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On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 8:56 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
>
>And above the word-level, phonological structure
> would probably be a mere concatenation of phonological words, certainly
> without any of the elaborately (and pointlessly) patterned structure of
> Lojban and its less egregious Xorban counterparts.
You mean allowing any concatenation of phonological words at all? The
point of the formal grammar is to select which concatenations of
phonological words have meaning. Ideally the formal grammar selects
all and only those concatenations that have meaning, and provides the
structure needed to assign the corresponding meaning.
[...]
> Doing something similar for Core Xorban, for the non-binding tree,
> we'd want something like:
> complement := argument-terminal | phrase
> phrase := head complement*
> [where the number of complements varies according to the identity of the
> Head].
What you would want then is:
phrase := head-0
| head-1 complement
| head-2 complement complement
| head-3 complement complement complement
| ...
complement := argument-terminal | phrase
which is either an infinite grammar or one with some fixed maximum of
complements per head.
That's basically what Xorban is, where (ignoring
illocutionary-operators for now) head-0, head-3, head-4, etc are all
empty, since Xorban only has head-1 and head-2. Head-1 is what we call
unary operators, and head-2 are the binary operators, and
"argument-terminal" are the atomic formulas.
>And for binding, we'd want:
> Binding := binder bindee*
> But I can't see how to capture the fact that a binder is a head and its
> bindees are contained within its complement.
Why can't you just say that binders are (certain) heads (namely l-,
r-, s- and x- in Xorban so far), and the bindees are any variables in
the binder's desinence that are free in the complements?
co ma'a xrxe