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Re: [lojban] Re: New soi's scope

Alex Burka, On 29/09/2014 17:25:

Yeah, the rules for scope-leaping could be more well-defined, though
the concept seems pretty good to me. As it is, it seems if you have
two or more {soi} clauses, they have equal scope at the top of the
sentence, but I don't know if "equal scope" can be formalized.


They could be treated as logically conjoined by AND.


How would you see a generalized scope-leaping mechanism working?


You could have a scope-leaping-marking UI, and then whatever the rule was going to be for soi can be ascribed to this UI instead. I shudder to think of how to formulate the rules to stop them leaking, and then all the sentences that would make no or uncertain sense containing this UI...


One could argue that scope-leaping should be discouraged as
confusing, so maybe {soi} should be the only way to do it.


It seems arbitrary to privilege soi. Better to start from a system with simple scope rules and then delicately investigate whether you can come up with workable devices to allow surface word order to follow discoursal semantics or whatever. (My own loglang happens to have utterly free word order, yet is utterly monoparsing.)


Is there a succinct description of Xorban's binary branching scope
somewhere? I'm not 100% sure what you mean by that.


The niceties of the analysis of the Xorban remain to be agreed on, but it goes like this: the Xorbo equivalent of Lojbo "lo broda lo brode cu brodi" is "la bbba le ccce dddake" [this from untrustworthy memory], which I'd see as having the following structure, where dependents follow and are indented from heads:

la
  bbba
  le
    ccce
    dddake

So each time you introduce a 'sumti' you have the gadri- or quantifier- analogue as head and it has two complements, one for the description/restriction and one for the rest of the proposition.

Lojban's left-to-right scope rule, if we treat Lojban as a variety of human language, must involve a syntax that works along these sorts of lines, so that a bridi is made up of nested binary branching phrases consisting of <sumti/tag, rest of bridi>, with the first element as head and the interpretation that the head scopes over the complement. I haven't worked out the details of that, but the essential insight is that "Scopes-Over" must be a fundamental syntactic relation, and you work backwards from that principle to work out what the syntactic structure must be.

--And.

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