[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
In a message dated 6/2/2002 8:22:19 AM Central Daylight Time, a-rosta@hidden.email writes:
Not just in this instance but always (though different quantifiers may use this rule differently -- that is admittedly not decided, mainly because & has raised questions). So. linear order, which is part of the grammatical representation at the appropriate level, does indicate scope. <The whole point of a grammar is to map sentence-sounds to sentence-meanings. Any so-called grammar that doesn't do that is not a grammar, and its claims to be unambiguous are hollow.> This is, of course, not a universally held view of grammars; many folk say it is enough to give possinble underlying structures and connections and assign the step from structure to meaning to something entirely different. When careful, Lojban says it has an unambiguous syntax, which can then rest with a unique structure, whatever it may mean. <It is not asking too much of an engelang that it have a real grammar, for, thanks to logicians, we already know and understand the structure of sentence-meanings. So the goal of the loglang inventor is to take logical structures as the starting point and work out the most efficient way of encoding them so as to satisfy the other design goals.> The claim -- expecially when made by logicians -- to know the structure of sentence meaning is worse than fatuoous. It is simply circular, if you are willing to chase the argument far enough: the meaning of the sentence is the structure that our techniques derive (period). All of the various theories about what those structures are like are indeed plausible, but none of them can safely claim to be THE answer, since each has cases it fails to handle that another does well. The primary source of Lojban ambiguity is tanru (predicate predicate constructions), where the connection between the two predicates involved is nowhere specified. This seems an insoluble problem in theory though usually not in practice -- the inf9inite regress can be cut off practically. At great lexical cost, I think. |