Subject: RE: [lojban] Re: Well I guess you do learn something new every day...

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2001 20:51:01 -0400

At 05:21 PM 8/6/01 +0100, you wrote:
>Bob:
> > And won't like this but ...
> >
> > no'a and nei being pragmatically defined (as are ri and ra) we have some
> > ambiguity as to what "this" and "next outer" mean. Anaphora almost always
> > are backwards referring, so that if the selbri of the next outer bridi
> > hasn't occurred yet, I would not be inclined to count it.
> >
> > (If And wants unambiguous exact reference, he has to use goi and cei).
>
>@$#%!!! >[] ;)
>
>If one wants unambiguous exact reference by default, then every sumti
>must have a goi attached. Anyway, it's intolerable that no anaphor--
>antecedent relationship can be defined precisely structurally,

It may be intolerable, but Lojban was explicitly defined with, umm, 
pragmatically-based semantics for anaphora (if for no other reason than 
"pragmatically-based" is the formal embodiment of "let usage decide" - but 
the real reason is that JCB defined all his anaphora using pragmatic rules 
- goi was MY addition to allow some sort of unambiguous definition)

>and
>indeed I don't know any justification for the claim that no'a and
>nei are pragmatically defined.

The justification is that ALL of Lojban anaphora are pragmatically defined 
*by intent*, with the exception of the bound variables required by formal 
logic and specific assignment with goi/cei.

>I don't deny that there are certain
>vaguenesses such as whether sumti tails constitute a bridi for the
>purposes of no'a definition; semantically they should, but
>syntactically perhaps not.

And pragmatically, it may turn out that the rules may depend on the values 
thereof, but in some of these cases we actually did make an attempt to 
think things through a little farther than that, which is why no'a is even 
in the language (we realized that vo'a was not enough to solve all anaphora 
back references within a complex bridi).

>The antecedent of no'a is a bridi, not a selbri, so the antecedent
>should be the mother bridi irrespective of whether the selbri of
>that bridi precedes or follows the no'a anaphor.

Except that if it follows, then it is not "antecedent". This is 
pragmatically rather hard to accept.

> > >Again, exactly one level up from "no'a" in "do djuno le du'u no'a" is
> > >the djuno-ing, so the sentence by that interpretation would be that
> > >I'm sad about the fact that you know that you know that you know etc.
> >
> > Pragmatically, in a bare "mi djuno ledu'u nei" I would not consider the 
> nei
> > to be self representing,
>
>I would: "I know that something is an argument of the current bridi".

Ambiguous: What is "the current bridi"? And what does "nei" convey that 
co'e would not? Anaphora have to stand for something usefully.

> > so the "current bridi" has to be "djuno", and no'a
> > refers outward from djuno, as ra refers backwards from whatever ri is
> > pragmatically determined to mean.
> >
> > >I really think that "no'a" would be more useful (and easier to think
> > >about) referring to the main bridi.
> >
> > But it was specifically intended to handle the indeterminate number of
> > middle cases where vo'a could not be used (hence the matching vowels).
> >
> > Only actual usage would tell us if reference frequency differs from the
> > patterns we assumed in the design.
>
>I expect that the usage of all but the incompetent or obtuse would be
>inhibited by the ill-definedness of these cmavo.

You could claim that of all the anaphora. But JCB himself seemed to favor 
loose definitions of the pragmatically defined cmavo, and having put in a 
mechanism for exact definition when needed, I am content.

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