Re: [engelang] Re: [jboske] LoCCan3 development ideas. - engelang messages

On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 9:43 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 17/08/2012 14:49:

> On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 8:47 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto:and.rosta@hidden.email>> wrote:
> 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.
>
> Regarding "event x1", I assume that event predicates are formed
> regularly as Lojban NU expressions are formed?

No, every predicate has an event argument, the state of affairs in which the relation among the other arguments is the case.

> Being a member of a
> set is not an event in the Lojban (or English) sense

The English sense of "event" is dynamic, tho the technical term "[Davidsonian] event argument" doesn't entail dynamicity, but the Lojban sense isn't dynamic.

Of course it's on me to look up Davidson for all the details, but could you please tell me more about Davidsonian event semantics, explaining roughly how events relate to time and possible worlds? Montague Semantics makes heavy use of possible worlds and time indices, but somehow I think these event things are different.

> I probably misunderstand this, but here's my interpretation of how
> your hebdoad works:
>
> I saw on television today the event (=x1) of John (=x2) becoming the
> third (=x3) (in set =elided x4 defined by being a) person to walk on
> Mars (=x5) (ordered obviously by time =elided x6) (with cardinality
> obviously now 3 =elided x7).

This predicate has a meaning that makes it unlikely to be an argument of "see", but it might be an argument of "not" or "believe".

> I find that x4 and x5 are really the same thing said different ways;

the set is the group containing the members, not the property that defines it

It seemed to me that if you know the property then you know what individuals are in the set defined by that property, and therefore you know the set. I may be misunderstanding. Is the difference that you posit between x4 and x5 in any way related to the difference between an extension and an intension?

> the rest of the places are essential to the meaning, but as a whole
> it's too unwieldy: x3 and x6 are closely related to one another and
> might be managed by a separate predicate linked to x4/x5; likewise x7
> is inherent in the x4/x5. In software terms this thing needs to be
> refactored.

It kind of depends on the syntax and morphology. The heptadic solution is economical in the number of predicates required (in the lexicon and in the sentence). If you can omit in the sentence any arguments you don't need to saturate explicitly, then there's not much downside.

That is what I think most humans would do--omit arguments, especially the trailing ones. The question that arises is whether humans'd comprehend the meaning when arguments weren't omitted.

It is possibly unfair of me to opine about heptads (hebdoads?) without disclosing that I have never included heptads in any of my own LL sketches, nor attempted to master them. So my intuition about them may be wrong. However, if reason ever compelled me to define heptadic predicates, then surely intuition would compel me to provide an optional case-tag to accompany each slot that provided a _semantic_ hint as to what each argument meant. That would also make it easier to elide and reorder places. Other than that, I fear that the heptadic solution is economical at the expense of stretching ordinary innate human abilities beyond their breaking point.

> 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.
>
> Why not "X tells Z Y"?

I wasn't making a distinction between them. I meant that there doesn't seem to be a natural way to decompose this triadic predicate into dyadic predicates: X says Y, X addresses Z, Z hears Y, all in the one event -- pretty cumbersome.

Actually, I thought that I did decompose it quite naturally by creating {tell} and {say}. You do correctly point out one interesting and key semantic difference between your "X says Y to Z" and my "X (say} Y {tell} Z": the latter does not entail (nor rule out) "Z hears Y". Hearing is not entailed by "A {tell} P (audience)" because that predicate is agent-oriented -- it describes what the agent does, not what effect it has on the patient.

You may or may not find it a deficiency to require a speaker to include "P {hear} T" if he wishes to include a truth condition about hearing in a proposition about telling. But I would assert that it's a minor virtue because (1) in normal discourse there's no need - it's often distracting in fact - to indicate the ordinary & obvious; instead, it's incumbent on the speaker to indicate the unordinary & unobvious, and (2) if we want to translate "John was telling Alice the story, but she wasn't listening, having already fallen asleep" or "Losing his mind, John told the story to his bucket of pet rocks", then we are unable to use your "X says Y to Z" predicate because the "Z hears Y" part is untrue. So in the end, you will have to create another predicate just like "{say} {tell}" to cover such situations.

> > 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.
>
>
> Am I to understand that every predicate in your system has to have an
> argument for event?

Yes.

> In that case reducing predicates to only two
> places would probably make it not only verbose but unworkable.

