Subject: RE: [lojban] Dumb answers to good questions

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 21:04:45 -0400

At 11:38 PM 9/23/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>lojbab:
> > Is the focus something other than the topic in this example (and if so,
> > please explain)? Your examples need to display a distinction if you want
> > us to make it.
>
>I'm not clear what it is you want me to explain. To mark something as
>topic is to indicate that it is the thing that the bridi is about. To
>mark is as focus is to indicate that it is the key, centrally important
>piece of information being conveyed by the bridi.

OK, then bi'u/bi'unai is indeed the focus marker, since it marks the piece 
of key information as being either new or old information. Just marking it 
says that it is key, of course.

> > > But I
> > >do think Lojban will be able to do this. I'm not sure how to do the
> > >"What ... was ... hit" ("wh-cleft") versions in Lojban,
> >
> > But why must Lojban cleft things in the English manner?
>
>See above -- because that is what is closest to the logic/semantics of
>focus, according to the very slender evidence available to me.

Ya know, this is precisely why I DON'T want to put that sort of thing into 
the languages. WE DON'T KNOW - all there is, is "slender evidence". Well, 
the major goal of Loglan/Lojban from the beginning was to serve as a 
linguistic test bed, in part to see just what was necessary in a language 
in order to achieve full expressiveness. Doing it the same way as natural 
language does is naturalistic, and not "logical". The logical way of 
marking focus, if focus is an important feature of language, is to ... 
*mark it*. But also in Lojban is the principle of leaving as many things 
unmarked as possible.

>I mean focus in the standard linguistics sense. It's not an area I've
>done much thinking about, so I don't want to offer a definition, because
>it's liable to muddy the waters. (Also, since I think the essence of
>focus is the logical manipulation already touched on, any attempt by
>me to give a precise definition would be biased.) It might be more up
>Nick's street, and some judicious quoting from reliable textbooks or
>online sources might be in order.

I'll look it up, when I can get to the LLG linguistics library, such as it 
is. But most of the books date back to the 80s when we got started, so I 
won't see anything new to theory.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org