Re: [engelang] Xorban: Termsets - engelang messages

I try to stay out of theological arguments (except when I am doing theology) but this complaint that such and such a system does or doesn't accurately represent a language seems to me a very odd one. There have been in my years in and around linguistics about a dozen different official formats for grammars, all of them variants on a couple of simple schemata. By and large, they have all turned out to be more or less equivalent (in the crude sort of way that no one could come up with a case that was handled by one that was not equally well handled by another). There have been many stories about these systems (they hard hard-wired or evolutionarily selected or natural), but no hard evidence for any of these claims (and considerable against most of them). It turns out that some linguists just like to do item and process grammars and others like to do item and arrangement ones, but they both end up with essentially the same descriptions of the language once you get down to cases. BNF is a classic item and arrangement type and, as far as I can work out, so is argument and binding (which looks suspiciously like governance and dependency from my youth). Generation and transformation grammars (and Montague) are item and process, for all the difference it finally makes (well, I like them, so it makes a difference to me). Can we just sit down and agree about what this language is supposed to be like, then go off and create whatever sort of rules we like for it. So far, the BNFers have the rules, though not a very clear overall picture. & hasn't supplied much of anything except programmatics, with the result that we don't have a clear picture of what he we is shooting for (I don't know, for example, what he means by a loglang, including what the log part is). Nor do I get much of a clue about what his idea of a good grammar would be like (the constant use of standard terms in non-standard ways doesn't help here), though I get some sense of what it is to do (the usual one, in fact).

The fact that discussion is going on under the rubric "termsets", is, I think, indicative of a serious problem in communication -- which appears to me, trying to make sense out of the various threads here, to have plagued this discussion form the get-go, however constructive it has been over all.

From: And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, October 8, 2012 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban: Termsets

Jorge Llambías, 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.