Complements and adjuncts

["Colin Fine" <colin@KINDNESS.DEMON.CO.UK>]

The botpi question raises in my mind a more general question about Lojban
and grammatical theory: I'm sure it must have been raised before, but I
don't recall it.

The question is, does Lojban distinguish complements and adjuncts?

At first sight, the answer is yes: by design, the defined terbri of a selbri
are complements (i.e. its meaning is incomplete without them), and any
additional terbri attached by sumtcita must be adjuncts (optional extras
specification, but not an essential part of the meaning).

There are two problems with this analysis. The minor one is the idea I am
sure I have seen stated (though I cannot find it in TCLL) that there is no
essential difference between the defined terbri and additional ones - it's
just a syntactic convenience that (for zipfean reasons I suppose) you can
use this predefined set of arguments without tagging them.
The other is that one of the reasons why the distinction between complements
and adjuncts is significant is that in languages generally (I hesitate to
say 'all languages') complements cannot come between the head and its
adjuncts. (You can't say "the bottle with handles of water"). But Lojban
lets us permute all the terbri with gay abandon.

Of course, there is no law that says that Lojban has to obey any rules at
all from natural language. But we should at least be aware if we are doing
so - if only to explore how comprehensible we are when we do so.

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Colin Fine - Paradise Green Promotions - 01274 592696
Greyfriars Kirk House & Augustine's
colin@paradise-green.co.uk
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-----Original Message-----
From: pycyn@aol.com [mailto:pycyn@aol.com]
Sent: 26 June 2000 02:19
To: lojban@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD: containers

As I said in the interest of NOT getting involved in this, lb has no better
solution than English (in fact it doesn't have as good a one right now, but
I
don't want to say that either).  But we are snagged on the horns of a
dilemma, one which happily occurs (as of right now -- but there are other
cases lurking) only when we mention that the bottle contains nothing.  By
the
rules {ta botpi no da} is equipollent to {ta na botpi da} and thus follows
from {ta tanxe}, on the plausible assumption that no box is a bottle.  We
can
save the case by saying that the the equipollence does not hold, that at
best
we have an implication, but then we have (as xorxes notes) the page being a
passer even though there is no one that he passes.  The latter is as clearly
wrong (or more so) as that {ta botpi noda} entails {ta botpi} is right, but
they have the same logical form (and even the same English form, if you want
to emulate the lb situation more closely).  English avoids the problem by
not
having inherent places (as xorxes notes) and by putting the information in
subordinate forms ("containing" or "of" or...) which can be factored out in
logical expansions (but the problem could probably be recreated easily in
cases where English did not have this device).
For now we are stuck with the reasonable appeal to common sense to sort the
cases out -- not a good position for a logic, though a common one for
langauges (Robin the Turk had a note from someone who said logic was
incompatible with language and it is cases like this that give the person's
claim some force -- until they are taken care of.)
This is not giving up on predicate logic, it is just not knowing how to make
use of it
correctly at this point.

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