From a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com Thu Jul 06 12:15:15 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 27506 invoked from network); 6 Jul 2000 19:15:13 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 6 Jul 2000 19:15:13 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO relay3-gui.server.ntli.net) (194.168.4.200) by mta1 with SMTP; 6 Jul 2000 19:15:13 -0000 Received: from m714-mp1-cvx1c.gui.ntl.com ([62.252.14.202] helo=andrew) by relay3-gui.server.ntli.net with smtp (Exim 3.03 #2) id 13AGy5-0007Tu-00 for lojban@egroups.com; Thu, 06 Jul 2000 20:05:50 +0100 To: "Lojban List" Subject: RE: [lojban] Complements and adjuncts Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 20:15:07 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 From: "And Rosta" Colin: > The question is, does Lojban distinguish complements and adjuncts? > > At first sight, the answer is yes: by design, the defined terbri of a selbri > are complements (i.e. its meaning is incomplete without them), and any > additional terbri attached by sumtcita must be adjuncts (optional extras > specification, but not an essential part of the meaning). Most adjuncts in English could be translated by a BAI sumti, but a proper answer to your question needs to sort out what the nature of the complement/ adjunct distinction is. For English (I say, speaking as a perhaps lacklustre but professional syntactician of English), the criterial property of adjuncts seems to be that they are recursible: X --> X + adjunct. It pretty much follows from this that semantically, the adjunct must express a predicate of which X is an argument. If you accept my definition of adjuncts, then BAI sumti are not adjuncts, but relative phrases *are* adjuncts of sumti. (My reading of the thread is that this is the conclusion you reached, but for different reasons.) My knowledge of Lojban is too sketchy to say whether there are pukka adjuncts of selbri/bridi. --And.