From a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com Fri Aug 17 23:25:52 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 18 Aug 2001 06:25:52 -0000 Received: (qmail 85700 invoked from network); 18 Aug 2001 06:25:51 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 18 Aug 2001 06:25:51 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mta05-svc.ntlworld.com) (62.253.162.45) by mta2 with SMTP; 18 Aug 2001 06:25:51 -0000 Received: from andrew ([62.255.41.57]) by mta05-svc.ntlworld.com (InterMail vM.4.01.03.00 201-229-121) with SMTP id <20010818062549.ELKU20588.mta05-svc.ntlworld.com@andrew>; Sat, 18 Aug 2001 07:25:49 +0100 Reply-To: To: "John Cowan" Cc: Subject: RE: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 07:22:05 +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) In-Reply-To: <3B7D4929.4010603@reutershealth.com> Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 From: "And Rosta" John: > And Rosta wrote: > > > Natlang syntax conforms to the principle that every phrase is a > > projection of a word it dominates (= contains) -- this word is the > > head. (= 'Endocentricity'.) A phrase that is a projection of a > > noun -- i.e. a phrase headed by a noun -- is a Noun Phrase. > > > > There is no such requirement in the formalism used for the formal > > Lojban grammar, which is formally much less restrictive than > > endocentric grammars. > > I don't see how. ... how they are less restrictive, I presume. > There can only be one non-terminal on the left > side of a yacc/BNF rewrite rule (Chomsky Type 2 grammar), so the head of > a non-terminal, whatever it may be, must necessarily be physically > within the non-terminal. But there is no requirement in the yacc/BNF system that phrases have heads. You can have rules of the form X -> Y Z, whereas endocentricity would restrict you to XP -> XP YP and XP -> X (YP). > > If you tell me the meaning of _florgendorf_ and its valency (i.e. its > > transitivity type) then I can predict with an extremely high degree of > > accuracy which semantic argument is expressed by which syntactic > > argument. > > If you have to know the meaning, you have scored an own goal: > what is (semantic, urgh) meaning but a generalization of place > structure? ??? You know the participants and you how many syntactic arguments, but you don't know which participant corresponds to which syntactic argument: in such a case it is possible, in natlangs, to predict the correspondence with much accuracy. I think I probably don't understand your point. > > I can't reconstruct the reasoning, but I have been told, and had it > > demonstrated to me, that representational recursion can always be > > implemented by nonrecursive procedures. > > Provided you have a stack to remember the current state on, yes. > In practice people's stacks are not very deep, which is why we don't do > center-embedding well. It's probably not worth bothering trying to explain it to me, but I thought it was recursive procedures that needed the stack (so as to remember each loop you're in the middle of). --And.