more errors. However, I think there is a more fundamental issue. Veijo claimed that Examples 1 and 2 were equivalent to postposed relative clauses: 3) le verba poi viska le nanmu poi klama le tcadu the child that sees the man that goes-into the town As he correctly states, Example 3 is much easier to understand than Example 1: there is no center-embedding, but just ordinary iteration. However, Example 3 is >not< the result of postposing the relative clauses in Example 1. That gives: 4) le verba poi le nanmu poi le tcadu cu se klama cu se viska the child that the man that the town is-gone-into-by is-seen-by which is not quite as center-embedded as Example 1. What happens if we prepose the relative clauses of Example 3? We get 5) le poi viska le poi klama le tcadu ku'o le nanmu ku'o verba the seer-of the goer-to-the-store man child which is also center-embedded. "And what do we learn from this, comrades?" I'm not sure, but at any rate some further thinking is needed. Please comment! -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban.