tijlan wrote:
On Apr 11, 7:14 pm, Christopher Doty <suomich...@gmail.com> wrote:In Lojban, which lacks case marking and relies on word order in order to determine which slot of the predicate a given argument goes in, it is the ordering of those elements that tells us about alignment.Can prepositions like BAI determine such slots?
BAI was originally intended to encompass both prepositions and case tags. JCB had two separate sets of words, case tags used only to mark sumti and what he called "modals" and "relative operators", which could be used either to mark sumti as prepositions, or could be used in the tense location before the selbri. We felt the distinction was arbitrary and "metaphysically restrictive" and merged them. There are some members of BAI that more naturally get used as prepositions/case tags, and others that are more likely to be used to inflect the predicate itself, but you can use whatever works in whatever way is useful.
The result is that grammatically the words that were originally case tags no longer are distinctively so (and the same for the other categories) and thus tend to be thought of as "prepositions", which is as much a misnomer as "modals"
As .xorxes. noted, if Lojban were a split-S language, we'd find that some gismu with only one slot take an x1, while others take only an x2. But, this isn't the case: ALL gismu have an x1 slot; they don't all have an x2 slot. Thus, the x1 slot of single-argument gismu align with the x1 of two+-argument gismu.The gimste says about "sance": x2 sounds (intransitive verb) This seems to be assuming that, in the form of "sance da", the x1 is non-existent even without explicitly marking so with "zi'o".
No. In such a sentence x1 is zo'e. zi'o never fills a place unless explicit. It was a late and somewhat reluctantly added cmavo.
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