John E Clifford, On 01/10/2012 02:55:
> I am having trouble following your wandering notion of syntax. I
> would have assumed that a minimum requirement was to specify the
> well-formed sentences of the language.
No, that's the job of the whole grammar. The grammar contains a module for phonology, a module for syntax, and modules that define relations between elements in syntax and elements in phonology, including the lexicon module and the inflectional morphology module. Syntax itself is independent of phonology.
>While [Ex Fy} Gz may be a wff
> in Logic (it isn't in my system, but there are are variants), I dont
> think that sa mlte xkri would get by in Xorban. And I don't quite see
> how attaching arguments to predicates fails to be syntax in a
> language of this sort (although, if myopic singulars get in, I
> suppose something has to be left out).
Attaching arguments to predicates may well be syntax, but the phonological _expression_ of this is not. The rules I've already given rule out the syntactic form Ex Fy Gz, where the quantifier is not a binder and the arguments are not bindees. Unless I misunderstood you, you responded by saying that those rules were insufficient because they didn't mention vowels. I've been trying to explain that mentioning vowels is not the job of syntactic rules. I of course don't deny that the inflectional morphology rules are necessary for Xorban.
--And.