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Re: [lojban] the myth of monoparsing





2015-02-03 21:42 GMT+03:00 And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>:


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.


I'm not going to argue over terminology.
If you call this syntactic ambiguity then Lojban can also be ambiguous.
If you call this vagueness then Lojban is similarly vague.

If something looks like a cat, walks like a cat, smells like a cat may be this is a cat?

Shall we rephrase the statement into the following?

"Lojban is one of the few languages (along with e.g. gua\spi) that has such interesting syntactic parsers that they perceive some sentences as syntactically vague whereas as of 2015 most English parsers perceive them as syntactically ambiguous. However, the humanity hopes that in future even English parsers will reach the level Lojban has now".

pei 


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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