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Re: [Ladekwa] Case tags

But why? If a linking grammatical particle such as a case tag or conjunction precedes the verb, then you will know that the verb is part of a clause. If no such linking word precedes the verb, such as a noun or adjective or nothing at all, then you will know that the verb is part of a new sentence. Because the language is right-branching, parsing will be no more complicated using nothing but case tags than it was before, it'll just be different.
 
Regards,
Geoff

 
On 13/11/05, Stephan Schneider <sts@hidden.email> wrote:
The advantage has been that reading the verb you already know how many verb arguments are about to come. This means that not only the words are self-segregating, but also the sentences are. The parsing process would be much more complicated if this syntactic preview would not be there.
 
Regards,
Stephan
----- Original Message -----
To: Ladekwa@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2005 1:46 PM
Subject: [Ladekwa] Case tags

 
Hi Rick,
 
Pardon this radical suggestion, but it seems to me that the case tags are an underutilised feature in Ladekwa (soon to be Latejami?). For example, why classify verbs according to their case structures if you still need to use other case tags elsewhere? Why not use case tags for agent, patient and focus as well, so that you can use whatever cases you want for the nouns, in whatever order you want, and then merely distinguish between the static and dynamic verbs? Not only would this greatly simplify the verb classification system, but it also would obviate the need for most of the voice system as well, because of the greater flexibility of the word order. Indeed, the only non-redundant distinction that the voice system would have left to make is between suppressing a case ( e.g. middle voice) and merely hiding it (e.g. passive voice), and even then, I'm not really sure that that distinction is meaningful.
 
If you're gonna overhaul Ladekwa anyway, I thought I'd better throw that in there, especially since it frees up a few more classifiers...
 
Geoff

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