[no subject]

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

An interesting post from comp.ai.nat-lang, and my private mail response.

>From: u7911005@cc.nctu.edu.tw ()
>Subject: Re: VSO languages? (was: Prefix languages?)
>Organization: National Chiao Tung University
>Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1993 12:53:47 GMT

>: The problem is considerably more complex.  Part of the problem is that
>: linguists -- including me -- are too often tempted to make the traditional
>: [...]
>: What of subjects and objects?  Well, though subjects in languages of the
>: normal Western European type, such as English, do tend to make the doer
>: of the action (if there is one) the subject -- but they don't have to;
>: it's perfectly OK to say "Charlie was arrested by the sheriff."
>
>Here the subject and object of the sentence are reversed by the use of
>passive voice.  Clearly, the meaning of "Charlie was arrested by the
>sheriff" and "Charlie arrested the sheriff" is different.  I don't know
>if linguistics consider "Charlie" or "sheriff" the "subject" of the
>passive-voice sentence, but I think the "sheriff" is the "true" subject.
>
>: What's a subject?  Very simple: a noun or pronoun which
>: in some particular language gets this special treatment reserved for one
>: noun or pronoun per clause -- whatever that treatment may be.
>
>I see.  When we analyze a sentence using predicate logic (i.e.,
>arrest(sheriff(), Charlie())), I think we can take everything as a
>function, so:  A noun would be a function without arguments; and a verb
>or an adjective would be a function with one or more arguments.  And the
>"subject" would be the "first argument" of the verb function, which (as
>you pointed out) doesn't have to be the "active argument" at all.
>
>(Here, some particular "features" of English are making thinking
>generally about all kinds of languages a bit more difficult.)
>
>: Finally, someone else claimed in a post that the notion of "subject" may
>: not apply in "ergative" languages such as Basque.  Ergative languages have
>: subjects all right, but they identify them on different principles.  When
>: a verb has a "doer" and a "receiver of the action", we would make the
>: doer the subject -- they make the receiver the subject and give it exactly
>: the same treatment they would give to the only noun in sentences such as
>: _The children are running_, _The woman is tired_ etc.
>
>Would that be a language with the "passive argument" always
>being the "first argument" to the verb?
>
>: Someone (if anyone is still reading) will jump on this and say that the
>: doer of the action in active or ergative languages is the "syntactic
>: subject".  There's no need for such a concept.  It turns out that in
>: all the languages I know, two sorts of nouns and pronouns are syntacti-
>: cally important: subjects in the sense that I have used the term, and
>: the noun or pronoun which ranks highest in a semantic hierarchy -- what
>: I called "most active" above.  These can just be called "highest ranking
>: NP"; there's no particular reason to say they're a separate sort of
>: subject, or (quod Deus avertat) the *only* subject.
>
>: So: is a distinction between noun and verb necessary?  Apparently yes; at
>: least, all languages make distinctions, though some much more clearly than
>: others.
>
>As I said above, the "everything's a function" (i.e., lambda calculus)
>concept, when applied to designing (artificial) languages, can result in
>no distinctions between nouns and verbs being needed.  For example, in a
>postfix artificial language based on lambda calculus (where "postfix"
>means "all the function arguments (if any) comes *before* the function
>name), the sentence "The sheriff arrested Charlie" would become "Sheriff
>Charlie arrest."  (Of course, the tenses of verbs are being ignored
>here.)
>
>Some kinds of ambiguity in English can be avoided this way.  For
>example, the sentence "They are flying airplanes" have several different
>meanings in (simplified) predicate logic:  "flying(they, airplanes)",
>"be(they, flying(airplanes))", etc.  In the abovementioned postfix
>language, these meanings would become:  "Fly airplanes they" and "They
>airplanes flying be".
>
>But (just as in any other language) the only way to *completely* avoid
>ambiguity is to use parenthesis-like devices to denote the "number of
>arguments" to each function.  The problem is that, given a certain
>function, there might be different number of arguments to it, and there
>are even "optional arguments" identified by "keywords/prepositions".
>For instance:  "He gave."  "He gave it."  "He gave it to her."
>
>Without parenthesis-like devices, the sentence "He saw the boy with a
>telescope" == "saw(he, boy, use:telescope)" would also mean "saw(he,
>have(boy, telescope))" -- the same ambiguity would still exist with the
>sentence "he boy with:telescope saw".
>
>: Are subjects and objects necessary?  Certainly not.  This is just one
>: possible way to encode the difference between "doers" and "receivers of
>: the action".  And in fact, not all languages have them.
>
>Agree...  In fact, when I come to think of it, it is rather strange that
>a number of languages *do* use the doer/receiver difference to
>distinguish subjects and objects, and even more languages have the
>distinction between subjects and objects.
>
>: Are categorizations such as SVO justified?  Are they useful?  In general,
>: yes -- but it gets really hairy when linguists start fighting about what
>: is the "real" or "syntactic" subject of some sentence.  For instance,
>: Spanish is said to be SVO, with the proviso that object *pronouns* must
>: [...]
>: So SVO and its ilk are sometimes accurate for a given language, sometimes
>: misleading, though accidentlally right much of the time (as with Spanish),
>: and sometimes, according to other posters, irrelevant.
>
>Here I see three kinds of distinctions, all getting confused with
>English:
>    - subject/object
>    - first argument/other arguments
>    - before verb/after verb
>
>
>  To: u7911005@cc.nctu.edu.tw u7911005@[140.113.4.17]
>
>I'm responding today because I just ran across your post on comp.ai.nat-lang
>regarding subjects and objects, dated 16 Jun.  Very interesting, and I am
