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And Rosta, On 30/08/2012 01:49:
I'm assuming you (even tho Jorge wasn't) were envisaging a system whereby if tvl- is defined as X tells Y Z, it can be tvlekaku "E tells A U" or tvleka "E tells A (something)" or tvle "E tells someone something". Given this sort of system, one would want the arguments ordered by how frequently one would wish to o'e them, the least often o'e-ed one first and the most often o'e-ed one last: that would maximize brevity. But that's a tricky calculation, and conflicts with the idea of trying to order arguments by their semantic role. In my system, if, say, there's a ternary predicate one of whose arguments will often be o'e, then we can just add to the lexicon a binary predicate with the same same but without the o'e-prone argument.I am afraid I can't imagine a situation in which it would be helpful to allow PtkV not to be defined as an abbreviation of PtkVkV; it seems a disadvantage to arbitrarily allow predicates to have more than one lexical entry.it wouldn't be a correspondence between one predicate and many lexical entries, it would be a correspondence between one stem and many predicates, each of which has one lexical entry. The arity of a predicate is a defining property of the predicate, as you of course are well aware. Allowing one stem to be recycled for different predicates would done not arbitrarily but on principle, the principle of respecting the fact that a predicate is partly defined by its arity, and the principle of maximizing brevity (by optimizing assignment of shortest forms to frequentest meanings).
Another possibility would be to change the morphology of predicates to XX-bV-cV-dV, where: 1. bV, cV, dV are each omissible (as long as one remains) 2. xxb-V, xxc-V, xxd-V are the same predicate (just with different arguments left implicit) --And.