Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2

On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 10:09 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

So then a tag would be able to play three roles:
(i) combining with an optional term to form a modal operator;
(ii) acting in certain connectives as a binary relation on events;
(iii) acting in the {pe [tag]} construction as a binary relation.

Shouldn't (ii) be split into (ii-a) a tag acting itself as a connective, and (ii-b) a tag modifying some other connective. It seems that not all tags can do (ii-a), only tags that can take two event/proposition arguments can do do that, whereas in principle all tags could do (ii-b), depending on how the modification of the base connective goes. Also (ii-a) may, but hopefully doesn't, split into two further cases: "[tag] gi ... gi ..." and "... .i [tag] bo ..."

It would be nice to unify (ii) and (iii).

Doesn't (iii) always reduce to (i) though: pe [tag] ko'a = poi ke'a co'e [tag] ko'a?

I don't see a natural way to fully reduce (ii) to (i) or (i) to (ii).

I think when the tag tags an event as sumti tcita. the relationship between (i) and (ii-a) is pretty straightforward:

broda .i [tag] bo brode ~ broda [tag] lo nu brode (for non-tenses)

broda .i [tag] bo brode ~ broda .i brode [tag] lo nu broda (for tenses)

With forethought I would drop the independent "broda" that appears in the tense case.

(ii-b) is the tricky case, because the logical connective wants to evaluate the truth values of two propositions independently, so in which of the two propositions does the tag play a role?

> The mix with logical connectives is the tricky case, but it becomes easier
> if we think of the tag as modifying only the second connectand, in which
> case "broda .i je tag bo brode" is just (broda) .ije (tag(brode)).

For tenses, yes.

And for non-tenses, by analogy I think it has to be

broda .i [tag] bo brode ~ broda .i broda [tag] lo nu brode

The only tricky bit is deciding what exactly the
seltcita sumti of the tag should be.

"lo nu xu kau broda"., "the event of brodaing or not brodaing, whichever the case might be".

OK. So it currently seems to me that:

* quantifying over events is the right thing to do;

If by that you mean the speaker is claiming a hidden "su'o", I have to disagree.

Going back a bit, when someone says "carvi" they are not saying "there is some event of raining, x, and x happens". They may be saying "c is an event of raining and c happens", but not the first. If they were saying the first, there would be no way to negate the claim, because "na carvi" would be "there is some event of not raining, x, and x happens", which doesn't contradict the first claim, so "na carvi" would not be the way to negate "carvi".

Now, when A says "carvi", we may describe this as "there's some event of raining, x, and A says that x happens", but that's not the same as saying "A says that there's some event of raining, x, and x happens".

So if by "quantifying over events" you mean that the speaker is quantifying over events, I don't see it. If you mean that you can interpret what the speaker is saying by quantifying over events, (i.e. the metalinguistic interpreter does the quantifying, not the speaker) then that may be, but isn't the parser supposed to just translate from one language to another rather than make a metalinguistic interpretation?

* for tenses: the second sentence gets tagged, with the seltcita sumti
being (the variable for) the event of the first sentence, which is
declared to occur (unless the connective is forethought and below
sentence level);
* for non-tenses: the same, but with the roles of the first and second
sentences swapped;

We're probably not disagreeing very much about those two, although we may quibble about a detail or two.

* when a logical connective other than {je} is involved: we have to
separately consider the cases that the seltcita sumti involved is an
event of the sentence and that it's an event of the sentence's
negation.

... because in order to eveluate a logical connective you have to consider cases where the proposition is not true as well as cases when it is true.

mu'o mi'e xorxes