>curious as I slowly catch up on my 2 month behind mail reading to see if
>there was any response.
>
>Your posting was interesting because in Loglan/Lojban it is indeed true
>that there is little difference between a noun and a verb.  In your
>post, you make the following definitions:
>
>>When we analyze a sentence using predicate logic (i.e.,
>>arrest(sheriff(), Charlie())), I think we can take everything as a
>>function, so:  A noun would be a function without arguments; and a verb
>>or an adjective would be a function with one or more arguments.  And the
>>"subject" would be the "first argument" of the verb function, which (as
>>you pointed out) doesn't have to be the "active argument" at all.
>
>In Lojban we could not even say this much.  Nouns may also have
>arguments in Lojban (and I suspect in other languages as well) For
>"sheriff", the obvious arguments are the person who fills the role, and
>the place he is sheriff of:  sheriff(John(), Nottingham()).  So
>[arrest(sheriff(John(), Nottingham()), Charlie())] would seem to be the
>formalism I want.  In Loglan/Lojban we attach the Nottingham onto the
>sheriff easily, and in a way identical to an option way of attaching
>arguments to the main predicate (verb).  Using English content words in the
>Lojban, this gives:
>
>le sheriff be la Nottingham bei fa la John    cu arrest be la Charlie.
>   noun       noun"object"      noun "subject"
>----------------------------------------------   ------ -------------
>               verb subject                      verb      verb object
>
>Note that in this case I expressed the 'subject' in 'VOS' order,
>probably most natural if one were to actually express the sentence this
>way in Lojban which is unlikely.  Rather, as in natural languages, we
>tend to express further information about the noun in the form of
>relative clauses or relative phrases that attach to the noun but analyze
>independently from it.  Loglan/Lojban allows the option of going either
>way.
>
>However, my statements are a little misleading, because in analysis we
>came to a different conclusion.  'Nouns' in Lojban, which are the
>arguments of the various predicates expressed in the language, are
>either names (i.e. labels), pronouns, or "descriptions", which
>themselves are verbs WHICH ARE EXPRESSED IN TERMS OF THEIR FIRST
>ARGUMENT. i.e.  "Sheriff of Nottingham" is a reference to the first
>argument of the function 'Sheriff()', which is the person filling the
>job.  We are describing that person by expressing another verb about him
>wherein he serves the first argument.
>
>It is abnormal therefore to express the first argument of such a noun
>overtly as I did in more early pseudo-Lojban sentence mentioning "John",
>Though it is permitted.  Normally in English (I don't know about other
>natural languages), an oppositive is used to express such a first
>argument since it is just ANOTHER expression of the same first argument
>that the descriptive argument itself is providing.  Lojban allows it in
>all three ways:  as oppositive, relative clause/phrase, or attached as a
>direct expression of the first argument as I did in my pseudo-Lojban
>above.
>
>Interesting about this analysis is that it assigns a special grammatical
>role to the first argument - i.e. it is what enables a verb to be turned
>into a noun, (or actually, a predicate into an argument).  Thus we could
>label this first argument "subject" and it would be useful and
>meaningful as a label.  But in Loglan/Lojban, that first argument need
>not be agent, passive, or any other particular semantic role in the
>sentence - it just is the first argument of the referenced predicate,
>whatever role may be played by that argument.  In most Lojban "active
>verbs" the first argument is indeed an agent, but there are some where
>it is not, and reordering the places is a simple grammatical function
>with no defined semantics beyond that reordering (we label this
>re-ordering "conversion", and its usual purpose is indeed to move an
>argument not naturally in the first position to that position so it may
>be used in an argument).  In Lojban words that equate to English nouns
>or adjectives, the first argument is typically the thing that is
>labelled by the noun or described by the adjective, but there are
>usually other arguments defined as well (a standard or observer for many
>'adjectives' for example).  But this is only when we look at these words
>with an English eye.  For the sentences expressing sheriff(John,
>Nottingham) and blue(eye, some_standard), we can look at these as verbs
>just as easily as nouns or adjectives.  The resulting English is
>strange, but understandable:
>
>John sheriffs at Nottingham.
>     --------
>The eye blues according to some standard.
>        -----
>
>where I have underlined the odd verb form of the "noun" and "adjective"
>respectively.
>
>
>Thus, I think I agree with you that:
>>As I said above, the "everything's a function" (i.e., lambda calculus)
>>concept, when applied to designing (artificial) languages, can result in
>>no distinctions between nouns and verbs being needed.
>
>And Lojban indeed avoids some ambiguities of natural language through
>this practice, though far more are avoided by the structures of the
>formal grammar, which genrally act as parentheses that may be elided
>when unnecessary.
>
>Note that we get a special definition for "subject" based on its logical
>position, but otherwise the distinction is between predicate=function
>and argument=object.  Lojban thus can be attributed an ordering by
>saying that an argument being a subject is thereby not an object, while
>all the rest of the objects keep that label.
>
>By this rather arbitrary standard the unmarked order for Lojban is
>either SVO or SOV with preference generally determined by the order of
>ones natural language (hence most commonly SOV due to English influence,
>these days, but it doesn't have to be.)  But the markings necessary to
>support any of the other orders is relatively minimal, and, for example,
>certain predicates (those which in English are expressed as subjectless
>modals, e.g "It's possible that I am coming" are often expressed in VSO
>order even though the form is marked by a single word.  But this
>abnormal order is not mandatory.