[lojban-beginners] Re: leaving a sumti out

["Adam D. Lopresto" <adam@pubcrawler.org>]

On Fri, 18 May 2007, Vid Sintef wrote:

> A sentence from Lojban Reference Grammar Chapter9:
> 
> la djan. klama le zarci .i la djan. go'i troci
> 
> Can "la djan" in the second sentence be left out since "go'i" should imply
> all sumti related to the selbri of the last sentence?

Sort of.  {go'i} does carry over all the sumti, but it carries them attached
to the {go'i}.  That is, in

la .djan. klama le zarci
.i go'i troci

The latter bridi is equivalent not to {.i la .djan. klama be le zarci be'o
troci}, but to {.i klama be fa la .djan. bei le zarci be'o troci}.

In fact, in the example given, the second sentence is actually equivalent to
{.i la .djan. klama be fa la .djan. bei le zarci be'o troci}, where John is
the x1 of both klama and troci.

> Also, can a repeating "ko" be left out, without connecting the selbri with
> "gi'e"?
> That is, is
> 
> ko lebna ta .i dunda lo cnino vanju botpi mi
> 
> instead of
> 
> ko lebna ta .i ko dunda lo cnino vanju botpi mi
> 
> possible? Or would that "dunda" without "ko" loose the intended imperative
> sense?

It's certainly possible, in that it's grammatical and legal.  But without
specifying the x1 of {dunda}, you're leaving it implicit.  So I don't think
it would normally be considered an implicit imperative, unless context were
overwhelming.  
-- 
Adam Lopresto
http://cec.wustl.edu/~adam/

If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to *buy* her friends?