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

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 12:08 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:

Jorge Llambías, On 21/01/2015 12:33:
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 8:35 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com <mailto:and.rosta@gmail.com>> wrote:

Step (3') yields something like Tersmu output, probably augmented by some purely syntactic (i.e. without logical import) structure. I think that can and should be done without reference to the formal grammars.

But Tersmu output is basically FOPL, which has its own formal grammar
(on which Lojban's formal grammar is based). I still don't see what
problems formal grammars create.

(3') must certainly involve a grammar, and I can't think of any sense in which a grammar could meaningfully be called 'informal', so I'm happy to call that grammar 'formal'. But it differs from the CS (or at least the Lojban) notion primarily in not having phonological objects as any of its nodes and secondarily in not necessarily being simply a labelled bracketing of a string.

I don't understand your primary objection because the syntactic tree generated by the Lojban formal grammars doesn't rely on its terminal nodes being phonological objects. The terminal nodes of the syntax part of the grammar are the selma'o. It just happens that these can be mapped in a trivial way to the output of the morphology, but that's not important. One could implement a completely different morphology and mount the same Lojban syntax on that. The only requirement for the syntax is that each syntactic word be a member of one of the selma'o.

The secondary objection I accept, but that's why I had (4), to complement the labelled bracketing generated by (3). That's what Martin's Tersmu is meant to do, because as I understand it it doesn't start from scratch with just a string of syntactic words, it starts from the output of (3).

To the extent that Lojban is a language, (3) doesn't really constitute any part of Lojban (despite the mistaken belief of many Lojbanists to the contrary). Also, to the extent that Lojban is a language, there exists an implicit version of (3'), albeit not necessarily one that is coherent or unambiguous. So I would recommend removing the current Formal Grammars from the definition of Lojban, and replacing them by one -- an explicit (3') -- that more credibly represents actual human language (but is unambiguous etc.).

The only problem with that is that we don't have anyone else besides yourself competent enough to give an explicit (3'). I wouldn't even know what (3') has to look like. We can only do what we know how to do.

Also questionable is the extent to which a nonterminal node can have properties/labels not simply derived from the label of the head daughter: the range of views among syntacticians is too hard to summarize in one sentence here, but certainly one does not come across syntactic trees for natlang sentences with a pattern of labellings resembling Lojban's, i.e. where the relationship between labels on the mother and the daughters is unconstrained.

I certainly don't want to claim that Lojban's syntactic trees are naturalistic. Let's say that they are to a natlang tree as Frankenstein is to a human.

Unary branches don't do
anything useful, but are they harmful other than in cluttering the
tree with superfluous nodes?

They're harmless clutter if there's no contrast with a version of the tree where mother and singleton daughter merge into the same node. You need to consider the branching issue together with the labelling issue. If mother and head-daughter have the same label, then the redundancy of unary branching is plain.

That's why Lojban parsers usually throw away a lot of the output provided by the formal grammar, and keep only the labels of key nodes for presentation purposes.

Ok, but in Lojban there's almost a one-to-one match between
phonological and syntactic words.

That remains to be seen, because there isn't yet an explicit real syntax for Lojban. However, it's perfectly possible that in Lojban, phonology--syntax mismatches are rare.

The only mismatch I'm aware of is "ybu", which is treated as a syntactic word even though phonologically it would break down into the hesitation "y" and the phonological word "bu".

I'm not sure if choosing a simple Lojban example is going to reveal why you can't have beliefs about binary branching in natlangs.

What I meant to say is that I can't see a syntax as an intrinsic feature of a natlang, as opposed to being just a model, which can be a better or worse fit, but it can never be the language. So I can accept that binary branching syntaxes are more elegant, more perspicuous, etc, I just can't believe they are a feature of the language, just like the description of a house is not a feature of the house. Maybe that's just me not being a linguist.

Syntax is a set of rules for combining the combinatorial units of syntax in ways that are combinatorially licit and that combine the units' phonological forms and their meanings. I suspect (but excuse me if I'm mistaken) that for you every set of rules that defines the correct set of sentences is equally valid, so that so long as the rules match the right sentence sounds to the right sentence meanings, it doesn't matter what the intermediate structure is like; if the syntactician has a job, it is to work out *a* set of rules, but there is no reason to think there is only one correct set of rules. In contrast, pretty much all linguisticians think (but not always for the same reasons) that of the sets of rules that generate the same, correct, set of sentences, some of those sets are right and some are wrong or at least some are righter and some are wronger

That sounds reasonable.

. In my case I think the rules matter because (i) to understand the system you need to understand its internal mechanics, and (ii) a speaker knows a certain set of rules. and it's known-rules that are my object of study.

Yes, but can't those rules, or rather a part of those rules, be presented as a CS type grammar? I understand that the Lojban formal grammars as they are are something of a monstrosity, but what if they were cleaned up and made more human compatible? You seem to be saying that the very idea of a PEG/YACC/BNF type grammar is counter to a proper grammar, not just the particular poor choices made for the Lojban grammar.

mu'o mi'e xorxes