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



As I said, this was for one narrow case, where there were no further complications.  With more quantifiers (or modes) in play, more problems arise.  I am, for example, inclined to think that your test sentence is simply illegitimate, since the {su'o plise}  is within the scope of different quantifiers and thus is not guaranteed to have the same instantiation.  If you do want this to be legitimate,  then you have, in fact, "there are some apples of which every boy ate some, but not every girl did" (disjunctive predication hypothesized).  Otherwise, the collapse is meaning-changing, a no-no in this game.  To reconstruct as you would, does not correspond to a real collapse rule, for it treats a quantifier phrase like name. And do you really want to talk about all boys and girls everywhere?



Sent from my iPad

On Dec 7, 2011, at 3:48 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 12:29 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
To sum up one part of this discussion, if there is a variable (with or without a
quantifier) in a compound predication,  it can only come from an underlying
compound sentence of the form Qx(Fx X Gx) or something equivalent to that, which
turns out to be just AxFx & AxGx) and ExFx v ExGx.  Other quantifiers cannot be
collapsed at all.  Now, as to how situation is represented in Lojban, the only
problem case is a plain {da} with a disjunctive predication.  But since this is
equivalent to the (relatively) prenex form, the rule to use that prenex for all{{
cases holds.

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Consider for example:

(1)  ro nanla .e nai ro nixli pu citka su'o plise
"Every boy and not every girl ate some apple."

My reading of that is:

(2)  ge ro da poi nanla su'o de poi plise zo'u da de citka gi na ku ro
da poi nixli su'o de poi plise zo'u da de citka
"For every x who is a boy there is some y that is an apple such that
x ate y and it is not the case that for every x who is a girl there is
some y that is an apple such that x ate y."

You seem to be saying that it's either:
.
(3) su'o da poi plise zo'u ge ro de poi nanla zo'u de da citka gi na
ku ro de poi nixli zo'u de da citka
"There is some x that is an apple such that for every y who is a boy,
y ate x and such that it is not the case that for every y who is a
girl y ate x."

or:

(4) ro da poi nanla ku'o ro de poi nixli ku'o su'o di poi plise zo'u
ge da di citka gi na ku zo'u de di citka
"For every x who is a boy and every y who is a girl there is some z
that is an apple such that x ate z and it is not the case that y ate
z"

or perhaps:

(5) ro da poi nanla ku'o su'o de poi plise zo'u ge da de citka gi na
ku su'o di poi nixli zo'u di de citka
"For every x who is a boy there is some y that is an apple such that
x ate y and it is not the case that for every z who is a girl z ate y"

You seem to be saying that "su'o plise" for some reason must have
scope over ".e", but I'm not sure where you would put "ro nanla" and
"ro nixli" with respect to ".e" (and thus with respect to "su'o
plise").

I hope we all agree that in "ro nanla cu citka su'o plise" it is "ro
nanla" that has scope over "su'o plise", so readings (3) and (5),
which make "su'o plise" have scope over at least one of the preceding
"ro", seem quite wrong to me. As for reading (4), with "ro nixli"
having scope over the negation, it's also weird.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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