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well if you're looking around at loglangs, you might be interested in how Minyeva deals with this problem. Minyeva isn't exactly a logical language, but it is regular and non-ambiguity is a goal of mine. I don't have the syntax documented anywhere since it's still in development. > I've been playing around with different loglangs and after looking > through ceqli, I am interested in how it resolves ambiguity. I am > specifically talking about figuring out what is the predicate and > what are the arguments. > > One example is: > > Pe xau kom pan sa kane. > Person sees the bread-eating dog. > > How does one know not to separate it as: > > [Pe] xau kom [pan sa kane] > Person see-eats the bread-type-of-dog. > > or > > [Pe xau] kom [pan sa kane] > Person-goer eats bread-type-of-dog. > > In both cases, the verb is confused as part of a compound. Minyeva is VSO for most verbs and SVO for others. Nouns/verbs can be interchanged. Articles come before nouns and adjectives/modifying verbs come after. Articles are required before nouns. So, some short example phrases: te = the pleva = dog pijo = loaf of bread sine = to think (about) vamo = to see tcavo = person u = object case - sine vamo te tcavo u te pleva pijo = the person see-thinks about the bread-dog. - sine te tcavo vamo u te pleva pijo = the seeing person thinkgs about the bread-dog. I have other rules to resolve ambiguity with phrases following other phrases. > I'm also curious as to what you consider the advantage of putting > adjectives and adverbs and suchlike _before_ whatever they are > describing. I realize that run-on sentences are non-existent in > chinese, due to the fact that descriptions can only run on for so > long before you must reveal what you are describing. I can't > decide whether or not this is a good thing, so I'll leave it for you > all to help me with. > > oskar >