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Jorge Llamb�as, On 08/10/2012 20:57:
On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 3:05 PM, And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:Jorge Llamb�as, On 08/10/2012 16:54:The point of the formal grammar is to select which concatenations of phonological words have meaning.No concatenations of phonological words have meaning directly.Let me try again: The function of the syntax part of the formal grammar is to separate the concatenations of word classes that have meaning from those that don't.
I don't know how much weight you want to lay on the details of your formulation. The components of syntax are not merely concatenated but rather connected in more complicated ways. The function of syntax is to specify the possible ways the components combine, which includes specifications for how their forms combine and how their semantic interpretations combine. Having meaning is not in itself a property that renders a combination of syntactic components licit.
To separate concatenations with meaning such as "LA CCA CCA" from others without meaning such as "LA LA LA", and also to determine that "LA CCA CCA CCA" consists of two sentences "(LA CCA CCA) (CCA)", and not anything else.
The grammar generates phrases with terminal nodes LA, CCA & CCA, and specifies constraints on their semantic interpretation, and doesn't generate phrases with terminal nodes LA, LA & LA.
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).I have trouble seeing how that is different from what I'm saying.
Is what you're saying "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."? Or are you referring to something else?
[...]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.The adicity of predicates does not enter into the syntax, because all predicates of any adicity in Xorban have exactly the same syntax.
No, this is precisely not the case: that's what I was explaining in my last message.
A finite number of rules can generate an infinite number of sentences, but if you want predicates of each adicity to have a different syntax, you need an infinite number of rules (although you could have a rule schema to generate the infinite rules).
Do you consider that a phrase containing a head and five distinct complements has different syntax from a phrase containing a head and four distinct complements? I do, and I don't consider that this requires infinite rules, but if you tell me it requires infinite BNF rules I will believe you. I consider the phrases to have different syntax both because four is different from five and because each complement has its own idiosyncratic semantic interpretation, and hence its own individual identity.
We don't need to mention the adicity of a predicate in order to formulate the binding rules, do we?
No.
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.By "atomic formula" I mean a formula that doesn't have another formula inside. They do consist of a stem and a desinence, and the desinence determines the adicity of the predicate, so in that sense they are not atomic.
Okay. The only problem I have with that is the use of morphological terminology ("stem", "desinence") to refer to syntactic objects rather than to morphological ones. We're likely to need to refer to the morphological objects in their own right, so the terms "stem" and "desinence" would be useful in their proper senses.
I realize I probably seem a bit anal about this, but we probably agree that conceptual clarity is important. John Cl wrote a message calling it theology, which sounds dismissive, but probably accurately describes the way a nonempirical discipline looks to an outsider who doesn't understand it.
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?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.I'm not sure I see the distinction.
My version: Binder, with two complements, binding a bindee, which is generally an argument-place complement (tho not in case of jek, ji'uk). The binding relation is expressed in the phonological form of the binder and the argument-place. Your version (if I understood right, which I probably didn't): Binder has three complements, one of which is a variable. It generally binds complements of predicates; complements of predicates are variables. The variable has multiple forms, all of the same shape; each form cliticizes to the form of the syntactic word the variable is a complement of. Syntactically it's one entity, but phonologically it gets expressed as many different forms, of the same shape.
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.Is that missing from my formulation? Yes, I'm taking that as a given.
That's one of the fundamental rules of the grammar. Okay, it's obvious enough that we can remember it without writing it down. But when we take the trouble to write down the fundamental rules, this is one of them.
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.They are still quite simple, and they are meant to be straightforwardly reducible to core Xorban.
I understand that they're still quite simple and that they're meant to be straightforwardly reducible to core Xorban. But from the BNF rules alone, I cannot work out -- at least from a cursory reading -- how they affect the Argument and Binding relations of core Xorban, which is what really matters. --And.