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

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 18:20:23 -0400

At 04:11 PM 9/24/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> >>> "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]> 09/24/01 02:04am
>#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
>#of key information as being either new or old information. Just marking it
>#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.

But it MARKS it, which will draw focus. And if it is marked as new 
information in particular, then I cannot see any reason for marking it 
UNLESS it is key. Now it is possible to use bi'u/nai multiply and thus 
have multiple foci, which may not be a natlang sort of thing.

Can you come up with an example (in English if necessary) where the focus 
is NOT new information, and something else is new information, and you mark 
the latter vi'a special marker/grammar/emphasis, and not the former?

Be that as it may, I find in looking at ancient postings that this came up 
once before, from you, and Cowan opined that ba'e was the focus 
marker. Much earlier, back in 1991, we apparently said that focus was 
conveyed primarily by position, with primary focus on the beginning of the 
sentence.

> 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.

The reason for doing that is, I suspect, that in English we use focus as 
part of making that distinction.

I believe (and I'd welcome being corrected if wrong) that Russian and other 
languages that do not have definite/indefinite articles indeed usually use 
ONLY focus to make the distinction.

>#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".
>
>At a sufficiently deep level, natural language is logical, and logic is simply
>an abstraction of natural language. The attraction of an invented logical
>language is that that level becomes very shallow.

Or perhaps natural language is quite illogical, and logic is an attempt to 
impose an order on it that really doesn't apply, a model that is at best 
only approximate.

>#The logical way of marking focus, if focus is an important feature of 
>language,
>#is to ... *mark it*.
>
>You can't mark it if you don't know what it is -- the marking would be 
>meaningless.

I don't understand this statement. If you don't know what the focus is, 
then how can you even refer to it?

>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 the
>structure of lojban bridi.

"if".

>And anyway, lojban marks other things 'structurally' rather than by attaching
>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.

"That's the way JCB did it". For more details, I defer to pc.

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