From cowan@ccil.org Sat Aug 18 16:17:48 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: cowan@mercury.ccil.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 18 Aug 2001 23:17:48 -0000 Received: (qmail 47180 invoked from network); 18 Aug 2001 23:17:47 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 18 Aug 2001 23:17:47 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mercury.ccil.org) (192.190.237.100) by mta2 with SMTP; 18 Aug 2001 23:17:47 -0000 Received: from cowan by mercury.ccil.org with local (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 15YFLn-0008QQ-00; Sat, 18 Aug 2001 19:17:55 -0400 Subject: Re: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban In-Reply-To: from And Rosta at "Aug 18, 2001 07:22:05 am" To: a.rosta@ntlworld.com Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 19:17:55 -0400 (EDT) Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL66 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: X-eGroups-From: John Cowan From: John Cowan And Rosta scripsit: > 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). I guess I don't understand what a head is. If you mean that a noun phrase must have a noun in it, where nouns and noun phrases are capable of filling the same slot in a sentence, then I point to French, where nouns cannot serve the purposes of noun phrases (a raw noun without a determiner is ungrammatical). Can you spell this out a little more? > > > 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. > > > > ??? 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. Ah, I understand *your* point now. > 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). Yes, absolutely. But if the recursive invocation is at the *end* of the procedure, then it's a special case with no stack required. Just jump back to the beginning of the procedure and do it again. Thus, X <- X0, X <- Y X does not require recursion; it comes out loop: if x0 found, then success; if y not found, then failure; repeat -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org Please leave your values | Check your assumptions. In fact, at the front desk. | check your assumptions at the door. --sign in Paris hotel | --Miles Vorkosigan