| We have two and a half choices so far, neither of which involves any change
of grammar or vocabulary -- yet. 1) Keep the present system but clean up the presentation and make maybe a few additions or modifications if clearly needed. Advantages: no change is almost always an advantage. a lot of documentation and accepted usage. easy rhetorical devices with position of UI. Disadvantages: It is going to take a lot of rewriting, as the presentation so far has not dealt consistently or clearly with what have become the major issues. the features of major interest are currently only loosely connected with form, so each word has to be learned separately (claimed). known cases of inadequacy (a'o) not dealt with and no program for dealing with other cases that may be discovered. present cases limited to parallels with English, no allowance for new, Lojbanic, discoveries. 2) Different functions of attitudinals marked by different positions in sentence (beginning, after sumti, after selbri, isolated, ...). the exact rules have varied from proposer to proposer. Advantages: leaves no doubt about the major questions (assertiveness, proximate,..) for any UI. opens up a number of new possibilities which might give Lojbanic results. probably could be written up as easily as the present could be brought up to speed, maybe easier. Disadvantages: The present corpus (several thousand pages) would have to be checked at least, and probably revised into conformity. Many, perhaps most, of the new possibilities will prove to be useless. The known problem cases have not yet clearly been dealt with. Rhetorical use of position lost. 2.5 (not a serious proposal yet) keep the present system with the addition of a small number (max at 4) additional flags to indicate that an attitudinal is being used outside its usual role. Advantages: keeps rhetorical use of position. would deal immediately with known inadequacies. Diasadvantages: all the rest of 1 plus the immediate need to add new expressions. New cases allowed are not all going to be useful, probably. |