Re: [lojban] semantic parser - tersmu-0.1rc1

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 10:49 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> Is unnegated {ro'oi} ever useful?

I think of it as "any number of":

 ro'oi prenu ka'e kelci
 "Any number of people can play."


> All I can say is that the rule I have in mind
> (and code) - always export to the closest prenex - seems coherent and
> simple, and as far as I can tell is in full accordance with the
> baseline.

I'm pretty sure the intention was that implicit quantifiers on "da"
were mere elisions, so "ge ko'a gi da da broda" would have to be
either "(su'o da zo'u) ge ko'a gi da da broda" or "ge ko'a gi (su'o)
da (su'o) da broda". It couldn't be something that needs an expansion
before being made explicit.

> If we're to let scope jump out of geks, why not also out of NOI-clauses
> or NU-clauses?

I don't think anything should be jumping out of anywhere, it's just a
matter of where the elided quantifier is in the first place.

There are two separate issues to consider: (1) Where is the binding
quantifier when an expression contains apparently unbound variables?
(2) What is the scope of an explicit quantifier which is not presented
in prenex form?

I don't think there's more than one reasonable answer to (2). Saying
that "no da blabi .i je no de xekri" means something different from
"ge no da zo'u da blabi gi no de zo'u de xekri" seems just
unreasonable. No quote from CLL can make it reasonable. The fact that
you need to use tu'e-tu'u if you want to move "no da" to a prenex
while maintaining the non-prenex ijek connective form is just
incidental.

Question (1) may admit more than one reasonable answer. The simplest
answer seems to be that the elided "su'o" is right in front of the
first instance of the apparently unbound variable, with scope as in
(2), and any instance outside that scope will require new binding.
Another perhaps reasonable answer might be that the elided "su'o" has
scope wide enough to capture as many instances of  the apparently
unbound variable as possible. I don't find it so reasonable that there
be no possible place to make "su'o" explicit in the expression as
presented.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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