Grammar changes 20 & 21

[CJ FINE <C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk>]

Bob, What can I say?

I am very appreciative of the effort you and Cowan and Nora have gone to
on this matter, and the respect that, as you say, you are showing me. 

I was going to send a further response to your interim paper disagreeing
with how you interpreted me in a few places, but I won't now: that's all
swept away in your excellent proposal. 

[What particularly delights me is that your proposal in effect matches
both much of my recent suggestion, and also the call I made the other
month for pre-posed relatives. I did not expect this bounty.]

I understand le do'o reluctance to make a change of this size this late,
but I believe it is a noticeable improvement to the grammar, so I
certainly support it. I definitely favour option 1) (which is the
closest to my suggestion), but would accept 3). I am least happy with
2).

A few more specific comments: 

No, I'm not looking at anything else at this level!

"le pe ci mi broda" was exactly what I argued for the other month.

I have one or two queries about the grammar you exhibited:
1) the bnf has "gek" in both sumti-3 and sumti-6, which surprised me,
and indeed it seems to be only in sumti-3 in the YACC. This prevents you
from saying
	*ci ge le broda gi ko'a
and	*[ge le broda gi ko'a ] poi melbi
which seems fine to me - they're not very intuitive, and if you really 
want them you can nest explicitly though sumti-6 with LAhE or else LE
<quantifier> <sumti>.  I take it that this is actually just a bug in the
BNF. 

2) I found it a bit odd that both sumti-4 and sumti-5 can start with
quantifier, but I take it LALR-1 can handle this. 

3) I also found it odd that multiple zi'e zei cau relative clauses are
sometimes left-branching sisters of a constituent (sumti-tail),
sometimes right-branching ditto (sumti-4) and sometimes a constituent in
their own right (nested-relative-clauses). I accept that this is an
artifact of writing grammar for YACC, but I think it is unfortunate for a
nu'o syntactic-semantic description of the language, not to mention
any transformational account. But for the time being, your note in
relative-clause-120 will have to serve. 

4) You've also left the old sumti-tail-113 in the BNF, and omitted a ket in
the second branch of sumti-tail.


The three options:
I favour option 1) because it is the most orthogonal - I don't like the
way that forethought/afterthought either have different meanings (2) or
depend on other structures, whose relevance may not be immediately
obvious (3). Note that the part of my argument which you have rejected
is my claim that the unmarked position for incidentals should be external,
while that for restrictives is internal; option 1 reflects that belief
in the (more important pe'i) case of restrictives.

Preposed relatives:
I didn't say that "post-posed relatives are abnormal to all but English
speakers in an AN-ordered language"! That's a much stronger claim than I
ever intended to make. I said that some languages have only pre-posed
relatives, and I don't see why Lojban should not extend its flexibility
to allow those. 

I note that we will now have the option of teaching pseudo-possessives
as a special case of preposed-relatives, thus
	le mi zdani
as elliptic for
	le pemi zdani
just as 
	ze mensi
is elliptic for
	ze lo mensi

I don't say we have to do this, but it is an option.

Other changes: I have no special comment on most of these. I'm generally
in favour of what seem to be improvements in simplicity and regularity -
I especially favour 10 and 16
15: If we are to allow SE NAhE selbri, we must specify that the place
structure of the NAhE selbri is the same as that of the selbri. This is
probably obvious, but worth making explicit. 
13: If it doesn't complicate the grammar, why take it out? I argued for
eliminating some special cases in sumti grammar, but they were both
anomalous syntactically, and required extra rules. That is not the case
here. Isn't part of what we're doing looking for meanings for things we
find we can say?  (Particularly if somebody has now found a use for it).
18: I like this n the abstract, though I am not in a position to
evaluate its effect in use.

VAU vs KUhO - no change. It's not clear that it's worth it, and it's a
big change to existing documents.