[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
Jorge Llamb�as, On 08/10/2012 16:54:
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?
Yes. There's no phonological reason for excluding any.
The point of the formal grammar is to select which concatenations of phonological words have meaning.
No concatenations of phonological words have meaning directly.
Ideally the formal grammar selects all and only those concatenations that have meaning, and provides the structure needed to assign the corresponding meaning.
I can't speak to the notion of "formal grammar" in the specialized sense in which Mike has been intending the term -- I've said in other messages that it seems ludicrously inappropriate for a language. But to speak instead of the grammar: the syntactic component will generate all possible sentential syntactic structures; the lexical and inflectional components will map each sentential syntactic structure to a corresponding phonological structure (concatenation of phonological words).
[...]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.
I think Xorban has to be the infinite one, on the assumption that there is no upper limit to the adicity of predicates. Simple-formulas are not atomic. Rather, they must consist of a predicate with a number of argument-terminal complements, these argument-terminals being argument-places; all 'terminal' (or 'complementless') nodes other than interjections are argument-terminals. The reason for this conclusion is that binders bind not a formula but an argument-terminal; ergo argument-terminals are separate nodes.
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 jek too
and the bindees are any variables in the binder's desinence that are free in the complements?
Are you thinking that a single variable appears multiple times in the tree, expressed phonologically at each place it appears, and always with a phonological form of the same type? If so, then binders would have three complements, one of the complements being the variable, and predicates' complements would be variables. I guess by "free in the complement" you must mean "not bound by a binder that is within the complement" (for otherwise it makes no sense to say that the bindee is free in the complement! The bindee is by definition bound!) I'd been thinking that there were no variables in syntax and that instead a binding relation between binder and argument-terminal is expressed inflectionally. I think my version is simpler and more syntactically orthodox. But anyway, to answer your question: your reformulation doesn't get us away from having to state the basic fact that bindees occur within the complement of their binder. To be clear: the syntactic rules of core Xorban are extremely simple; it's just that BNF is not suited to stating them. I don't know if the syntactic rules of termtree-augmented Xorban are equally simple, because I haven't yet had time to sit down and work out what they are. --And.