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RE: [lojban] Dumb answers to good questions
At 11:38 PM 9/23/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
lojbab:
> 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.
I'm not clear what it is you want me to explain. To mark something as
topic is to indicate that it is the thing that the bridi is about. To
mark is as focus is to indicate that it is the key, centrally important
piece of information being conveyed by the bridi.
OK, then bi'u/bi'unai is indeed the focus marker, since it marks the piece
of key information as being either new or old information. Just marking it
says that it is key, of course.
> > 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?
See above -- because that is what is closest to the logic/semantics of
focus, according to the very slender evidence available to me.
Ya know, this is precisely why I DON'T want to put that sort of thing into
the languages. WE DON'T KNOW - all there is, is "slender evidence". Well,
the major goal of Loglan/Lojban from the beginning was to serve as a
linguistic test bed, in part to see just what was necessary in a language
in order to achieve full expressiveness. Doing it the same way as natural
language does is naturalistic, and not "logical". The logical way of
marking focus, if focus is an important feature of language, is to ...
*mark it*. But also in Lojban is the principle of leaving as many things
unmarked as possible.
I mean focus in the standard linguistics sense. It's not an area I've
done much thinking about, so I don't want to offer a definition, because
it's liable to muddy the waters. (Also, since I think the essence of
focus is the logical manipulation already touched on, any attempt by
me to give a precise definition would be biased.) It might be more up
Nick's street, and some judicious quoting from reliable textbooks or
online sources might be in order.
I'll look it up, when I can get to the LLG linguistics library, such as it
is. But most of the books date back to the 80s when we got started, so I
won't see anything new to theory.
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