From jcowan@reutershealth.com Mon Jun 26 12:14:13 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 4532 invoked from network); 26 Jun 2000 19:14:11 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 26 Jun 2000 19:14:11 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta3 with SMTP; 26 Jun 2000 19:14:11 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@skunk.reutershealth.com [204.243.9.153]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA15821 for ; Mon, 26 Jun 2000 15:14:09 -0400 (EDT) Sender: cowan@mail.reutershealth.com Message-ID: <3957AB62.5A8E9FFA@reutershealth.com> Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 15:13:38 -0400 Organization: Reuters Health Information X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.5-15 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "lojban@onelist.com" Subject: Re: [lojban] Complements and adjuncts References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan 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. -- Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)