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Re: [engelang] Xorban experimental tense markers



Jorge Llamb�as, On 30/09/2012 00:09:
On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 7:29 PM, And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email>  wrote:
Jorge Llamb�as, On 29/09/2012 22:47:

Arguably mV is redundant to "q...qV", which is more general.

The contents of q...q is raw phonological material, whereas the complement
of mV is a single phrase, and therefore has syntactic (and hence semantic)
structure.

Yes, but I'm not sure there's much difference in the end. If the raw
material is interpretable, it can be interpreted anyway, and also the
syntactically valid phrase could have no other meaning than as an
onomastic, just like the raw material. I'd say mV is more a
convenience than an essential.

Okay.
My list of "essentials" so far would be:

ca
fV
lV
xV
(certain) simple-formulas

I think that would be exactly my list, too. Possibly lV could be reduced
to xV, tho.

How would that work? How would you reduce "la mlta xkra" to something
with x-? I can't think of any way to do it.

I can't see a way of doing it in basic Xorban. But if arguments were complements of predicates, then "la mlta xkra" could be "xxoi xa mlta xkra", where predicate "xx" supplies the element of meaning that lV does.

So I should instead say that lV is essential within the context of Xorban's current syntactic design, but not essential to every viable design.

Arguably illocutionaries, including ca, could also be reduced to
simple-formulas too.

I thought you would say that. Is it because we could give default
assertive force to an utterance without an explicit cV?

No, it's because the illocutionary force can simply be part of the meaning of an ordinary formula. There could be a formula meaning "I hereby promise you that", and so on. (That's how it is in Livagian, whose only word classes are predicates and various quotative markers of the zo/lu/zoi sort.)

--And.