Robin Lee Powell, On 12/04/2010 18:58:
On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 02:51:17PM +0100, And Rosta wrote:I don't doubt that the great majority of expert Lojban speakers' utterances are passed as licit by the formal parser. But I do doubt that the licitness of those utterances is due to the Lojban speaker having internalized the formal grammar and making active use of it during sentence processing.That is certainly my internal experience.I wager that syntactic structures that would be assigned to Lojban sentences by (1) syntacticians and (2) Lojban speakers would differ very substantially from the syntactic structures assignedby the formal grammar.I can't speak to (1), but my structures would differ significantly only by missing parts.The situation is rather as though human speakers when faced with an impossibly inhuman grammar construct internally an entirely new, human language with approximately equivalent weak generative capacity (i.e. gives thumbs up and down to the same candidate sentences as the formal grammar does).I think you're full of shit, and I'd appreciate it if you would not continue to try to tell me what goes on in my head.
Hopefully I can evade your wrath by not talking about your mind in particular? But remember that neither of us know that much about what's going on in your mind when speaking Lojban. You have the limited benefit of introspection, and I have the questionable benefit of a decent knowledge about syntax and sketchy knowledge about psycholinguistics, which may be relevant. At any rate, I will readily concede that somebody could learn the formal grammar and then apply it by sheer brute-force brainpower. I guess you can test that by doing a quick pencil and paper parse and seeing if it matches the formal grammar. If you can (and I'm sure you and xorxes can), then it's at least possible that you're using brute-force brainpower. (But I note that in another message you acknowledge you think you use a streamlined/pruned version, which I find easier to believe). But anyway, in the general case, bear in mind that the formal grammar isn't taught; it's not covered in CLL, apart from the nondidactic Ch 21. And nobody could work out the formal grammar inductively from usage. I'd still wager that almost all Lojban users use their linguistic faculty in syntactic processing rather than only brute-force brainpower, and operate with some fairly natural-language-like grammar derived to varying extents from CLL Ch 21, CLL Ch 2 and similar, and natural language a nalogies (gadri = articles, sumti = noun phrases, selbri = verbs, etc.). --And. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group. To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.