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In a message dated 6/10/2002 1:49:12 PM Central Daylight Time, maikxlx@gmail.com writes:This is not quite clear to me. If something is "defined in No. It produces a syntactical one, the logical one is worked out by "other means," in the prose or not at all. See below. <Well, perhaps I misunderstand something, but it appears to me that the parse you give here directly contradicts the one implicit in Chapter 2 of the RG, which is the way I had analyzed Lojban grammar up until now. Chapter 2 shows a tree in which the parse of the above example must be given as: (cu prami (lo ninmu) (ro nanmu)) if we adopt a convention that places the header first, or just as well as: ((lo ninmu) cu prami (ro nanmu)) if we opt to maintain the word order. Either way works fine. In no case can we get ((ro nanmu)(cu prami (lo ninmu))), assuming that the predicate always governs its arguments, as I understand they do in Lojban.> This comparing apples and pears -- almost the same thing but not quite. the parse is a strictly linear and binary breaking of the sentence to determine whether it is grammatical and how it is constructed according the this particular grammar (the official one). This is meant to be very close to the syntactic structure of the sentence but pretty obviously is not identical with it. The difference is often, as here, that the synstructure is not binary, so the transition is simply to ignore certain kinds of divisions that the parser introduces (there are several other artifacts of the parser, whose charm is that it has all sorts of nice technical features and is relatively easy to work with, and some of them are much worse: sentence modifiers that get bound to the nearest word, for example. This may be what & is talking about when he says it is a long way from being a logical language). I don't, incidentally agree that the predicate must govern its arguments, though I admit it is hand for a lot of things. But handiness, rather than theoretical elegance is its main virtue. I actually think that the Lo*an parses are better for logic (FreeMod et simul aside) than many putative linguistic tricks. But, then, I am in this area yet another clique of one. I tend to think that in the case of this instant sentence it is almost perfect: I would have done it as ro(nanmu (cu prami (lo ninmu))), an A-proposition with the main internal break between subject and predicate (of course) and a complex predicate (in the older sense of those terms). I would not expect the parser to give me this, but surely to give me -- as I think it does -- good input to get this. |