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

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 14:51:26 +0100

>>> "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]> 09/24/01 11:20pm >>>
#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 markingit
#>#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.  

Not all new info is key. And not all marked info is new or key. For
example {ci} in {le ci prenu} is a marking of cardinality but is not
necessarily new or key. As for an example of nonkey/nonfocal new info:

I was walking along the street yesterday, minding my own 
business, and this policeman tried to ARREST me.

the focus is ARREST. "This policeman" is new (le bi'u) but nonfocal.

#Now it is possible to use bi'u/nai multiply and thus 
#have multiple foci, which may not be a natlang sort of thing.

I don't know whether it occurs in natlangs but certainly it is not
the norm.

#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?

I've given you an example above where new info is nonfocal. I'm not
claiming that all focal info is not new, but in fact in:

It was the man/him that tried to arrest me

the man = le bi'unai namu; him = ko'a bi'unai. -- old but focal info.
Obviously the old and focal bits are different -- what is old info is
the referent; the focal info, which is new, is that the referent is
the one that tried to arrest me.

#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.

It would help if you could include pointers to the messages in question,
so we can see whether we concur with your reading of them. The only
focus marker I remember is "kau".

#> 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'll leave the refutation of this to someone with more time and patience
than me...

#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.

I know only Western European lgs, so can't comment. But it does sound a
bit implausible. Try asking Ivan.

#>#Well, the major goal of Loglan/Lojban from the beginning was to serve asa
#>#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.

Let us agree that we do not agree on how deep the logal/natural
dichotomy runs.

#>#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?

I mean that if you don't know what Focus is then you can't mark it.
It's no good saying "Let this cmavo signify Blah" is you are unable to
offer any sort of adequate defintition or characterization of Blah.
Words -- and linguistic forms in general -- are pairings of sound and
meaning. A sound alone is not a word. Until you add the meaning, then,
you don't have a proper word.

#>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.

It became clear from the "any" and opacity discussion (c. 1996,
1997?) that lexical rather than structural indicators of scope 
would be too complicated to be worth the candle. The discussion
was about afterthought scope indicators, which would require
lexical rather than structural marking -- we eventually gave up
on the idea.

--And.