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Mike S., On 12/09/2012 00:25:
On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 5:25 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto:and.rosta@hidden.email>> wrote: Mike S., On 11/09/2012 20:46:Imagine if we had to remember or notice that "he", "she" and "it" changed meaning based on something like the scope of its referent (and only scope) instead of based on introducing a newer, more salient referent (i.e. rebinding).You mean, imagine a system like English anaphora? Like pronouns bound by quantifiers in English? Like wh-phrases binding their traces? Even personal pronouns are sensitive to syntactic scope -- sometimes, tho not always, to scope alone). Like English anaphora with nonspecific referents as in "John likes cats. Alice likes them too", but without barring specific readings either.
I meant anaphora in the jargon sense of reflexives. Ordinary pronouns needn't be bound.
Xorban variables are resumptive and phonological. Traces of wh-phrases are the opposite, which makes it impossible to use them more than once.
There are parasitic gap constructions, as well as extraction out of conjuncts.
Even pronouns bound by universal quantifiers can seemingly appear outside their scope: ra prna le lsre djnake. di djni tvlika. Every person knows the story. John told them. ra prna se pzzslce ctkake. si mnika so nmdoke ctkiko. le skne klmake. Every person ate a slice of pizza. Some of them ate two [slices]. Then they went to the movies.
These aren't bound pronouns. One giveaway is that alongside Each plate was broken. John had smashed it. we also have Each plate was broken. John had smashed them. It seems to me that binding in English is almost entirely based on hierarchical syntax, tho there are some interactions with linear precedence (e.g. "While John was in the kitchen, he smashed the plates", which allows a reading where John binds "he"). I'm making a distinction between binding, a syntactic relation that entails coreferentiality (or similar) in semantics, and definite expressions like "the man" and (unbound) "him" that point to something in the UoD.
It takes no diachronic change at all to make "lu fu sa xrma bjra vska'aku. [la na xrma] xkra" un-Gricean when "xkro'e" is available and practically begging to be used.
I'm not sure I understand the point of that particular example, but I take it that your general point is that unbound -a is not going to be interpreted as o'e given that o'e is available. That's debatable if o'e is at all phonologically or stylistically marked, because the o'e is there only out of morphological necessity, and the speaker will for Gricean reasons want it to be as unobtrusive as possible. However, if your example was "leuoi mlteuoi xkreuoi mrseuoi", I will completely agree that reading "mrseuoi" as "mrso'e" is incredibly unGricean and perverse.
Just out of curiosity, of the two choices: 1. Free variables have implicit restrictions. 2. Free variables are illicit with a few sanctioned exceptions. ... which do you think is better?
Out of those two choices, and assuming they apply to Xorban in its current form, then (2) is far far better.
The implicit binding scheme gives a simple and useful and probably inevitable interpretation for afterthought free variables.John's notion -- or, at least, a notion I arrive at through discussion with him -- of variables continuing with their binding beyond the syntactic scope of their binder, until rebound (or forgotten) strikes me as more simple, more useful, more usable and more inevitable than the implicit binding with perseverative restriction scheme. Not that I am yet ready to advocate such a scheme, but I am more persuaded of its cognitive naturalness. With all due respect to John, I understand at best a third of what he writes so it would be helpful to explain if you could how his scheme differs from the one already in place.
"sa mlta na xkra mrsa" would mean not "sa mlta xkra la mlta mrsa" but "sa mlta je na xkra mrsa". I think that if you let ordinary speakers loose on Xorban, that's the reading you'd get, and for the reasons I gave, it's better than your scheme. You might ask me what are the precise rules for how to incorporate an apparently unbound variable within the scope of a previous quantifier. I think my answer for the time being is that the rules are left up to users to negotiate tacitly; if you want the advantages of a loglang, then use it properly and make sure all your binding is explicit. Having said that, my hunch is that the predicate with the unbound variable would be treated as an extra complement of the quantifier: "sa [mlta] [na xkra] [mrsa]". (Not always, mind. "It's not the case that some pig flies" has to be virtually rewritten to "Every pig doesn't fly" before you attach'unbound' "doesn't have wings". That's the sort of thing I'd leave to users to fudge about with.) If you add this as a third option to the two you asked about above, I think I'd opt for this latter scheme. --And.