But capping predicates at two (non-event) arguments is too much even for Xorban. Given the shape Xorban is taking, though, it's now clear that there's no upper limit to the number of arguments, but every argument adds add least one syllable (and maybe four or more).

Well, just to be clear, my claim that you can get away with an upper limit of two arguments per predicate entails using an approach like the serial-verb construction shown in my sketch that implicitly applies "A" and "P" variables to predicates as needed (although I didn't describe it that way until now, that's pretty much what's happening); without such an approach, _three_ seems to be the most natural minimal upper limit (at least following Morneau's case role philosophy).

Because Xorban does not allow any method of implicitly applying variables to predicates, it's necessarily going to be a little (no, a *lot* actually) different than my sketch. You mention arguments adding a syllable, but don't forget also that combining N primitive formulas (predicate + arguments) necessitates N-1 binary operators as well as a certain amount of repetition of variables. It'll be interesting to see how it all works out.

> I am uncertain of the function of your event arguments and why they
> can't be grammaticized more efficiently, but I am curious to find out
> more about it, so please feel free to shed some light on that if you
> would. If these events have all the related tense and modal logic
> worked out behind the scenes, I would especially like to see your
> notes.

For example, rather than "False(angry(x))" ("It's false that x is angry"), Livagian would have "false(x1[e],x2) angry(x2[e],x3)".

Could you please give me a gloss of the second formula?

> I see the triad "X says Y to Z" as most conveniently decomposed into
> dyads strictly among X, Y, and Z, namely "X expresses Y" and "X
> addresses Z". Here's the basic idea:
>
> {say}: X says/expresses proposition/narrative Y
> {tell}: X tells/addresses/communicates to audience Z
>
> John {tell} Alice.
> John tells Alice.
>
> John {say} he is going to the store.
> John says that he is going to the store.
>
> John {tell} Alice {say} he is going to the store.
> John tells Alice that he is going to the store.
>
> John {say} the story {tell} Alice.
> John tells the story to Alice.
>
> Alice {inverse-tell} John.
> Alice is told by John.
>
> Alice {inverse-tell} John {say} the story.
> Alice is told by John the story.
>
> Alice {past} {inverse-tell} {say} the story.
> Alice was told the story.

Interesting. I've never looked into a system like this before. what would you say its main virtues are?

I think that simplifying predicates to one or two places allows the syntax to be relatively simple and flexible.

Employing simplified predicates themselves to introduce arguments into a clause makes case role semantics always obvious.

Allowing the easy, relatively free (yet semantically precise) combination of simplified predicates into more complex predicate structures obviates the need to create a relatively large number of higher-arity predicates (e.g. telling +hearing; telling ?hearing; telling -hearing) with subtle differences of meaning.

> > 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?
>
>
> The short answer is that the serial predicate syntax and
> corresponding semantics under consideration do not treat all
> predicate slots as interchangeable, which is what a one-open-class
> system like Lojban's requires. Four appears to be the smallest number
> of open classes required to make this version of Morneau's system
> work. A description of the system follows for your curiosity.

Thanks. I read it with interest and thanks.

> The syntax of this version is basically SVO and SV. As mentioned, an
> open class basic predicate has one of four types of argument
> structures, (P), (P, T), (A, P), (A, T). The A refers to an agent
> slot, P to a patient slot, T to a theme slot. Argument structure type
> is lexically determined.

_Theme_ is misnamed, I think. In "X enter Y", X is the theme in the standard sense of the term.

You're right, but I can't think of a better name. I suppose "object" might work, because what I am calling the theme is really the "object" of a "transitive" predicate with either an agent or patient for "subject". But that might be even more confusing because there exists also the predicate type in which the patient is the "object" (and the agent is the "subject").

Your reasoning about the need for no more than these four patterns seems sound, except if we can merge (A) into (P), why not also merge (A, T) into (P, T)?

If all (A, T) were merged into into (P, T) then there were would be no way to express instruments and other themes/objects used by the agent on the patient, such as messages. John-A {push} the barrel-P {use} a forklift-T. John-A {tell} Alice-P {say} the story-T.

What do the three cases and four predicate types buy us?

What about a system of binary serial verbs, forgetting about the 'cases': e.g. "John wield knife cut bread become slices"?