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Re: [engelang] reformulating the core grammar

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 9:30 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 01/10/2012 18:43:

> We all know who supports what on that.

I don't think we do, because John WC's suggestion appeared only today, and I have formulated only vague proposals, too vague to be considered properly yet.

Fair enough.  As is well known, I currently support implicit [lV RV], but I am happy to consider clearly formulated alternative proposals. 

 
> Of the other problem, it's tempting to me to want to declare it
> ungrammatical, 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.

It is ungrammatical in the core grammar. Some of us think it wasteful for any well-formed phonological form to not correspond to a complete or incomplete sentence, so the appendix could have some extra rules for sa bbe ccci. I think the rule I'd go for would be that the phrase is incomplete and sa must have a complement containing what sa binds.

--And.

As a side note, I'd say there's really no such thing as an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence.  As far as free variables, right now the grammar allows them in sentences, and therefore the "appendix" (which I envision as a pretty gigantic tail wagging a rather miniscule dog) will need to provide an interpretation for such sentences.

--
co ma'a mke

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