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On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 8:27 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote: > > The rules are: > > Every word tries first to bond syntactically with words preceding it; if > it fails, then it bonds syntactically with words following it. That would make it very difficult to ever end a sentence, since every sentence would always remain available for some future word to grab it. Doesn't that impose an even more unbearable burden on the listener than having to remember the restriction on some variables? Or maybe you could have a full stop. > > It would be nightmarish to write a formal grammar with that rule, I > > would think. > > Not if you choose the right formalism. Take the kind of rules you have so > far, and strip away the element of linear precedence, leaving purely > hierarchical structure. Then add the rule I've outlined above. Bob's your > uncle. The simple formal grammar we have can't tell one variable from another, so it can't tell whether a formula has free variables or not. That's left to a subsequent semantic stage of parsing. Your rules require the identification of each variable at the syntactic stage, right, so that an appearance of "li" knows whether the utterance so far has a free "i" for it to bind or not? Unless you allow sentences like "for every x, if snow is white then it is now raining", which I don't really see a reason to disallow. So it seems that getting an operator to look to the right for its dependants would tend to be quite difficult. > >> But I'd be fine with *a specific series of variables*, e.g. V'u, > >> preserving the same restriction when subsequently unbound. > > > > But then the speaker has to plan ahead. > > And the hearer is forewarned to make the necessary effort to remember. I suspect the language we have so far is more taxing on the speaker than on the listener. My only evidence is that I have to put more effort into constructing a well formed sentence than into deconstructing one. > >The idea here is that this is for afterthought use. > > First of all, I think that a loglang demand of its speaker a fair bit of > forward planning. All the more reason to give the speaker as much help as possible. > Second, I think afterthought anaphoric relations should not rely on memory > of preceding phonological form or completed syntactic structure, i.e. should > not rely on stuff the mind forgets as soon as it's done with it. I think this probably needs to be tested by experience. Each rule has advantages and disadvantages, and I don't think it's easy to determine which outweigh which in each case. > My vV solution is an > economical way of expressing exactly the desried meaning, but it's probably > a bit too baroque for Xorban. (Or is it? Actually, no, I think it's pretty > neat. I don't think I'll withdraw the proposal yet.) Would you use vV for something like "when John visits his grandmother, he usually brings her chocolates" too? mu'o mi'e xorxes