Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 03:21:21 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199802260821.DAA19228@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Ivan A Derzhanski Sender: Lojban list From: Ivan A Derzhanski Subject: Properties etc. and the Spatial Metaphor X-To: The Lojban List To: John Cowan X-UIDL: f8f441fbe1fd1bb9796485750e7c26bf Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 8001 X-From-Space-Date: Mon Mar 02 13:25:22 1998 X-From-Space-Address: - We seem to have a problem here. There is a bunch of semantic research (I'm thinking primarily of Jackendoff's, because that's whose work I am most familiar with) that shows that the Spatial Metaphor (which means talking of being at or moving (away) from/to(wards) non-spatial areas, eg possession, properties, existence etc.) is a very pervasive thing in language. That is, it is not at all malglico, nor even mal-[Standard Average European], to think and talk of a house as being/staying in or coming into someone's possession, an object moving from one size to the other, someone keeping something in existence, and so on. Now it could be said that Lojban isn't _a priori_ going to reflect all this, and if there is something about the mind that absolutely requires it, it will make itself known eventually. Fine. But as Jorge pointed out, some gismu already do reflect it, and it appears most illogical -- to'e logji, I'm tempted to say -- for the rest not to. A note about the extra argument places. I don't see that as a problem. Spatial motion doesn't always involve a route or a means of conveyance. Think of teleportation; that doesn't happen via anything. Or think of the final phase of Three Men's Morris (the only phase in some variants of the game, I think): any stone can be moved to any vacant field, so a move has no route, and all fields are equally close to one another, so there is never any `away from' or `towards' either, just `from' and `to'. Yet the stones are involved in genuine spatial motion. Does it matter that it is not the 3d continuous space we operate in? I don't think so. On the other hand, Lojbab is right that letting every spatial word in Lojban have a non-spatial interpretation can lead to confusion, what with the general law that pretty much everything is elidable. A natlang could say that a spatial word has its principal spatial meaning unless one or more of the argument places are occupied by non-spatial arguments. But in Lojban there is no way to enforce the filling of any argument place, so things like {le zdani cu klama} will end up meaning nothing at all (they'd be trivially true, since everything moves all the time, say, towards a state of being older), and we don't want that to happen. -- <'in tarY ad-dunyA 'a.gArat wa-nu^gUmu as-sa`di .gArat fa-.surUfu ad-dahri ^sattY, kullamA ^gArat, 'a^gArat.> (Nasr Ibn Hasan Marginani) Ivan A Derzhanski H: cplx Iztok bl 91, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria W: Dept for Math Lx, Inst for Maths & CompSci, Bulg Acad of Sciences