Re: Elided selbri

[mark@kli.org]

>Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 18:03:55 +0300
>From: Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>
>Organization: Bilkent University
>
>From: Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>
>
>coi rodoi
>
>I've been having correspondence with pc for a while on the
>question of whether, and to what extent, one can have a Lojban
>sentence without a selbri.  The Book is quite explicit in denying
>that you can simply miss out a selbri in the same way that you
>miss out trailing sumti, for example (p. 158).  However, there
>exist sentences, or sentence fragments, without selbri, e.g.
>
>lo smuci .i lo forca  (p. 154)

Careful; bare sumti ARE valid utterances, but that doesn't make them
complete sentences.  They're great for answering fill-in-the-blank
questions:

do pilno ma? .i lo forca

or even

ma klama ma ma
.i mi le zarci le briju

You can say these things, but they're hardly full sentences.  They don't
state the relationship between the sumti; presumably someone can work that
out from context (like the questioning sentence).  Does that mean there's
an implied {co'e}?  Maybe.

>The sentence in question is in the draft of my Lesson 7 (
>http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin/lesson7.html ) which reads
>
>caku la djiotis. goi ko'i mo'ine'i
>
>Here I omit the selbri since {mo'ine'i} implies coming in, and
>Jyoti's manner of coming is not important, but this contradicts
>the ruling on p. 158.  I could add {co'e}, but this would be
>almost as long as simply saying

It implies motion-inwards, but not necessarily coming in.  Could be Jyoti
fell inward, or sneezed while moving inward, or anything.  mo'ine'i is a
tense, it doesn't say what was done, only where/how it was done.

Sound right?

~mark