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Mike S., On 16/08/2012 01:33:
Pentadic predicates? I would keep predicates lean and mean. There is really no need for bloat-happy hijinks /� la/ Lojban. The majority of predicates are going to have 1 or 2 inherent places, and very few need more than 3. I would argue that _all_ predicates can be decomposed into predicates of no more than _2_ places. Take "give" for example, with 3 inherent places. This can be represented by two predicates syntactically combined: xfr: Ax transfers Px kl: Pk passes to Tk so prna xfrai so mlti kliu ro vrbu. Some person (Ax) gave a cat (Px=Pk) to every child (Tk).
I agree that increase in the adicity causes exponential increase in complexity. In Livagian I had one ogdoadic (iirc) predicate -- it was something like "x1 is the event of x2 being in ordinal position x3 in set x4 defined by property x5 ordered by property x6 with cardinality x7", maybe it was hebdoadic not ogdoadic -- and it required a ghastly amount of baroque machinery to accommodate it. But not all decompositions seem to adequately capture the sense of the gestalt. E.g. "X says Y to Z". And decomposition is itself cumbersome, of course.
If all predicates are kept to 2 places, then we will be able to afford suppletive forms for the inverse/passive and reflexive of common predicates as you suggested. The rest can be formed regularly using particles. The number of possible operations is relatively small if one insists on 2-place predicates; it quickly starts to get complicated if you go even to 3.
I agree that even with 3 places things get more complicated, but reducing to only dyadic leads to verbosity. E.g. "X says Y to Z" could be "X is talker in event W, and Y is message in event W, and Z is addressee in event W". Likewise the megapredicate I mentioned above could be restructured so that instead of one predicate with 7 arguments, you could have six dyadic predicates each of which have an argument corresponding to the x1 and the other argument corresponding to one of x2--7.
By the way, {zi'o} will never be needed because bogus places simply
won't be admitted into predicate semantics.
I doubt zi'o has ever had any fans.
I think the best way to link the place structures of syntactically combined predicates is by simply adopting Richard Morneau's system of three archetypical thematic relations called agent (A), patient (P), and theme (T) (the last Morneau calls "focus"). These can represented by vowels a/i/u. Clauses can be composed of serial predicates as in the example above, or you can derive case tags like Morneau if you prefer; there is only one agent- and/or one patient-arguments per clause, each of which is governed by any number of co-predicates of the correct types; there are any number of theme-arguments, each governed by exactly one co-predicate. In my tinkering I have found that there are only four open-class predicate types needed: (A,P) "A does something to P", (A,T) "A does something using T", (P) "P is something", and (P,T) "P has something to do with T". There is also a need for a closed class of coordinating particles with arbitrary valency (P, T1, T2, T3,... ) but I'll leave that out for now.
Could you say a bit more about the syntax of serial predicates, and about why you need four (rather than just one) open classes? --And.