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Jorge Llamb�as, On 01/10/2012 23:38:
On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 2:43 PM, Mike S.<maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:In "sa bbbe ccci", we have two distinct problems: unbound "e" and "i", and "a" bound uselessly. The former problem we have discussed at some length with solutions:[...]We all know who supports what on that. Of the other problem, it's tempting to me to want to declare it ungrammatical,I don't see a reason to make it ungrammatical, since it clearly has meaning (even if not a very useful meaning). "sa bbbe ccci" has the same truth value as "je bbbe ccci". The variable "a" is just wasted there, but I don't think there can be any doubt as to the meaning: "For some a for which bbbe is true (i.e. anything if bbbe is true and nothing if bbbe is false) it is the case that ccci", A pointless use of "a", but not meaningless.but if we were determined to try to make sense of it, it might be something like, sa bbbe ccci sa [le sme] [je pseka] bbbe [li smi] [je psika] ccci "There exists an A pertaining to bbb E such that A pertains to ccc I. ... which is not at all necessarily good, but may be the best thing we might make of a bad sentence.I don't see the need for anything that complicated. That may well be a connotation of that sentence, but surely not part of its proper meaning. "sa R P" is truth functionally equivalent to "sa sma je R P", and I see no reason to exclude from these the contrived cases where R (or P) don't contain a free a.
It's at least as easy to exclude them as to include them. (If necessary they could be reincluded by special rules that make them meaningful and somehow useful.) The approach I'd favour is to make syntactic binding obligatory. Structures without the appropriate inflections for the binding relations are either ungrammatical or rescued by special rules adding extra (phonologically null) structure sufficient to provide the binding relations. The alternative is to make all binding relations optional, But how would that be formalized? You'd need to define a relation 'potential binding relation' such that if X and Y are in a potential binding relation then X and Y inflect with the same vowel iff one binds the other. This strikes me as unproblematic, but nevertheless as more complicated than the alternative. --And.