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Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2
Martin Bays, On 11/10/2014 15:18:
* Saturday, 2014-10-11 at 12:42 +0100 - And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>:
Martin Bays, On 11/10/2014 03:12:
it looks like {tu'a} is in LAhE only syntactically, not
semantically, and must be handled separately.
(So then tu'a needing opacity is no longer an argument that the rest of
LAhE should get it...)
Given that syntax is logical form -- rather than combinatorics of
morphophonological forms, which is pseudosyntax -- your framing of the
issue should not be accepted. (I realize I've expressed that in an ex
cathedra way, but I'm happy to argue the point if it is contested.)
I'm not familiar with the syntax vs pseudosyntax distinction. Probably
there are multiple competing definitions involved, but at least one
meaning of "syntax" has the question of what strings are accepted by
a formal grammar to be a matter of syntax. That's what I meant.
'Pseudosyntax' is my term for 'what formal grammar (computer science) terms _syntax_', and by 'syntax' I meant 'the syntax component of (glossic) language'. I meant not to reprove your choice of terms but rather to insist that if we are describing a (glossic) language rather than a computer science object, then your move to distinguish the 'syntactic' from the 'semantic' was illegitimate.
Me I would advocate throwing away the pseudosyntax as the unlinguistic
junk it is, but anybody set on keeping it as the basis for actual
syntax couldn't get away with this wishful distinction between
'syntax' and 'semantics' where 'semantics' is used to mean 'structure
of logical form'.
Of course logical forms are also syntactic, but the (probably not fully
realisable) aim here is to translate lojban to a logical formalism whose
semantics is standard or relatively straightforward to define, so the
logical forms are at least a useful proxy for the actual semantics. Of
course there's still a distinction; equivalent non-equal formulae exist.
I think I didn't make myself clear. Regarding the baselined CLL 'grammar', which is a pseudosyntax, you can either (a) reject it as irrelevant junk (-- the move I would favour) or (b) treat it as an actual syntax. If you go for (b) then the members of a syntactic category must have the same behaviour with respect to the rules that translate into logical form, and hence if {tu'a} is in LAhE syntactically then (by definition) it is in LAhE semantically.
Actually, (a) and (b) presuppose that we are describing a language, but there's also option (c), which is to describe something that isn't actually a language but nevertheless involves a set of rules mapping pseudosyntax to logical form. I guess (c) is what you're actually doing, which as an intellectual exercise is fair enough.
--And.
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