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



On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 4:35 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:

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?

First I'd have to know what English is, in order to compare, but it seems unlikely that English is the same as a full explication of its rules. 

If a zoologist presented me with a full explication of a tiger I would be able to tell it apart from the tiger immediately. I wouldn't be as scared of the explication as of the tiger.  

But more importantly, if someone else presented me with their own full explication of the rules of English, using different terminology and different analytic tools, I don't think it would be necessarily the case that one explication had to be better than the other, they could just be two different explications.

 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.

Right. But the question is whether it's an aid, an impediment, or neutral in our quest to encode logical form. My impression is that it is an aid.
 
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.

Either it's driven by, or drives it, or both. Given a phonological sentence, the "syntax" can break it apart in such a way as to facilitate the identification of the corresponding logical form. And conversely, given a logical form, the "syntax" can be used as a partial guide in the generation of an appropriate phonological form that encodes it.
 
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.

The "syntax" is pretty good with predicate-argument relations, but poor with binding relations. One important type of binding relation is achieved by repetition of phonological form, but the "syntax" is completely blind to phonological form (in the sense that it can't tell "da" and "de" apart). But it can tell that a given KOhA is an argument of a given BRIVLA for example.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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