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Re: [lojban] the myth of monoparsing




On 3 Feb 2015 17:29, "Gleki Arxokuna" <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com> wrote:
 
>
> I only started this to understand how monoparsing in Lojban is different from English.
> If one sentence can be expanded into two distinct syntactic trees by applying precise numbers instead of imprecise {mo'e zo'e} then it's still monoparsing of course.
>
> What makes me wonder is why English can't be called monoparsed. May be because those who described it that way felt that polyparsing was the only reasonable explanation?

I wouldn't necessarily say that Lojban is monoparsing, but certainly lots of people wish it to be, and indeed take it as a basic principle of the language, even if the actual monoparse of a given sentence is often unknown. Monoparsing means that to a given sentence phonology there corresponds no more than one sentence meaning (encoded logical form).

I find it hard to answer your question about why English can't be called monoparsed, since you and everyone else knows that to a given English sentence phonology there usually corresponds more than one sentence meaning -- the Zurich examples showed this. That is, given all the evidence already available to you, what would it take to convince you that English isn't monoparsing?

And

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