Re: [engelang] Xorban Development - engelang messages

On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 12:51 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 30/08/2012 16:25:
OK. I see those rules as a kind of informal backoftheenvelopey sort of description, so I'm not that fussed about them, but yes, it's good not to take technical terms from linguistics and then use them in a different incompatible technical sense here.

Agreed. I think if we change "complement" to "(formula-)modifier", then that will remove that problem.

> 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.

I'll explain why I think you can't be right.
1. Semantic composition. A dependent's meaning is complete in itself. A head's meaning is incomplete until the dependents are added. Ergo "ja" is head with two dependents, "na" is head with one dependent, "r-" is head with two dependents.
2. A head may have multiple dependents but a dependent may not have multiple heads. Ergo in "ja/ra X Y", ja/ra is head of X and Y, not dependent.

With all due respect, I think I can be right because there are more than one way of looking at it, and it's trivial to show an alternative to your way. In Ba Ra Pa, formula Ra is the head of unary operator (Ba Ra), Ba something like a determiner. Pa is the head of ((Ba Ra) Pa). The J-series can be looked at in the exact same way.

I think that you are using wooly and inappropriate criteria for distinguishing heads and modifiers, unless you think {fgro'e} is not its own head--it seems to me that its meaning is complete. In fact, the formal semantic rules will give all WFFs an interpretation with respect to a model but it will not generally speaking have rules for interpreting modifiers by themselves. Without a WFF, modifiers are syntactically incomplete utterances and will be semantically incomplete as well by the formal rules.

> 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.
>
> Xorban is pretty different from natural languages, so the terminology
> is going to be at least a little different.

The grammatical categories will be different -- no need for nouns, verbs, subjects, objects and so forth. But the basic mechanics are the same -- at least, I would stipulate that as a fundamental design goal, else why insist that the language have a linear phonetically-realizable phonology, for example. I'm pretty sure that we all [of us taking an interest in Xorban] take this design goal pretty much for granted, tho if it turns out we don't then that would make for an interesting discussion.

> To the extent that it patterns like a natural language, it very
> clearly patterns like a rigid SOV language in which the S and the O
> are BR-expressions and the V is a formula.

There is no S and O. That is, the verbs/predicates have inflections marking subject and object, but there are no separate subject and object phrases.

Using "S", "O" and other terms *informally*, Xorban BR-expressions pattern much like "S/O", and "clauses" pattern as in an "SOV" language in what I anticipate will be the normal human usage; "case tags" with their preceding BR-dependents can either be nested, or the "case tag" can be promoted to become part of the main predication -- Xorban allows a wonderful amount of flexibility due to its double-marking grammar (I have several examples on these variations, which I will provide later). These observations are not diminished by the fact that the formal rules allow one to transform any sentence into, say, prenex normal form, simply because no one is going to speak in (non-trivial) PNF.

Well, I can see how you could see it your way. You could see "la xrma mrsa" as having the structure of "[[the [horse]] died]", "[[la [xrma]] mrsa]", rather than "[la [xrma] [mrsa]]". But I can't see a rationale for that, and I can see obvious problems with it.