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On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 6:40 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote: > Jorge Llambías, On 01/10/2012 23:38: > > > > "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.) As I see it, there's nothing special we need do to include them, because the basic syntax already generates them and there's a natural extension for their meaning from their ordinary meaning. To exclude them you need to add a rule to specifically exclude them, so it does involve a certain (even if minimal) complication. > The approach I'd favour is to make syntactic binding obligatory. Me too, but what exactly counts as syntactic binding? For me it's something like this: "A binding operator removes any free occurrences of its variable from its complement formulas." The special cases in which the complement formulas happen to have no free occurrences of the variable are just that, special degenerate cases. The resulting formula will have no free occurrences of the variable, which is exactly as it should be. > 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. Formulas with free variables need to be rescued somehow because otherwise they can't have meaning. They need an implicit binder. Binders whose one or both complements happen to have no free occurrence of the variable they bind need no special action, because they already have a natural meaning. > 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. I think binders always do the same to their complements: they bind any free occurrence of their variable. Anything else strikes me as more complicated. co ma'a xrxe