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Mike S., On 26/08/2012 15:47:
On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 9:43 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto: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%40gmail.com> <mailto:and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto:and.rosta%40gmail.com>>> 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,
No, it's fine to ask, but I had thought I'd explained the little that needs to be explained.
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 see them as not having anything to do with possible worlds. They can have to do with time. Take "X kisses y on Monday". You could represent that by allowing a syntactic predication to be an argument: "on-monday(kiss(x,y))". Or you could add an event argument to kiss, being the state of affairs in which x kisses y: "kiss(x, y, z) + on-monday(z)". (I used "+" rather than "&", because the predications should only be juxtaposed, not logically conjoined, for reasons I will explain further if need be. Conjunctions and negation can also be reduced to combinations of quantification and predicates with event arguments.
> 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?
Yes. But just because knowing one entails knowing the other doesn't mean they are equivalent. For example, a set (in Livagian) can encircle you, but a property can't.
> 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.
In Livagian, only a tiny handful of closed-class predicates have more than 4 (3 + event) arguments. For open-class the maximum is 3 plus event argument. Recent changes to Livagian might allow me to relax that maximum without difficulty, but there aren't that many predicates that seem to call for more than three arguments.
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.
Livagian is sort of head-marking -- it marks the predicate for the nonimplicit arguments it has. The inflections don't encode semantic roles, but there are cross-predicate patterns of inflection--semantic role correspondence. But Livagian in one way or another or more probably does stretch ordinary innate human abilities beyond their breaking point. My aim is find an optimal design and then consider whether humans can cope with 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.
>
> 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.
I can see that so long as the grammar captures that the saying and telling are aspects of the same situation, then "X say Y tell Z" suffices. After your earlier messages explaining your Morneauan system, I now roughly grock it.
> 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?
"false(x1,x2) angry(x2,x3)" where the first argument of each is the event argument -- "it is false that x3 is angry", "x1 is the state of affairs in which there is no state of affairs x2, where x2 is a state of affairs in which x3 is angry". Is that a bit clearer?
_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.
Nor can I, butbetter something more arbitrary than more confusing.
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.
I'm trying to remember why there can only be one A and one P per clause, and why {use} and {say} can't be (A,P).
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"?
In a language that worked as in your example, I think you would need
two predicates for "cut", one with an agent-x1 and one with an
instrument-x1.
Yes. Or just say "I wield cut cake".
Secondly, it would be tricky to reorder the constituents without changing the meaning, except perhaps by againdefining alternate predicates.
Yes, reordering would by tricky. any particular reasons why you want reordering to be possible? --And.