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RE: [lojban] Dumb answers to good questions

At 07:23 PM 9/22/01 +0100,  <a.rosta@ntlworld.com> wrote:

Xod:
> On Sat, 22 Sep 2001, And Rosta wrote:
> > lojbab:
> > > At 01:59 PM 9/20/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> > > >So the general Lojban strategy I'd propose would be twofold
> > > >(a) a method of isolating the focused item along the lines sketched
> > > >above,
> > >
> > > We have a prenex approach to this where it is a sumti you want to draw
> > > focus to, as well as fronting and trailing markedly, which brings focus by 
> > > the marking.
> >
> > What'd help here would be Lojban translations of
> >
> > It was John that Bill hit
>
> la djan. zo'u B darxi D

lojban prenex is normally said to be topic rather than focus.
Is the focus something other than the topic in this example (and if so, please explain)? Your examples need to display a distinction if you want us to make it. 

It'd be a very bad thing if they couldn't be translated into Lojban, but

the grammar of UI is plenty powerful enough to translate them. However,
to my mind, the semantics of focus calls not for a discursive but for
the kind of logicosyntactic manipulations evident in the English.
Why? Specifically, why must Lojban convey things by logicosyntactic manipulations merely because English does? 


 But I
do think Lojban will be able to do this. I'm not sure how to do the
"What ... was ... hit" ("wh-cleft") versions in Lojban,


But why must Lojban cleft things in the English manner?


> Why not? What else could "ba'e D darxi B" mean, besides "*John* hit
> Bill."?

the emphasis needn't be focus ("It was John that hit Bill"). It could,
for instance, be metalinguistic, e.g. "Look, I'm calling him _John_,
not _Johnny_, because he intensely dislikes the latter".
And how is it not focus to make such an emphasis? You seem to be using focus to mean some particular kind of semantic emphasis that excludes others, and it isn't clear to me how they are distinguished. I will of course consult my references on the topic of "focus", but it would be useful for you to clarify what you mean by it. 

lojbab
--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org