From jcowan@reutershealth.com Fri Aug 17 09:42:58 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 17 Aug 2001 16:42:57 -0000 Received: (qmail 92599 invoked from network); 17 Aug 2001 16:41:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 17 Aug 2001 16:41:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta3 with SMTP; 17 Aug 2001 16:41:53 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[192.168.3.11]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/Pro-8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA03894; Fri, 17 Aug 2001 12:43:45 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <3B7D4929.4010603@reutershealth.com> Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 12:41:13 -0400 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.3) Gecko/20010801 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: a.rosta@ntlworld.com Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 9726 And Rosta wrote: > Natlang syntax conforms to the principle that every phrase is a > projection of a word it dominates (= contains) -- this word is the > head. (= 'Endocentricity'.) A phrase that is a projection of a > noun -- i.e. a phrase headed by a noun -- is a Noun Phrase. > > There is no such requirement in the formalism used for the formal > Lojban grammar, which is formally much less restrictive than > endocentric grammars. I don't see how. There can only be one non-terminal on the left side of a yacc/BNF rewrite rule (Chomsky Type 2 grammar), so the head of a non-terminal, whatever it may be, must necessarily be physically within the non-terminal. > If you tell me the meaning of _florgendorf_ and its valency (i.e. its > transitivity type) then I can predict with an extremely high degree of > accuracy which semantic argument is expressed by which syntactic > argument. If you have to know the meaning, you have scored an own goal: what is (semantic, urgh) meaning but a generalization of place structure? > It may be helpful to know that whereas in programming, 'recursion' and > 'iteration' are kinds of *procedures*, in linguistics 'recursion' is > a declarative/representational property whereby the rule defining > things of type X itself involves things of type X (e.g. X -> X Y). Mathematicians call this "inductive definition": an inductive definition can always be implemented by a recursive program. Note that if X is *solely* defined as X Y, the induction has no "base" or "ground" case and is useless: it is not enough to say that something is a natural number if its predecessor is also; one must also say that zero is a natural number. This sense of "induction" is quite distinct from the usual sense. > I can't reconstruct the reasoning, but I have been told, and had it > demonstrated to me, that representational recursion can always be > implemented by nonrecursive procedures. Provided you have a stack to remember the current state on, yes. In practice people's stacks are not very deep, which is why we don't do center-embedding well. If the recursive element is at the end of the rule (Lisp programmers call this "tail recursion", Prolog programmers say "last call optimization", same thing), then no stack is required: one can just jump to the beginning of the rule and start over. From the Jargon File: Recursion: See recursion. See also tail recursion. Tail recursion: If you aren't sick of it already, see tail recursion. -- There is / one art || John Cowan no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein