From arosta@uclan.ac.uk Mon Sep 24 08:03:10 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: arosta@uclan.ac.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2_2); 24 Sep 2001 15:02:21 -0000 Received: (qmail 15691 invoked from network); 24 Sep 2001 15:02:21 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by 10.1.1.224 with QMQP; 24 Sep 2001 15:02:21 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO com1.uclan.ac.uk) (193.61.255.3) by mta1 with SMTP; 24 Sep 2001 15:03:09 -0000 Received: from gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk by com1.uclan.ac.uk with SMTP (Mailer); Mon, 24 Sep 2001 15:40:43 +0100 Received: from DI1-Message_Server by gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk with Novell_GroupWise; Mon, 24 Sep 2001 16:11:36 +0100 Message-Id: X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise 5.5.2 Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 16:11:18 +0100 To: lojbab , lojban Subject: RE: [lojban] Dumb answers to good questions Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline From: And Rosta >>> "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" 09/24/01 02:04am=20 #At 11:38 PM 9/23/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote: #>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= =20 #of key information as being either new or old information. Just marking i= t=20 #says that it is key, of course. No and no. Marking something does not necessarily signal that it is key. And bi'u(nai), marks any information as new/old, not just the key piece. The main known use of bi'u(nai) is after "le", to render the contrast between definite and indefinite "the"/"a", and it should be clear to you that the the/a contrast in English has nothing to do with focus. #> > > 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= =20 #the languages. WE DON'T KNOW - all there is, is "slender evidence".=20=20 Oh bollocks to that. First of all I said that the evidence available to me is slender, not that the total evidence is slender. Second, there is at thi= s point no question of adding new grammatical structures to the language; the question is how to use existing possibilities. And third, it's the only decent suggestion to arise so far, given that bi'u and ba'e are wrong, and kau, once upon a time a focus marker, has been subverted into an indirect question marker. #Well, the major goal of Loglan/Lojban from the beginning was to serve as a= =20 #linguistic test bed, in part to see just what was necessary in a language= =20 #in order to achieve full expressiveness. Doing it the same way as natural= =20 #language does is naturalistic, and not "logical".=20=20 At a sufficiently deep level, natural language is logical, and logic is sim= ply an abstraction of natural language. The attraction of an invented logical language is that that level becomes very shallow. #The logical way of marking focus, if focus is an important feature of lang= uage,=20 #is to ... *mark it*.=20=20 You can't mark it if you don't know what it is -- the marking would be mean= ingless. If focus is, logically, the abstraction of one constituent of a bridi so as= to form an equational statement, then the logicalists would want to reflect that in th= e structure of lojban bridi. And anyway, lojban marks other things 'structurally' rather than by attachi= ng cmavo. An example is quantifier scope -- an interesting example, because several years ago we had big discussions about adding cmavo to mark scope and the proposals fizzled out for lack of advocates. --And.