[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 8:49 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote: > Jorge Llambías, On 04/09/2012 02:56: > > 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. > > Rather, let every word try to be final in a macrosyntagm, and only if that > is not possible should it set forth links to following words. I'm assuming > that binding is syntactic. How can you tell when a macrosyntagm is finalized? For example, if I think I have a finalized macrosyntagm, and the negation operator "na" comes along, does it try to be final and does that mean that what I thought was a macrosyntagm wasn't one after all, or is the old macrosyntagm part of the new one? I'm not completely sure what a macrosyntagm is. Is it any part of a sentence that can itself be a sentence? But then unless you have a full stop (or something like my illocutionary operators that "close" a sentence) I don't see how you can ever be sure that the putative macrosyntagm is not part of a bigger one that encompasses it. > > 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? > > Yes, that's right. Until the output is the logical form, I don't think > it's reasonable to call the process parsing -- or rather, it's one stage of > the parsing process. Right, the syntactic stage. I think keeping the syntactic stage separate from the semantic stage is nice. > > 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. > > I don't see a need to introduce a rule specifically to disallow them, but > in the syntactic system I outlined, I think it would make sense to say that > in "bcda fgha li", li's dependents must follow it rather than being "bcda > fgha". And likewise in "li bcda fgha", at least "fgha", and prob "bcda fgha" > wd have to be dependents of a following quantifier. If you do allow things like "for every x snow is white", then I don't understand how you can tell that "li" in "bcda fgha li" is not supposed to take "bcda fgha" as its dependents. Why couldn't it then be followed by "jkla la" so that all the 'a's end up properly bound? > > So it seems that getting an operator to look to the right for its > > dependants would tend to be quite difficult. > > How so? The job of the parser is to establish predicate--argument and > quantifier--variable relations, so at any given word, the parser knows > whether or not it contains an unbound variable. Even if that was to be part of the syntactic stage of parsing, I still don't see when you would allow "for every x snow is white" as a valid sentence and when you wouldn't. If "for every x" follows "snow is white", does it take it as a dependent? > > Would you use vV for something like "when John visits his > > grandmother, he usually brings her chocolates" too? > > You could, yes, though in this instance you could have "John -A, John's > grandma -I, occasions when A visit's I -U, occasions when A brings I > chocolates -E, majority of U are E". But if the sentence were "When John > makes a cup of tea, he usually forgets to drink it", the vV system wd be > best I think. Is that because John and his grandma are typically pictured as individuals, while "cups of tea" is typically seen as "dividual"? That's really the only thing that distinguishes the two cases. mu'o mi'e xorxes