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

Jorge Llambías, On 04/02/2015 22:05:

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 12:45 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com <mailto:and.rosta@gmail.com>> wrote:
    Reflecting on this further, during the couple of weeks it's taken for
    me to find the time to finish this reply, I would suggest that
    *official*, *definitional* specification of the grammar consist only
    of a set of sentences defined as pairings of phonological and logical
    forms (ideally, consistent with the 'monoparsing' precept that to
    every phonological form there must correspond no more than one logical
    form).

But how do we identify those sentences if not through some generating algorithm?


Yes, through a generating algorithm. But only the output of the algorithm is official, not the algorithm itself.

Also, you could decide that any superset of the official set is also eligible for being decreed official.


    Then, any rule set that generates that set of pairings would be
    deemed to count as a valid grammar of Lojban, and then from among the
    valid grammars we could seek the one(s) that are closest to those
    internalized by human speakers.


Would it have to be a rule set that generates that set of pairings
and only that set, or could it also generate new sentences? I'm not
clear on whether you mean the initial set to be a finite sample from
which to generalize, or the complete language.


I mean the initial set is the complete language. But a rule set that generates a superset of the complete language should still be potentially okay.


Could you give an example of a phonological word that would
correspond to a chunk of logical structure? Do you mean something
like "pe" possibly being logically equivalent to "poi ke'a co'e" for
example?


Yes. Or "ko" fusing imperativity and "do". Or "tu'a X" being "lo su'u X co'e" (or some indefinite counterpart of co'e).


Would that mean that "pe" does not correspond to a syntactic word?


Yes, it would. Or, it it is an inflectional variant of "poi" before ellipsed "ke'a co'e".


I don't see a problem in considering the empty phonological string as
corresponding to a syntactic word, and in fact some of the parsers do
exactly that in dealing with terminators. (Not sure if any parser
does that yet in dealing with "zo'e", but then current parsers don't
know the number of arguments that a predicate has.)


Don't brivla have infinite sumti places currently? It would take a grammar change to know where zo'e has to go.


I don't think a natlang can be a set of sentences because a set is
much too precise an object to accurately describe a natlang, which
would have to be fuzzy.


Well, it is a fuzzy set then. (As a linguistician rather than a mathematician, I tend to assume that sets are fuzzy by default.)


In any case, I don't know what a natlang is, but I do think that a
syntactic theory can only be a model for it and not it.


So if I, at the age of 500 after a lifetime spent diligently on this task, present you with a full explication of the rules of English, what is the difference between English and that explication?


    In denouncing the suitability of PEG/YACC/BNF, I was really meaning to
    denounce treating phonological stuff (e.g. phonological words) as
    constituents of terminal nodes in syntactic structures. You said that
    terminal nodes are actually selmaho and (iirc?) that the 1--1
    correspondence between phonological words and selmaho terminal nodes
    is not essential.

The 1-1 correspondence would be between classes of phonological words
and selmaho, since for example "mi" and "do" are two phonological
words belonging to the same selmaho KOhA. The correspondence between
phonological words and selmaho is irrelevant from the point of view
of the "syntax" (in scare quotes), which doesn't care at all about
phonological form. The "syntax" only works with selmaho.


Right. So technically the "syntax" is separate from the phonology. But of course in fact the "syntax" isn't a syntax, for all it does is generate a labelled tree with selmaho as its leaves; it doesn't encode logical form. Furthermore, since every selmaho leaf (with the possible exception of terminators) corresponds to a phonological words, the "syntax" looks like it's driven by the sentence phonology.


    So in that case my objection would not be to CS
    grammars per se but only to the idea that a CS grammar can model a
    whole grammar rather than just, say, the combinatorics of syntax. So I
    reserve judgement on PEG et al: if they can represent logicosyntactic
    structure in full, then they have my blessing.

They can only model the combinatorics and parse trees, they can't
model things like co-referentiality.


The most important thing to model is predicate--argument and binding relations; nothing else really matters, or at least, whatever else there is simply serves the purpose of facilitating the encoding of predicate--argument and binding relations.


--And.

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