Re: [lojban] Re: [Llg-members] nu ningau so'u se jbovlaste / updating a few jbovlaste entries

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 3:28 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

Would it be fair to say that what an actual grammar should do is, given some input of sound or written characters, tell us how to:

(1) convert the input into a string of phonemes

(2) convert the string of phonemes into a string of words

(3) determine a tree structure for the string of words

(4) determine which nodes of the tree are terms, which nodes are predicates, which terms are co-referring, and which terms are arguments of which predicates 

Rather:

(1') convert the input into a string [or perhaps tree] of phonemes

(2') convert the string [or perhaps tree] of phonemes into a string [or perhaps (prosodic) tree] of phonological words

(3') map the tree of phonological words to a structure of syntactic 'words'/'nodes', which structure will specify which nodes of the tree are terms, which nodes are predicates, which terms are co-referring, and which terms are arguments of which predicates

You seem to have just merged (2) and (3) into (2'), which may be more general, but in the particular case of Lojban we know that (2') can be achieved in two independent steps, one step that takes any string of phonemes and unambiguously dissects it into a string of words (possibly including non-lojban words), and a second step that takes the resulting string of words as input and unambiguously gives a unique tree structure for them (or else rejects the string of words as ungrammatical). That probably doesn't work for natlangs in general. 

> If that's more or less on track, then we can say that the YACC/EBNF formal grammars do (3). The PEG grammar does (2) and (3). Martin's tersmu is trying to do (4). I would agree that the way our formal grammars do (3) is probably not much like the way our brains do (3), but I'm not sure I see what alternative we have.

Right. So I think (3) is not a valid step.

But why is it invalid if it achieves the desired result? And what's the alternative, how else could we formalize (2')?

 

(3') should be doable, partly from Tersmu and partly by using some natural language formalism to analyse the syntax (e.g. at minimum make all phrases headed and forbid unary branching; binary branching would be a bonus if it could be managed).

In order to do (3'), we first need to do (2'). PEG does (2') (and so does Yacc+its preparser, with some limitations). And the resulting tree has enough detail (in the labeling of its nodes) to give us a head start with (3'). I assume Tersmu uses the output of one of these as its input.  

The current PEG doesn't produce binary branching exclusively, although it can probably be tweaked to do that by adding many intermediate rules. Why is unary branching bad? There are many rules where one of the branches is optional, so that would result either in an empty leaf or a unary branch. Would you want binary branching all the way down to phonemes, or just to words?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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