Subject: Re: [lojban] Complements and adjuncts

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 15:13:38 -0400

Colin Fine wrote:

> There are two problems with this analysis. The minor one is the idea I am
> sure I have seen stated (though I cannot find it in TCLL) that there is no
> essential difference between the defined terbri and additional ones - it's
> just a syntactic convenience that (for zipfean reasons I suppose) you can
> use this predefined set of arguments without tagging them.

No, I think that a question of the form "What fills the x2 place?" always
has to have an answer, or the selbri is wrong, but "What fills the 'bau' place?"
need not have an answer: rain does not fall in some language, e.g.

> The other is that one of the reasons why the distinction between complements
> and adjuncts is significant is that in languages generally (I hesitate to
> say 'all languages') complements cannot come between the head and its
> adjuncts. (You can't say "the bottle with handles of water"). But Lojban
> lets us permute all the terbri with gay abandon.

This is indeed a difference.

-- 

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