Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Position question: go'i na'i

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 17:16:28 -0400

At 06:07 PM 06/13/2001 +0000, A.W.T. wrote:
>Repeating the {na'i} issue in the Book (p.388), I've to raise a question.
>
>xu do sisti lezu'o do rapydarxi ledo fetspe
>na'i go'i
>(so far no question: {na'i} refers to th whole bridi)
>go'i na'i - stopped!!!???
>For what *grammatical* reason should it be that {na'i} now refers to 
>{sisti} and not the whole bridi or bridi tail or something else
>within the bridi tail (maybe: {le do fetspe} - What, my wife??? I'm not 
>married to this woman!!!)?
>I understand that it doesn't refer to x1 (= do), what would be something 
>like {na'i le go'i} or {le go'i na'i}

It pragmatically COULD refer to the whole bridi, but we use the UI scope 
conventions to presume that it focuses on the selbri because the part of 
speech represented by go'i is the selbri. It is true that this selbri 
incorporates all the places of the prior bridi so that go'i is actually 
more like "sisti be fa mi(do) bei fe lezu'o mi(do) rapydarxi lemi(do) 
fetspe be'o".

But unlike the latter, go'i is subject to replacement - if you were to say 
go'i na'i le zu'o mi rapydarxi lemi gerku, then I have replaced the x2 of 
sisti, and the prior value is as if unspoken (if you use the be bei 
construction instead of go'i and then add the sumti about gerku, the latter 
would be x3, and if you explicitly marked it as x2 with fe, you would be 
doubling up the values of x2.

The fact of possible replacement/modification after the na'i means that one 
cannot assume that all instances of go'i na'i will be referring to the 
complete bridi at the time the listener hears the na'i. This would at 
least appear to violate the spirit of LALR(1) grammar, though YACC would 
not detect such a violation since it is based on the semantics of go'i.

Does this make any sense? a'o

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