In a message dated 9/26/2001 12:57:37 PM Central Daylight Time, arosta@uclan.ac.uk writes:
give some examples from ordinary English I think all of the cases you cite and the rest of the lines on a typical personnel form are good examples of functions of the sort I have in mind. But in the process of doing that, I realized where (perhaps) the snarl is -- back at indirect questions. You think that {tu'o du'u makau mamta ce'u} ultimately gives a woman (or a name of a woman); I think it gives a proposition. So we may be talking about the same thing and merely disagreeing about what says it and how. I think that your view (if I am being fair to it, as your cases suggest) is inconsistent, since it would have the wrong sorts of things in places like {djuno2}, but I am not sure. I'll think on it more, once I am sure I have figured this out right. <Okay. That could be helpful. Your < > notation didn't correspond to any notation I am familiar with.> What notations do you know? I can usually translate. <However, normally a bridi preserves its meaning when subordinated (e.g. #placed within an abstraction), so if {la djoun mamta ke'a} and {la djoun #mamta ce'u} have a certain meaning as main clauses then that meaning #ought to preserved when the bridi is subordinate. And that would then #seem to stymie the meaning that ce'u and ke'a already have when #within ka/du'u and noi bridi.> # #I don't find this particularly persuasive, since it is inside out. We have #these critters well-defined in subordinate positions and not as main clauses, #so we can't say that the main clause meaning stymies the subordinate meaning. # We might say that it is hard to imagine a main clause meaning that would not #stymie the subordinate clause meaning, and that may be true of {kea}. Put it that way, then. It's what I meant. #But arguing from what we hard a hard time imagining to "it ain't so" is generally #an awfully weak argument, since it collapses so easily to someone witha bit #more imagination. That is not how my argument works.> Sorry if I've missed something, but what exactly, given your argument and your agreement of my version above? <if we had an explicit way of binding variables to NOI and to ka/du'u #-- call it "goi'i" then we could replace ke'a and ce'u by da variables: # # NOI .... ke'a = NOI goi'i da ... da # ka/du'u ... ce'u = ka/du'u goi'i da .... da # #That would have been longerwinded than the current system, but would #have overtly and explicitly expressed the way I understand ke'a and #ce'u to work.> # #Well, I don't think that is historically accurate about how {ke'a} and{ce'u} #were selected ke'a predates my involvement in Lojban, but throughout my era it has always been well understood as a resumptive pronoun, in which case my representation seems appropriate. 'Binding' here does not mean quantifier-variable binding or coreference-binding; it means that NOI is the intermediary whereby its modificand is coreferential to the ke'a. As for ce'u, that was inceived well into my era, so I think I can safely assert that ce'u was seen as one of the arguments of the relation denoted by the ka phrase. I concede that my use of the term 'binding' was a bit loose.> Yeah, but quite comprehensible. {ke'a}, you are saying, is the way that relative clauses in Lojban mark the connection with the sumti to which they attach, where it is anaphorized. And that is clearly right. Analogously, I suppose you are saying that {ce'u} marks the places where arguments are to be inserted in {ka} phrases to create whatever it is they create (propositions in the {ka} case, right?). I agree again, except that I don't see the use of {ce'u} limited to {ka} or even NU, as the lambda variables are not limited to predicates. <I am not competent to extrapolate the consequences of defining '"ce'u" as "lambda variable". But I would take that as a rough description, notas a definition. > Whereas I take it as a definition and the limitation to NU as a mere introductory -- because relatively clear -- example, to be gneralized upon along lambda lines. Another case of the fuzziness of Refgram, though pperhaps it could not have been foreseen as a problem back then. <ce'u is an argument of ka (tho not a syntactic sumti). That is, ce'u is the way that arguments of ka are expressed linguistically> Well, I would say "argument places" because the whole point is that the actual arguments aren't expressed -- its a function to propositions or whatever, not a proposition. And, of course, {ce'u} is a sumti syntactically, as is {ke'a}; otherwise how could they perform thaeir function? Maybe not one semantically, though. |