Re: [engelang] tanru - engelang messages

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 3:43 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:

Take even a simple _expression_ like "girls' school" (or "girls school" or "girl school") and render it in a loglang, assuming for now it means "school for girls as students". The analytic approach would have this divide into two predicates [girl] and [school] and then join them sententially somehow. The obvious solution is that [school] is a predicate (or family of predicates) which has a place for type of students, in this case girls, so Sv1 [girl]v1 [school]x v1. But there is no guarantee that, for a given girls school, there are in fact girls it is for (it may not be open yet or have very restrictive requirements or...). So, the reference to girls is intensional, possibly to the property of being a girls, whatever that may be:

Tv1 [^girl^] v1 [school] x v1 and the place of [school] is now "for things characterized by".

I assume that S is the existential operator, but what exactly is T? Is it like Xorban "l-"?

You've picked a complicated predicate for your exposition (a prime debloatification candidate in Lojban), and it does not seem clear that there is a school-relationship without students. Ultimately, in my opinion, whether a given argument place is intensional or extensional is a lexical design consideration. If "student" is to be an argument place of "school", can a "school" be a school in world w without having "students" in w? Maybe; I think it depends on what you want "school" exactly to mean.

Of course, [school] has other places as well, for subjects taught, grade range, and probably others which are crucial to being a school. So, we must either distinguish the various predicates with in the cluster [school] or we have to have a lot of vacuous quantifiers (or strictly unquantified variables) to show what is not functioning at the moment. Of course, we might leave [school] alone and have a predicate [for girls], giving just K[for girls]x [school]x.

I would hope that "grade range" would not be part of the argument structure of "school". That would be like adding "mother's hair color" to the argument structure of "human". In such a language, people with bald mothers would not be "human". And schools that dispensed with formal gradings (as some educational approaches would have it, I gather) would not be "schools". I don't claim to have the magic bullet on predicate design, but I think place structures should tend to encode essentials rather than contingents. Unfortunately essence/contingency seems to be a scalar rather than polar distinction with some predicates, so I am not sure what the argument structure "school" should look like. One drastic approach, however, is to drop all contingents and use a compounding morphology to create a bunch of predicates to indicate the specific contingent relationships.

school: x1 is a school i.e. educational institution
school-student: x1 is student attending school x2
school-topic: x1 is a topic taught in school x2
etc.

Another approach would be to allow the primitive concept "school" to have an "x2", which would probably be the students, as students are arguably the most essential, or most salient, or most useful thing to encode. But in general, the lean predicate approach entails no more than two essential arguments per predicate.

But then there is the issue of how this new predicate is to be related to [girls]. Is it, in fact, merely stressing one place of [girls] -- in which case what do we do with the normal main place? Or is it [for][girls] with some sentential connectives to get that right (and the old problem of there being the right sort of girls and all). Now, of course, we can do all these things and analytic precision requires us to do so (up to a point, of course).
On the other hand, we can generally just leave the unanalyzed cluster [girl][school] (probably with an connective -- not sentential -- to keep the grammar simple and deal with pretty little girl school teachers and the like), hopefully unpacable on request.