On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 10:25 AM, And Rosta
<and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
I would approach the rules differently, by defining the combinatorial properties of words, so the thing currently called "complement" wouldn't arise. I would normally have said a unary operator has one complement and a binary operator has two complements, but one could call them "dependents" instead, to avoid confusion.
Would "formula-modifier" be acceptable to you? Then we can use "complement" in the manner that you want it to be used, to refer to formulas governed by operators. I would prefer *not* to change the rules, but I agree that "complement" as it is used now has a slight smell.
However, I do object to using "dependent" to refer to formulas, i.e. _well formed formulas_, which is exactly what they are. Xorban formulas are *not at all* analogous to natural languages
"dependents" -- they are
analogous to sentences and the free-standing heads of sentences. Unary operators and
BR-expressions
(binder-restriction expressions) are the real dependents, precisely because they
are not well formed formulas. Unlike formulas, but like like natlang adverbs and noun phrases, they *cannot* stand
alone. The notion that formulas are
the dependents is simply backwards.
Basically, I'm influenced by the way natlangs work, on the grounds that ideally the loglang would be usable as if it were a natlang. But as with phonology, the syntactic description can come later.